TRPG General Chat

2:10 AM

TTRPGkids: TTRPGkids will be a regular spot on Ludology Podcast! Check out Episode 1 now!

posted on June 06, 2023 by Steph C.

For the next year, TTRPGkids will be hosting a monthly show on Ludology Podcast where I'll be chatting about making games adaptable for kids, using TTRPGs for education, highlighting some cool games, and more! Check out here for the link to Episode 1! Continue reading “TTRPGkids will be a regular spot on Ludology Podcast! Check out Episode 1 now!”…

Feeds

2:21 AM

Deeper in the Game: Game Hype: Ninefox Gambit

posted on June 06, 2023 by bankuei

Yoon Ha Lee, the author of one of my favorite sci-fi series, The Machineries of the Empire, has made an RPG based on the setting – the Ninefox Gambit RPG. The series is… magical nightmare space opera? You have a shapeshifting spaceships, battles fought where different formations changes the laws of physics or creates forcefields, […]

V2Blast

3:28 AM

@GcL Lol. No kids, though there are 3 dogs (my partners' parents' dogs, specifically)

bobble

4:51 AM

@TheOracle you can sign the letter without making an SO account by contacting @mousetail

If you want to sign the letter but don't want to create a stack overflow account, DM me. I can add you manually @bobble — mousetail 12 hours ago

Mithical

(That information has now also been edited into the post.)

bobble

5:03 AM

Sorry

Mithical

Nothing to apologize for, just mentioning

doppelgreener

12:13 PM

Also edited into my meta post here!

Feeds

4:08 PM

Twenty Sided Newsletter: Self-Promotion Isn’t a Dirty Word

posted on June 06, 2023 by The Twenty Sided Newsletter

How to Build an Actual Play Podcast, Part 4

JohnP

4:42 PM

@doppelgreener - Just FYI, I plagiarized most of your excellent meta post for the Fitness site as well. If you object, let me know and I will create it out of whole cloth instead.

GcL

4:57 PM

@JohnP Just cite them.

KorvinStarmast

@JohnP nice to see you. @doppelgreener Thank you for that well presented post. I am appalled at how SE/SO corporate heads once again defecate upon their volunteers. (The Monica thing being another harsh example) How is this to their benefit? SE's value proposition is an excellent signal to noise ratio. AI generated content, and ChatGPT in particular, are noise, not signal. They are, as I mentioned to Glazius yesterday, showing themselves to be pro machine, anti human. Bizarre.

@Mithical I signed the petition. Thanks to all of you in the mod world for your leadership and for speaking up. Very much appreciated.

Mithical

Wish it wasn't necessary

KorvinStarmast

As do I. The tone-deaf nature of SE/SO "leadership" strikes again.

@Mithical @doppelgreener@nitsua60 @linksassin @V2Blast @ObliviousSage I felt a need to speak up

Mithical

5:18 PM

@KorvinStarmast as a heads-up, that's going to be deleted, you'd be better off posting it at meta.stackexchange.com/q/389617/294691

KorvinStarmast

@Mithical OK, I'll remove it. Thanks.

Oh wow. That was quick. It is already gone!

KorvinStarmast

5:36 PM

@Mithical Yep, I copied and pasted it into the correct spot, thanks.

Mithical

(thumbsup)

Glazius

6:14 PM

My main issue with asking for a separate ability to classify and ban AI-generated answers is that this assumes there will be posts that are somehow recognizably AI-generated but not recognizably noise.

I can't see how we would treat someone who posted AI-generated content any differently from someone who otherwise created noise in the pursuit of fake internet points.

And having an easy and separate classification for AI-generated answers encourages making that judgement, accusing a complete stranger of doing just about the worst thing possible for the stack. I don't think something like that should be so casually available.

doppelgreener

5

Q: Hot meta posts section is no more?

I was browsing Stack Overflow for tags of interest related questions and I noticed that there was no 'hot meta posts' section on the right side! I navigated to the corresponding meta and found the same. Even here on Meta Stack Exchange, it doesn't show up. Is this another move by SE management af...

discussion

Stack Exchange switched off hot meta posts so people wouldn't see the strike discussions on site metas. (Which also can't be featured because they're removing those too)

@JohnP wonderful! Happy to be plagiarised in this case. :)

@KorvinStarmast I'm also shocked and baffled.

JohnP

6:40 PM

@GcL I thought I had, however I left out the name. That has been corrected.

Thomas Markov is on Strike

7:02 PM

tinfoil hat on: Catija did not say it was unintentional, just that it was a bug. It can be both intentional and a bug. It’s a strangely convenient time for exactly that bug to occur. — Thomas Markov is on Strike 29 secs ago

GcL

@Glazius You can get chatGPT to produce decent code, but it takes some hand holding by someone who can evaluate the code as fit for purpose and catch the little gotchas that would bork you in a production deployment. So an expert who could have written the solution themselves, can get chatGPT to write a solution. I tried using it as a boilerplate generator for a bit, but it tended to make mistakes that were harder to catch, and it wrote garbage tests regardless of hand holding.

