There's a new, professionally-published book version of "There Is No Antimemetics Division" out as well[1], if you want to support Sam's work that way. I have print copies of both the self-published V1 and the new V2. I'm very excited about the latter, though I haven't finished it yet.
One small word of caution if you read the older version first: for what I assume are copyright reasons around using SCP in a professionally-published book, the new published version has had to strip out all the SCP references and change the names of all the characters, but it is otherwise very close to the old one. There are a handful of new scenes and some other small differences, but many pages and chapters are word-for-word identical apart from the aforementioned name changes.
This could just be a me thing, but I found this incredibly distracting after being so used to the old version, and just couldn't manage to enjoy it. Fortunately I bought the old one as well.
I’ve read the older version and really liked it, strange ending and all, and I’ve gifted the new version for X-mas. My xmas wish list is for a 6 episode mini-series funded by the fruit company.
I don't think it's that the lawyers are undifferentiated; some are better than others, in the same way some real estate agents are better than others (source: people complaining bitterly about theirs).
The problem is that there's currently no effective way to comparison shop. Needing a real estate agent or lawyer is a rare event for most people, so they don't have grounds to make a comparison. And you can't really tell how good they are until you've hired them.
Compare to, say, an auto mechanic. In the US, 90+% of households own a car, and after a few years of car ownership, unless you're a much luckier person than I am, you've probably been to a few mechanics and had some good and bad experiences. On top of that, most of your friends have done the same, so it's much easier to get enough data to figure out who to take your car to next. And, of course, the stakes are a bit lower: a lot would have to go wrong for you to end up in jail because you picked a bad mechanic, and cars are usually cheaper than houses.
Tangential, but I wonder if the given example might be straying a step too far? Normally we want to keep sensitive data out of logs, but the example includes a user.lifetime_value_cents field. I'd want to have a chat with the rest of the business before sticking something like that in logs.
In some companies, this type of information is often very important and very easily available to everyone at all levels of the business to help prioritize and understand customer value. I would not consider it "sensitive" in the same way that e.g. PII would be.
Good to know! At previous jobs, that information wasn't available to me (and it didn't matter because the customer bases were small enough that every customer was top priority), so I assumed it was considered more sensitive than it perhaps is.
Yes, the understanding is that trans people were always trans. It may have taken time for them to understand that and perhaps more to decide to adopt that identity publicly, but they're not "not trans" before that. Other queer identities are generally thought of the same way in queer communities: many people have early experiences (e.g. fixating on same-sex characters in fiction the way peers might opposite-sex characters) that they later realise were early expressions of their orientation.
Bear in mind, the terminal goal doesn't actually require unbiased numbers; the way most TTRPGs work is that you're trying to roll over or under a target number to get a weighted, unpredictable outcome. The idea is that while players (usually) want any given action to succeed, they some of their actions to fail in order to preserve narrative interest, while having their character be better at some things than others.
As such, while randomness is best, the given method is quite sufficient for having fun, and both players can agree that it's fair: they each have equal influence over the result.
I think it depends on the roll. For two players against each other it’s a bit more fun, but dm/player feels imbalanced, even when it’s character based. Th player winning might feel more fun beating another character with wits but that doesn’t work as well imo for luck, strength, or against something inanimate. It also moves success into a personal skill of the player vs the dm. I don’t agree that it’s necessarily fair.
Perhaps it’s just the feeling of “I took a risk and it didn’t work” vs “I chose badly and was outsmarted by the dm” seem different to me in an important way.
You could reframe this all easily as well for “I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 100, guess it within Y distance to succeed”. That’s mathematically equivalent I think, if you allow it rolling around.
This strikes me as a rather uncharitable view. I think it's okay for people to be proud of their work on a difficult project, and want to have their names on it.
I would be a bit sad if most mega projects (space stations, battle ships, international probes, dams, etc) do not have some kind of honorary tribute to the many people who came together to make it happen. A little plaque costs nothing but would be meaningful.
For many years now, NASA has let random people get their name printed on the Mars missions on a little plaque. Perseverance has 11 million names bolted onto the frame. My buddy boasts that he has been on Mars N times.
Fedora makes it pretty approachable, and some distros (e.g. Nobara, Bazzite) just straight-up ship the driver.
IMHO, stuff is moving fast enough in the Linux gaming world that any distro built around taking its time to update things (i.e. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint) is liable to be a bad time. Anecdotally, I've found that redirecting new users interested in gaming away from those distros has dramatically improved their satisfaction.
A better measure, assuming that pennies facilitate value exchange[1], would be whether the cost to mint a penny exceeded the marginal increase in GDP[2] due to having that additional penny available.
[1]: This assumption may not be true; if they're worth so little that people lose track of them, they could actually make it harder to exchange value.
[2]: Making the GDP higher is also a very debatable measure, but I think this generalizes to other dollar-denominated measures of prosperity.
[1]: https://qntm.org/antimemetics
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