Workers skeptical of unions in a survey of 1,900 tech professionals conducted by the career site Blind cited specific concerns: that unions are “not meritocratic,” “prevent innovation,” and “hold back earnings of top performers.”

Looking at my non union job where idiots make millions and it has taken years to get even the basics of ci/cd implemented.

That can be scaled horizontally and is just a matter of building more data centers.

At one of my old jobs “just” was considered a bad word

Good. Break them up. Criminally charge their leadership.

Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about these people. Calls them “Business Idiots”

Microsoft will continue on inertia for years. but it’s basically a walking corpse full of parasites at this point.

I’ve seen a couple games that have the high res textures as a free separate download. That’d be nice. I’m not playing in 4k so I don’t need all that extra crap.

Good. Now fire the people who said it was a good idea and promote the internal people who said it was bad

My hypothesis is that the least competent people use AI the most, and it’s a big multiplier on their incompetence.

Consoles haven’t seemed worth the price since like… the PS2 era, maybe PS3.

I might have a little more tolerance for jank than some people, though. Some people are like “I had to go into the settings and change something” like it’s a dozen years hard labor.

A lot of Linux works out of the box now. If folks started selling preconfigured Linux machines like you can buy for windows, that’s all most people need. Valve is following a good strategy

Teams is the worst. Microsoft keeps finding new lows.

Not excited for this to be used to squash union efforts (legally or not)

I decided not to get one. If I had a lot more money, maybe. I got a steam deck a couple years ago when I had a nice job, but even that I don’t use all that much.

Usually if I’m not home, I don’t want to be playing video games.

Using a summary written by a soulless lie machine is irresponsible

Most people seem to not even have any notion of how things can be better. They never even think to look up like “block ads”. They just take whatever fuckery they get

I will continue to not buy consoles.

I don’t think I’ll get it. Maybe if it’s on deep discount on PC eventually, and it doesn’t have horrible DRM, and the reviews are good.

I didn’t really like gta5 that much. It’s very on rails / Simon-says in a lot of the stories. I guess they’re going for something cinematic. I’d rather have something more like an immersive sim.

I think it feels fiddly to people who already know a thing or two about mechanics, but most of the fiddliness can easily be ignored or barely paid attention to and you can still manage to play and have fun.

I mean, this is true, but if you ignore enough rules you’re essentially playing a different game. I talked to someone once who “played DND” but didn’t use skills or spell slots, and I think they just let casters interpret spells based on the names. That’s so different it’s arguably a different game. Or at least as different as a Chihuahua and a husky.

. It’s a lot easier to just hit straight brick walls in games like pathfinder or shadow run where the player is so lost they just can’t play.

I agree with this, but note those systems are far more crunchy than DND. Something like Fate goes in the other direction, and I think is why it’s better for fast games.

Though as an aside, a downside of Fate is it’s so open it can cause a tyranny of the blank page effect. DND puts you in a pretty small box, and that can be helpful for people. The small decision space is a positive for some kinds of players. Though if you were doing Fate, you could just tell people to pick from some core ideas similar to character classes.

but 5e is pretty damn good at it while also being popular enough that people have heard of it and are interested in trying. That last part is just as important as being technically good on paper.

This is also undeniable. Someone who’s going to half-ass it will drag down a game in any system.

I think we agree more than we disagree for what it’s worth. Check out Fate though. It’s free ( https://fate-srd.com/ )

It’s by design.

This is true. However,

It’s just meant for more casual play, that’s all.

It’s kind of bad at that goal. It’s really fiddly and full of friction points. What bonus do you get for 16 strength? Why do they insist on keeping that mapping.

I’ve had to kick people for just refusing the learn what dice to roll after months of sessions.

Further evidence of it not actually being great at casual play.

Which leads me to

5e is a great gateway drug to get people into TTRPGs

Counter argument: it’s actually really bad at that. It’s so specific and idiosyncratic it pushes people away. Uncountable players just bounce off the whole genre because their first impression is fiddly “what does 15 strength mean again?” and “sorry, you can’t fit your cool idea into this class/level system”

Fate Core or Accelerated would be much more in line with how people think about this sort of stuff.

Yeah, but unfortunately they kept 5e’s design principle of “you barely get any feats”. I want my characters to be interesting because of who they are, not because of what glowing doodads they looted from more interesting dead people.

Also class + level is so coarse. I’d rather be able to, like, buy individual things I want. Get XP for doing a quest, buy more sneak attack. Or a spell slot. Maybe hit dice. Really let me mix and match.

But DND 5e is designed to have a small decision space in builds. They want the half paying attention guy’s character to perform about as well as the optimizer, instead of the huge gap between those archetypes that 3e had.

It’s funny because while 5e has simpler math than the predecessors, it’s still kind of clunky. 1d20 + proficiency + modifier isn’t that bad, but I’ve seen a lot of players who can’t correctly add 16 + 7.

I really liked the nWoD system where you roll a bunch of d10s and just count how many came up >= 8. No addition or subtraction.

Also 1d20+stuff is flat probability, which feels bad.

I think that a ruleset optimized for computer RPGs would probably look somewhat different.

But also 100 times this. You could do so many things that would be painful to do by hand at the table.