I’m not talking about Valve giving things back to us. I’m talking about the fact the owners of the company get money simply by owning the company. They take money they didn’t work for. Even if the company isn’t manipulative or scummy, they’re enriching people who don’t deserve it.

And benevolent capitalism

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I reported harassment from other students to teachers. They ignored it and did nothing for 8 years. I stopped asking for help.

Are you lost? I’m responding to the previous comment

I’m guessing the reason for most things forcing you to use an app is less because of data harvesting, and more because it increases repeated use.

When you have to go to your browser and remember to check a website it’s harder to create a habit. If you have an icon flashing on your home screen every day it’s much easier to remember to go to their site. Sure you can “Add to Home screen” functionality, but average users don’t even know that exists.

It also feels like a bespoke app is more “professional” than a website, despite many apps secretly just being a website anyway.

That said, they are definitely harvesting your data. I just don’t think that’s the main reason for most apps.

Thanos was a fucking stupid character in the MCU. The human population is currently doubling every 61 years with a growth rate of about 1.14%. Assuming similar numbers across the galaxy, he didn’t do anything except cause suffering. He’s a very poorly written villain.

I guess to stay on topic, they would have looked at population growth, and determined that his plan was moronic, and fought him.

Thanos was a fucking stupid character in the MCU. The human population is currently doubling every 61 years with a growth rate of about 1.14%. Assuming similar numbers across the galaxy, he didn’t do anything except cause suffering. He’s a very poorly written villain.

I guess to stay on topic, they would have looked at population growth, and determined that his plan was moronic, and fought him.

Even when capitalism serves customers well, it still takes the work of people who make things, and gives it to people who own things

Ah nice, the “everyone who isn’t a conservative is on the left” tactic. It lets you compress 80% of all ideologies into “the left,” which means you can accuse everyone in “the left” of the stupid shit tankies and liberals believe at the same time!

I dunno, there some necessary context here. I think Requiem for a Dream is a better movie then Iron Man, but I sure as hell wouldn’t pick it as the only movie I’m ever going to watch again.

They were shoehorning a reference to the game Starfield where it didn’t fit

A great way to learn about someone’s values is to ask what their pronouns are

You’re right that you can come up with pretty good ways to challenge players with certain spells. The problem is that it can be pretty difficult to do on the fly. Assuming the party goes in a direction you haven’t really prepped for, they’re are a lot of abilities that can make it trivial if you forget about them.

There’s a really big, tedious, ongoing discussion on exactly how overrated 5e D&D is and what type of game it wants to be, but it’s fair to say the system has a lot of small things that trivialize challenges. Goodberry means you never have to worry about food ever again. Fly means physical distance is not much of a problem. Pass without trace means stealth will almost always work. Leomunds tiny but means sleeping is almost always safe.

All of these examples can be fixed. Goblins can stack a bunch of rocks on leomunds hut for example. The problem is that it gets repetitive and forced to counter everything all the time.

I agree though that the developers have done a really good job trying to handle all the complexity of turning a tabletop RPG into a video game.

You’re right, you can’t. My bad. Still, a party containing two players who can cast these spells is pretty common too.

Mage hand is the kind of spell that is incredibly useful and dynamic in actual ttrpgs, and incredibly difficult to design around in a video game.

A GM is going to consider the distance and weight limits of the spell, and determine of it makes sense of not. If you stole The One Ring from Frodo, for example, the GM can pivot and make the world react to that.

The video game has to program all possible uses of the spell while also trying to keep a prewritten story on track. If you steal The One Ring from frodo, the game would have to reinvent the plot dynamically, which isn’t really possible. The end result is that they have to severely limit the uses of Mage Hand.

Because Mage Hand is so potentially chaotic, it can’t be as useful as it would seem. The same would go for the spells Fly and Invisibility. Imagine the Black Gate of Mordor. If there was a level 6 wizard, they could use fly + invisibility to get everyone safely over the wall. Now, sure, it would take a while waiting for spell slots, but this is supposed to be the most fortified pass in the entire world. Even GMs have problems with this. Suddenly every remotely secure area needs a mage on staff detecting intruders, or permanent enchantments. At that point, Fly might as well not exist.

Edit: I forgot that fly and invisibility both require concentration. Oops. Still, now you only need a level 6 mage and a level 4 mage, which is still pretty easy to pull off.

TLDR: number of possible passwords is x^y where x is the size of your alphabet and y is the password length. Increasing y is better than increasing x.

It’s not immediately obvious, but it is pretty straightforward math. It has to do with password length vs alphabet size.

Let’s look at an 8 letter lowercase only password. Each time you increase the minimum length, you increase the maximum number of passwords by 26 (the number of letters in the alphabet). So it would be 26x26x26x26x26x26x26x26 or 26^8 which is 208,827,064,576. This is a lot of passwords, but pretty easy for a computer to brute force.

Let’s add the ! symbol. This means there are 27 options or 27^8. The total number of passwords is now 282,429,536,481. A bigger number, but not by much.

If we only have lowercase letters but increase it to 9 letters long, then it increases to 26^9 which equals 5,429,503,678,976. We’ve jumped from millions of passwords to billions with passwords only 1 character more.

If you allow all symbols and numbers, but also increase minimum length, you get the best of both without creating difficult to remember passwords.

This of course ignores the primary way people get past passwords: by asking the user for their password. It also ignores that an intruder is going to check the most common passwords and not just try them all. Adding numbers and symbols doesn’t really change the most common passwords though, since dragon just turns into Dragon1!

Has Penny Arcade always been this hideous?

Hah, Rogan is 7 years older than Alex Jones

I recommend the video “In Search of a Flat Earth” by Dan Olson, aka Folding Ideas