roystgnr
14d ago
@yofuckreddit: Ask your doctor about dosages, too, when you go in for the surgery. When my son had a broken bone healing, the osteopath recommended levels that, although sold over the counter in the vitamin aisle, still had "don't take this without talking to a doctor about it" in the fine print on the jar. Unless you're super prone to kidney stones or something, long-term concerns about hypercalcemia can probably take a temporary back-burner to short-term bone healing improvements.
roystgnr
14d ago
Did you see the video? I couldn't find a link (Voat's shut down, and a low-res thumbnail plus headline wasn't sufficient for my Google-fu), but I'd have guessed it would be anecdata rather than anything with which we could hope to calculate a frequency.
That third headline was easy enough to find the context for, though. It's on the witchiest-looking website you could imagine, and it's a little hyperbolic (house arrest with an electronic monitor isn't quite "roaming" "freely"), but it's hard to say that it was too hyperbolic, with at least a couple years of hindsight:
One condition of home-arrest required Huff to seek preapproval from a parole officer before having contact with children. But Huff was temporarily returned to prison in late 2018 after an eight-year-old girl was found in his apartment along with her parents.
In January 2019 the clemency board unanimously revoked Huff’s home-arrest and made his return to prison permanent. His only option now is to reapply once a year for release.
roystgnr
14d ago
Is Wall Street allowed to get much money involved yet? Polymarket.com still lists the US as "blocked"/"completely restricted from accessing Polymarket", Wiki claims the block lasted until December 2, 2025 after Trump "eased the regulatory environment" (with a link to a headline that only mentions trading on election results), and I can't find anything that lists what the current regulatory environment actually permits.
roystgnr
15d ago
and build a base of clientele and advance
Do you know if there are any good stats on what percent of lawyers are making excellent livings after they take some time to advance? New lawyer salaries have been scarily bimodal for decades now, but it's hard to tell the extent to which that's a career-long problem rather than something the lower half of the distribution just has to work their way out of over 5 or 10 years.
roystgnr
15d ago
That's not a bad point. I'm old enough that "find a spouse before OKCupid gets bought out" was actually an actionable strategy for me, so I'm hearing the awful reports of modern dating apps second-hand, and I don't actually hear anything about modern non-app-based online dating.
Does it really exist, though? Naively, I'd have expected random Discord channels to be subject to the same social dynamics that work/school/etc were, wherein now that there's a "Find Your Dates Here" Schelling Point of the apps, more and more of the younger generations are starting to consider any but the most slow/careful flirting in ostensibly non-romantic contexts to be intrusive and creepy.
roystgnr
15d ago
Thank you! I probably saw the reference in that very post and then forgot that I had.
roystgnr
15d ago
Huh - it goes to that "Removed By Moderator" page for me too. I swear I just copied and pasted straight from my browser's address bar. Actually, this is weird - I copied and pasted a www.reddit.com address, I see a www address in the markdown when I hit "Edit" on it, but when I hover over the link I see an old.reddit.com address. Looks like that might be an rDrama bug "feature"? Then, while the www.reddit.com address works, the old.reddit.com address doesn't.
Try this link for the full post rather than just the png - both www.reddit.com and old.reddit.com work for that so it should survive any mangling.
Rather unlikely. What percentage of college-educated middle-class women are on dating apps anyway?
For heterosexual couples as a whole, a majority now are couples who met online. I don't know if there's any way to get a breakdown by education level for internet dating specifically, but more-educated people have never been less likely than less-educated people to use the internet in general.
resort to online dating apps
Are you posting from 1999? Boy, are you in for some nasty surprises [edit: this link seems to work better]. Online dating never gets any better, mind you; the alternatives just keep getting worse. I recommend trying to find a spouse before OKCupid gets bought out. Oh, and if you find yourself on a plane getting hijacked, ignore all the "just cooperate and don't get hurt" protocol; they're not just flying to Cuba next time.
roystgnr
16d ago
I like the general idea of having kids, and I think I'd be decent at raising older kids, but with little kids I'm totally lost.
I was like this when I was young, but I didn't realize what became obvious in hindsight: your own little kids will be your own little kids. They'll be genetically half you and half your spouse, and environmentally some mix in which (especially when they're little) you're still a plurality.
