Yeah, ok. I'll concede Betterhelp too.
Exactly. Day 2. ;)
Firefox, Plex, and VPNs I can understand being surprised about. But the rest of them... I mean of course they were going to milk you for money. Was there ever a time when any of those didn't?
"Eat this if you want to live."
Hold my beer.
And throw in a side of pork belly.
Maybe they matched the donut placement to the sign. Did you ever think of that?
Yes. If there's any one thing that pisses me off about the latest "AI" bubble, it may be that... AI has been around for decades, and has been useful for decades while this "GenAI" scam BS is taking center stage.
I took a course in college named "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" in like 2005. In that course, I learned about the A* algorithm which is used among other purposes by games to let NPC's navigate from point A to point B potentially around obstacles or over terrain of different passability. That shit is genuinely useful and bears no resemblence to LLMs or Stable Diffusion. And yet it was called "AI" back in... like the 1960s and was still called "AI" in 2005. Probably still is in college courses around the world.
Now, I haven't read the article, but I'd have to hope nobody put too much blind faith in the AI's output here. But the right tools in the hands of sufficiently well-educated scientists, be they called "AI" or not, can certainly assist in things like drug development.
Oh, also, you can call just about anything that's done with code "AI" even if it really has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. My employer was fairly recently sold an automated customer service tool by a big, well-known software vendor that another team I work distantly with had to configure/program, every step from soup to nuts. (There was absolutely no machine learning involved or anything like that. This other team had to decide all the flows the customers could go through.) But you can bet your ass you couldn't read any three consecutive words in any of their marketing materials about it without at least one of the three being "AI".
I'm sure there are microwave ovens no more sophisticated than the one I have (spoiler: it's the dumbest microwave oven I could find) that are being marketed with the term "AI".
Wake me up when I can hack it.
"After all, we aren't best friends in this one."
#killedthevibe
This is awesome and I highly recommend this approach. I've used something very like this in Pathfinder (1e if you're wondering) for a series of natural caverns occupied by Skum and it worked out great. I didn't so much work loot and monsters into the plan. I mostly just used it for the shape/layout of the caverns. But I can definitely see benefits to having more worked into the roll table system.
If you want certain things to happen at intervals through the dungeon or whatever, just skip rolling every 4th time they explore a little further and instead put in in what you want them to run into.
Also, when I did it, I found it worked nicely to consider the results on the roll table "suggestions". Like, if you roll 1 four times in a row, in a TTRPG situation, it could end up being like "ok, there's more hallway." "I scout ahead further." "More hallway." "Ok, further then." Mor-" "Let me guess, more hallway."
Here's the (d20) roll table I used for the aforementioned Skum dungeon if anyone's interested:
I want to say I made a slightly improved version later for a different campaign, but I haven't been able to find it. I might search more later if I have a second.