I’m always reminded of https://youtu.be/ZI0w_pwZY3E?si=MM_jYb2Xey7Hz-zb for Skype

I mean, I guess, but that’s only a selling point to the small number of people without smartphones, which isn’t a large enough group to make it a sound business strategy.

Also, the “(after federal incentives)” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The basic option for the 2023 Bolt comes out to about $20K after federal incentives, but you get way more range and a bunch of those “luxury” features this is missing. Considering how cheap low-end smart phones are, I have a hard time imagining that infotainment systems actually add more than 1-2% of the cost of the vehicle. Feels more like a type of virtue signal than a real cost-saving measure.

For me, the huge value-add of Discord is for gaming (and is what Discord was created for). In college, my friends and I were originally using Skype calls when we’d play League together, but it was super annoying; essentially in order to not have to create a new call and add everyone who happened to be playing every time we just had one giant call with everyone we’d “redial” when playing. The downside is that if you were on Skype but not part of the game (in class or something) you’d get the Skype call invitation and have to decline it.

Switching to Discord was fantastic. We’d just have a persistent voice channel for different games, and you could chill in there to indicate it’s what you were playing or wanted to play, and if someone wanted to join they just jump on the call. It was also nice for organizing our text chats into different subjects (using different text channels), so if you were trying to ask if anyone had any advice for a certain class, you wouldn’t have your messages drowned out by people talking about news about a upcoming game. We just have a “games” text channels and a “classes” text channels and a “weekend plans” text channel, etc. This became particularly important as the server grew from friends to friends of friends and would’ve been overwhelming to have everyone stuck in one chat.

That’s pretty much been the extent of my Discord use, and I’m continually amazed to hear how others have been using it. I’ve seen the “join us on Discord, X, Facebook, etc.” for different games coming out, but never thought much of it or ever considered doing that.

Corporations cannot create nontoxic social media, the incentives will always be there to make it toxic.

I don’t know that’s true. The incentives to make it toxic come from engagement being the goal, which is a function of advertising being the income. I’m not advocating for it, but if there were a flat subscription and no ads, I don’t think they’d have any economic pressures for toxicity.

Definitely a fair question; at least for the large bodies of water near me, before they let you park and take your vessel in, they check the registration on it. I’m doing that, they can check what other bodies of water you’ve taken the vessel to and how recently, and can then determine whether or not it’s safe for you to bring it into that one.

I don’t actually know what the recourse is if it’s not safe, if they make you spray it down thoroughly there, or completely refuse entry, or something else. My information here is from a vague memory of a sign at a lake parking area that was titled “Why do I need to register?” or something like that.

I think this is pretty common, I think part of the reason is so that you don’t accidentally introduce critters/eggs from one body of water to another

Oh, I don’t heat it at all, I just eat it room temperature

I haven’t heard of that being what threading is, but that threading is about shared resourcing and memory space and not any special relationship with the scheduler.

Per the wiki:

On a multiprocessor or multi-core system, multiple threads can execute in parallel, with every processor or core executing a separate thread simultaneously; on a processor or core with hardware threads, separate software threads can also be executed concurrently by separate hardware threads.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(computing)

I also think you might be misunderstanding the relationship between concurrency and parallelism; they are not mutually exclusive. Something can be concurrent through parallelism, as the wiki page has (emphasis mine):

Concurrency refers to the ability of a system to execute multiple tasks through simultaneous execution or time-sharing (context switching), sharing resources and managing interactions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrency_(computer_science)

Correct, which is why before I had said

I think OP is making a joke about python’s GIL, which makes it so even if you are explicitly multi threading, only one thread is ever running at a time, which can defeat the point in some circumstances.

If what you said were true, wouldn’t it make a lot more sense for OP to be making a joke about how even if the source includes multi threading, all his extra cores are wasted? And make your original comment suggesting a coding issue instead of a language issue pretty misleading?

But what you said is not correct. I just did a dumb little test

import threading 
import time

def task(name):
  time.sleep(600)

t1 = threading.Thread(target=task, args=("1",))
t2 = threading.Thread(target=task, args=("2",))
t3 = threading.Thread(target=task, args=("3",))

t1.start()
t2.start()
t3.start()

And then ps -efT | grep python and sure enough that python process has 4 threads. If you want to be even more certain of it you can strace -e clone,clone3 python ./threadtest.py and see that it is making clone3 syscalls.