The problem I found is that it often emits code that compiles or runs and at first glance appears kosher. It's often wrong in less obvious ways than a junior dev would make on their own. So it makes a junior dev just a little more dangerous in submitting answers. They know enough to get a working output, but not enough to know that it's not a good working output. Makes reviewing their code harder as well.

So you might get upvotes and a green check before someone who recognizes subtle problems comments on it, and there's likely fewer of those people to downvote it.

@Glazius Going through chatGPT can make a junior dev's obviously noise answer less easy to spot. Also, even allowing it means there will be answers by complete neophytes and they can output a lot of garbage answers that are at least superficially syntactically correct.

@Glazius I concur that does seem like a problem. An issue is that the LLM code generators are so casually available.

JohnP

7:37 PM

@KorvinStarmast Did you leave a comment? I can't find it.

And is anyone else disturbed about the past tense feeling to this sentence? "The moderators who are engaged in this action served this community collectively for many years on the platform."

GcL

@JohnP Likely, have been serving would be better wording. It is a true statement; the mods have served the community for years. I suspect being put off by the wording says more about our assumptions or expectations about the author.

JohnP

@GcL That is my perception as well, but it is a definite nuance. Have served or have been serving suggests a continuity, served connotes an end.

Too many corporate "this person is gone" emails. :p

GcL

I think we're jaded. I guess late-stage capitalism does that to us.

JohnP

@doppelgreener Additionally, any mention of "strike" is being changed or reverted to "moderator action".

MissMisinformation

7:53 PM

@doppelgreener I see hot meta posts again, both in the meta questions main page and on the main site questions page. Possibly fixed/un-removed?

MissMisinformation

8:32 PM

...and the hot meta questions (and featured) box is gone again.

GcL

@MissMisinformation That behavior could be the result flakey redis cluster. At least the behavior matches the explanation.

KorvinStarmast

9:21 PM

@JohnP A comment on what? I wrote an answer

JohnP

@KorvinStarmast I found that, your original link however goes to the Philippe post/answer combo that can only be commented on.

KorvinStarmast

@JohnP heh, I wrote an answer there and it got deleted almost immediately. 🤣

I then posted the answer at the correct place.

JohnP

9:37 PM

What a kerfuffle.

V2Blast

9:48 PM

@JohnP Not "any mention", just in official statements by staff/the company. Per Cat's comment:

While we recognize that the community is referring to this event as a "strike", that term has a specific legal meaning and we have been advised not to refer to it as such. For that reason, we ask that future editors of this post do not edit it to use that language. — Catija ♦ 17 mins ago

@doppelgreener The community bulletin issues are not intentional, just an unfortunately timed bug with Redis. (There's 3 different MSE posts about it, including that one, but I think Catija and Adam Lear have left comments on all of them explaining as much.)

doppelgreener

@V2Blast Thats' a relief.

@V2Blast Folks are not editing our posts right?

V2Blast

@KorvinStarmast A link to the reposted answer, for clarity:

6

A: Discussion: Network policy regarding AI Generated content

This policy stands to undermine a core value proposition of the SE/SO platform. As I spelled out in this meta post at my "home" SE site (RPGSE): Under the basic premise that the SE value proposition is a favorable signal to noise ratio, ChatGPT only provides noise. While I am open to the possib...

@doppelgreener Nope, just rolling back others' edits to Philippe's post, as far as I know.

doppelgreener

Phew, good

Thanks

JohnP

@V2Blast Yes, and I've seen screenshots that show it is sporadic across the network, it's not all or none.

V2Blast

@JohnP Yeah – different parts of the community bulletin seem to be appearing/not appearing on different sites at different times

JohnP

9:53 PM

@V2Blast Got it, I have been in and out with work today, it's been a little confusing to follow some of this.

V2Blast

Totally understandable. I was out all last week so I spent most of yesterday just catching up on notifications and chat messages :P

JohnP

@V2Blast - Any idea how many moderators there are across the network? I know some sites have 15+ mods, others 2, and some mods are on multiple sites (cough RoryAlsop cough). 240 odd current mods have signed the open letter, plus a handful of former mods/employees.

V2Blast

@JohnP I think there's a stackexchange.com subpage that lists them all

@JohnP Ah, here it is: stackexchange.com/about/moderators

JohnP

@V2Blast So nearly 50% of mods have signed the letter.

V2Blast

@JohnP How are you getting that number? (I haven't actually counted them up myself, but that seems... higher than what it looks like from the signers list, at a glance)

JohnP

10:02 PM

17 rows of 16 acr....shoot. It's 17x6, so 102. Dangit.

So more like 20%, but I know a few have put themselves on hiatus, and I'm sure a few more are doing the equivalent of quiet quitting.

doppelgreener

11:27 PM

It's also worth bearing in mind that for a couple dozen sites that's 50-100% of mods or 50-100% of active mods, and for the big sites like Stack overflow and Math Overflow, that's a majority of mods striking.

Just looking at it as a % of the total number of network mods is a very incomplete picture.

Heck, stack overflow mods were the ones organizing this strike.

doppelgreener

11:38 PM

The bulletin's back!

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