Kalbear

Anything is a porn theater if you count iphones and cars

Wait...Times Square isn't all of New York City? *shocked*

The US government is once again going Just Fine: https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/10/politics/trump-fisa-speaker-johnson-house-republicans/index.html Why would Trump want to do such a thing? It's because of his deep love of privacy rights for all Americans and respect for the rule of law, of course.

It's already been renewed for season 2.

I'll take "MEN ASSHOLE" for 200, Trebek God damn it Connery, the topic is "Men as a whole"

Interesting findings on how Russia is getting and using Starlink: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/report-details-how-russia-obtains-starlink-terminals-for-war-in-ukraine/

I assume per the documentaries Hot Fuzz and Untitled Goose Game there is an ample amount of dealing with underage drinking, waterfowl on the loose and well-meaning parent groups enforcing the morals of the countryside

There's a confirmation of season 3, including apparently leaks to at least one of the episodes.

It's an increase from +2 to +3. That's a 50% increase in what it was before. Given the fundamental math that's a pretty big deal in terms of overall success rates. This is especially true when you expertise instead of just proficiency. Another way to put it - for most characters the proficiency bonus is equivalent to getting a +2 stat increase. It's equivalent to getting a +1 weapon. And it is doing that for every single thing that they can competently do.

The difference in power between levels 4 and 5 is pretty insane. It's also pretty insane from 3 to 4, but 4-5 is even moreso. Specifically: - Virtually every martial character gets a second attack as part of their attack action. - Everyone increases their proficiency bonus from +2 to +3, meaning everyone gets better at hitting things and casting spells and doing anything - All major spellcasters get access to 3rd level spells, which are significantly above the powerlevel of 2nd level spells This means that your martial characters are usually doubling the amount of damage they're doing on a turn. Your spellcasters have both more abilities to do more things and those things hit significantly harder. And everyone is better at everything by 50%. The 3-4 bump is mostly about the ASI or feat, especially the feat. Getting crossbow master and being able to go from shooting once to shooting twice in a turn is pretty crazy. Sharpshooter/GWM have similar powerful beats. Even if you go away from some of the more broken feats you get things like +2 to your main stat, which adds chances to hit and chances to damage increases. But the feats are usually where it becomes nuts.

It's not that bad. Earthdawn had a good example of this. Every talent (your special, magical skills) could be advanced by a level, and the cost for each of these was in karma points which increased via fibonacci sequence values (1,2,3,5,8,13,21,etc). At certain thresholds the talent got specific perks or special abilities, but otherwise it just increased the kind of dice you rolled to determine success. (so level 1 = d6, level 2 = d8, level 3= d10). In addition you got certain abilities unlocked after some period of time as well for your general class. It sounds like a lot but it was all really self-contained and there weren't a ton of talents per class, so it wasn't crazy. It also meant that most everything scaled pretty similarly, solving some balance issues. I think this is a real good idea and something I was talking about with my group. While it's true that some levels aren't that significant for some classes that's a flaw and sucks; it should be a feeling of getting some really cool things all the time. I mentioned champions getting to jump further as an example of how crap some of those level breaks are, but the real problems are that (again) magic users always feel like they're getting something amazing basically every 2 levels and often feel amazing every level because they get more slots. I suspect you need things to feel more like what you're getting in those 3-4-5 levels, not less. But having more granulated progression would also be nice. The idea of having milestone progression has a flaw - it gives the characters no real idea of how well they're doing. You can give them slices of XP every week and that helps, but it still means you go from not knowing how fireballs work to being able to cast them effortlessly in one big jump. I also think that having a lot of the drudgery of this stuff be available on apps and online makes this a lot easier in terms of what you might want to do and keeping track of it.

Is it...3?

Maybe! And that's totally fine if you want to talk about that as a reason why it's not been done too! I personally suspect that this is somewhat misleading - an intelligent species would not go as fast with the kind of bootstrapping and energy-debt systems that we're doing, but there's no requirement that that has to occur - and renewable energy sources are going to be relatively easy to figure out. Most of my statements explicitly stated otherwise; you don't have to have technological progression, you have to have willpower. Again, if we wanted to set up autofactories to go out and build and rebuild we could do that literally right now. We literally have the scientific know-how to do it. As @Werthead pointed out in the previous thread there are a lot of very special things about Earth that we probably took for granted that we're just learning about - which again is an answer to the Fermi paradox idea. It may be that this specific combination of things means that it was exceedingly unlikely, even with the massive amount of overall chances. It may be that life is not a particularly easy thing to have happen either. One of the things I talked about with my wife recently is that in order for intelligent life to evolve you need to have the right kinds of evolutionary pressures. You need to have catastrophes but none that are permanent erasers of life - so the Jupiter sweepers and no weird 3-body problem orbits. You need to have mutagens but not too many, so that you get variants. Your climate needs to change and vary, but not so much that you get runaway greenhouses (like Venus) or a dead, cold planet. And you need to have that happen for close to a billion years potentially. That's a whole lot of ifs!

