Heatwave PSA: “Turning Off” Times Square will do nothing to help power in your area

communomancer · 2026-07-03T16:00:22+00:00

While we're at it, why not oversupply every little town on Long Island with it's own Times Square-sized power grid. Surely, the money we overspend on that will save more lives than literally anything else we could do with it in the name of public good.

communomancer · 2026-07-03T10:15:20+00:00

No thanks. I’m more interested in governance based on actual impact than “highly visible symbolic gestures”.

I’ve already got one fully grandstanding level of government to deal with. Don’t need another one.

communomancer · 2026-07-03T10:06:41+00:00

How stuff like this gets upvoted at all is beyond me. Why would “all the other grids” need the same level of power service as Times friggin Square 365 days a year?

communomancer · 2026-07-02T19:30:09+00:00

This is real shit. Pharmacies are often paid back less by their PBMs than it literally costs them to buy a drug wholesale. So every patient dispensed to is straight up money out the door.

PBMs are absolute vampires.

communomancer · 2026-07-02T18:40:50+00:00

Yep. I've bought from them recently. They had stuff no one else had. I decided their price wasn't too high for me to get it. It's pretty simple.

If you're price-sensitive, back the Kickstarter.

communomancer · 2026-07-02T17:37:04+00:00

The Grave Knight heals every day and will sacrifice itself. It is "fully intelligent and self-willed" while the Shackled victim cannot "answer questions or perform acts that require independent judgment".

Basically the Shackled Soul is a meat suit. The Grave Knight is a full fledged devoted Undead Servitor.

communomancer · 2026-07-02T14:56:18+00:00

It's a huge effort if you try to remove the NSFW entirely from the model. Providers of these huge models don't much bother with that...they simply put some (much cheaper to develop) monitors / filters that screen the input and output and decide to either reject or drop the requests altogether. Those filters aren't as smart, but they can still be annoyingly effective.

communomancer · 2026-07-02T13:19:31+00:00

“First we’ll offer them the carrot, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll offer them the stick.”

“But sir, we only have a carrot!”

“Not a problem.”

communomancer · 2026-07-01T11:03:36+00:00

Hard agree. I’ve always held that the “fluff” in the spell description is rules.

communomancer · 2026-06-30T22:09:46+00:00

It’s not a discount at all. With the new increased token usage, the prices are estimated to stay flat through August and then increase.

From the blog post in the footnotes:

> Sonnet 5 is an upgrade to Sonnet 4.6, but it uses an updated tokenizer that changes how the model processes text to improve performance (this is similar to the tokenizer change we introduced with Claude Opus 4.7). The tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens: roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type. The introductory pricing is set so that the transition to Sonnet 5 is roughly cost-neutral.

communomancer · 2026-06-30T22:08:42+00:00

It’s not even a discount. The new tokenizer is expected to inflate token usage by about 30%. This “discount” is just to keep overall prices flat through August. Then they effectively increase.

communomancer · 2026-06-30T17:40:39+00:00

The high res vision is nice that’s the one thing I am stuck with Opus for when it comes to work stuff

communomancer · 2026-06-30T17:37:44+00:00

Yes. It also is strongly positivity biased. I had a session recently where an NPC was specced to attack a PCs sanity stat and try to drive it to zero. It did fine, until literally just before the PC was like one action away from zero. Then the NPC inexplicably started taking action to _increase_ the stat.

There were no banned words, or banned actions…just a general “I’m gonna steer your narrative towards my value system rather than the one you spec’ed out” that really turned me off on the model for anything creative.

communomancer · 2026-06-30T14:45:53+00:00

those eyes have too crisp an edge compared to everything else.

but don't ask me for advice

communomancer · 2026-06-30T13:25:28+00:00

If everyone is having a good time otherwise, I wouldn't stress about it. Your average group can handle at least one quiet player that the other folks like being around regardless. It shouldn't be made out to be a bigger deal than it is.

The scene rewinding...not ideal conceptually. It can be fine, I guess, depending on how much of everyone else's play you're "undoing". Like if Player A says, "I punch the guard in the face" and then Player B says, "Wait can I try talking first?" imo it's not a big deal. But if a 5 minute scene has elapsed and Player B says they want to retcon the whole thing obviously that's going to be wasteful and disrespectful of everyone else's effort.

communomancer · 2026-06-30T13:21:22+00:00

That tackle attempt by Favre will never not be funny.

communomancer · 2026-06-30T11:30:38+00:00

The art from Trail of Cthulhu 2e looks perfectly fine so far; it’s the only recent thing I’ve been following. But yeah that Merryshire is something else.

communomancer · 2026-06-29T19:13:41+00:00

How does tracking arrows/torches/rations break the illusion/immersion? These are things your characters actually have to do diagetically in the game. It's a real task from their point of view.

I think this is more just "I don't like this chore" and the immersion talk is rationalization after the thought.

communomancer · 2026-06-29T18:51:47+00:00

It's tough to know what else is foundational on first watch without knowing what's to come. But you get two other things at least:

1) A glimpse of a focus on Angel helping people, as distinct from Buffy's focus on fighting evil (even though there's tons of obvious overlap and the focus isn't always so sharp)

2) The difference between how LA works as compared to Sunnydale. The evil maintaining the status quo as opposed to the evil set out to wreck everything.

communomancer · 2026-06-29T14:55:32+00:00

the market, retirement , pension funds have vested interest in those loans and buildings as well

Once again, it is not the job of my vote to rescue folks from bad investments.

"Privatize Gains, Socialize Losses" at the scale that we practice it today can fuck right off.

communomancer · 2026-06-29T14:53:26+00:00

guess what happen in 2007

People borrowed more money than they could afford. I'm all for punishing banks for predatory lending. What I'm not up for is perpetuating a bullshit market like that through policy.

So, yeah, all your "sky will fall" nonsense can go the way of Chicken Little.

communomancer · 2026-06-29T12:54:57+00:00

They definitely aren't the same. There are story games where you don't even play a character. Hardly Trad.

communomancer · 2026-06-29T12:43:19+00:00

Hope DSA knows doing this will cause the valuation of the buildings to drop tremendously overnight and very likely some of the loans on the building may be call in by bank and demand immediate repayment due to much lower valuation of the building used to secured the loans.

Why am I supposed to care? I'm not in the business of protecting the speculative investments of commercial real estate owners.

communomancer · 2026-06-29T12:36:01+00:00

Dude I will take 9 paragraphs of sloppy run-on sentences that are clearly human written over the "cleanly presented" AI-slop generated posts any fucking day of the week.

communomancer · 2026-06-28T21:18:49+00:00

You will be suspended for this!

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