You’ll notice that the 4s are all hugging the exits – it’s the most lucrative spot. Yes, you have to squeeze in when the doors open to let people in and out, but you also get to gtfo first. You’re not subject to the Showtime kids doing flips, when the Mariachi band walks in you can run out to another car at the next stop, and you aren’t in the urination/defecation areas. Sitting is a trap.

I recommend going to Disboard and then searching for dnd, dnd5e, or avrae, or else finding an invite to the Avrae discord server and looking through the latest posts in its looking-for-community channel (Avrae is a discord bot that helps automate D&D 5e gameplay, so I find it to be a convenient search term–but if ypur partner prefers other systems, Disboard probably has searchable tags for them too). Then just make sure the description also includes LGBTQ+ and you’re probably golden (at least in terms of finding a community that is not vitriolic to your partner).

These communities are often “Westmarches” style, where players group up for short events, so the specific group of people playing at any given time rotates. Some servers are primarily focused on being a place to find groups for synchronous play (e.g. over voice chat for a few hours), while others focus on slow asynchronous play-by-post that has participation from each player once or twice per day. Some servers combine the two styles.

Good luck!

Preface: I have a lot of AI skepticism.

My company is using Cursor and Windsurf, focusing on agent mode (and whatever Windsurf’s equivalent is). It hallucinates real hard with any open ended task, but when you have ALL of:

• an app with good preexisting test coverage
• the ability to run relevant tests quickly (who has time to run an 18 hour CI suite locally for a 1 line change?)
• a well thought out product use case with edge cases

Then you can tell the agent to write test cases before writing code, and run all relevant tests when making any code changes. What it produces is often fine, but rarely great. If you get clever with setting up rules (that tell it to do all of the above), you can sometimes just drop in a product requirement and have it implement, making only minor recommendations. It’s as if you are pair programming with an idiot savant, emphasis on idiot.

But whose app is well covered with tests? (Admittedly, AI can help speed up the boilerplating necessary to backfill test cases, so long as someone knows how the app is supposed to work). Whose app is well-modularized such that it’s easy to select only downstream affected tests for any given code change? (If you know what the modules should be, AI can help… But it’s pretty bad at figuring that out itself). And who writes well thought out product use cases nowadays?

If we were still in the olde waterfall era, with requirements written by business analysts, then maybe this could unlock the fabled 100x gains per developer. Or 10x gains. Or 1.1x gains, most likely.

But nowadays it’s more common for AI to write the use cases, hallucinate edge cases that aren’t real, and when coupled with the above, patchwork together an app that no one fully understands, and that only sometimes works.

Edit: if all of that sounds like TDD, which on its own gives devs a speed boost when they actually use it consistently, and you wonder if CEOs will claim that the boosts are attributable to AI when their devs finally start to TDD like they have been told to for decades now, well, I wonder the same thing.

Level 3 feels significantly more punchy for most classes, which is nice.

Most d&d podcasts and shows get a bunch of free stuff that they feature (dice, minis, dice towers, stuffed animals, drawings of their characters, etc).

I doubt they buy things that someone wants to sell them.

You probably have to choose: do you want to sell it, or do you want to see it featured?

If the latter, then probably send a letter with some pictures, asking if they would feature it if you had it shipped, to whoever you want (most shows and podcasts advertise a PO Box or some such). If they answer such things on their show, chances are they’ll give you a shout out and let you know on an episode. If they say yes, then you ship it to them, and that’s… It.

Maybe. There are many ways to move files and directories around without using Finder, at which point all indexed data about those files and directories will be stale. Forcing something as core as mv to update Spotlight would be significantly worse, I think. By keeping the .DS_Store files co-located with the directory they index, moving a directory does not invalidate the index data (though moving a file without using Finder still does). Whether retaining indexing on directory moves is a compelling enough reason to force the files everywhere is probably dependent on whether that’s a common enough pattern among workflows of users, and whether spotlight performance would suffer drastically if it were reliant on a central store not resilient against such moves.

So, it’s probably a shaky reason at best.

Look into your local game cafe(s). That’s the type of place that sells board games, dice, minis, but also has gaming tables and often a small food and drink counter. There are likely nights for newbies you might be able to join, to experience it live.

Watch some youtube videos of people live-playing the game you are interested in. You’ll see the character players interacting with the DM, propped up mostly by their shared understanding of the game mechanics, and the individual mechanics of their characters. Keep an eye out for how things are different in combat vs out of combat.

You don’t need minis or dice if you play online. E.g. there is a Discord bot called Avrae, and many small communities come together around use of that bot to play, where it handles most of the crunchy mechanics like dice rolls and modifiers and even maps. Some communities play live sessions over video chat, others play without video chat but with 5 minute turn timers, and others play asynchronously with 24 hour timers in a format called play-by-post (or pbp) where they roll the crunchy math in one channel, and then roleplay their characters’ actions in another. Disboard will let you search communities who are looking for members–filter by whatever tags interest you most.

Finding a live play group to play a campaign with can be… Hard. I recommend you start by educating yourself about a system via free resources, maybe finding a game cafe to experience it in a one-shot, and try some online play, before investing too much. As you learn more, you’re also more likely to encounter people looking to start or grow a group.

Check out Disboard, and search for 5e or avrae (and optionally play by post) to find a discord server to play on.

