@[email protected] It's almost like picking a different architecture changes how you solve your problem, rather than removing it. Who would have thought?

(Not that some problems aren't easier or harder to solve with some architectures, but I do get a bit tired of the 'do this, it will make it easy!')

@[email protected] Some of it is so much more banal than the creepiness and directly sexual as well. The very first professional tech conference I went to, I chatted to a female speaker and found out that (in context of the conference having paid to fly her across the atlantic to give a technical talk because she was a world class expert on the subject) she had just been told that she needed to choose between taking a pay cut to move to "developer relations" or get sacked because "a really good engineering candidate came on the market, and you're so good with people skills". No points for guessing the gender of the new team member.

Blue coder needs coffee, badly

@[email protected] You are not alone in thinking this metal-archives.com/bands/Mer...

@[email protected] @[email protected] The release note was from the next release that included the fix, given I apparently haven't had enough coffee to write clearly this morning yet.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Early in my career I accidently wrote a parser for an open source project that restarted from the beginning of the string every character, going one further each time. Never been quite so embarrassed by a release note before or since: "[x] parser performance improved by three orders of magnitude on average config file"

Shhh! It's (kind of) secret. I'm running an online course for teens creating assets for visual novels, and last week one person couldn't make it. So if you're curious about some beginner tips on creating game characters with varying expressions and nice environments in Krita without running out of time to actually write your game, you can be nosey. The video is unlisted because it's a but rough and ready for people see without context, but given you've got enough taste and distinction to be following this account you now have context!

youtu.be/8W7L2-0f2RE #VisualNovel #krita #GameDev #Layers #MoreLayers #YouCanFixThatProblemWithLayersToo

@[email protected] @[email protected] Yeap, gluten free food required over here and we do something like this regularly. Also chonky varient with embedded veg: soften some sliced courgette, pepper, or spinach in a pan and tip a slightly thicker layer of the egg mix on top. Try and have enough veg to cover the base of the pan so the egg at the bottom doesn't over cook before the top sets. Bit of garlic with the courgette or nutmeg with spinach goes nicely.

@[email protected] Ostensibly the person using the word ostensibly meant ostensibly

@[email protected]

"Ostensibly for Risus of all things. Takes me back."

"He wrote Risus as well."

"Ah!"

Whelp, found out today that someone wanting to improve the clarity and engagement of their #ttrpg writing hadn't heard of 'Toast of the Town' so I was able to give them enough experience to immediately level up.

Thanks, @[email protected]

@[email protected] You'd hope tactics like this would be self-defeating, but unfortunately that "hope" is bearing rather a lot of weight I'm not sure it can support.

@[email protected] But like a pineapple does it contain neither apple nor sauce?

Chatting with someone about #ttrpg writing and was reminded of Nobilis 3rd edition, a game that contains my all time favourate example character and that has writing in its rules that you could quote for days. Like... how the interaction between your supernatural connection to things you value (the Treasure stat, think things like Thor's hammer) interacts with the Aspect stat (your ability to personally perform tasks beyond mortal limits, or opposed to say Domain where you control the thing you're a Power of to create miracles):

If you possess something using Treasure, you can wield your Aspect through its body. This draws on the natural limits of that body, however, rather than your own — if you’re possessing one of your hopes, for instance, you’re not going to be able to lift a great weight very easily because hope has no arms and legs. All you’ll be able to do is coil more tightly about your own heart, or shine in yourself with greater strength.

And synchronisity in full play I'm not the only person thinking about this and trying to get the idea communicated in different ways.

wandering.shop/users/xgranad...

Thinking about LLMs again because, unfortunately, I needed to think about LLMs again and I think I found a way to say something.

LLMs are a technique for matching input requests with semantically connected outputs from their training set, where 'semantically connected' is determined by how language in different contexts in the training data. That's what they do: find related language to what 'should come after' the prompt.

Which means that with enough input related to anything in the training set, you'll start getting the related training data (mixed and matched at the token level to varying degrees). Bomb making instructions? If they're in the training set, there's a way to extract them. Hacking tips and tricks? Of course. Other customers private data? If the LLM can access it, it can be triggered to share it.

Which means, fundamentally, the only way to control LLM output is... choosing the LLM training data. Apart from all of the odious business practices of the current suppliers, why are we trying to legislate LLM output when what we really need to enforce is ethical LLM training input? The rest is just noise; even banning LLMs makes no sense, at the end of the day they're just applied matrix multiplication and we've seen how 'banning maths' goes historically a few times already. #llm #MathsBan #IllegalNumbers

Teaching early teens how to create their own game assets for #VisualNovels (and #GameDev in general) and today we were talking about using layers to speed up art creation (alpha locking, filters on layer groups), to give characters different expressions, or even create variations with multiple colours without having to redraw the whole image every time. In talking about expressions we discussed icons and why adding two diagonal lines to an orcs face immediately makes them an angry orc.

We also talked about how you always want clear visual separation between your visual focus (the orc) and the background (the corridor), lowering saturation and making sure that there's a contrast between the edge of the focus object and the background even if it isn't "realistic" - i.e. why it wouldn't work to have the corridor fade to black if we want to use filled line art with black lines.

All after doing some thumbnail sketches to work out what the problems were in the first place. Not bad for an hours work! #krita #VisualDesign #IterativeImprovements

@[email protected] while I had sort of assumed the five referred to fingers, I suppose there is also the possibility that (the people being represented by) American kids on TV during my childhood took a lot more drugs than I thought.

@[email protected] ...you have five thighs?

Not too surprisingly, we're huge fans here of Inkle studios (headed up by @[email protected] and @[email protected]) which is part of why we chose to use their scripting language to power VisualInk.

We are mentioning this because currently their whole back catalogue is up for a charity supporting sale on Humble Bundle and if you like fun, quirky, narrative heavy games you may want to go have a look. We, er, might have just bought a copy ourselves.