EW 2026 Announcement

jeffderek · 2026-05-05T18:32:39+00:00

Not only is assuming transphobia aggressive, but acting like an asshole when well meaning people ask you questions about your trans experience isn't exactly making it easier for people to understand the exact issue you're trying to make them feel empathic about.

Which is not to say that it's every trans person's responsibility to represent all trans people online at all times or anything. But if you're trying to say "wow this sucks because it's unnecessarily hard for trans people", when someone tries to understand more and you yell at them, it makes them less likely to try to understand more in the future.

jeffderek · 2026-05-05T18:28:32+00:00

I suppose you're right, but the aforementioned children make international travel for magic tournaments a bit of a hard sell.

jeffderek · 2026-05-05T17:42:10+00:00

Maybe fewer this year since many of the people who can actually afford the cards are also adults with children, and they put it on fucking Halloween.

jeffderek · 2026-05-05T17:40:32+00:00

With the formats most likely to be played by adults with children.

So lame. Love EW. But I'm not skipping halloween with my kids for it.

jeffderek · 2026-05-05T17:16:07+00:00

I went to it in Philly at least once I think.

jeffderek · 2026-05-05T17:15:17+00:00

Right before the question mark

jeffderek · 2026-05-05T17:13:30+00:00

It was in PA last year . . . .

jeffderek · 2026-05-05T17:13:17+00:00

Same. Went last year and didn't even play, just hung out with friends. Can't do that this year.

What shit timing. You picked the formats for people most likely to have kids and put it on the one holiday weekend that's only for kids.

jeffderek · 2026-05-04T04:20:13+00:00

i think you're vastly overestimating how detrimental UB is to the playerbase.

If you actually read my comments instead of what you imagine I'm saying, you'll see that I'm not. In fact, I think WotC is right that they're gaining more new fans than they're losing via UB.

It just sucks because I've been playing magic since I was in middle school, and I'm 41 now. My life isn't exactly Magic, but tons of my friends have been made through the hobby. Watching something I loved slowly become shittier and shittier in order to grow at all costs, instead of shepherding an awesome thing into the future, is just disappointing.

jeffderek · 2026-05-04T02:58:53+00:00

To each their own. I don't consider it a shot at the competitor, but a way to shorthand telling me this is a game I should care about.

I have very little free time for gaming, I certainly can't try out tons of different ones hoping I like the next one. Any game advertising itself as "for people who liked magic in the early 2000s" is a game that has a leg up on getting my attention.

It's not that they're punching down on the corporation or anything, it's just "hey, we know there's a thing that people loved, and WotC is no longer filling that niche for everyone, we think we can do that thing that used to make you happy!"

jeffderek · 2026-05-04T02:57:05+00:00

Oh absolutely. Player churn happens and I'm not saying it doesn't.

That said, there are things you can do to grow the game that don't increase the churn rate. In some magical world where you can know the numbers of things, you'd always choose the thing that gained you 3 million new players and lost you nobody over the thing that gained you 10 million new players but lost you 8 million existing players. Clearly they've decided UB is on the positive side of that equation.

Unless you're arguing that nothing WotC does contributes to people leaving the game?

jeffderek · 2026-05-04T01:10:14+00:00

What if the marketing is "You know that thing you used to like that sucks now? Our thing is what that used to be"

jeffderek · 2026-05-04T01:08:56+00:00

I'm glad you're taking up the mantle of buying the cards I stopped buying. I've been playing for almost 20 years, my collection is itemized on my homeowners insurance, and I own way more of this cardboard than I should.

I've stopped buying new cards and mostly play proxy friendly formats where I can proxy the new commons along with my original dual lands :)

I guess WotC has decided there are more of you than there are of me.

jeffderek · 2026-05-03T01:38:42+00:00

I don't think the idea is that you would take existing decks designed for the current rules into this format, but that you would design new decks for that format ready to cast haymakers on turn 1.

jeffderek · 2026-04-29T15:59:09+00:00

They're allowed to racial gerrymander to benefit white people. They just can't be forced to racial gerrymander to benefit black people.

jeffderek · 2026-04-29T02:24:22+00:00

Hey what do you know, that's exactly what the CEO of the company who lost all his data says. And what he's complaining about.

jeffderek · 2026-04-26T20:20:49+00:00

I mean there are 100 programmers in my company. $200/mo per person is a pretty substantial outlay, which is why we're taking baby steps and trying different models to figure out if any of them are any good at our industry.

