From the outside, I cannot help but liken the atmosphere to how we felt in Turkey in Spring 2023. I really hope the result will be different for you guys.

Many happy returns (hopefully with a continuous lack of nuclear apocalypse)!

If you're interested in the offer, the application deadline is Sunday 15 February.

Find more info and apply here:

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My research unit at the University of Lausanne is currently hiring a PhD assistant to work on "democracy and the life cycle (e.g. old age or youth)"! It's a PhD position that can last up to 5 years, and I can say from first-hand experience that Lausanne is a great place to do a PhD thesis.

Now that you say it, the second picture really looks like the kind of FMV cutscenes you'd find in 90s Command & Conquer games!

You should sue OpenAI for including your house on their training data!

Nothing much! Trying to juggle thesis writing and doctoral courses... I hope everything is good on your end! 😊

There I was, all motivated to get back building my personal webpage when I discovered that WordPress.com is selling all user data to OpenAI to train their LLM. I guess I'll need to find a new place to host my website before I do anything.

The difference between a fancy robe de chambre and a bathrobe seems to be attitude in the end!

I'm very sorry to hear about your loss.

Zeki Faik İzer'in 1933 yılında çizdiği İnlıkâp Yolunda tablosu.

Cumhuriyet değerlerini yaşatan herkesin Cumhuriyet Bayramı kutlu olsun!

He specifically mentions that laissez-faire capitalism is categorically incompatible with a conservative worldview, which I think is rather in line with the abandonment of civic virtue that we see today to the profit of planet-destroying billionaires.

Sorry for barging in, but to the moral decay among conservatives you two are discussing reminds me of GA Cohen's Rescuing Conservatism, where he specifically mentions that modern conservative parties are antithetical to the concept of "preserving the existing thing which has value"!

This is a serious accusation so I wouldn't really name names unless I somehow get concrete proof, but I hate how current LLM technology has made it so that we can't trust the authenticity of so many things in our life.

There's a new Youtube channel that gives surprisingly GMing advice that I'm watching, and I just can't help but shake the feeling that its scripts seem AI generated. The general writing style ("It's not just X - it's Y"), the way they Give A Special Name to basic advice, it all feels... off.

So basically a big Civ campaign?

Since TSR-era D&D didn't really do "balance", IMO the daily depletion of spell slots (and light, and rations etc.) was a measure of how deep you can go. But when everyone's combat abilities have daily limits and combat is balanced around those limits, the dungeon needs to account for that structure.

Do you think the "X encounters/day" way of designing the adventuring day (with or without the fine-tuning for bosses) plays well with old-school dungeoncrawling? When I'm designing a dungeon in 5e, I feel like the entire dungeon must fit an adventuring day or the player incentive to LR ruins pacing.

Real Prime Ministry of France has never been tried!

Putting fences around farm animals would be deadly for farmer's economy, says the wolf hungrily circling the farmstead

This reads like a wall of a text written by someone who talks *a lot* about TTRPGs with extremely complicated jargon, but in truth plays very little. Just the worst kind of person to discuss TTRPGs with.

Jersey and Guernsey, specifically.

Nothing like some unquestioned assumptions disguising themselves as self-evident a priori facts in analytic philosophy!

And let's not forget that Spain's regime change only happened because a terrorist attack killed Franco's first choice and the second choice was a closet democrat beyond all expectations who had to dodge a coup attempt in 1981!

I really want to believe in peaceful regime change away from authoritarianism, but if anything what we see is that either the authoritarians plunder the country and hand its corpse back after they're done or there is a violent intervention that ends the regime.

- Estado Novo could be considered as similar with the Portuguese military's colonial defeat pushing for a regime change

And most importantly, regardless of how you feel about the fall of communism, the existence of the US and NATO as a hegemonic power supporting anticommunism is a massive factor

I understand the sentiment, but I have to say a lot of these are very bad examples.

- Chile suffered for 17 long years under Pinochet and a lot of the regime's damage is still not undone
- The Greek Junta fell over its incapacity to Turkish response to Enosis in Cyprus

Skirmish and Ceasefire

This is fascinating since in Turkish we still call the queen the Vizier, but he's obviously got the post-Queen patch powerset. Even if the game balance was patched, the old name stayed!

And I'm guessing something similar happened with the Bishops which we call the Elephants!

20 years ago I might have said Dan Brown is also a contender, but seeing how he fell into irrelevance in the 2010s, this seems like the only correct answer!