Also, since I rarely get to do a QUADRUPLE post, here's the previous thread.

Again, I don't really need communication between species to matter. The thought process is not why we haven't talked with another species - it's why we have no evidence that we understand that they exist. It also got a lot less dickish, honestly. I'm a bit surprised by how angry folks are in this thread; maybe they need to take out their frustrations about Gaza on these poor alien theories. This is one of the things I also believe - that our problem is that we are digging in the wrong place. We assume alien life that would do things similar to us, using mechanical systems and photonic broadcasts. And that's not necessarily wrong, but it's very limited in terms of detectability. Biological seeding is another one that would be very hard for us to actually detect and ascertain it came from another species. In more sci-fi thoughts, things like quantum communication and entanglement might mean that things talk to each other without having any artifact of communication. But one way or another one major conclusion comes from the above - that we are largely unique and pretty special. Either we're faster than every other intelligent species, or we're way more expansionistic and exploratory, or we're way too noisy, or we're way too uncautious - but we are pretty different.

It's certainly possible! That's one of the various ideas of what aliens would do. Seeding primordial oceans with interesting chemicals is a possibility. But that still raises the question of what actually seeded these things and why we've not found evidence of them yet. Or why only Earth succeeded in our general light cone.

Great. That's what we've done in 50 total years, with technology that wouldn't be sufficient to power a watch these days. And that's one probe. And that's only a million years. And only 100,000 probes, something that if we wanted to we could launch right now without too much of an issue. And these aren't self-replicating, these aren't designed to do more than just fly out there. Let's instead talk about a billion years. Imagine you can do what you said - which is still absurdly small in terms of scope! - every million years. Now we're talking about 100,000 probes sent out every million years 1000 times, each expanding the scope and size of where they go. And if we're sending something to actually go exoplanetary we are going to make it faster, so covering that 57 light years in a million years is also small - even though that goes to 57,000 light years in a billion years timeframe. 57000 light years is literally half the size of the milky way! And THAT is why I say it would fill a galaxy. Given a large enough time period you do that easily with relatively rudimentary technology from a single planet. When you start getting into autofactory ideas and geometric growth it becomes even more easy to determine that at that time period. So the question should then become - why hasn't that happened? And you continue to think way too small, or assume that you have to hit a technological peak and then decline in some way. Which is fine - that's one of the Fermi paradox answers, that intelligent species effectively end themselves - but you need to actually state that as a thesis instead of just wildly saying that things are big, therefore it's okay. Obviously something that looks like our tech would need to be 3000 light years away for us to detect it. My point is not that it needs to be precisely that timing - only that given tech like our current level, we could easily detect that sort of tech coming from planets at that distance in spacetime. How about you do it then? Because again I'm not talking about a million years - that's an absurdly small timescale. I'm talking about a species that can harness the power of its solar system and chooses to explore, with a long dedicated goal. Just one would be able to send artifacts to every corner of the galaxy in a billion years. Earth is young by comparison to a lot of the systems and worlds out there; a civilization a billion years ago is not particularly weird. So please, you should get your facts straight - because you're basically saying that the expansionist nature of the human race and our trends are impossible. One of the better things to base predictions on is on what we've observed in the past with our own species, because we know that to be actually possible. Refuting my claims is refuting the existence of things like us. And I'm not suggesting that you make contact, only that you are aware. Bidirectional communication is not necessary any more than it was necessary for us to determine Sumerians existed 6000 years ago. And that's exactly my thesis - that they WOULD come close to the solar system. Many times, in fact. And that, well, we can detect readily. It's remarkable how angry and how incorrect you are, just by assuming certain things. You assume we have to look at planets to see the life and ignore the notion of life going out and looking on its own. You assume passivity in exploration despite humanity's verdant examples of active exploration. You assume only a million years and the technology of the 1960s and ignore even what we've done in the last 50 years. Is it because you really want life to exist but not be noisy, and will be disappointed if you're wrong? Is this a matter of faith and not science? We have a probe that launched from the 1970s that has survived for 50 years. Who needs to launch life? Is the hang They'd be able to if they started early enough, and with enough of a thought about doing exactly that. Again we almost have the technology to do that in our lifetimes right now - we could fill the galaxy with von neumann machines without major difficulty. It wouldn't even take nanotech or anything magical; simple robots that can self replicate and extract fuels while using solar power to bootstrap is already something that we either can do or could do real soon. It doesn't take esoteric or imagined tech to do something like this - you don't need small fusion reactors or more efficient rocket engines than we have or nanotech. You seem to think that time is somehow short in the galaxy or the universe. It's very odd. The universe and the galaxy are vast, but time is much more vast. What's especially weird to me is that you think that intelligent life could not possibly do something like this, but you also believe 100% that any intelligent life will have something like religion.

