So, have some fun with the other players at the expense of the player who refused to do even some basic work for the benefit of everybody else. It doesn’t have to be massively cruel, just give them a nudge so that next time they do put in the required effort.

Sure, but given that the player did avoid doing the work, the DM can take the opportunity to punish them for it.

In other words, “My backstory is whatever you want it to be”.

If you were the DM and this bothered you, the player just gave you powerful ammunition.

You could even have it so whenever the player entered a shop in his home town, the shopkeepers looked at him with disgust and refused to serve him. The DM wouldn’t even have to necessarily come up with a reason. Just, that the player is extremely well known among the locals and they universally think he’s absolutely disgusting and want nothing to do with him.

This headline sounds a lot funnier if you assume “it” means Signal, like I did.

Doubleclick has been Google for decades now. The difference is that (at least these days) most companies wouldn’t accept it if doubleclick ads had obnoxious pop-ups. But, they choose to have a Google sign-in form that has an obnoxious pop-up. Yes, it’s annoying that Google made an annoying login pop-up. But, much worse is that places like Reddit choose to go with that obnoxious pop-up instead of saying “we don’t want to force that on our users”.

What I mean by it not being a Google thing is that it doesn’t just appear there on its own, like it might if it were a Doubleclick ad or something.

This is something that companies like Reddit see and think “Yes, I want that obnoxious thing on my site”.

Worth noting, this isn’t really a Google thing. It’s something other websites do to allow you to login with various other credentials: Facebook, Google, Amazon – Twitter used to be common. It’s just that Google is obnoxious because when say Reddit allows you to login with your Google account, the login widget Google uses is an obnoxious pop-up.

Yeah, I love rolling dice, but certain rolls shouldn’t be done by the players.

Rolling on a hit in combat? That should definitely be the player. You know how well you swing your sword and when it makes good contact.

Rolling on perception should almost always be done by the DM. This is especially true when another party member can rescue the bad roll. Like, someone rolls to spot a hidden enemy. They fail, but shouldn’t know it, but they rolled a 2, so… Another player at the table sees this horrible roll and they have their character light a torch and look out into the wilderness. Sure, that’s metagaming, but it’s really hard to avoid when you know someone failed a potentially important roll.

One idea I’d like to see, and might try if I ever DM’d a game would be Dunning-Kruger rolls. The Dunning-Kruger effect is basically how people who are incompetent at something sometimes think they’re much better than they are, and people who are experts (and realize how complex things are) underestimate their own competence.

So, in this case, the DM rolls a die which says whether the rolls are normal or reversed, then the player rolls. If the DM’s roll said the player’s roll was reversed, the player’s 20 might become a 1, or a 1 might become a 20 (the actual number is 21 - roll). Mid rolls stay roughly the same: a 10 becomes an 11, for example.

If the barbarian is trying to check for traps and gets an 18, the DM might say “You’re confident there are no traps”, but that could be the result of overconfidence when they really “rolled” a 3. If they get a 10, the DM might say “You didn’t notice a trap, but you’re not sure”. You could set this up so if someone has a proficiency, the DM rolls a D10 and only a 1 means the player’s role is reversed. But, if the player is trying something they’re not good at, a 1 to 5 on the D10 means it’s reversed.

I haven’t tried this, so there may be serious flaws in it in reality. But, I like the idea of players still being able to roll for something like spotting a hidden enemy, but not knowing for sure if their roll is good or not.

throes

We need to talk about data as a physical object.

We need to admit that it isn’t and that that’s a terrible metaphor.

It’s still saved on disks somewhere, whether they’re a traditional HDD or a modern SSD.

Yes, often multiple copies are saved. Sometimes it is aggregated with other data, sometimes not. Making a new copy is insanely cheap, and, under the hood, even when just moving the data from the hard drive to the computer’s memory, a copy is made automatically. There’s no way to avoid copying the data.

But, to make it clear, “data” is basically “ideas”, and you can’t really treat ideas as objects. For thousands of years the idea that you could control ideas was ridiculous. You could control the physical object that an idea was expressed on, but if someone took their own time and copied it, that was a new object and the person who made the original had no claim on it.

