The Neverblog

You know what? Sure:

More.

Even more.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

(With reference to this post here.)

There were a couple of major factors in play there.

First, a big chunk of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition's popularity had come about due to robust third-party support, published under the auspices of Open Game License (OGL). Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, however, was not licensed under the OGL, being subject to a much more restrictive license imaginatively titled the Game System License, or GSL. Hasbro reportedly refused to negotiate with existing third-party publishers to get them on board with the GSL, or to offer transition support of any kind; instead, they simply demanded an immediate halt to the publication of all 3E material, and attempted to bludgeon publishers into compliance by threatening to yank their trademark authorisations (i.e., the agreements which allowed them to put the "D&D compatible" logo on the covers of their books).

Predictably, this approach was not well received. The largest of 3E's third-party supporters, Paizo Publishing (now Paizo Inc.), elected to produce their own game which was statblock-compatible with 3E in order to provide a venue for other publishers to continue producing OGL material; many of their peers decided to gamble on Paizo's plan rather than play ball with Hasbro, and this is how we got Pathfinder. Hasbro's behaviour thus caused D&D's third-party support to crater nearly to zero with the publication of 4E and created D&D's largest competitor.

Second, 4E was badly behind the curve on digital availability. Shortly before 4E was scheduled to drop, the digital masters (i.e., the files provided to printers in order to manufacture the books) were leaked on file sharing networks. Hasbro responded by panicking and ordering an immediate and indefinite halt to e-book publication of D&D material (in spite of the fact that the leak had demonstrably originated from their print production arm rather than their e-publishing arm), even going so far as to refuse to honour pre-orders for 4E's now cancelled e-book version.

Combined with a series of mismanagement-induced delays which caused 4E's virtual tabletop tools to miss the game's publication date entirely, and a decision to paywall what few first-party resources did manage to hit their target behind a monthly subscription, this resulted in 4E being available exclusively in print for the first two full years of its lifespan, at a time when D&D's competitors – including the aforementioned Pathfinder – were literally giving their core rules away in digital form for free.

A big part of the reason I don't talk a lot about Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition as a system is because it's been my experience that, as indie RPG designers, there's a constant temptation to treat a game's culture of play as something which emerges purely from its published text. It'd be super convenient if that were the case: if the ultimate source of the problem is bad game design, then it can be fixed with better game design. In practice, this framing leads people to prattle on about how playing trad RPGs causes brain damage while overlooking the rather more obvious economic incentives for why D&D's culture of play is the way it is.

All that in mind, I tend to look at it the other way 'round: the main problems with D&D5E as a system stem from a shared set of circumstances with its culture of play. Hasbro wants to market 5E as a universal entry-level game, and to that end, they've given Wizards of the Coast a mandate to produce an "evergreen" D&D which appeals equally to fans of all past iterations of the game. This goal is of course both impossible and absurd, and the result is a game whose rules are put together based mostly on vibes, with greater weight given to whether any particular feature is deemed to reinforce D&D's brand identity than to how it actually operates in play, or to how it interacts with other features that have been included in the same fashion.

In the most extreme cases, this leads to a text which pretends to have features it does not in fact possess. For example, 5E wants to have the vibe of a game which cares deeply about logistical play, in order to attract players who like that sort of thing; however, it's also terrified of imposing entry barriers that might interfere with maximising the number of people playing D&D, so you end up with stuff like lengthy stats tables of functionally identical weapons, an economy that denominates prices of adventuring supplies to the hundredth of a gold piece and stops being relevant by level three if you're running the gameplay loop as written, and subsystems for carrying capacity and consumable resource tracking which ask you to do a lot of math for a mechanical impact so insubstantial that it doesn't materially affect said gameplay loop at all if you simply leave it out entirely.

Permanent DMCA regime and an end to fair use seems pretty dystopian from where I'm sitting and the fact that the comments on this post are full of uwu smol bean creatives who are very proud to say things like "I don't care how AI works, it's evil" but can't imagine how their attempts to define model training as theft might have downstream problems that harm everyone BUT megacorporations is exactly the issue that I'm trying to articulate.

1. Do not do age verification.

Oh no I dropped my link, what a horrible thing! Sure hope this doesn't get reblogged until it reaches users from the UK and Brazil!

Here are the rules for the simulations physics

That particular zone of the political compass has been propagating the idea that "war is good for the economy" for a while now, and this administration especially has gotten high on their own supply.

No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.

There are two kinds of crustaceans that are called "shrimp" that use concussive force via cavitation bubbles as a weapon.

These are Pistol Shrimp, a group of actual shrimp, and Mantis Shrimp, which are not actually shrimp but they are the ones you probably think of when you hear "murder shrimp" and "shrimp colors" (specifically the Peacock Mantis, bc there's a lot of species for both.)

I'm not annoying enough to grumble about the mantis being called a murder shrimp, because "murder stomatopod" is objectively a less fun combination of words.

