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Adding the second banshee considerably worsens the players chances. If saves are 10% likely to be successful, the chances of two failures go from 1% to 3.6% if the number of banshees is increased from one to two. This issue of stacking saves is a problem of encounter design: There are big...

Wow! My charging unit was originally mounted outside .. and unsecured. I never considered that someone might park in my driveway and steal charge. I moved to a new house and now have the unit inside my garage. Actually, with a minimum of tools, I’m thinking the whole unit could have been...

US Tesla owner. Having a charging station outlet is almost a requirement. Here, that is either a 240v outlet, or a 240v outlet plus charging unit. You will also need to have an electrician calculate the total load — you may need an upgrade of the feed to your dwelling. Here that would be...

Huh, how about that. I never scroll past the reply box so I never see them. Having the new banner ads appear at the bottom has added a level of aversion to glancing at the bottom of the screen, so there's that, too. (Grumble, grumble, banner adds, grumble grumble.) TomB

Would it help to have an option that prevented notifications for new accounts for a predetermined probationary window? "Don't notify of new threads created for one week." TomB

I suspect folks are having different meanings of slavery. In the us, children of slaves were slaves, and slaves could be separated from their families. I doubt that would be allowed in a LG society. TomB

I was commenting on rules that you quoted. (IMHO), those rules don’t fit with some notions of the outer planes and of the nature of souls. Souls become too easy to destroy, and too easy to send to a plane other than where they are judged to go. Again, in my opinion, souls should be nearly...

Ugh, just no. I don’t know that I would ever use this in my games. Souls judged to go to a particular afterlife should, absent exceptional circumstances*, immediately ascend or descend to their designated plane. They might resist this, perhaps, but would ever feel a pull. * I can see means...

Ah, then the answer is incomplete! What happens on Mars with all of that water? Does it freeze solid in an immense incrementally collapsing mountain of ice? Does it heat the surface sufficiently to remain liquid, eventually covering the entire surface — except, perhaps, one very tall extinct...

I’ve heard mostly of cases of professionals misusing AI, where the professional was due chastisement for their clumsy use of it along with creating sub-par output. The most prominent that I’ve read about have been lawyers using generative AI and submitting un-validated information. The other...

While there have been dramatic improvements in the energy cost of cryptocurrency related computation, I’m not sure crypto is a good direction to go: An answer provided by google: TomB

Hmm, I was under the impression that the underlying software was open. Or at least widely known. The current major cost is in training the models, which has become horribly expensive computationally, which translates directly into an energy cost. “Sam Altman stated that the cost of training...

Eh, can you support this? (“I did not hear artists speaking up from them”, which I presume you mean “Artists did not speak up for them.”). My presumption is mostly the opposite. I wonder how many Appalachian folk songs are about mining life. Also, there are many categories of work which has...

To be clear — arguing that people and computers “think” differently is not the same as arguing that computers can or cannot achieve consciousness, either in practice or in principle. I believe the first (computers think differently) but not the second (I believe that computers can achieve...

Looking further, I’m finding evidence for contrary legal opinions on whether data mining is fair use. My conclusion is that “data mining is fair use” is a position of some, including, unsurprisingly, companies that use data mining for AI training. For example: TomB Edit: The following seems...

I’m not finding the Quang paper convincing: Essential steps are simple declared to be true. For example: Bold added by me. This is the heart of the analysis, and it cannot simply be declared to be true. TomB

There are ongoing programs to simulate neural activity. See: Simulations. As I understand it, these simulations are for research purposes: Figuring out how brains actually work. They don't seem anywhere close to being used as AI platforms. TomB

Can we split this into separate issues? * AI will likely have profound impacts, regardless of how it works or how it is trained. * Those creating AI models seem to be doing so by unfair use of protected works. * There are questions of how similar (or different) the way that AIs work in...

There is a lot here to unpack, and much of it doesn't fit in the current thread. Most certainly, people do a lot of imagining of what other people are thinking. Often, they have a good sense of this. Also, often, they get a lot wrong. There seems to be a lot of this going on when people...

Responding to just the above point. A person reading an article, or looking at a painting, or listening to music, is not the same as software doing a similar thing: * Software generally has the ability to retain much more detail than a person. * I am not a lawyer, but I suspect: That a...