I think OP is making a joke about python’s GIL, which makes it so even if you are explicitly multi threading, only one thread is ever running at a time, which can defeat the point in some circumstances.

Think about how quickly the entire WWWIII (Wizarding-World War III) would have ended if all of the good guys had simply armed up with good ol’ American hot lead. Basilisk? Let’s see how tough it is when you shoot it with a .470 Nitro Express. Worried about its Medusa-gaze? Wear night vision goggles. The image is light-amplified and re-transmitted to your eyes. You aren’t looking at it—you’re looking at a picture of it. Imagine how epic the first movie would be if Harry had put a breeching charge on the bathroom wall, flash-banged the hole, and then went in wearing NVGs and a Kevlar-weave stab-vest, carrying a SPAS-12. And have you noticed that only Europe seems to a problem with Deatheaters? Maybe it’s because Americans have spent the last 200 years shooting deer, playing GTA: Vice City, and keeping an eye out for black helicopters over their compounds. Meanwhile, Brits have been cutting their steaks with spoons.

Remember: gun-control means that Voldemort wins. God made wizards and God made muggles, but Samuel Colt made them equal. Now I know what you’re going to say: “But a wizard could just disarm someone with a gun!” Yeah, well they can also disarm someone with a wand (as they do many times throughout the books/movies). But which is faster: saying a spell or pulling a trigger?

Avada Kedavra, meet Avtomat Kalashnikova. Imagine Harry out in the woods, wearing his invisibility cloak, carrying a .50bmg Barrett, turning Deatheaters into pink mist, scratching a lightning bolt into his rifle stock for each kill. I don’t think Madam Pomfrey has any spells that can scrape your brains off of the trees and put you back together after something like that. Voldemort’s wand may be 13.5 inches with a Phoenix-feather core, but Harry’s would be 0.50 inches with a tungsten core. Let’s see Voldy wave his at 3,000 feet per second. Better hope you have some Essence of Dittany for that sucking chest wound. I can see it now…Voldemort roaring with evil laughter and boasting to Harry that he can’t be killed, since he is protected by seven Horcruxes, only to have Harry give a crooked grin, flick his cigarette butt away, and deliver what would easily be the best one-liner in the entire series: “Well then I guess it’s a good thing my 1911 holds 7+1.” And that is why Harry Potter should have carried a 1911.

Ah gotcha, I was wondering where I might’ve lost the thread. I would agree with everything you said there. But, putting a pin in that and going back to your original post, what are the lore changes that you dislike? I understand what you said regarding inter-species complications, but feel like I might have lost what you were saying after that.

Honestly, I’m a bit more confused now. I definitely agree that humans have a tendency to dehumanize others, but I wouldn’t consider this a good or healthy thing that we should just accept. So having a ruleset that says, canonically, “this group of sentient creatures is inherently evil” and not “this group of sentient creatures is believed to be evil by this other group” you are encouraging the players to take an unnuanced view of the world.

However, as a gamemaster you have to allow your players to make two choices:

1. Are the monsters we are fighting people or not?

2. Does my character agree with me?

Isn’t this what the lore changes encourage, by not making a factual statement about the groups, so the players should ask themselves this question on a case-by-case basis and not simply based on what type of creature they are? And I’m not sure how the changes would prevent the narrative approach you describe. Saying that goblins and orcs live in human-like societies doesn’t prevent you from telling a story that’s analogous to what has happened between human societies.

Maybe we’re working off of different data points, what WotC material are specifically referring to for the changes?

A game about combat needs a world full of things for the players to mow down but also not feel bad about killing, and sometimes you need a bunch of Violent Dungeon Fodder that can think and plan and make tactical decisions and potentially be negotiated with.

I’m a bit confused by this. Why not have them be any other species, or combination of them? If they’re capable of being negotiated with shouldn’t the players feel as bad about killing them as anyone else? I feel like “self-defense” can do a lot of heavy lifting in dungeon crawls, I’ve never really noticed my players feeling bad about killing bandit dwarves or whatnot.

I do the same, the bumpers feel kinda squishy to me.

I’m always reminded of https://youtu.be/M6dWG18HnOo?si=6VyysSwkj5lD3AEc

Klaus is a newer one, but has joined the tradition rotation