HOWEVER!! People keep drawing mantis murder shrimp with pistol shrimp claws. They are not the same claws!! They are not used the same way!!! I will explain!!!!

Pistol shrimp: A number of shrimp species which have one big megachad claw and one dinky normal one.

The dactyl, or movable part of the large claw, is snapped shut with so much force that it shoots a cavitation bubble out with a very loud snap that can stun prey or scare off predators. It's very fucking cool.

As cool as that is, there is a reason that the mantis shrimp is what most people think of when they read "murder shrimp."

This is the Peacock Mantis Shrimp. Which is not a shrimp, but a stomatopod.

(In a lot of pictures it appears like they're staring intently at the camera. They probably are, because they are alarmingly intelligent.)

Note that it doesn't seem to have the big classic claws, and that's becaus it doesnt. Please stop drawing a shrimp claw on them. Their "claw" appendages are kept tucked up, praying mantis style.

These are a raptorial appendage that do have a sharp bit, but that sharp point has adapted to add support to the club end. They use the club to punch the shit out of things. They do punch so hard that they create a cavitation bubble, but the punch is the main deal.

If you look up a mantis shrimp puncher you may find this image, but they rarely if ever fold out fully past the punching part.

The second common mistake on mantis drawings is from mixing up two types of mantis shrimp. There are punchers, which includes the peacock mantis, and stabbers. You can guess what they do.

Fun fact! The peacock mantis is the largest puncher species, maxing out at 6-7 inches. Some of the stabber species, such as a zebra mantis can get 11 inches. This is because the peacock mantis is as big as it can get before it would shatter itself with the force of its punch!

This has been the marine biologist PSA.

and the thing that tickles at my brain is, it'd be interesting as a worldbuilding premise to keep the huge leaps in capabilities done by individual actors but get rid of the lack of replicability. start with a world like ours and say, ok, we're on the cusp of the mad science revolution, people are starting to come up with all sorts of previously-impossible technology, but once invented it's out there. every military has to adapt their doctrine to super soldier serum and laser guns. there's a cure for cancer and the protocol has to account for the one in a twenty chance it'll turn you into a werewolf. your neighbour moves in and she's made of metal and you're not sure if it's a full-body prosthetic or if in the last month when you stopped keeping up with the robotics news they made robots who are people. and it's definitely rude to ask. teleportation halfway across the planet is not cheap but like neither are planes and it does have a lower carbon footprint.

A megacorp (one you would definitely have heard of) is giving us $250k this year (a pittance) to try to reprogram our devices so that "it doesn't take two PhDs, or [R], to run it." (Their words.)

The tech we're dealing with never really makes it to a general audience, is probably still years away from active military use, and two decades away from reaching a price point where it makes sense for civilian use, even if it's going to be on the market much sooner. (Although one of our megacorp customers says they want to see it on commercial passenger airplanes in five years, possibly even before it enters military use. But it's not something the passengers would ever be aware of.) In the long run, it's probably a must for interstellar travel; will make interplanetary travel easier; and in the meantime we can use it for submarines, and airplanes whose flight paths get too close to Ukraine.

But even so, we're constantly like, we invented this thing using a team of experts who trained under Nobel Laureates--but did another similar team also invent it?

Or, we see a press release from a competitor and they're leaps and bounds ahead of us in some niche way and we're like, where did they even get the exotic tech/expertise to do that?? We have to replicate it immediately! We have to incorporate that into our process immediately! Even though we know they're way behind us in some other critical aspect of the project.

For example, there's a quantum computing company that is apparently using photonic integrated circuits, according to a press release from a couple months ago. HOW!! How are they doing that! Where did they get them! Which means, in the next year, we'd better find a way to get them, too, even though we're not even in quantum computing. We all want PICs, but we were so sure they were impossible with current materials-technology! I mean, the telecoms use them but like, they use weaksauce ones that would burn up if they came anywhere near the lasers used in quantum control, and they rely on wavelengths > 1 micron, which quantum control rarely has the luxury of doing. But now that ONE company has them, that makes it the new normal and everyone MUST catch up.

Meanwhile, I discovered about a year ago that TI (the same TI that makes calculators) is now making a brand new chip that is completely game-changing. We will blow our competition out of the water with our ability to (longitudinally) shape laser beams with this chip--although I'm sure TI never imagined this as a use-case; I think they intended it for 5G or something. But we're talking 2-3x improved instantaneous performance and possibly 10-100x improved hour-scale performance of our entire quantum control apparatus, if only we can get the funding to redesign our boards to use this chip.

Combine these two things and I can revolutionize a different subfield, of quantum tech, too, and I think my competitors there are sleeping on these advances. But if I get that, and find someone who can do the talking for me, suddenly we'll have different airplane safety standards; different secure communications protocols--a whole new dimension of keying (not even getting into actual quantum communications, just classical communications via quantum tech); and new types of cameras and telescopes. Again, not that most people will ever know that anything changed.