My oldest kid binge-read the Harry Potter series when she was 5 and decided that my reading to her for 20 minutes a night was way too slow. When her little brother was 8 or 9 he thought my home group-theory lessons during Covid were amazing. Their little sister picks Babylon 5 episodes for her every turn at Family Movie Nights lately. Now, you may be thinking, "wow, what unbelievable geeks", but that's exactly the point - I'm kind of an annoying geek, and my wife isn't annoying, and it's not much of a coincidence that we got a trifecta of exactly the sort of non-annoying geeks we're thrilled with, even if they might not stand out as positively to other random adults. Whatever personality/subculture you may have and/or have fallen in love with instead, that's what you can probably expect instead, and even if you're not a big fan of little kids in general you might be much more enamored of your own little kids in particular.
roystgnr
16d ago
What's stopping him from letting his kids be free range ? The restrictions feel self-imposed.
The classic viral image showing children's shrinking ranges comes from this Daily Mail article in 2007. The article seems to agree, and to make a good case for, the idea that the increasing restrictions are unnecessarily self-imposed by parents. I mostly agreed at the time. It wasn't until years later that I saw that map again and did a double-take at the place names...
roystgnr
16d ago
Four year old and toddler is a bit annoying, because the four year old talks much better than the toddler, making mutual play a bit difficult
My then-2-year-old daughter got so upset once when she was trying to play with her younger cousin: "[Cousin's name] not listening to me!!!" "Honey, she's 1. She barely understands you." It was short-lived frustration, though.
roystgnr
18d ago
Do you believe in therapists?
I don't just believe in them, I've seen them!
More seriously: talk therapy rescued one of my kids from some crippling anxiety issues, but it wasn't the first therapist we tried who did so. For her it was the second, but I've heard that that's better odds than average. Therapists are like teachers: quality varies way more than it should, and someone sufficiently motivated can get by with self-study alone, but if you need one then you'd be silly to deny it.
roystgnr
20d ago
To "accelerate the contradictions" (or in other popular phrasing "heighten the contradictions" or "sharpen the contradictions") seems to be a Leninist idea originally. And to be fair, Lenin did get the total revolution he wanted rather than the more incremental improvements that occurred (and that leave extremists fuming) elsewhere.
There seems to be a continuous spectrum of these ideas in Marxist (and probably wider leftist) thought, though. The idea that you can bring about The Revolution faster by making things worse shades into the idea that you just shouldn't try to delay The Revolution by trying to make things incrementally better, and both are similar to but distinct from the idea that you can't do much either way because prophecy psychohistory dialectical materialism proves that The Revolution will come when it's destined to regardless.
roystgnr
21d ago
That article covered "meals, housing and autism therapy fraud cases" being prosecuted. The video here was about childcare fraud going unprosecuted.
conservatives by and large don't read.
Good thing that problem only afflicts Them, not Us!
roystgnr
29d ago
There's nothing in there that can't be improved upon by a writer working with an LLM.
There's nothing in there that can't be improved as prose, but are you entirely sure that the changes will be improvements as game writing?
I like Table Top RPGs, despite them being worse than some Computer RPGs in every way but one, and the one way they're better is the way that matters here: in a TTRPG, your players don't have to be railroaded nearly so strictly. When the players try to dig deep into the interactions with some character, there can always be something rewarding they can dig deep into. Once the Game Master runs out of official quest writeup material, he can start to improvise, and those improvisations can actually affect all subsequent gameplay. It's quite common for players to develop an attachment to someone like that elderly forgotten veteran NPC, who the GM can then slot into other parts of the story, on the fly, as a recurring side character, making the story much more fun and interesting. In the longest-running game I run, my players have one originally-mid-level mook who's managed to escape enough fights to become a recurring villain (with some hilarious banter), and even have another three mooks who (via vast interleaved efforts of diplomacy and subterfuge) they've managed to semi-reform and (despite some lingering head-butting with PCs and each other) recruit as underlings. The written adventures for this campaign included some designed-as-recurring-character NPC friends and villains, too, of course, but these four were all characters who were written with at most a short backstory but who were expected to be eliminated in the first encounter if the players had been aggressive enough and their dice rolls lucky enough. We're all glad they weren't.
