I know a lot of people recommend rules-light games for beginners, but if your group has neither roleplaying experience or theater experience, then something more structured and board-gamey may actually benefit. What I find is that players without any experience fall into choice paralysis in rules light games, and having clearer structures can facilitate learning. It really does depend on what sort of experience your players are interested in. If I had to make a blind recommendation, I think that the Free League “Year Zero Engine” games might be a good candidate if you’ve never played a TRPG before. They have the right balance of rules complexity for new players, good GM support and high production values. There are plenty of different genres (and degrees of complexity) in the ecosystem.

Some examples that you may want to look at:

• Mutant: Year Zero (post-apocalyptic adventure)
• Dragonbane (fantasy adventure) (Technically not YZE, but it has similar levels of complexity)
• Vaesen (mystery, folklore, horror)
• ALIEN RPG (sci-fi, horror)
• Tales from the Loop (coming of age, sci-fi adventure).

Most of the these games have a starter kit with one-shot adventures that are meant to introduce players to the system and roleplaying more general.

This is actually not true. The use of AI media in the Chinese entertainment industry is just as pervasive and probably more so than the US, and Chinese universities and private firms are developing their own AI image/video generators at an equivalent pace to the Western firms. For example you have Chinese-developed SOTA DiT txt2img models like Pixart, Hunyuan and Lumina, and even SOTA video models like Kling. Tencent, Alibaba and Bytedance are putting out various models, optimizations and distillations in this space as well. Even back in April of last year, there were articles indicating a 70% decline in illustration jobs in sectors like video game development.

Red Markets is a game about poverty a zombie apocalypse where the US federal government has written off the western states and the people that live there as “The Loss” and attempts to enforce a sense of “normality” on the remainder of the country (although the game takes place in The Loss and I don’t think that the eastern US has that much detail on it.)

I use diffusion models a fair bit for VTT assets for TTRPGs. I’ve used LLMs a little bit for suggesting solutions for coding problems, and I do want to use one to mass produce customized cover letter drafts for my upcoming job hunt.

Neither model class is sufficiently competent for any zero-shot task yet, or at least has too high of a failure rate to run without active supervision.

As for use in a socialist society, even the current version of the technology has some potential for helping with workers’ tasks’. Obviously, it would need to be rationed per its actual environmental and energy costs as opposed to the current underwriting by VCs. You’d also want to focus on specialized models for specific tasks, as opposed to less efficient generalized models.

I mean outside of the Labor party.

Meh. Was hoping that he’d throw support behind a broader left-wing challenge to Starmer, but I guess it’d be good for him to remain in parliament.

I’m not saying it shouldn’t be legalized or that those other benefits aren’t present, I’m saying that cure-alls/panaceas don’t exist and that legalization advocates in the past have indulged in that sort of myth-making.

Hemp/cannabis certainly has benefits, but a lot of those benefits have been exaggerated to support decriminalization/legalization. When it comes to medicine, cannabis has benefits as a non-opioid analgesiac/painkiller, so that’s obviously a huge boon for chronic pain where the risk of opioid addiction and another side-effects are a major concern. However, I would be skeptical of claims of healing properties of cannabis or any other proposed panacea.

Outside an atmosphere like Earth’s, everything is already exposed to intense ionizing radiation from the sun/stars. A bit more from an RTG, even a big one, is a drop in the ocean. If we found signs of extraterrestrial life, then we’d want to be extra cautious about not sterilizing by accident, but that’s not currently a major concern. And of course, any sort of nuclear rocket propulsion would need to be handed with utmost care, but it’s also not a major issue once it’s outside the atmosphere.

To get the data to build and validate that type of model, you would need to study a lot more living brains than these neuralink experiments. Like, orders on orders of magnitude more. You can’t really model this sort of thing from first principles.

There isn’t a capability to model a complete living brain in silico, so not really at this time.

Why are they teasing this as a secret game, when it’s either EU5, or one of their ill-fated gaiden games (March of Eagles, Sengoku, etc…) which I though PDX stopped making.

Surprised that Microsoft is letting them compete in search engines while they’re spending boatloads of money/compute on trying to make Bing relevant.

If db0 was banned, then I don’t see how we can stay federated.

Smuggled/evacuated to where? To the Sinai where Sisi has erected concentration camps, or to Israel’s bombing site “humanitarian” zone, or to the destroyed uninhabitable North? There is no where to go, and the resistance’s infrastructure can’t exactly shelter a million people.

Forgot that Starliner was still a thing. Boeing/ULA is such a joke,

While I live on Liberal Mountain, I can testify that Iowa seems to have no culinary tradition. It’s south of Midwestern German/Scandanvian/Polish food, and north/east of the Southern/Tex-mex food.

An immediate vote might be a win. A months away vote is a defeat for the student movement here.

I don’t see why you can’t baptize someone in Gatorade. It’s just sugar water. How would that prevent it from being used in baptism?

I was talking about the anti-Trump inauguration J20 protests from 2016.