Millions of years, then? Maybe billions? As an example, how long will the Voyager spacecraft last, or parts of it? I'm not even suggesting functional - just random garbage. A whole lot of the artifacts that we produce will potentially exist for millions and millions of years, and that's just us in the last 100 or so. In any case, a major problem that seems to be ignored is the notion of exponential expansion. Even if you're talking slower-than-light, and even if you're talking slow behaviors, you're still looking at creatures that potentially can fill up a galaxy in millions of years' time with various cruft. And that would include the solar system. We don't need to see them first; the most surprising thing to me is that there isn't something here, already. It is time alone - see above. It's a lot easier problem to solve when you're not just talking about us seeing others on their planets and are instead talking about us seeing others on our own. And if there was a civilization like ours that existed 3000 years ago at our current tech time frame we could, actually, detect its signals. Pretty clearly even. The only way we couldn't is if they were technologically behind us - but that's not nearly as plausible. Really, all it takes is one very noisy, very exploratory, very expansionist intelligence to have happened to be in this galaxy at some point in the last few billion years to show crazy evidence that they have been around here that is visible to us. Now, it's certainly possible that that didn't happen, and it's certainly possible that we're looking in the wrong, poorly-human designed ways. But the idea that all the life out there just...didn't go exploring, ever? That's a pretty implausible notion that requires a whole lot of special thinking. We have the resolution to detect all sorts of things heading out in all directions, everywhere. Again, we don't need to just see a planet to see the evidence of intelligent life. Put it another way - if we can reasonably think of ways to colonize and seed the galaxy given enough time, it is highly implausible that we are the only things that could ever do it, or have ever done it - if others exist. So why hasn't that happened in the billions of years of the universe or the galaxy's existence?

Eh. That's only true for signals of communication. Other signs of life - artifacts, materials, etc - last a whole lot longer. That's ignoring the notion that once a species starts sending things out they would do so for, like, ever, too. I've heard this idea repeatedly - the notion of timeshifting - and it continues to be the wrong way of thinking about things. We don't need to have constant communication with the Romans to know that Romans existed. The big one is that there's no signs of anything, not just signals in the photonic spectrum. Or at least not ones we're interpreting as information that indicates other life.

Pfft so unrealistic, everyone knows women can't surf

In more relevant news, AI is being used to pick targets for Israel in Gaza - and it has a 10% failure rate: https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/middleeast/israel-gaza-artificial-intelligence-bombing-intl/index.html I guess that 10% is acceptable as long as you're not particularly punished for it.

It's much less about us not finding life and more about life not finding us.

Iger's keeping her around because by their metrics she's doing a pretty good job. People seem to forget that she's also responsible for things like Andor and Rogue One and the Mandalorian, and a lot of their licensing deals. But can we maybe, just once, not turn a topic about Marvel into bashing Kathleen Kennedy? Maybe?

The Ultima manuals and game box was absurdly cool. It had things like a cloth map, and a crazy detailed manual, and all sorts of things. Later on RPGs put in a ton of actual text from the game that you needed to use a specific key system to read from - along with a bunch of random things to throw people off - because storing that much information on disk was actually taking up too much space, plus it was something of a piracy fix.

I mean, kinda? I'm saying less about having spell slots and everyone having spells or even the same kind of mechanics, and more looking at it as: is this ability in general as power as the standard spells you can get at that slot and with the amount of things that you can use? And again you need to balance it with how many times it comes up, how powerful it is in and out of combat, flavor parts, etc - but that should be how you balance it. As an example, comparing champion level 7 (more jumping!) with 4th level spells shows an obvious imbalance, even if you can jump every single turn. If you want wizards to be the master of versatility but having to plan for and make tough choices, and want other classes to have more niche abilities that are less flexible that's fine too - but you need to balance that with increasing that power level too. Ultimately I think D&D suffers greatly from not having a clear idea of what each class is really good at and what they're not good at, and then balancing around that behavior; it is clearly missing intentionality. Which is weird, because WotC owns it and they're absolutely stellar at that sort of thing with MtG.