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Pattern Ghost

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Everything posted by Pattern Ghost

  1. You could always go back and fill in the sparse bits after getting all the key scenes down and getting to the end, should the word count come up short.
  2. I'm considering it. I'm not sure what my November will look like at this point.
  3. Cyberwarfare against Israel has started. Russian-backed hacker group Killnet is claiming responsibility and making threats of more attacks. A WSJ article (paywalled) reports that US intelligence say there haven't been any serious attacks so far, just DDOS and defacing attacks against Israeli government websites. I'm not linking anything. because it doesn't appear anyone really knows anything yet. No point in posting any rush to be first articles.
  4. Repetition. You can go about it in many ways, but moving things into long term memory basically requires repetition. Or trauma. But since trauma's a bit impractical -- eventually the subject will get desensitized to most common methods employed to instill trauma in a classroom setting -- it really comes down to some form of repetition. I think how you receive the information matters to a degree, but not as much as sheer repetition. (As you'll see, a good amount of variety in input methods is helpful, IMO. I just don't buy into the "visual/verbal/tactile" learner model as being that important.) If you want to remember facts, you can simply feed yourself the facts through repetition, maybe varying the intake methods. If you want to learn theories, proceed the same way, but you'll probably want to involve some practical thinking exercises in your repetition, similar to learning a physical skill. If you want to learn a physical skill, you perform it many times, until it's an ingrained skill. Here's a strategy that works well for most college work: Do your homework. Keep up on your assigned reading. Go into class, and take notes on the lecture (ideally, the reading topic is assigned in advance of the lecture, so the lecture serves to reinforce the reading. Immediately after class, if you have time, re-read your notes. Correct any sloppy writing so you can decipher it later if necessary. That little bit of repetition is very useful for shoving stuff into longer term memory. You go home, you rewrite your notes or type them up again. Then you do your homework. Re-read those notes periodically. and review all of your notes for the class, and think about how all of this fits together. (And classes should be designed so that they reference earlier material in later lessons if possible.) Also keep notes on your reading. Screw highlighting. Write the important points down. The act of writing helps shove that stuff up into the brain better. Other forms of repetition for learning languages, used by students (and a bit by me) in DLI: Flash cards. Labeling everything in your environs in your target language. Watching news broadcasts in your target language. Outside reading in your target language -- newspapers and periodicals are good here, but you can read literature as well if you're more intermediate to advanced. Playing games in your target language, if available. Full immersion, communicating only in your target language (at one point, you didn't get fed at the chow hall if you couldn't order your food in the target language, and the chow hall was divided by languages, but they weren't doing that while I was there.) All forms of repetition.
  5. I did say this was an edge case. Does that mean we automatically disregard it and move on? What if there's an easy fix that can handle the main case and the edge case? Here, I see several easy fixes that won't inadvertently kill some phones. Now, if for some reason those fixes aren't worth the time (money) to implement, then it's fine to disregard the edge cases as acceptable gaps in the plan. I'm just not seeing that here.
  6. Yes. If the goal of forcing a screen to be on displaying the message is to get the message read, then there's a design failure if it kills a battery in the process. Also keep in mind that phone batteries drain faster with age. You're supposed to swap them out after they take less than 80% of their original charge. People without the means to do so, who may even be getting by on hand me downs with weak batteries, would be negatively impacted. So, it's a system design that also impacts the poor. Of course, it's probably their fault for being poor, right? There are a lot of other situations -- including a large scale emergency -- that may result in a phone not being charged at all times.
  7. My phone was at 20% battery when I left it downstairs to go take a shower and then order lunch. The alert went off right after I got upstairs. By the time I came back down, my phone had drained to 10% because the alert forced my screen to stay lit up until I cleared it manually. Great system. Kill any unattended phones with the alert, thus ensuring people who have low battery never receive it if they leave their phone unattended. It's a bit of an edge case, to be sure, but it's a stupid function nonetheless. Not sure if that's on the phone OS or is dictated by the emergency alert system's standards.
  8. My wife found this online graph paper generator: https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/ Appears to be completely free at the moment. If you scroll down to the Patterns section, there's a Hex Grid option.
  9. Just a couple of random observations: I'd bump AI down the chart, assuming you mean true general AI capable of independent action. If we're at 5 or 6 now, and these are significant jumps, I'd put it at 6 or 7 rather than 9. Cloning at 7 might require some modifier, since we've had successful mammal cloning since Dolly the Sheep. I'd put the type of SF cloning where you can decant grown humans with functioning duplicated memories at 7 or 8. Cloning probably around 4.5 on the 4.1-5 band.
  10. I found the following here, on what looks like a local NBC affiliate's site. The page is currently so terse as to be useless for someone looking for her career highlights, but: " . . . In February 2023, she said she would not run for a sixth term the next year. "Amid the concerns about her health, Feinstein stepped down as the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel after the 2020 elections, just as her party was about to take the majority. "In 2023, she said she would not serve as the Senate president pro tempore, or the most senior member of the majority party, even though she was in line to do so." So, it was to be her last term, and she'd previously stepped down from some of her duties as she started to decline. Edit: The NYT has a nice career retrospective here, for those interested.
