Notices by Jesse Morris (aubilenon@peoplemaking.games)

@inthehands if using ai absolves you of responsibility one can trivially game that to “use ai” to launder basically any decision by selectively using its results and retrying with different parameters/prompts.

@inthehands @Nonilex I guess my dreams of reducing American hegemony involved a lot more giving everyone else a leg up and a lot less shooting ourselves in the face

@inthehands That seems kind of meaningless as a mode of censure. If the people affected were to list “Degree from Columbia, later revoked” on their C.V., with a footnote linking to this whole idiocy, whose hiring or further education admission decisions would that affect?

OTOH it sure does make it less appealing to apply to and spend 4 years working one's butt off to _get_ a degree from Columbia, the idea that you are forever after beholden to their political agenda.

@inthehands CallCentric is an IP telephony service that is not free but is cheap as heck. It doesn't have any out of the box "record your name" settings, but it does let you set a telemarketer block that makes them press a number to be connected. You can either have it forward to your regular number, or use a VOIP app (I like using an app better because it makes it easy to see whether calls are coming from it vs from my personal phone number. I personally use Acrobits Softphone but there's a lot of VOIP apps and I haven't evaluated any of them for 3 years). We use it for the escape room business. IDK if it's a good fit for you, but I'm pretty happy with them

@inthehands @sundogplanets My old 2003 Subaru has bad fuel efficiency but I drive it so little that I'm sure the math works out the same. Until it breaks too much to fix, and then I have to make harder choices.

@inthehands Another thing about being wrong is it’s also a lot easier to do

@inthehands My take is that this fits into the same category of whether something is art, or music, or a game, or a sport, or drug paraphernalia, or a toy, or a tool, or a vacation. None of these are intrinsic properties of the object or activity, they're ways of engaging with it.

The reason this is even a topic to talk about arises because one can totally use a WSIWYG editor and treat HTML as "text with some parts in italics” which is _not_ a programming type interaction, but you can also do more complex stuff that has to account for a bunch of different situations both today and tomorrow, which is not materially different from the sorts of things what someone writing C++ has to do.

@inthehands Discount that by the fact that only a tiny percent of their user base is willing to spend even 1 minute figuring this out never mind 12. (Obviously people not understanding how that feature works has its own cost or downside or whatever, but it's pretty hard to account for)

@inthehands “Words are useless, especially sentences. They don't stand for anything. How could they explain how I feel?" - Madonna but obvs written by Björk

@inthehands So much for my Big Hopes for Elon Musk!

@paulference @tehstu @inthehands I don't care about any of that, I just need to get to Tower Records

@inthehands I had not slept at all the night before! Fun times!

@inthehands That feels awkward in a lot of situations, particularly in extreme cases where keeping the same units means the numbers aren't how we think of things. For instance it's easier to think about how long 5 miles is than 26400 feet is. I think a good alternative is to include a ratio so you can't gloss over and conflate the units. “TMTG had 7.7 million visits. For comparison, X, formerly Twitter, had nearly 800 times that number - 6.1 billion”

@inthehands top tier victim blaming here

@inthehands The converse is also true

I've been mostly heads down on the next escape room*, but my colleagues have been cooking up a play at home puzzle-hunt-in-a-box type game.

It'll still be a few weeks before we're ready to take pre-orders. For that we're trying to finalize everything so it's ready to go to print (allowing us to take good promo photos) and get a handle on the actual manufacturing so that we can offer shipping estimates that we feel some amount of confidence in.

Anyway the game is super cute, and the puzzles are good, so everyone get excited! Yay! Also, stay tuned for updates

* Okay I did write _one_ of the puzzles

https://www.triviumgames.com/the-costume-kerfuffle

@inthehands @_elena Was anybody ever imagining that he was CEOing 3 companies, shitposting on twitter all the time, and still be around to spend any significant amount of time every day with each of his eleven kids?

@inthehands So much Disney revolves around the theme that family is the most important thing - you all have to look out after each other, and heck that even defines who you are. The hero's a hero because they're a princess or a great explorer or important lion or whatever and maybe their stepfamily is awful but their biological family is good so they're inherently good.

I think this message is harmful! Real people are _not_ automatically good (or bad) because their parents were good (or bad), and people outside your family are important too!

If your market is families constantly saying "family is the most important" is just savvy business I guess.

@inthehands I also wish all modern operating systems had Mathematica's "Why the beep?" feature.

@jbouie @inthehands Idk if it _is_ worth asking. I mean obviously he does so the question really boils down to does he feel comfortable admitting it out loud or is he just going to stick to obvious dog whistles