In a CRPG ... do you want to let the AI rewrite your game on the fly, like a GM does, not just write things you can review in advance? Writing on the fly is probably an AGI-complete problem. If you've got an LLM that you trust not to make its part of your game worse than your part then you might as well let it write your part too. But if all your writing is done in advance, that won't let you have long-term effects on the story. The possibilities you'd have to write for grow exponentially with elapsed gameplay, as more story elements arise and more combinations in which they might affect Ascended Extras' actions accumulate. If you instead do a lot of writing in advance without letting the now-fleshed-out side characters have long-term effects on the story, that just tricks the player with false affordances: instead of interacting with a world where ten characters have deep dialogue trees and obviously are critical to the story and another hundred characters quickly get to a loop with nothing new to say and are obviously scenery after that, you'd be giving them a world where ten characters have deep dialogue trees and are critical to the story while another hundred characters have deep dialogue trees but are still going to be plot dead-ends after those trees are finally exhausted.
Roger Ebert infamously took the stance that "video games can never be art", which was nonsense, but the interactivity of games is a bit of a two-edged sword: on the one hand it's an additional capacity that can make video games much better art than non-interactive media, but on the other hand it puts the artist even more at the mercy of the audience than is the case in other media. Someone may fail to understand what you intended them to understand from your painting, but at least once they're part of your painting's audience they'll see what you intended them to see. If you want to make art in the form of a game, however, everyone in your audience is also your collaborator, and your job isn't just to make them understand a finished product, it's to guide them into helping properly finish that product with you, and part of that guidance is making it easier to see which parts of the work they should focus on the most and which are just intended to be out-of-focus background. Making the background more beautiful would be an improvement, all other things being equal, but making it more beautiful without accidentally bringing it to a spot in the foreground where it shouldn't be is much trickier. The reason why new fiction writers always have to be told to be unafraid to "kill your darlings" is that it's true but non-obvious that most authors' writing can be best improved not by expanding it but by cutting it, removing the digressions and infodumps and red herrings and detached side plots and on and on until you're left only with the things that most contribute to the story. Game writers (and level designers, and so on) have a much harder problem, because even if you avoid handing the player a pointless distraction the player might seek it out anyway, and they'll enjoy the game less as a result even if they don't understand why. I recommend playing the Half Life 2 Episode 1+2 with Director's Commentary - some of the most interesting tidbits there are tricks with which they coax players into actions as simple as looking in the right direction at the right time to see a scripted event, while not actually taking any control away from the player or even letting most players realize they'd been maneuvered into making the decisions they did.
roystgnr
29d ago
Public Service Announcement for anyone who might want to read Project Hail Mary (the book) and hasn't yet: the trailers for Project Hail Mary (the movie) contain major spoilers, for something like a quarter of the most interesting plot developments in the book, without the context that made those developments as interesting as they were.
My kids and I had already read the book, but I feel bad for anyone who would have wanted to read it but didn't know about it or just didn't get to it yet.
Anyone who was a fan of The Martian and would also enjoy something a little less dry (at the cost of being less grounded; this time there's a vital plot device that's a much bigger stretch than "implausibly strong dust storm") should read Project Hail Mary ... and if somehow you've also avoided seeing any of the movie trailers yet, you should read Project Hail Mary quickly, and until you're at least halfway through the book you shouldn't see Ryan Gosling's face (possibly disguised by a beard - don't be fooled!) pop up on a screen without immediately closing your eyes, covering your ears with your hands, and loudly saying "La la la la" for the next three minutes.
Huh. Learn something new every day.
"An Athenian, Epizelos son of Kouphagoras, was fighting as a brave man in the battle when he was deprived of his sight, though struck or hit nowhere on his body, and from that time on he spent the rest of his life in blindness. I have heard that he tells this story about his misfortune: he saw opposing him a tall hoplite, whose beard overshadowed his shield, but the phantom passed him by and killed the man next to him." - Herodotus, "Histories"
I know "PTSD" used to be called "combat hysteria", then "war neurosis", then "battle hypnosis" and "shell shock", and with one name or another it seems to have been common for well over a century ... but I'd been told it's hard to find under any name in accounts of ancient wars. It was tempting to wildly speculate whether the reason for such a strange interesting fact might be technological (after explosive overpressure we can see physical brain bruising, not just psychological damage; we now experience most casualties from impersonal random explosions, not other humans in direct combat) or cultural (we now see a diagnosis of psychological trauma as a first step toward healing, rather than an insulting additional attack to be avoided; we now see war as a necessary evil, rather than a glorious good) or social (the ancient veterans that historians focus on were often large proportions of the upper class; modern veterans are more likely to be isolated). But it's easy to forget that often the explanation for a strange interesting fact is that false and exaggerated "facts" can go viral if they're sufficiently strange and interesting.
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