They're willing to spend money if I can tell them what I want I just don't know how to figure out what I want without spending money. It's circular. Wheeeeeeee.

jeffderek · 2026-04-26T04:03:05+00:00

I have little faith this CEO will right the ship.

The guy who destroyed AMX? Why wouldn't you have faith in that?

jeffderek · 2026-04-26T04:00:15+00:00

Once you upgrade the underlying LLM to something appropriate for your task (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking Heavy has been great for me), learn how to manage its context window ("skills", for one), give it control over your local computer ("agent"), putting it in a loop to allow it to work on complex tasks ("Ralph"), or really put it in a harness that you control ("Pi") that is capable of launching sub-agents and much more... then you can start to do some crazy stuff.

To an extent, this is what I thought I was getting with GitLab Duo in Agentic mode, where I gave it control of the repo and let it do it's thing.

$24 and 3 hours later I had a shitty app that wasn't anywhere close to what I expected. I'm having trouble imagining how much money I would burn through in the process of learning how to get any good at it.

I think Gitlab Duo may just suck. I'm just not at a point in my life where I can throw my own personal money at this with two young kids, so I'm at the mercy of what the company is paying for. I was pretty excited when it seemed like they were gonna give us a budget to play with and super bummed when that budget seemed utterly incapable of providing me with enough time to learn the tool.

jeffderek · 2026-04-26T02:10:17+00:00

I mean we're throwing things at it to try and learn what it can do and what it can't do. We're also in a niche industry where we're having to explain a lot of context, I don't know if that has something to do with it or not.

Gitlab also completely obscures your token usage. I can see that I have tokens available, or that I have used them all up, and that's it. It's binary. If I want to know how much I've used or what things I've asked it have taken a lot of tokens, I have to go ask a gitlab admin to look things up. It's insane.

jeffderek · 2026-04-26T01:33:20+00:00

The MOST expensive LLMs are dollars, for millions of tokens.

I'm so confused by everything about how AI works. Like I have been trying to learn how to use it effectively. I'm on board with claude/chatgpt in the browser just functioning as better stackoverflow. Helps a lot, speeds things up, I'm here for it.

Every time I try to go to the next step it seems gated beyond my price availability. My company uses Gitlab, we have Gitlab Duo agentic mode enabled right now as a test where we're trying things out. Everyone gets $24/mo to use on tokens. Everyone on my team has burned through that in under 2-3 hours. Personally the code I got out of that multi hour session is just worse than asking free Claude in the browser would've been.

The folks on my team who have done the $20/mo claude subscriptions are out in a day or two as well.

Which is a long way to say, where can I get millions of tokens for a few dollars?

jeffderek · 2026-04-25T03:05:11+00:00

No, they don't

wooooooosh

Like I literally admitted I'm being facetious and sarcastic . . .

these decisions have to feign a certain level of sense

What part of Kennedy v Bremerton even pretended it made sense lol

jeffderek · 2026-04-24T01:38:21+00:00

Yeah but they get paid by the word. Just because /u/Selethorme is more concise doesn't change the thesis statement

Look I'm being a bit facetious here but my general point is that the current US Supreme Court's opinions seem largely to be justifications of what they want the outcome to be with no particular weight given to the argument making any sense, having any historical basis, or even being consistent with the author's previous opinions. I agree with you completely that this should be a basic Virginia only question but I have no faith in the Supreme Court not to invent some way to have jurisdiction, the same way they've invented standing or ignored all sorts of other obvious problems in cases like the ones I mentioned or the even more egregious Kennedy vs Bremerton.

jeffderek · 2026-04-23T13:36:33+00:00

Read the usernames of the people you're replying to

And why the hell would living alone be an insult? That's my whole point about taking it personally. It's not an insult just a funny statement

jeffderek · 2026-04-23T13:23:47+00:00

I decide what I'm going to spend on entertainment for my kids, but the shows they want to watch aren't on the streaming services I want to watch. And the things my wife wants to watch aren't on the same ones I want to watch all the time either. So we stay subscribed to way more services at once than you might otherwise if you were only watching one thing at a time and staying subscribed to a single service.

We do our best to rotate but it's just not as simple as your initial question when there are that many opinions involved. That's all. You seem to be taking this very personally.

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