There are plenty of small Discord servers that use a bot called Avrae to automate the crunchy mechanics of d&d 5e, with things like char sheets, initiative, monsters and combat, and even maps. Some servers are slow paced, where everyone is expected to act once per ~24 hours, so you get a nice asynchronous game going where you have time to learn your character’s abilities, bot commands, etc, all while typing up your roleplay that matches the mechanics of your turn. That format is great for learning and getting the hang of things in the system, IMO, because you have a ton of time to ask questions in a chat channel to have others help you. Other servers will do sync events, where you sign up for an event with a specific star time, hop into a voice channel, and play with ~5 minute turn timers to really crunch through some combat quickly. This is great once you have the basics of Avrae down (and by extension, the mechanica of 5e).

That’s usually a “westmarches” format, where the server has a large number of players who queue up for events, but each event can only accommodate a small number of players from the top of the queue. You get grouped with random others this way (contrast that to “campaign” play where you stay with the same players for many consecutive sessions). IMO westmarches really helps get you acclimated to D&D through broad exposure to lots of classes, monsters, mechanics, RP styles, etc. And it works really well for someone who is casual!

In my utopia, Google would be forced to continue to pay out the current annual contract sum, at a decreasing percentage every year, for some number of years, to all affected companies, giving them the opportunity to divest and pivot.

The root problem doesn’t get fixed if the company with enough money to be a monopolist still has the money when this is “resolved.”

AI can draw fingers, Midjourney fixed that in their model over a year ago now.

So I’d say we have a real race on our hands!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion

The fusion of light elements up to a certain nucleus size releases energy. However, fusion only occurs at very high temperatures and pressures. The goal is to 1) create the conditions for nuclear fusion (which they did), 2) have the fusion reaction produce energy that sustains those conditions (they did for 48 seconds), and ideally a tiny bit more, 3) gather residual energy that isn’t critical to the reaction itself, which is the part that looks like a steam engine.

If dropping a database scares you, you are either unaware of the disaster recovery process, or there isn’t one. Edumacate yourself, or the org, as appropriate, so as to increase your confidence when dropping databases.

It is totally fine to kick or knee or headbutt someone for your unarmed strikes when your hands are busy–this is true with or without Tavern Brawler

Post office too. Really any government office where the public is allowed inside.

Underpaid workers trying to explain bureaucratic minutiae (for which they are not responsible) every single day to people who are not versed in that minutiae, do not want to learn it, cannot learn it, and are preemptively frustrated that they have to have this interaction in the first place. There is no winning–mental health isn’t cheap, do the workers’ resilience only lasts for so many years/months/days before they default to hating the clients, and the clients don’t trust publicly available instructions, thus dooming themselves to the shitty interactions.

The only way to fix this is to take both people out of the equation–preprocess everything that might need to happen for everyone, to the point of turning every transaction into a single trasaction. That requires for every city, county, state, national, international agency to federate, so that you never have to file multiple documents to do a thing.

Capitalism has been touted as superior to the alternatives (Socialism, Communism, etc) b/c it has been claimed to be “self-regulating” and “self-correcting” and “even if we don’t understand why, it fixes itself”–basically the only choice among bad ones that, given our collective small brains, has any chance of sustaining itself and society in the absence of an ability of individuals or government to do so intentionally.

What it really is is an opportunity to stay anonymous while gaming the system, all the while convincing everyone else that they too can game the system (thereby being gamed). It is not a net benefit to society when taken to extremes.

Capitalism is great for the consumer in the micro. If there is a coffee shop on your street that sucks, and you start a coffee shop two blocks away to compete with it with your better coffee, you are participating in the version of capitalism that “works as intended.”

It doesn’t work in the macro. When, instead of continuing to manage your mom & pop business that barely breaks even, you vertically integrate, buy up or otherwise destroy your competition, and then reduce the quality of your product to bare minimums in favor of profits and shareholder value and growth, you take capitalism to an extreme that makes everyone else (the consumers, the workers, the would-be-competitors) have a worse quality of life.

People prefer better quality of life. Capitalism in the modern age is so far in that macro extreme that it no longer makes people’s lives better. East Palestine train derailment as an example… why would they prioritize safety over cost cutting? Bam, a town is cancerous. It’s not unreasonable for people to point at a corruptible system and blame it for the corruption that exists.

Problem is, people are corruptible, so whatever alternative we think is better, someone will come along and ruin it for personal gain.

RE Battlemaps: strongly opposed to allowing them. Lemmy.world already has a battlemaps community. Ttrpg.network is welcome to make such a community too, I suppose. That content works for many more ttrpgs than dnd, so putting it in its own space makes more sense than allowing it in here.

RE artwork, if someone wants to post a hand-drawn scene of their group’s epic win/loss against the bbeg, that’s cool. I think we like seeing dnd success stories from folks, and a picture can be worth a thousand words. But, if that person is open for commissions, I would strongly prefer not to know about it.

IMO advertising needs to be segregated to opt-in communities kept exclusively for that purpose, much like LFG posts get their own space to mot pollute the general discussion.

(Similarly, links out to other sites that have comment sections, like youtube, should IMO be required to have actual supporting text content worthy of discussion, as without it they are just more advertising. That’s outside the scope of the original discussion tho.)

Edit: RE homebrew–IMO it too should be sequestered, as it represents a divergence from everyone else’s frame of reference.