. I’m sure there are efficiencies and they need to be enacted but we need to ask why we use the systems we use.

Yes. This is sometimes known as chesterton’s fence

https://theknowledge.io/chestertons-fence-explained/

G.K. Chesterton was an early 20th century English writer known for his clever paradoxes.

He once wrote: “There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”

In other words, don’t be so quick to tear down things you don’t understand. That fence may have been put up for a very good reason, even if that reason is not immediately obvious. To ignore that reality risks unintended and potentially negative consequences.

I don’t know about “fine”. It has a lot of weird stuff baked in. Hoisting. Unexpected type coercion. Too many ways to loop over something and I always forget which one is which. “There’s more than one way to do it” is kind of a recurring problem, come to think of it. Several function declaration syntaxes. Dot notation AND bracket notation for objects.

Also it will forever bother me that object keys aren’t quoted.

const foo = "hello"; const bar = { foo: "world" }

That should be, in my mind, { "hello": "world" } . It’s not. It’s { "foo": "world" }

But if you want to do that, you need to do const bar = { [foo]: world }. Which looks like your key is an array with one entry, a string with a value of “foo”

You also end up learning a whole framework, with its syntax and idioms, every couple years. Angular. React. Redux. Whatever.

There’s also a lot of people who have never used anything else, and want to use javascript for everything.

Javascript is basically D&D. Wildly popular. Full of legacy jank. People try to use it for anything even though there are better or more specialized tools.

You can always count on republicans to have a bad idea

I didn’t recognize the source and thought to myself this is either archaic or amateur. It feels purple by modern standards.

Hey the SRD says tieflings “can speak, read, and write Common and Infernal.”

The only case I can think of is like you had to call 911 for an emergency and you want the people around you to also hear the dispatcher.

For day to day stuff, not really.

Well, if you want to have a conversation go ahead and read the rest of the post. Otherwise you’re just kind of jerking yourself off

At the very least form unions. That will help with stuff like wage theft, some people getting underpaid, BS firings, etc.

More aggressively, maybe some sort of collective ownership. Not this “options” bullshit where they never even vest for most people. The whole thing where management pays you $100 and sells what you made for $3000 needs to go. That $3000 needs to be more fairly shared among the people that made it happen.

But I don’t really know. I’m just some guy with entry level knowledge and a sense that the current system is wrong.

They could live more modest lives in more rural areas

Living in a rural area for many people is literal hell, on top of having an array of less obvious costs. The big one is going from not needing a car to needing one. Your rent might drop $500 but you need to spend a lot on gas, insurance, maintenance, etc.

Also the social options might fall off a cliff. Humans are social creatures. I live in a city and I can walk to dozens of social activities, many of them free. Board game meetups, free music in the park, free museums with tours, free sport leagues, etc. Out in the countryside there just aren’t as many options.

If you’re queer or another minority, you might also have a worse time in the countryside. Maybe even fatally. A city is going to have a queer scene.

Also, there are likely more jobs in the city. Remote work and economic upheaval have changed things, but even so, most of those offices in Manhattan are full of jobs. There’s just more stuff where there’s more people.

Now, to your point, some people are certainly living in a $5900/mo apartment with a doorman and in-building gym that they can’t afford. They could move to a less “nice” place in south Brooklyn or Queens for less than half that, likely at the cost of a longer commute, and losing easy access to a neighborhood they feel a part of. There is a housing crisis though, and people are getting priced further away. That’s probably not going to be solved any time soon because capitalism doesn’t care and will happily eat itself.

Anyway. Long tangent but I’m extremely pro city so I spoke up.

I feel like letting your skills in reading and communicating in writing atrophy is a poor choice. And skills do atrophy without use. I used to be able to read a book and write an essay critically analyzing it. If I tried to do that now, it would be a rough start.

I don’t think people are going to just up and forget how to write, but I do think they’ll get even worse at it if they don’t do it.

But if the text you’re working on is small, you could just do it yourself. You don’t need an expensive guessing machine.

Like, if I built a rube-goldberg machine using twenty rubber ducks, a diesel engine, and a blender to tie my shoes, and it gets it right most of the time, that’s impressive. but also kind of a stupid waste, because I could’ve just tied them with my hands.

I don’t think AI is actually that good at summarizing. It doesn’t understand the text and is prone to hallucinate. I wouldn’t trust an AI summary for anything important.

Also search just seems like overkill. If I type in “population of london”, i just want to be taken to a reputable site like wikipedia. I don’t want a guessing machine to tell me.

Other use cases maybe. But there are so many poor uses of AI, it’s hard to take any of it seriously.

Assuming what you’re describing works (and i have no particular reason to doubt, beyond the generally poor reputation of AI), that’s a different beast than “lol i fired all the copywriters, artists, and support staff so I, the owner, could keep more profits for myself!”. Or, “I didn’t pay attention in English 101 and don’t know how to write, so I’ll have expensive auto suggest do it for me”

I used a lot of mods, but I don’t remember all of them right now

“Natural growth and decay” I think was the one I got for stats, because I didn’t want to deal with the original’s insane leveling system. It was pretty good, but had some bugs. Once you got money to pay for training, the wheels fell off because you could rocket up all your skills and stats.

Once you have the skills for Frenzy100 and a spear, you can get unlimited money by taking out the guards that carry ebony weapons. Ok, that kind of wackiness is a little charming.

I also got a mod so NPCs had more money, because hitting every merchant in town and advancing time so they refresh is really tedious.

Oh, and I got one so Magicka regenerates, because constantly sleeping or chugging potions is tedious.

And one so you can have up to 12 marks saved.

If you have any recs let me know

I keep hoping this will spark some sort of anti-capitalist zeitgeist. But labor might be too scattered and individualistic.

Like, why are we all scrambling for a handful of jobs when the rich have so many resources?

games? I found a civilization port for the phone and it sucked up a lot of time. Turn based so you can do it for a few minutes at a time: https://yairm210.itch.io/unciv

learn a language? duolingo and other apps are out there

People should probably protest this. go in person and demand to speak to your rep. or whatever. i don’t know how to organize a protest. i just go when i hear about them happening.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Ald'ruhn#Notes

It’s the Ald’ruhn fighter’s guild. Apparently it’s not a full set, but it’s a lot of it.

This is a time of political crisis. The US government is upending decades of alliances and economics. The right wing is globally on the rise, and that means people’s lives are in danger. The environment is becoming more unpredictable and less supportive for humanity.

There’s a lot of important political shit to talk about. If we were living in a boring utopia, there’d be less, probably.

Also, what do you even consider “political”? Some people will tell you that a story about a man and a woman getting married isn’t political, but a story about two men getting married is. That’s a really low quality analysis there.

The idea that players all make their characters in isolation and just show up on session 0 with them sounds like such a recipe for disaster. I know it can work sometimes, much like “just grab four things from the fridge and throw them into the soup” can work sometimes. But sometimes you get like gummy bear pizza bites with shrimp and mayo topping.

I think a lot of games that came after D&D figured out solutions to common problems, but D&D insists on staying kind of archaic.