Copyright, and its evil friends, is a relatively new concept where the government grants a temporary monopoly on the expression of an idea. Stealing the physical object on which the idea is printed is one thing. But, now you can get in trouble for “stealing” the idea. That’s what you’re talking about with stealing “data”, is that what you’re supposedly “stealing” is information.

But, of course it’s not theft. When you copy an idea without permission, the person with the original doesn’t lose it, they just lose control over a copy of that information.

Treating ideas, data, etc. as physical objects just never works because ideas can be copied without the original person losing anything. This is different from physical objects where my taking it necessarily means that you no longer have it.

In other words, data was always as physical as words on the page of a book.

Not at all, because each copy of a book is its own physical object. Copying a book is difficult and requires its own printing press. Even a low-fidelity copy like a photocopy requires a photocopy machine, ink and paper. Copying data is essentially free. When copying a book required a printing press, you could sort-of pretend that ideas were objects because copying was so burdensome. But, with digital data it’s clearly ridiculous. That doesn’t mean you can’t have laws about data (i.e. information), it just means that those laws care going to have to be completely different from laws about physical objects.

Why did we accept the change in how ownership worked simply because of a change of storage medium?

Because copying is essentially free. It’s no longer an object, it’s information.

But, having said that, the storage medium isn’t a major issue. The real question is when did people start accepting that you could treat ideas as objects. Stealing a book out of someone’s backpack and photocopying a book are completely different crimes. In one case, the person no longer has the object. In the second case, they still have it, but they don’t have control over the copies of it.

Talking about data as if it’s an object or something you can own is a red herring. The real issue is privacy.

For instance, say you use a period tracker app, that is owned by an non-profit, trying to use the data to better understand women’s hormone changes so that they can get better medical care. Great! Ok, now what happens if that non-profit goes bankrupt and as part of the bankruptcy proceedings sells its data to Meta or Google so that it can afford to make payroll. Well shit, your data is now owned by them, and you’re out of luck.

A privacy rule handles that situation better. You can give the company access to your private data, and then revoke that access later. If your data is something they own, they can use it however they like. But, if you own your own privacy, it doesn’t matter if the period tracker app gets bought out or goes bankrupt or whatever. The data they have isn’t something they own and can sell, it’s private data that they had temporary access to.

They don’t have a monopoly like any of their competition that will easily sustain them.

Erm, you think Bing is a serious competitor? Aside from search (91.54% of the global search market), Google is part of an ads duopoly that is only stalled by walled gardens like Amazon, TikTok, Wal*Mart, and the various entertainment companies. There’s also Google Maps, used by 77% of users between 16 and 64, and their biggest non-iOS competitor is Waze, which Google also owns. For email, 75% of the US email market is dominated by Gmail. As for the user-generated media market, YouTube absolutely dominates that. The closest competitor (Twitch, A.K.A. Amazon) is far behind.

As for what Google engineers do, it’s mostly not rip-things-up-and-start-over innovation since these are all very mature markets with billions of users. Instead it’s small tweaks that generate hundreds of millions in savings or additional revenue.

Most people don’t remember this, or weren’t alive at the time, but the whole Colin Powell event at the UN was intended to stop the weapons inspectors.

France (remember the Freedom Fries?) wanted to allow the weapons inspectors to keep looking until they could find true evidence of WMDs. The US freaked out because France said it wasn’t going to support an invasion of Iraq, at least not yet, because the inspectors hadn’t found anything. That meant that the security council wasn’t going to approve the resolution, which meant that it was an unauthorized action, and arguably illegal. In fact, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said it was illegal.

Following the passage of Resolution 1441, on 8 November 2002, weapons inspectors of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission returned to Iraq for the first time since being withdrawn by the United Nations. Whether Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction or not was being investigated by Hans Blix, head of the commission, and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Inspectors remained in the country until they withdrew after being notified of the imminent invasion by the United States, Britain, and two other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_and_the_Iraq_War

On February 5, 2003, the Secretary of State of the United States Colin Powell gave a PowerPoint presentation[1][2] to the United Nations Security Council. He explained the rationale for the Iraq War which would start on March 19, 2003 with the invasion of Iraq.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell's_presentation_to_the_United_Nations_Security_Council

The whole point of Colin Powell burning all the credibility he’d built up over his entire career was to say “we don’t care that the UN weapons inspectors haven’t found anything, trust me, the WMDs are there, so we’re invading”. Whether or not he (or anybody else) truly thought there were WMDs is a bit of a non-issue. What matters was they were a useful pretext for the invasion. Initially, the US probably hoped that the weapons inspectors were going to find some, and that that would make it easy to justify the invasion. The fact that none had been found was a real problem.

