[-] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 6 points 15 hours ago

Oh, no problem then! The AI bubble will carry us through far enough until it all comes crashing down in... I want to say 2027?

[-] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Higher infant mortality, and higher maternal mortality to boot, all while chasing the $5k bait with poor insurance coverage at public hospitals. Meanwhile, the haves can afford better private care. Since that's where the money will be, they'll be pulling better doctors and nurses to it, thus avoiding becoming statistics.

Edit: it all boils back down to "survival of the fittest", where "fittest" has been redefined to mean "has the most money".

[-] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 23 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Preface: I have a lot of AI skepticism.

My company is using Cursor and Windsurf, focusing on agent mode (and whatever Windsurf's equivalent is). It hallucinates real hard with any open ended task, but when you have ALL of:

  • an app with good preexisting test coverage
  • the ability to run relevant tests quickly (who has time to run an 18 hour CI suite locally for a 1 line change?)
  • a well thought out product use case with edge cases

Then you can tell the agent to write test cases before writing code, and run all relevant tests when making any code changes. What it produces is often fine, but rarely great. If you get clever with setting up rules (that tell it to do all of the above), you can sometimes just drop in a product requirement and have it implement, making only minor recommendations. It's as if you are pair programming with an idiot savant, emphasis on idiot.

But whose app is well covered with tests? (Admittedly, AI can help speed up the boilerplating necessary to backfill test cases, so long as someone knows how the app is supposed to work). Whose app is well-modularized such that it's easy to select only downstream affected tests for any given code change? (If you know what the modules should be, AI can help... But it's pretty bad at figuring that out itself). And who writes well thought out product use cases nowadays?

If we were still in the olde waterfall era, with requirements written by business analysts, then maybe this could unlock the fabled 100x gains per developer. Or 10x gains. Or 1.1x gains, most likely.

But nowadays it's more common for AI to write the use cases, hallucinate edge cases that aren't real, and when coupled with the above, patchwork together an app that no one fully understands, and that only sometimes works.

Edit: if all of that sounds like TDD, which on its own gives devs a speed boost when they actually use it consistently, and you wonder if CEOs will claim that the boosts are attributable to AI when their devs finally start to TDD like they have been told to for decades now, well, I wonder the same thing.

[-] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 62 points 1 month ago

Can we stop posting this headline? Again and again and again?

It's not news.

If a sizable portion of the population did want to do something stupid, that'd be news.

This is... It's not even propaganda. It's just a waste of our limited time and emotional capacity for idiocy.

[-] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 62 points 6 months ago

The poop knife is irrelevant until and unless one plans to flush, which this question did not ask.

Also, why do you assume the nurse is a lady?

[-] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 23 points 9 months ago

In my utopia, Google would be forced to continue to pay out the current annual contract sum, at a decreasing percentage every year, for some number of years, to all affected companies, giving them the opportunity to divest and pivot.

The root problem doesn't get fixed if the company with enough money to be a monopolist still has the money when this is "resolved."

[-] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 28 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I find that system inconvenient, as it does not inform me of how I should eat any given item. Classification for the purpose of classification is insufficient. However, an alternative that allows me to prepare my ustensils based on the classification is useful, and therefore I propose...

Soup, salad, and sandwich are the three states of food, and they can go through phase transitions. They are closely accompanied by spoon, fork, and knife, respectively.

  • A soup is any food that requires a spoon, and thus includes soups, drinks, cereal with milk, etc. Tipping a container is merely the use of the container as a large and unwieldy spoon, a straw is similarly a spoon when its topology is combined with suction.

  • A salad then is anything bite sized that can be forked, and one's hands are little more than fleshy forks, the fingers prehensile tines. Popcorn, salads, cut up steak bites, a handful of cheerios, etc.

  • A sandwich is anything that requires it to be cut in order to be consumed, and one's incisors are merely built-in knives. A sandwich is thus the vast majority of the cube rule's content, and only because the cube rule focuses on the physical location of the starch. This is, of course, entirely irrelevant when it comes to the consumption of food.

