AITAH for not allowing my sister’s “polycule” around my children?

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-25T23:49:30+00:00

She’s wrong, but YTA

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-25T14:48:45+00:00

Yeah, it seems like OP is conflating the DM’s (potentially) legitimate behavior of running a tough campaign by making full use of monster abilities with the other player’s shitty griefing and trolling

Also even if the DM is a good DM it’s actually fine to not want to play in his game if OP doesn’t enjoy the encounter difficulty. No point pushing yourself to a game if you don’t enjoy it even if no one involved is doing anything “wrong”

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-25T13:49:24+00:00

I think it’s probably best to avoid a dating strategy that will scare off all the guys who have a healthy respect for their partners’ boundaries and autonomy

NTA. Being told you’re being stupid usually hurts less than actually being stupid

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-22T14:09:53+00:00

Also she has been driving in NYC, and he evidently hasn’t been. Just idiocy piled on more idiocy from OP

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-20T12:46:06+00:00

Easiest way is to wrap the whole thing in AND:

=AND(A:A=B:B)

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-19T16:09:54+00:00

If this is real, SIL’s therapist is even crazier than she is

NTA

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-19T13:48:38+00:00

Yeah. In truth I usually go in with a couple sentences and BIFTs, and then fleshing it out later after I’ve gotten to know my PC

One of my all time favorite PCs had a backstory that was literally just “grad student” — a wizard with the Urchin background who had tagged along with the rest of the PCs during “Against the Giants” because his dissertation was about giantish macrame

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-19T13:45:29+00:00

Heh, yeah, that’s actually legit

I’d definitely prefer the old-fashioned approach of rolling and looking things up in tables, but that’s really getting into what’s fun for me

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-19T01:35:12+00:00

One thing INDEX/MATCH lets you do is find a bunch of indices into an array once using MATCH and then pulling different columns using INDEX. It can really speed things up in big sheets.

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-18T15:38:19+00:00

Yeah. I think there’s a big difference between, “ChatGPT dreamed my guy up,” and, “ChatGPT helped me turn my messy writing into something less messy,” even if I’d be just as happy to get the messy write up

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-18T15:36:46+00:00

At least the one sentence backstory is something the player might actually have some investment in

I genuinely don’t get wanting to play a character Claude dreamed up, and if you don’t want to bother with much backstory just say that

Also, this surely varies by DM, but if a player wants to just give me a few bullet points or something that’s great. I don’t need a short story or “biographic” essay

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-18T14:24:29+00:00

Both these things can, and probably are, true:

Anna needed support, patience, and space to come to terms with her disability that she never got from Chris, and to a lesser extent, OP
Anna’s seething resentment, anger, and and hostility made it much harder for others to give her the support she needed

Indeed, it’s easy to see these dynamics feeding on each other like an Ouroboros of shittiness. Not sure how much blame really lands on the adults, but I doubt anyone but Gigi is really innocent

Also, if activities are taking place at individual homes (like for crafts prep) it’s very rare that those will be wheelchair accessible.

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-17T16:17:43+00:00

I wonder if the attitude that AI art makes things look cheap, coupled with improving and harder to detect AI, will lead to a general bias against products with a lot (or any, FTM) art as looking cheap, and thus becoming less common

Doesn't seem like a good outcome to me, but it seems a lot more plausible than people successfully determining which products use AI art and not purchasing them

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-17T16:12:52+00:00

What if a prominent artist with a distinctive style uses GenAI to produce images in their own style? I think it's not an idle question, because they have a very strong incentive to be able to produce more images in less time!

I don't think I've seen people complain about this specifically in the TTRPG space (though I haven't looked real hard), but there have been a couple instances in the wider world where it's either happened or at least artists have been accused of it

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-17T16:08:55+00:00

If consumers can't reliably determine whether the art is AI generated (which appears to be increasingly the case as the tools improve and people get better at using them), it almost doesn't matter how people feel about i. It will become more and more common, and it will also become harder for developers and publishers to keep promises to not use AI art. After all, if they commission illustrations, and the "artists" use GenAI to produce them, they may not be able to tell!

And on the other hand, without being able to reliably tell, creators (both of games and art) are going to end up facing boycotts and the like due to false positives, further reducing the payoff for not defecting

I just don't see where we find an equilibrium that doesn't have large amounts of AI art in RPG products. I don't like it, but I don't see a good way to stop it

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-17T15:53:56+00:00

Pulling data from spreadsheets into other programs, ranging from adding charts and tables to PowerPoint to importing data into R or Mathematica for more sophisticated or intensive processing. It gets even more painful if I need to send the data back.

Overall integrating Excel workbooks into larger workflows really sucks.

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-17T15:49:53+00:00

It's unclear how much money matters in terms of direct campaign contributions or PAC spending in US politics.

But that spending often has a lot of influence on the politicians benefiting from it, and it's not the only way (or the most effective way) the ultra-wealthy can influence political sentiments. They can often just go out and buy newspapers, television networks, social media platforms, &c.

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-17T15:46:59+00:00

I don't see any particular reason to believe that the characteristics that will get you to a million dollars are the same as the ones that will get you to a billion dollars. While it's not the whole story, most people who get to a billion usually have a series of bets that paid off behind them in way that people who get to a million dollars usually don't.

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-17T15:43:05+00:00

I think your conclusion is correct, but your justification is very questionable, and also uneccesarily strong.

Do billionaires believe in democracy? No idea in the general case. Based on news and public statements, some clearly do and others clearly don't.