In the end, we don’t know if it was a lie that the US expected to find WMDs in Iraq. Most of the evidence suggests that they actually thought there were WMDs there. But, the evidence also suggests that they were planning to invade regardless of whether or not there were WMDs.

Relevant:

Criminals will start wearing extra prosthetic fingers to make surveillance footage look like it’s AI generated and thus inadmissible as evidence

https://twitter.com/bristowbailey/status/1625165718340640769?lang=en

The first 3 are really interesting. They make me want to know more about your character. I especially like the shutter shades one, because it draws you in and makes you want to know more about how they work, why he has migraines, etc.

I have a suggestion for one though: “I heard he made a deal with Tiamat, giving up his limbs to gain secret knowledge.” I like the idea of people thinking the limbs getting blown off wasn’t an accident, but was a deliberate trade. You can imagine how that kind of rumour would spread, especially among people who don’t trust artificers because they’re scared of “technology”.

So, 4 out of 5 rumours are true?

I’d say make it like this:

1. Rumour that’s hard to believe but true
2. Rumour that’s true, but not too interesting
3. Rumour that’s based on something that actually happened, but the facts have been distorted
4. Rumour that makes the player look good, but is false
5. Rumour that makes the player look bad, and is false

If there are only 2-3 other players, each one gets 1 or 2 rumours. If there are a lot of players, you might duplicate some of them. You could ask the player to pick the rumour that’s most popular about them, and some extra copies of that one get handed out.

So, about half the rumours are true, or based on something true. Half are false or distortions. There’s one that the character might want people to continue to believe, even if it’s false. Another one that is a lie that the player can’t seem to shake. Another one where it’s a true story, but maybe the character is just tired of having to re-tell. On the other hand, maybe it’s a tale of heroism that they love to tell people about.

IMO having one that makes the player look good, but is false, and one where the facts have been distorted are the most interesting ones. A paladin-type character would probably want to clear up the rumours even if they made that paladin look good. A rogue might want people to believe all the rumours even the ones that make them look bad, just so that nobody really learns the truth about them. A bard might want to string people along, building more rumours and making even the true stories into fanciful tales.

What about scar tissue? Does it get cleaned up? People who have been in a lot of fights tend to have a big build-up of scar tissue. Also, what about calluses? Does the warrior suddenly have baby-soft skin, losing the calluses he/she built up over years of training with the sword?

A round is roughly 6 seconds, that seems like a pretty normal timeframe.

*its hoard

Your horrible what?

It’s really shitty that this trial is being kept secret. Even if it’s a fair trial, it sure doesn’t have the appearance of a fair trial. I guess Google would prefer the appearance of a corrupt trial if the alternative is embarrassing information getting out.

Having said that, I really don’t get the issue with this:

when Google executives used “history-off chats” to destroy conversations after 24 hours even after Google was on a litigation hold.

You’re not allowed to destroy past chats / emails after you’ve been notified you’re on a litigation hold. That makes sense. You can’t shred any documents or delete any emails. But, this seems to be about current / future communications. It sounds like they started a history-off chat after the lawsuit started, and they may (or may not) have discussed things relevant to the case. AFAIK the default is history-off for chats within Google. So, they’d have had to specifically turn on history for any new chat.

So, what does that mean. If they’re sued, any current or future communications between executives there have to be history-on communications in case in the future something they say is related to the trial? Are they allowed to chat in person? If they do, is it mandatory that those chats be recorded and transcribed?

If some communication is allowed to be off-the-record (say a personal chat with someone), it seems weird to say ok, but if you use a text-based program to chat, you can’t have to keep transcripts of that chat and give them to us.