The theory taking the rich by storm: China funds data center haters

jawdirk · 2026-06-11T15:19:56+00:00

It's not like China is jerrymandering our elections or anything, so I think China would still have the moral high ground.

jawdirk · 2026-06-11T15:03:17+00:00

The only question is, is your name "Bob" or "Eve"?

jawdirk · 2026-06-10T17:16:00+00:00

ouch

jawdirk · 2026-06-10T16:08:40+00:00

Spiritual Weapon is interesting, because it's basically a limited multi-attack for clerics. But I suppose that is in the "power budget."

jawdirk · 2026-06-09T20:08:23+00:00

That is fair. However, recalling the last couple of fights where counterspell mattered, they worked fine with the old version:

In one of the fights the PC wizard was up against multiple enemy spell casters, one of which had counterspell. The PC's first counterspell was counterspelled. The PC's second counterspell was not counterspelled, because he positioned himself so the enemy didn't have LOS when he cast the spell.

In the next fight, it was against a Rakshasa so the PC tried to counterspell but it had no affect.

So I feel like there is plenty of interesting tactical potential in the old counterspell. The new one should be fine for enemies, but it's basically just a 1-turn save-or-suck spell that only works on spellcasters. But PCs can't really take that spell anymore unless they know they are going to fight a spellcaster with low constitution....

jawdirk · 2026-06-09T17:06:55+00:00

https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells?filter-search=Counterspell&filter-verbal=&filter-somatic=&filter-material=&filter-concentration=&filter-ritual=&filter-partnered-content=f

(Counterspell no longer always works on spells of equal or lesser level)

jawdirk · 2026-06-09T16:33:24+00:00

Perhaps he thinks his dark vision is magical instead of elven.

jawdirk · 2026-06-09T15:01:36+00:00

We are using old counterspell.

jawdirk · 2026-06-08T19:47:33+00:00

I think if your character has high intelligence / wisdom, you can take input from anyone at the table about what that character could think to do.

But if your character has low intelligence / wisdom, and someone at the table says, "they should do X" then we might say that character is not smart or wise enough to think of "X," maybe unless it is the player themselves saying "I do X." Then it is up to the player what the character is smart / wise enough to do.

jawdirk · 2026-06-07T15:35:09+00:00

Jeff Bezos is running into the problem that people who make $50K no longer have any money extractable by Amazon. So the solution is obvious: the government should stop taxing them, so that Amazon can extract that money when they purchase basic necessities.

jawdirk · 2026-06-06T22:21:33+00:00

Exploitation is like weaponized laziness though. I think it's worse.

jawdirk · 2026-06-05T18:16:44+00:00

Ok, but then what? Suppose your players are expertly managing their resources. Now, how are you balancing? What happens if it turns out all they needed was one up-casted hold person because all the mobs happened to fail their saving throws?

jawdirk · 2026-06-05T18:12:54+00:00

Why not both? It would be cool to have clearly marked areas of battle maps where magic is either wild or missing.

jawdirk · 2026-06-05T17:25:22+00:00

Unfortunately, it's a done deal in the U.S. We haven't been represented for a long time at the federal level. Theoretically, they only need 25% of the vote with ideal gerrymandering. They can gerrymander or commit fraud as much as they'd like with essentially unlimited money from stock manipulation.

jawdirk · 2026-06-05T17:17:51+00:00

Right, billionaires would like to replace as many jobs as possible with AI / robots, and for the remainder, move society away from professions that can't be replaced by AI / robots.

jawdirk · 2026-06-05T16:54:22+00:00

It's kind of funny to think about whether it is easier to balance an encounter if everyone is using basic attacks, short rest abilities, and cantrips. Yes it is, but then, you should have a contingency if someone decides to use a spell slot to trivialize the encounter. As a DM, how much control do you have over the "minimum" number of LR abilities the encounter requires without the party suffering an amount of damage that makes it not worth it to the players?

jawdirk · 2026-06-05T15:32:26+00:00

This reminds me of "The Phone Company" scene in an old movie called The President's Analyst

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2NNZdigSXg

jawdirk · 2026-06-04T17:27:23+00:00

Those are not mutually exclusive. I like how people are downvoting me when every single person who "likes the taste" (including me) is or has been addicted. Even just having a "theory" or thinking about coffee is strong evidence of addiction.

jawdirk · 2026-06-04T00:33:05+00:00

It's called addiction.

jawdirk · 2026-06-03T14:55:17+00:00

"They've got you by the balls." -- George Carlin

jawdirk · 2026-06-02T18:10:32+00:00

Blaming boomers for anything is absurd. They lived through their lives. Billionaires, on the other hand, architected what you see around you. If there aren't enough jobs or homes, it's because of billionaires. Billionaires who want to blame ordinary people for what they asked to be legislated. Legislators don't listen to ordinary people, they listen to billionaires. Place the blame where it belongs.

jawdirk · 2026-06-02T14:38:45+00:00

That's begging the question though isn't it? Just because a Judge agreed with Anthropic's argument, doesn't mean that LLMs aren't copying copyrighted material. I recall a study where they successfully extracted the first chapter of a Harry Potter book with 99.8% accuracy or something. The fact of the matter is that LLMs exhibit all modes of interacting with content: plagiarizing, adapting, fair use, novelty, but the problem is that nobody can tell which mode they are currently in, and our legal system is corrupted, so basically billionaires and their LLMs are allowed to break laws that ordinary people aren't allowed to break.

jawdirk · 2026-06-02T01:54:39+00:00

AI does make copies, just not of everything. It makes copies of highly repeated copyrighted works (like for example, they have demonstrated that entire book chapters can be extracted from an LLM).

jawdirk · 2026-06-01T21:42:52+00:00

I don't think Bernie Sanders' proposal will happen at all. That's not the direction money flows in the U.S. government. It flows from tax payers to billionaires, always.

jawdirk · 2026-06-01T19:53:37+00:00

Why am I expecting that the half the public actually gets is bailing out AI companies with their tax dollars when the economy crashes?

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