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JamesBarneyon Dungeons and Dragons rolls the dice with new rules about identity

And a better solution for this is to not run campaigns at conventions or public games that have sexual assault.

JamesBarneyon Dungeons and Dragons rolls the dice with new rules about identity

I think guidelines and an equivalent of a trigger warning is a better solution. It's really hard to modify a campaign on the fly if for example someone is uncomfortable with cults but that's the primary driver of the storyline.

JamesBarneyon Dungeons and Dragons rolls the dice with new rules about identity

You're right it's not ideal that races shoehorn you into certain classes, but on the other hand you don't want someone's race to be flavortext. I think there's a balance to be struck. I doubt DnD will find it on the first shot, but I'm looking forward to what it looks like for the version after next.

JamesBarneyon Taxi drivers offer a clue to Alzheimer's risk

My guess is it's correlational. It's almost always correlational. Remember the knowing a second language reduced risks of dementia, turned out it was correlational. The real cause was under diagnosis in immigrants who were disproportionately more likely to speak a second language.

Still worth investigating further but dollars to donuts it's not causal.

JamesBarneyon Always go to the funeral (2005)

I really don't think that's true. It's combination of a couple of things.

1. Life is busy, it's hard to find time, and easy to put off 2. They are anxious about what to say, and it really sucks going to places where people die. 3. There are a lot of people who show up to funerals because they are trying to support the friends and family of the deceased and don't really have any relationship with the deceased. My friends parents for instance. I don't really feel an obligation to visit my friends parent's I barely know, but would want to show up to the funeral to support my friends.

JamesBarneyon UK's Online Safety Act comes into force

I don't believe in banning websites but that website is unequivocally bad.

It's a website that reinforces all the cognitive distortions of anorexia. It's the equivalent of a website for depression that says "You know how you feel like life isn't worth living, you're right it isn't, everyone who tells you that with treatment it will get better is lying to you. Here's a bunch of inspirational blog posts about how wonderful suicide is and 10 ways to kill yourself."

Anorexia is not a very stable condition, you can't really just accept it and live with it. Anorexia is built on a positive feedback loop. Obsession with thinness drives low body weight, and low body weight increases the obsession. Most anorexics get worse when not being treated. This is one of the reason it has such a staggeringly high mortality rate.

JamesBarneyon Ask HN: SWEs how do you future-proof your career in light of LLMs?

I think not only is this possible, it's likely for two reasons.

1. A lot more projects get the green light when the price is 5x less, and a many more organizations can afford custom applications.

2. LLMs unlock large amounts of new applications. A lot more of the economy is now automatable with LLMs.

I think jr devs will see the biggest hit. If you're going to teach someone how to code, might as teach a domain expert. LLMs already code much better than almost all jr devs.

JamesBarneyon Chatbot hinted a kid should kill his parents over screen time limits: lawsuit

Which screenshot showed an AI advocating for suicice?

JamesBarneyon Chatbot hinted a kid should kill his parents over screen time limits: lawsuit

Because every other time I've seen an outrageous example similar to this one, it seems far more mundane when given the full context. I'm sure there are lots of issues with character.ai and the like, but my money is that they are a little more subtle than "murder your parents".

9/10 times these issues are caused by the AI being overly sycophantic and agreeing with the user when the user says insane things.

JamesBarneyon ChatGPT Pro

I just tried this and it worked fine. Right clicked on image, clicked "copy image" then pasted into a word doc.

JamesBarneyon Hit men aren't what you think

Most personal assistants are not going to go find an hire a contract killer for their 200k a year job.

JamesBarneyon Hit men aren't what you think

I really don't think most billionaires know professional killers. Where would they have met them? The idea that someone at JP Morgan introduces you to them when their company IPOs doesn't pass the smell test for me.

JamesBarneyon ChatGPT Pro

Well now at $200 it's a little farther away from free :P

JamesBarneyon Dependency management fatigue, or why I ditched React for Go+HTMX+Templ

You can build a complex stateful widget in a MPA.

JamesBarneyon Amazon to invest another $4B in Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival

Claude api use is already as high as openai. I believe that market will grow far more over time than chat as AI gets embedded in more of the applications we already use.

JamesBarneyon 14-Year-Old Casper Wind Farm Has Not Turned a Blade in at Least 3 Years

The idea that Chevron is purposefully building wind farms not to operate them sounds dubious to me at best. My guess is they bungled something up because wind energy isn't their core competency.

Much more likely there is a room at Chevron where someone said "Wait who the fuck was responsible for negotiating that contract?" than "We're going to spend a bunch of money building a windfarm in Casper in order to get some small amount of good publicity, and the purposefully not operate it ?to make wind energy look bad?"

