My pleasure! And if you’re being the GM, remember to keep track of the character trouble for each character. It’s basically a built-in way to make everything personal for the characters, as well as a mechanic to offer them extra fate points in return for invoking the trouble.

My favorite example is this: Imagine you’ve got Indiana Jones as a player character in your game. His trouble would be, “Snakes… Why’d it have to be snakes?” He gets a fate point when you invoke it (if he accepts), but in return, it guarantees that he’s falling into a pit of snakes. Instant drama!

There are tricks to getting better output from it, especially if you’re using Copilot in VS Code and your employer is paying for access to models, but it’s still asking for trouble if you’re not extremely careful, extremely detailed, and extremely precise with your prompts.

And even then it absolutely will fuck up. If it actually succeeds at building something that technically works, you’ll spend considerable time afterwards going through its output and removing unnecessary crap it added, fixing duplications, securing insecure garbage, removing mocks (God… So many fucking mocks), and so on.

I think about what my employer is spending on it a lot. It can’t possibly be worth it.

Yeah, code bloat with LLMs is fucking monstrous. If you use them, get used to immediately scouring your code for duplications.

It always is with these guys.

Dude, time is stopped. You can keep going until you want time to start again. And I’ve got a list for you:

• Every single kiddy diddler? Suddenly in prison, with piles of evidence of their crimes.
• You can solve every missing persons report where anyone is still alive. It’ll take you a while, but you’ve got the “time.”
• Every bribe of every politician - and especially justices of the Supreme Court - exposed with thorough documentation.
• Go around and erase all medical debt and all student debt. All of it. Use some of Elon’s money to do it.
• Find and reunite families that were split up by Trump’s family separation policies.
• Cut Russia off from the internet entirely. They’ve demonstrated that they’re not ready to join the broader civilized community. Pay special attention to permanently offlining the “Internet Research Agency.”

I’m sure I could come up with more.

40 dollars? That’s all? I’m salaried and can work any hours I want to, so I guess I’m logging in at work and writing a few lines of code or answering some emails.

Twenty minutes will do it. Probably round it up to half an hour just to be safe. And honestly, if I get into the zone, an hour will fly by, easy.

After working on a team that uses LLMs in agentic mode for almost a year, I’d say this is probably accurate.

Most of the work at this point for a big chunk of the team is trying to figure out prompts that will make it do what they want, without producing any user-facing results at all. The rest of us will use it to generate small bits of code, such as one-off scripts to accomplish a specific task - the only area where it’s actually useful.

The shine wears off quickly after the fourth or fifth time it “finishes” a feature by mocking data because so many publicly facing repos it trained on have mock data in them so it thinks that’s useful.

In our case, there are enough upper management folks who are opposed to it that I doubt it will last or ever be enforced. For people like me, it really doesn’t make any sense to enforce it in the first place, because all of my teammates are in other states and countries.

Making me go to the office just means you can’t schedule early meetings with me, because I’ll be commuting during that time.

My office just did the same thing. And the backlash is enormous. No one wants it. No one likes it.

The funny thing is that I’m actually an Arch user. I’m just not a dick about it.

Yeah, this sucks. Use the distro you like, people.

I like it, but I don’t nerd out about it.

I’ve read Lord of the Rings a few times. And The Hobbit. And his lesser-known works (e.g., Leaf by Niggle, which is just great). And The Silmarillion. And The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (which, honestly, isn’t his best). And I know what an Istari is (and why Gandalf, being a lesser Ainur, is actually so much more than a mere “wizard”). And I know that while they changed the line from “you cannot pass” to “you shall not pass” for dramatic purposes in the movie, the original line subtly says a whole hell of a lot more about who and what Gandalf is and why the Balrog should have actually been shitting itself.

So you might say I’m passingly familiar with it.

Oh, you need Fate Accelerated. Six stats, five descriptive phrases that define your character (one of which is your character’s “trouble,” giving the GM automatic story hooks) and a smattering of stunts your character can perform, and off you go!

Regarding Traveller, I’ve never had the stomach for it. Me and a group once sat down to create characters, and discovered it was so rules-heavy that by the end of two sessions dedicated to character creation, we still didn’t know for sure that we’d done any of the characters correctly.

I’ll check it out. I’m very much interested in video games that delve into deep topics that way. Have you ever encountered The Talos Principle series? Fantastic games that do surprisingly accessible treatises on philosophical topics while forcing you to think through pretty mind-blowing puzzles. Highly recommended.

Ha! My glob, she was so amazing. I had the opportunity to attend a reading she did from The Lathe of Heaven years ago, and I was struck anew not only by her creativity, but by the philosophical ideas underpinning it. A lot of people think The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is her most philosophical work, but I actually found what Lathe had to say about control, obedience, and power incredibly compelling.

Oh, goddamn it, this is gonna take a while.

• Code. Like, I actually get real pleasure from seeing elegant and well-structured code. I have no idea why, but I’ll almost start salivating at particularly beautiful code.
• Anime. Yeah, I’m a walking stereotype, a software developer who likes anime. But have you seen Frieren? It’s so goddamn good.
• Philosophy. No, not bullshit continental philosophy. I’m talking real philosophy. Analytic philosophy. Distilled and legitimately useful logic. Which of course leads me to…
• Science. My YouTube feed is full of fascinating deep-dives into esoteric mathematical and scientific topics. Fuck yeah.
• Tabletop RPGs. Surprisingly, not a huge D&D fan, though it can certainly be fun. These days, I’m much more into story-focused systems, like Fate or Blades in the Dark. Most people I mention that to have never heard of either.
• Science fiction and fantasy. I mean, are you surprised at this point?
• Writing science fiction and fantasy. I mean, are you surprised at this point?
• Politics. Less so nowadays, since our political system is falling apart and we’re being overrun by fascism, but I still do enjoy a meaty policy discussion.

That’s a good list for starters.

That’s how it’s done, yep.

Yep. Premiered in 2013, so it meets the OP’s requirements.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my fiber supplement, and Matlock will be on the television box soon, so I’d better go.

Not the person you asked, but I do that sometimes. For instance, when I want to watch a specific video but I don’t want having watched it to affect other video recommendations.