  • To observe a phase transition, one can cut up a sandwich without consuming it, thereby turning it into a salad; can drown a salad to turn it into a soup; can freeze a soup to turn it into a sandwich, etc.

Shredded cheese is a salad.

[-] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 27 points 1 year ago

Is it bad that my first thought goes to "have you tried a federal database that keeps track of guns, gun owners, and gun ownership applicants?" And yet I know this new idiocy is far more likely to happen than the much more reasonable yet somehow illegal federal gun registry.

[-] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 29 points 1 year ago

"Would incest be okay if we could guarantee no reinforcement of bad recessives?"

"I want space travel, to live forever, and make an AI human for... Reasons."

"Get off my lawn, big government!"

That tracks.

[-] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 32 points 1 year ago

If dropping a database scares you, you are either unaware of the disaster recovery process, or there isn't one. Edumacate yourself, or the org, as appropriate, so as to increase your confidence when dropping databases.

[-] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 23 points 2 years ago

Post office too. Really any government office where the public is allowed inside.

Underpaid workers trying to explain bureaucratic minutiae (for which they are not responsible) every single day to people who are not versed in that minutiae, do not want to learn it, cannot learn it, and are preemptively frustrated that they have to have this interaction in the first place. There is no winning--mental health isn't cheap, do the workers' resilience only lasts for so many years/months/days before they default to hating the clients, and the clients don't trust publicly available instructions, thus dooming themselves to the shitty interactions.

The only way to fix this is to take both people out of the equation--preprocess everything that might need to happen for everyone, to the point of turning every transaction into a single trasaction. That requires for every city, county, state, national, international agency to federate, so that you never have to file multiple documents to do a thing.

5
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network to c/pf2character@pathfinder.social

I’m struggling to build out a Psychic that primarily uses Imaginary Weapon in melee. It is so flavorful, yet at 6 base HP per level and no armor proficiency, it feels really dangerous to get up close and personal. Sure, Warp Space amps it to be at 30ft range, but there are only so many focus points available to spend amping.

I’m looking to have this be viable at level 6 (so Parallel Breakthrough is an option). Any heritages, feat chains, or items I should look into to make it feel good to use Imaginary Weapon?

12

I'm struggling to build out a Psychic that primarily uses Imaginary Weapon in melee. It is so flavorful, yet at 6 base HP per level and no armor proficiency, it feels really dangerous to get up close and personal. Sure, Warp Space amps it to be at 30ft range, but there are only so many focus points available to spend amping.

I'm looking to have this be viable at level 6 (so Parallel Breakthrough is an option). Any heritages, feat chains, or items I should look into to make it feel good to use Imaginary Weapon?

3

I recently theorycrafted a Dex and a Str version of an Artillerist with the Gunner feat popping off a Booming Blade and a Force Ballista each turn.

Dex variant: Choose a race that gets a weapon proficiency (e.g. Githyanki) to weild a Rapier. Pick up Gunner at 4. Starting stats are somewhere along the lines of 8 15+2 14 15+1 10 8, aiming to max Dex and pick up a Headband of Intellect to cover the otherwise low Int. Rolling can get the starting Int to be more respectable, but otherwise this feels pretty bad early game.

Str variant: Can start with a feat race for Gunner, point buy stats of 14 13+1 14 14+2 9 8, aiming to max Int, get Resilient Wis, and pick up Gauntlets of Ogre Power to cover the otherwise low Str. Acquiring an All Purpose Tool can provide Shillelagh to not need GoOP.

Why do this at all? Arcane Firearm, whether you tap your rapier with it as your Artificer-required tool material component, or whether it itself is the staff you go bonking people with Booming Blade, provides an extra 1d8 Thunder damage. Force Ballista's built in knockback has no save. Put those together with Faerie Fire, and you have a pretty reliable chunk of damage every round alongside a semi-reliable BB rider proc.

Questions:

  • is Shillelagh via APT viable here? Since you can't cast Shillelagh and Faerie Fire on the same turn, setup feels bad.
  • would some other pushback, like Crusher, be more effective?
  • is being ranged overall, with ranged cantrips, just better damage faster (i.e. by dropping Gunner and maxing Int faster)?
3
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network to c/3d6@ttrpg.network

Much of the time I think of items as addons to a build, and focus on the race, class, and feat progression when planning. However, in both Westmarches and many standard canpaigns, it is not unreasonable to be able to buy, craft, or at least request some specific items, at least going up to Rare rarity. That got me thinking about trying to optimize a build around the item, rather than the other way around.

