Basilisk

AI discourse has way too much "Throwing the baby out with the bathwater," especially from a lot of people who have no idea what they're talking about. AI, as a thing, is not a perfect system. It's not a magic panacea that will cure all. There are legitimate concerns about how much it infringes on creative spaces and how it may put people out of work. There are also legitimate concerns about the AI training data scraping web-hosted content indiscriminately without permission. However, these are not the same as AI just being "bad".

Do I think a D&D campaign led by a ChatGPT-like DM would be "good"? Probably not as it stands. I've played a lot with ChatGPT and its limitations are pretty obvious. Could it get better in the future? Probably. Is it an interesting possible way to get to play D&D if you can't get a group together? I mean, it's gotta be better than nothing, right? But the real interesting prospect to me is machine-learning powered tools for the DM. A System that's trained on WotC-owned resources that lets you just choose a paintbrush that's labeled "cave" and draw out a series of tunnels and have it automatically populate with crystals and mushrooms and visual points of interest, which lets you sketch out a good-looking map in minutes. Then, as your party is in the cave, the system knows what type of "biome" you used so it has a button to let you generate a random encounter, which it takes from your character levels and where your players are. There's a lot of ways that "smart" tools could take a lot of work off the DM's shoulders that would be great. I don't know if they're in the pipeline, but the point is that AI isn't a boogeyman that's just out to steal jobs and IP.

Literally, Qapla'! is "Success!"

The rule of thumb I used to use as a draughtman was that plans would be metric for zoning and permit approval, metric for steel-frame or concrete, and US standard measurement for lumber and wood-frame. this is because dimensional steel mostly comes from China, which is sold in metric lengths, while lumber is cut to US standards.

Yeah, I mean I can do the math and get work it out if I care enough, but I doubt I'll ever grok Fahrenheit the way I do Celsius. It's like saying "oh it's 300K". You can do the math and work out what temperature that is, but until you bring it into the frame of reference you're familiar with it's just a number.

Yeah, basically. I think it kind of depends on your age though. I was almost 100% metric with the exception of baking until my teens or so (we never had a pool).

A lot of it comes from getting stuff from the US. Most of the cookbooks you find here come from the US so they use US measurement. Doing construction? The lumber's cut to sell to the US market so you may as well use US measurement when you work with it. Steel lengths are usually available in metric so commercial construction is metric too. I've done a fair amount of construction and land surveying so I can do most length conversions like that in my head.

Temperature, though, I'm hopeless with Fahrenheit. Some older folk will still prefer °F to °C all the time but to me it's just numbers. Most of my life is spent between -30°C and +30°C so it works out very conveniently as a nice symmetrical gauge between "cold winter day" and "hot summer day."

The rest, well, it's mostly just the unitary form of peer pressure. You just sort of pick it up. The really wild thing is that I might say something like "oh yeah, my cat weighs 5 lbs, so she's like half the weight of one of those 5-kilo bags of flour" without irony.

Here's a fun fact - I still play Magic with friends that I played magic with back in 2002. 21 years and going strong, baby!

My parents really liked Ticket to Ride and Qwirkle. Much more complicated than that, though, and my dad starts pulling faces.

Yeah, conflating an adventure that's on rails and "railroading" seems to be really common lately. The idea that you've got a straight through-line through your adventure without a ton of options how to proceed differently is not only pretty common, it used to be pretty explicitly how you'd run a game. Most published adventures would start you off, give you a goal, and most of your options on how to complete it would be like a video game; you might talk your way out of a confrontation or you might fight your way out, or you might sneak past it. Simply avoiding it altogether though? Not really an option, or if it was, it was only because you could choose one of two or three "tracks" to get to the same endpoint. "Sandbox"-ier games did exist and even sandbox-style published adventures existed. But they were decidedly less common and certainly not the expected product.

Frankly when I'm starting a campaign, I tend to start off with a short premade adventure in this style anyways. If the players don't gel or find they're not interested in D&D, or we just can't get a schedule together, then I haven't invested a ton of time in building a playhouse that won't get used. But also being able to hold new players' hands through the really overwhelming part of learning a whole new system and a character and also coming to terms with the things you can do in a TTRPG, by limiting their options to "one way in, one way out, follow the tracks and you're going the right way" is just one thing they don't need to flounder through. If it sticks and they like it, then when the first part of the adventure is done, then they get access to the bigger world and can start to make decisions about what they want to do and where they want to go.

Anson Mount's wife had their first child just before the filming of the season, so he was given a few episodes off

It just feels like it should be because it makes a "spelunk" sound when you cannonball into the water.

Generally speaking, I think it's the ideal use case for AI art. You wouldn't likely otherwise be buying art assets, and most likely just be finding whatever comes up under a Google search anyway. Meanwhile you can dial in to a clearer representation of what you want to depict from the art without necessarily having to "make do" with "oh, it's like this but imagine he's an elf instead..."

There's definitely something to be said about the cost of living becoming problematic, but I'm not jumping ship to the US anytime soon. I've seen too many US friends put into catastrophe thanks to health care issues, even when insured.