Notices by Eaton (eaton@phire.place), page 6

It's the little things, like writing your own custom progress bar renderer that uses UTF8 characters to show more accurate fractional completion on the command line, that really makes life sweet.

@timbrown Thanks so much for putting it out there. It's a great book, and I've still got my print copy!

If you're interested in putting it up on the web, LMK; @Wilto and I put together a (relatively) turnkey tool that turns the ABA epubs into @eleventy sites automatically.

Consider two examples of legal responsibility that the American right has argued for in recent years.

Torture of prisoners: “It might be necessary, for special circumstances, and having laws that prevent it would discourage brave souls from risking legal consequences.”

Abortion: “Punish doctors and pregnant women with the full force of law, and make interstate travel illegal. If there’s a medical need for an abortion, it’s hardly our fault doctors won’t risk it.”
https://newsie.social/@ProPublica/113407542468070347

But the trick (because there's always a trick) is that I still end up enjoying Blades a lot because I rather shamelessly am happy to *plan anyway*.

So what makes it work? Well, there are player answers and GM answers, s let's start from the player side with the two most critical bits - Pacing and generosity.

@emmadavidson *perfection*

@aki DAMNIT MATT

TFW you realize the shitposting tumblr you and your partner threw together on a weekend is actually doing numbers

https://www.tumblr.com/why-ai

Like: It's a solid pitch! However, currently undercut by the fact that Acquia's marketing team is almost certainly being held back with CHAINS to keep them from blasting out a “Do you think Matt Mullenweg will notice YOUR web site? [ominous music]” email

You know, I have to admire the chutzpah

@wesruv @Eclipsephase FYI, they also have a tactical tabletop game coming out based on that system, which I’ve got high hopes for :D

@wesruv Ecpipse Phase - They’re here, too, at @Eclipsephase … we should meet up sometime!

@socketwench @DNAcomic It’s one of the reasons I laughed, hard, when Matt started his attacks on WPEngine with “they disable REVISIONS!”

Like, yeah, no shit, buddy

@hipsterelectron Anyways, I’m definitely a Hobbyist Slash Professionally Adjacent nerd rather than an expert on any of this stuff, but loving the conversation, thank you!

@hipsterelectron yeah, I think there’sabsolutely truth to some of the broader ideas about languages and laanguagelike things having consistently occurring qualities and structures, and the *nature of human existence and social experience* means we’re lokely to produce statistically similar things across lots of languages, but seems like a matter of the tool fitting the need, rather than THE NEED BEING SHAPED LIKE X, INHERENTLY, GENETICALLY, etc

@hipsterelectron I’ve always tended towards the idea that language representations without experience/understanding of the language and understanding of the purpose the language is being used for is kind of a “teach a horse math” trick, it can be impressive but struggles badly at solving the actual problems we use language for

@hipsterelectron having done a terrifying mess of large-scale parsing work on a crawler/scraper project for clients, I have to agree. Fascinating project, I’m gonna give it a look!

@hipsterelectron Which… well, I suppose that IS exactly the load of caveats you mention, lol.

I think the reason I find it intriguing is that those questions of language/meaning/communication are all really important to me and have been long before LLMs, but unfortunately there’s little cultural appetite or capacity for them, which means the really critical nuance is collapsed to “But I asked it! And it answered right!” anecdotes

@hipsterelectron Yeah, like, I’d say that “making stuff up” is a category error, it’s not a question of invention or imagination but of… slavish inherent devotion to training data and syntactical/semantic patterns without regard for pragmatics or more complex or nuanced meaning that’s more than skin deep. Thus “shortening” rather than”summarizing” — it won’t simpky invent unrelated text, but there is ho assurance what it produces is in fact “the theme” or the important elements at all

@hipsterelectron the best description I’ve ever managed is that LLMs are really good at *shortening*, but not *summarizing*. The more neutral, factual, and verbose the original, the more useful that is — but that’s a heck of a caveat.

@hipsterelectron @ireneista @adrienne the PDF.js project is actually an interesting one to experiment with; among other things it handles a lot of the document-level stuff, and lets you hook your own logic in to manage the page by page conversion of a PDF to text: “here’s a pile of text and graphic objects with metadata about each one, feel free to iterate them and give us back a string when you’re done!” Etc