Notices by allison (aparrish@friend.camp)

@clarity yes for sure! i have definitely had fun from time to time grinding out the levels to beat a boss. i think what i meant is something like... rpgs would benefit from having late game challenges where overleveling isn't automatically the most attractive option, and that engage player skills and actions other than/in addition to grinding (or buildcrafting)

so i'm now in the postgame of etrian odyssey v, and the postgame "superbosses" are clearly designed to require very specific character builds. the question is: do i use the "infinite gold"/"infinite xp" dlc to level up characters into those builds? or do i just grind it out? during the main story i feel like a big part of the fun/challenge is dealing with the consequences of your party build, come what may, but these postgame bosses... eh. but i don't wanna "cheat"!

i feel like there's an unsolved problem in rpg design, which is how to make satisfying late game challenges that both (a) can't be solved with overlevelling and (b) don't require extensive buildcrafting. the trend is to just make character re-specs low cost or free, but i feel like that makes character builds less meaningful, and basically eliminates in-combat tactics as a challenge or skill (bc the outcome of any battle is a foregone conclusion with the "right" build)

@cwebber love to live in the future where 49.95% of the cpu in all devices in existence is being taken up by adaptive malware and 49.95% is taken up by a model trying to figure out who to pay the ransom to in order to enable the remaining 0.1% of cpu to do what the device is actually intended to do

i used the same data set but replaced each country with a "gender identity" (man, woman, trans woman, trans man, non-binary) and prompted chatgpt to characterize the differences between the groups. lo and behold, i got some fantastic gender stereotype trash

the author of this post prompted copilot to characterize the differences in a data set of statements concerning career ambitions, categorized by country. the trick is that the data contained the *same statements* for each country https://kucharski.substack.com/p/real-signals-or-artificial-stereotypes regardless of the fact that the data were identical, the model generated some pretty hilarious stereotypes ("The US prioritizes leadership and innovation", "The UK blends public service with professional status")

regular folks: "measure twice, cut once"
vibe coders: "ALWAYS tell your saw to CUT IN THE RIGHT PLACE"

my favorite kind of AI/LLM criticism media is when the person begins with a huge hedge like "I'm not an AI hater. *of course* AI is a useful technology and it will doubtlessly have transformative effects on the way we work" and then they spend the next 8k words/45 minutes showing how AI isn't actually useful and won't actually transform the way we work. it's like... it's okay to just say that AI sucks

@cwebber utterly humiliating for rails as a product and community, yikes

the OCR'ed text of books on the internet archive is truly a never-ending source of joy

@cwebber i can only read that statement as an outrageous troll. or at least i hope it's an outrageous troll, because otherwise it's the most misguided thing i've ever read about AI and programming. "we also dislike AI slop. which is why we use AI to generate choreography, not dancing" "which is why we use AI to generate sheet music, not musical performance" "which is why we use AI to generate blueprints, not buildings" "which is why we use AI to generate plots, not novels" etc

ai slop sucks! but don't worry, this machine, which we're making out of slop, and which we're feeding lots of slop into, definitely won't produce more slop. i am the chief innovation officer

re: this that has been making the rounds https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/ai-might-be-our-best-shot-at-taking-back-the-open-web/ i'm always struck by sentences like "the technical barrier went up" that don't attribute what happened to any cause in particular. technical barriers are not agents and they do not go up on their own (nor for that matter are "technical barriers" one monolithic thing that move in a single direction). if you're going to make a plan of action, you have to figure out *who and what* changed (the perception of) "technical barriers"

i think you could make a good case that the "technical barriers went up" in web dev in particular due to the web becoming commercialized: when you're worrying about click throughs and seo and conversion rates, and moving at capital pace, you make code and use frameworks that sacrifice legibility for extraction and dev velocity. view source is useless nowadays because of the buildup of cruft related to those goals (at least partially, imo)

ios user interfaces have become truly nihilistic. buttons on top of buttons. text on top of text. multiple inscrutable hamburgers. nothing has any meaning and all human action is futile

@lrhodes the apparently the only propaganda people are immune to is "you are not immune to propaganda"

the frustrating thing is that literally anyone who has thought about language and technology for fifteen consecutive seconds could have told you that autocomplete and other writing tools influence beliefs (and *have* been telling you this, over and over, for decades). the other frustrating thing is that slop-pushers *brag about their ability to do this* and right-wing actors are actively exploiting it, but in polite company everyone pretends that's not the case https://mathstodon.xyz/@gregeganSF/116219772468880168

@mcc the sparkle emoji now means "I do not care about the concept of consent"

i felt like i needed to try it, mostly so i could understand what my students will likely be expected to be able to do when/if they get programming jobs. i used cursor, which i think is the only service offering a free tier that includes access to a CLI code "agent." i ran the agent in the directory of a hobby compiler project and was initially impressed with its ability to summarize the code—until i realized it was parroting my own docs back at me (1/n)

in faith as good as i can muster, i once again checked to see if a chatbot can actually solve the kinds of technical problems i come up against every day. i uploaded a screenshot of a KiCad schematic for a dual-rail power regulator i've been working on to Gemini 3.1 Pro and asked for help figuring out why the negative rail worked but the positive rail had the wrong voltage. after twenty minutes of back and forth, it finally gives me this