JamesBarneyon 14-Year-Old Casper Wind Farm Has Not Turned a Blade in at Least 3 Years

https://danluu.com/ballmer/

For the argument Ballmer didn't waste a decade but setup MS up for the success it's seeing today.

JamesBarneyon Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

Almost everyone I know manager or not is usually ranking everyone they work with on various attributes.

In fact it would be incredibly weird to ask a close friend who at their work kicks ass and who sucks and have them respond back, "I've never really thought about how good any of my coworkers were at their jobs"

JamesBarneyon Trump wins presidency for second time

https://www.andrewbenjaminhall.com/Hall_Thompson_Base_Turnou...

Here's the study on turnout. And basically comes to the conclusion extremists motivate the opposing party base more than their own.

Here are a couple of journal articles.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...

https://academic.oup.com/poq/advance-article-abstract/doi/10...

Note: There is small minority that show that this is effect shrinking with time. My personal belief for why this is happening is basically voters are judging individual politicians more by the moderation/extremeness of the party's positions and less by the politicians personal beliefs.

JamesBarneyon Trump wins presidency for second time

Goal #1 is just an instrumental goal to goal number #2. Socialists underperform moderates in general elections. Hell even Kamala, a terrible candidate who just got trounced by Trump outperformed Bernie (who has literally everything going for him) in his home state by a slim margin. Where as a moderate like Dan Osborn without the backing of the party outperformed Kamala by almost 14%.

Americans don't want to pay European style taxes even for European services. And our public sector is far less efficient than Europe's so we wouldn't even get European level of services for that taxation rate.

JamesBarneyon Trump wins presidency for second time

Trump also lies to voters. For instance every sophisticated analysis of his tariff plan have shown it will do the exact opposite of what he promises. The analysis is as bad as the analysis of Bernie and Warren's Medicare for all plans where magically everything was 50% cheaper.

JamesBarneyon Trump wins presidency for second time

That mattered quite a bit for a three reasons.

1. Kamala isn't a great candidate shown by her poor primary results in 2020.

2. She has all the baggage of running pretty far to the left in 2020. (Like saying she was for performing gender affirming surgery on trans illegal immigrants, agree or disagree with the stance this is a deeply unpopular position)

3. She was tied to the current administration which meant she couldn't distance herself from the inflation issue or attack Trump on age and fitness as much as another candidates not tied to the administration.

JamesBarneyon Trump wins presidency for second time

Look at senate and governor candidates that over performed and underperformed vs Kamala in their state. People have studied it for years and the basic finding is the classic one. Moving to the center wins you votes. You'll find that moderate/centrist dems over perform and leftist dems underperform.

They've studied this. And the cause is is the following. Yes you get your base to turn out more. But extremism motivates their base even more than your own, and switched vote from an independent is twice as impactful as an extra vote. A simple example is you get one more of your base to turn out. You lose an independent, and you get 2 of their base to turn out. And end up down 3 votes.

JamesBarneyon New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

I worked lots of places. Never worked for a manager I didn't trust to fire me.

Most managers are pretty good but organizing lots of a people is really hard. And there is something like a leaky abstraction for every level of the organization as goals and context and understanding get filtered and warped as information travels up and down the org chart. You're manager is your closely interface to the insanity of distributed human decision making, so they usually are seen as bad and are blamed for all of the dysfunction of the organization when they're trying to make the best of an imperfect situation.

JamesBarneyon New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

In theory that's how it works. In practice the amount of documentation is onerous enough most managers just decide it's not worth the effort.

JamesBarneyon New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

An inexperienced good employee will slow you down far less than an experienced bad one.

JamesBarneyon New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

For white collar jobs management's job is to guide and mentor not babysit adults into doing a job they are paid a salary to do.

JamesBarneyon New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

And the problem with slow to hire, slow to fire is one day you might be incredibly slow to hire.

And overall if you're looking to be employed as much of your life as possible quick to hire/quick to fire is obviously better based on unemployment data.

JamesBarneyon New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike

Any individual woman has far more control over how she and her husband split childcare responsibilities than her employer who was not involved in who she decided to marry or how they decided to split up childcare and financially providing for the family.

And I don't think it's crazy for individuals who dedicate more of their life to work to make more money those who don't.

JamesBarneyon How I write code using Cursor

This has been my approach in the past that only certain parts of the code are worth unit testing. But given how much easier unit tests are to write now with AI I think the % of code worth unit testing has gone up.