A note from a very tired editor, it is almost always more appropriate to write "use" rather than utilize or leverage.

Quintin Smith's review of the Wildsea is intriguing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c29Ecut4K_E

What's the best #ttrpg for a #solarpunk campaign?

What's more likely to be effective in creating a left-wing government in the USA?

#uspol

MASTODON, YOU ARE NEEDED

I'm the faculty advisor for our campus fire dancing club. We're doing a show for alumni weekend, and the students have chosen Y2K as the theme.

It'll be easy for them to choose songs from that time, as well as the obvious "1999", but are there any danceable songs *about the Y2K bug*?

If anyone knows, you would!

#music #asktodon #y2k

This time #Violet didn't even bark at the deer. #DogsOfMastodon

No Web Without Women: a collection of innovations by women in the fields of computer science and technology: https://nowebwithoutwomen.com/

Put in a full day's work building video games and found time in the evening to engage in THREE hobbies (juggling, drawing, and Go).

Choose your saint!

https://www.catholic.org/saints/patron.php

I'll open the bidding with St. Barbara, patron for protection against death by artillery.

City / civilization building games usually start with a land that is empty (or perhaps depopulated by the collapse of what came before).

Are there games where you start with a running (but deeply flawed) society and have to move it utopiaward?

#BoardGames #VideoGames #GameDev #GameDesign

A safe deposit box implies the existence of a dangerous deposit box.

*frantically pressing numbers on keypad* I'm in!

Convenience store clerk: Sir, that's a microwave oven.

My Ubuntu installation of Discord is borked.

snap refresh discord

gives:

snap "discord" has no updates available

but when I try to launch it, it gets caught in an update failed, retrying loop.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it.

Any ideas?

#ubuntu #discord

Ooh, neat! PyCharm (and, I would imagine, other JetBrains IDEs) shows you all of the enclosing code you've scrolled past, to put what you're seeing into context.

#python #pycharm #programming #SoftwareDevelopment

#Violet is happy for spring. #DogsOfMastodon

Ah, spring -- that brief, wonderful time of year when you can go outside without an environment suit or a protective layer of anti-radiation unguent.

We're looking for a good introductory text on Ubuntu system administration. This is just for our personal computers, not any kind of server. We're tech-savvy and I know my way around the command line. What we want is a good overview mental model, grasp of vocabulary, and generally the ability to ask the right question when we run into a problem. Bonus points for a tour of standard apps (e.g., for simple photo editing).

What's your favorite book / website / video series for this sort of thing?

#ubuntu #AskFedi #asktodon

Unit tests just paid off bigtime. An underlying python library changed the return type of one of its functions. If we hadn't written unit tests, our output would have been garbage, and if we even noticed it, finding out where in the pipeline things went wrong would have been a nightmare.

#python #UnitTests

I've been playing Grid Legends, an excellent car racing game. I've got the difficulty turned up fairly high, but the damage is still set on "visual", so I tend to plow through the pack at the start and then use the other cars as leverage to get around corners. In a real race, this would be considered "unsportsmanlike" or "attempted murder".

#VideoGames #grid #motorsport

Another insightful banger from @pluralistic:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

This one focuses on LLMs and the idea of the "reverse centaur", where a robot does the fun stuff while a human does the tedious, error-prone work.

I'll note from the periphery that, despite the current hype, AI is more than LLMs. There are other AI systems (e.g., Chess and Go players, VLSI design tools) that *do* have an internal model of the domain about which they are reasoning. Unfortunately, there's a slippery continuum:

- solves the problem perfectly and deterministically
- significantly outperforms any human
- about as good as an expert human, but makes different, weird mistakes
- meh, output looks vaguely plausible