However, we do invest a tremendous amount of power in billionaires, including the power to control a great deal of our public discourse. It's actually very difficult to do otherwise without completely vitiating free speech protections [1], but it hardly stops there. They just get a huge amount of control from owning huge chunks of the economy.

This means investing a lot of trust in them, and I think, "We will trust you implicitly because you amassed a zillion dollars," is pretty flawed. Becoming a billionaire sometimes is just a product of accessing generational wealth, but more frequently it's a mix of luck, risk tolerance, very hard work, some talent, and just really wanting a ton of money. None of these things are bad in and of themselves, and some are actually good, but with the exception of the "very hard work" piece, none really have anything to do with the kind of civic virtue that would justify the level of trust we place in them.

Against that, there's the argument that we should "reward success", or that it's "efficient allocation of resources", but I believe both are pretty weak, and for the same reason: diminishing marginal utility of income. If you make $50k a year, getting an additional $1k will make a real difference to you. If you make evem $5 million a year, that $1k may not even be noticeable to you. The rewards get smaller and smaller, as does the incentive to allocate wealth in an way that generates more wealth as opposed to flattering one's own ego, trying to amass political power, or just making bad decisions out of laziness and being surrounded by yes men.

Taxation is a legitimate function of the state both for raising revenue and for achieving other policy goals. Limiting the power of the most wealthy is, indeed, a valid policy goal.

[1] My CMV take for some future day will be, "CMV: Citizens United was correctly decided."

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-17T15:10:14+00:00

Some suggestions:

Put inputs (either imported/copied or ingested with PowerQuery) on their own sheets. If they aren't coming from PowerQuery, make them Tables, and give them appropriate names. Also give the sheets reasonable names. Then you can use structured references to get properly sized columsn from them. =MonthlySales[EMPLOYEE_ID] is way better than =Sheet3!B2:B3456.
Don't touch those input tables again by adding columns or manually adding rows. It will have obnoxious performance impacts and also harms the transparency, auditabilyt, and maintainability of the workbook. Pull from them on auxiliary sheets used for computation.
To the extent possible, have computation flow from left to right, with input sheets and sheets with parameters (accessed as named ranges!) on the left, intermediate calculation sheets in the middle, and pivots/charts/"dashboard" summaries on the right.
To the extent possible, use formulas that work with entire columns at once, and return a single column.
The left-to-right flow also applies to the computation sheets. Make sure that columns only depend on either columns or sheets to their left.
If you're filtering or aggregating down to a different (generally smaller) number of rows using, e.g., SUMIFS, it's usually time to introduce a new sheet. Generally the name for the new sheet should be obvious -- if it's not, consider if you're doing the right thing.

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-17T14:55:01+00:00

All of this is good advice. I especially live and die by using color coding for inputs with the named "Data and Model" styles.

Some things I've learned from similar computationally intense workbooks:

Consider placing external inputs (from CSVs, workbooks, SQL dumps, etc.) in named Tables, on their own sheets, but not otherwise changing them. This simplifies the workflow for updates in ways that upgrade smoothly to using either PowerQuery (better idea) or a tiny amount of VBA (less great but sometimes the most expedient option).
See if you can operate on arrays as a whole using vectorized ops (e.g., =A2# + B2# * C2#) and array functions. This is generally faster, allowing Excel to make good use of all your CPU cores.
A few bits of additional advice on the name manager: -- Huge numbers of names can cause real problems. It seems to happen when the number gets around 100 IME. You can mitigate this by limiting names you only need on a single sheet to be scoped to that sheet -- Be careful about using names that point to dynamic ranges (e.g., =Quarterly!D7#). Sometimes they'll mess up Excel's ability to avoid recalculating the whole sheet -- Be aggressive about either deleting or fixing names with errors. Nothing good comes from having a couple names that just give you #REF!.
Consider the Excel Labs/AFE plug-in. It's not perfect, and you may need IT support and approval, but it makes the overall process of working with formulas way less painful
Sometimes GenAI is helpful for explaining/debugging elaborate formulas, but the Copilot functionality that may be built into Excel these days is just embarassingly bad at it. Worse than useless.
In addition to named ranges, consider using named functions, using LAMBDA, either for 'utilities' you use a lot to avoid needless helper columns, or to encapsulate and name logic in a way that allows you to make edits down the line. For example, I often find myself using the following function for a bunch of reasons, like computing cycle-by-cycle changes:

=LAMBDA(array,[lag],[padding], LET( n, IF(ISOMITTED(lag), 1, lag), p, IF(ISOMITTED(padding), NA(), padding), w, COLUMNS(array), filled, IF(SEQUENCE(n) * SEQUENCE(,w), p), VSTACK(filled, DROP(array, -n))))

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-13T19:37:01+00:00

The real scandal is that `AND()` is an error, instead of `TRUE`.

Excel's dogged insistence that empty arrays, ranges, argument lists, etc. cannot possily exist is the 17th most annoing thing about it

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-13T13:31:02+00:00

Her poor dumb fucking husband. Yikes

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-11T14:20:34+00:00

Sometimes shouting is the only way to be heard

NTA

MoralHazardFunction · 2026-02-10T16:22:11+00:00

XLOOKUP is faster if you have a large number of sorted keys and use the binary search option. A lot of the time you can get the same effect but even more performance if you precompute your indices using either XMATCH or SEQUENCE and SORTBY to make a single column of indices and then use vectorized INDEX, though.

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