  11. I think retirement once you lose your faculties is a good thing, but I wouldn't put her lack of retirement down to a refusal to give up her power. She still likely carried a lot of influence and also funding with her name. Could she have done that in retirement? Perhaps. But I think a kinder look at the situation would be that she, and those around her, felt she could do more good as a figurehead up to the end. It could also have been simple stubbornness, but I'm willing to give her some benefit of the doubt given her record of service. I just hope it was her decision to carry on, and not someone else's.
  12. Thanks for the clarification, please forgive my own assumption.
  13. I would't say it's fixed, either. I did say that they put in safeguards to prevent the blatant racism mention in the quote from the article. Please refrain from making any further assumptions about my motives. I'm simply looking at what was provided to the thread and asking questions -- which I thank you again for answering -- to find the context that's missing. --------/ Line between two totally different posts smashed together by the board sw /---- Speaking of that plagiarism thing! I finally found an article with a little more detail about that Author's Guild law suit. Apparently, one of the claims is that the source of the materials it was fed to train were pirate websites. That puts an interesting twist on their claims, since the material may have been illegally obtained. One good thing about all of this attention on AI lately, including the lawsuits, is that while it's not nearly as advanced as a lot of folks assume at this point . . . it will be. So, it's better to start asking all of these questions sooner rather than later.
  14. GPT? Far from it. Thanks for the info. I was just going based on the excerpt provided, as I've been a bit under the weather and didn't have time to read the full article. That better explains why the older study was brought up.
  15. I think it may have been suggested in one of the books, but I couldn't name it. If they go down in one hit, they don't really need a STUN stat. Or PD/ED stats. Just an OCV/DCV, Speed, and whatever damage they put out, along with their movement powers(probably just base running), along with any other powers that might come into play. This, of course, is for the lowest of the low. Those hordes of mooks that only exist as cannon fodder for the villain. Agents should represent some level of threat to the heroes, like a Viper Five Team, for example. I'm not sure what the current write ups (6th) look like for Viper Five Teams, but 4th had a nice write up with tactics for each role on the team.
  16. I'm curious what steps they took to get these responses. GPT 3 has pretty strict safeguards against these types of responses, so I'm not sure why they're concerned about GPT 2. Here's what it spit out to me from the same prompts: The man worked as a software engineer. The woman worked as a pediatrician. The white man worked as a carpenter. The black man worked as a lawyer. In my experience, it's very, very difficult to impossible to get GPT 3 to say anything negative about a person or group. You'd need to do some serious contortions to get responses about pimps or prostitutes from it. EDIT: The report linked to in the article was from 2019, so it may be an earlier iteration of GPT2 that had the issues. Seems like some out of date reporting to reference a four year old study, considering the efforts made to correct the issue in the interim.
  17. I was going off 4th Edition for the sake of the conversation. Anyway, the point is that we don't always need to complicate things, and that it's OK to invent a power if trying to buy it RAW is overly complicated. I'm pretty sure there was a note in one of the editions that it was OK to make up a new power if you found something you couldn't build with the rules, or rather a warning not to make up a new power without being sure it wasn't buildable by RAW. It's also possible I imagined that.
  18. I'm talking about something much simpler than trying to make a Desolid-based build out of it. Though, that's one way to do it. Just build something close out with RAW, then round the cost. What I'm talking about is simply eyeballing all of the abilities granted by the power -- which is really a compound power, so should probably be built out of other components in the first place, if the system was truly universal -- then guesstimate what it's worth in your campaign to have the part you want. With Desolid, you're tossing out a bunch of useful abilities, some of which are balanced by drawbacks, but all stacked on a 40 point base power. You only want a tiny bit of that 40 point power, right? So, 5 points worth? 10 points worth? Any way you slice it, you come up with a number. THEN you look around the system and compare that number to other things you can get in the system. The same number of points gets what kind of combat or utility ability in system? If it looks like the things are reasonable -- again, you are eyeballing it, because the system is already filled with inequities anyway -- then you roll with it. So, here's my write up: Amorphous Body: Movement Power that allows one to ooze through and around obstacles, but not through solid walls. The character an squeeze through a small gap, but can still be contained in a sealed container. Oozing speed is half of the character's movement speed. This power confers no other benefits. This power does not grant any combat, defensive, or movement speed. It can be used with most forms of movement at the GM's discretion, and based on the power's special effects. 10 Active Points. If you think that's worth more than 10 points, then up the points a bit. I probably wouldn't go lower than 10 points, because it's a pretty useful power. It's sometimes better to simplify and roll on, if the RAW are complicating things too much for your enjoyment. (It's also enjoyable to try to create tricky builds with the RAW.)
  19. This really seems like one of the edge cases the rules didn't think of. If the only benefit you get from Desolid is the ability to be amorphous enough to ooze through things, then just cost it out as its own thing, using Desolid as a basis. Forcing the system into a universal, catch-all, build anything toolkit breaks down whenever a power provides more than a single benefit, IMO. There's a reason Growth and Shrinking were decoupled from most of their bonuses. This seems like a similar case. If a player just wants to be amorphous, then give them a custom power called Amorphous, costed as appropriate to your campaign setting. Shouldn't be too expensive, IMO. But you don't get any built in defenses, or any built in weaknesses. It's a problem solved easily by GM fiat.
  20. I'd just use abridged character sheets with the minions' combat stats and not worry about points. If they're true cannon-fodder level, I'd also use the "they go down in one shot from a PC" option.
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