I keep of top-5 list of dumb geek myths, and "I want robots to go fight wars for me instead of our sons" is #3 on that list.

People don't submit to perceived tyranny because their material stuff got destroyed; rather, the opposite.

"What robot soldiers could do is just as scary, though: Make outright colonialism a practical option again."
War Nerd, 2014-02-13

I emailed the official support contact to ask about this yesterday, and they explicitly said in highlighted text that they would delete any such YouTube videos.

Received 2023-05-16 @3:05 PM ET:

(Emphasis theirs.)

"Original D&D" (OD&D) is the customary term for the 1974 edition of the game (3 little brown booklets in a white box).

D&D Editions Timeline by Nick Wedig

Similarly, I tried testing ChatGPT on writing stuff for prior editions of the Dungeons & Dragons game, and it likewise failed the same way. One piece of output said, "For more details, look in the Original D&D Monster Manual", which is not a thing that ever existed.

"Why are you even trying to do this? / There's no reason you should want to do this"

Holy god yes. I have no hair left to tear out from the culture of SE people calling "X/Y problem!!" and patting themselves on the back for coming up with a reason to not answer a question.

I agree with this. A major problem with SO (and Stack Exchange in general) is that people really like easy questions that they can answer in a few lines, show off how smart they are, and quickly scoop up some points. They seem to get cranky if a hard question is posed -- esp. from a new poster.

On that subject, amusingly, I'm actually currently banned from posting questions on SO because I have a history of low-rated questions. Even though, e.g., my last question provoked a personal response from the IDE's primary maintainer, and after a few comments they realized the software had a bug they needed to fix in the next release. Nonetheless that question was low-rated -- b/c no one else could solve it -- and it wound up triggering an automated suspension of my account.

Coincidentally, on Friday (before anyone saw this article) I was talking to a married couple of friends of mine, who work at two separate fully-remote companies. I brought up the IBM chairman's statement the other day against remote work. And my friends pointedly said they couldn't imagine why anyone would not do full-remote nowadays, specifically for the case of startups.

Why spend the majority of your investment on office space that does no one any good? Why not spend it all on acquiring the best talent, anywhere in the country/world?

Yes, this, one hundred percent.

I've been teaching about half as long as you. The very first day completely shattered some of my deeply-held, preconceived notions.

Almost all folks who haven't taught themselves will kick back against this observation and not believe you. Thanks for the breath of fresh air.

Your office will be at 420 42nd street, zip code 04200.

You will be expected to perform 42.0 hours of work for 42 weeks a year, with another two 4.20 week long team-building retreats annually.

Your pay will be $420 a day with a 0.0420% vesting of stock over 420 months.

Nyuk nyuk nyuk nyuk lulz fart sound

Someone's playing a super-sized version of Conway's Game of Life.

Wikipedia: Puffer train

There's a fair point here, even if I don't have exactly the same experience.

As a fantasy reader, I've found that the golden age was pulp fantasy where the core works were short stories published in monthly pulp magazines. They're dense, snappy, and risk-taking. The problem is that as a publishing concern the industry found you needed a certain 200-300 page count to make it worthwhile binding and putting something on the shelf. So yes, writers commonly took popular short stories and bloated them up (or pasted them together) to make novel-length works.

It's still very common for a highly popular magazine article to get picked up by a publisher and inflated into a book. I keep wishing there was a business case in the internet era for short stories to make a comeback.

This is bullshit misinformation.

I have multiple volumes by Foucault and de Beauvoir on my shelf, and I've never encountered even the slightest whiff of any such topic. I mean, the word "queer" doesn't even appear anywhere on de Beauvoir's Wikipedia page. (I'm not LGTBQ myself, I have their works for other subjects.)

Cite or STFU.

Probably shouldn't have to repeat this, but here goes:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Hanlon's razor

I have a married couple of friends who work in software at two different companies, each of which had money at SVB, and it's questionable if the companies will be operating on Monday.

At the community college in NYC where I teach, registrations for spring 2023 are up and exceeded all of the college's target numbers. My own classes are filled to capacity for the first time since the pandemic. So it's possible this article is being written just as the situation turns a corner.