Out of the Abyss provides a unique and interesting Rare item, the Stonespeaker Crystal. It has 10 charges, regains ~7 per day, allows spending some charges to cast the three Speak With spells, and, most importantly, allows expending a number of charges equal to a divination spell's level to replace one consumed spell component. The following divination spells have consumed spell compoments:

  • Divination (4) 25gp¹
  • Fortune's Favor (2) 100gp
  • Legend Lore (5) 250gp
  • True Seeing (6) 25gp

¹uses two components with combined cost of 25gp, so the crystal can only replace one of them.

If you play with EGtW, the obvious use case for this is the Graviturgy or Chronurgy Wizard, getting Fortune's Favor (upcastable for more targets, letting you safely cover a party at least once per day with a 1-hour long Lucky d20 each). You also get Legend Lore (cast for free once per day to keep improving your results about the same thing) as well as True Seeing as a Wizard, and since TCoE expanded Wizard spells to include Divination, you don't even need Ritual Caster Cleric to get the full set. It's nice to have the crystal on a Wizard who normally doesn't get Speak with Animals or Speak with Plants too.

The most broken use of this item that I can think of is, conveniently, with Chronurgy's Arcane Abeyance on Fortune's Favor. Cast Fortune's Favor at 5th level on four members of the party, and then also save a bead with a 4th level casting to re-up three party members' Lucky dice mid-combat, increasing the likelihood they actually use them. Between that, Chronal Shift, Silvery Barbs, and Convergent Future, you might as well be the DM now.

Even without EGtW, a Divination Wizard can benefit greatly from the Stonespeaker Crystal thanks to Expert Divination, effectively reducing the total burned cost of Legend Lore to one fifth of a spell slot. Again, after enough castings, you at least know as much as the DM does, and with Portent and Silvery Barbs can control the outcome somewhat.

Did I miss any synergies worth exploring?

8
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network to c/3d6@ttrpg.network

(In the absense of a WhatWouldYouBuild type of community, I figure 3d6 is the closest place here for such things, but correct me if I'm wrong.)

How would you build, in either D&D 5e or Pathfinder 2e, Cirilla of Cintra, based on her powers and abilities exhibited in the beginning of season 3 of The Witcher? She had the battle-prowess of a witcher, but she doesn't use her magic in combat. Her magic is powerful enough to stand against very strong sorcerers, but seems to mostly be reactionary rather than intentional.

4
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network to c/3d6@ttrpg.network

5e's Fear has the added mechanic of requiring the target to take the Dash action and run away, unless there is nowhere to run. This can cause some DMs to rule Oath of Conquest's aura as allowing the target to use its action for other things. But with Sentinel's reaction causing movement speed to drop to zero, that wouldn't trigger until after the Dash action had been used--creating an optimizable opportunity.

My current build idea for this is a Hexblade 1 / Whispers Bard X, choosing to be Custom Lineage to grab Sentinel at level 1. This means that Cha can be maxed by 9 (rather than 13), the build is Cha-SAD, and you can augment your attacks with blade cantrips (yes, BB doesn't synergize with either Fear* or Sentinel, but it is still a nice chunk of scaling damage). Bard also provides Command, Dissonant Whispers, Healing Word, Psychic Blades, and eventually Find Greater Steed (to get another opportunity attack).

(* If your DM counter-rules that Fear, Command, Dissonant Whispers, etc should proc Booming Blade, definitely opt for a reach weapon. That way BB procs when they move 5ft away, and then you lock them down with Sentinel at 10.)

The primary drawback is a lack of reliable advantage, so even though Psychic Blades add another layer of damage, missing on an opportunity attack risks them breaking Fear.

Thoughts on how to optimize around Fear+Sentinel, either by improving this build, or through some other means?

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FearfulSalad

joined 2 years ago