Use 3.5 Level chart, ie (Level - 1) * 1000 for next level.

Level 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Power .25 1 2 3 4 6 8 11 16 23 32 45 64 91 128 181 256 362 512 724
ECR .25 .25 .50 .50 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

How to Use:
For each party member, find their level (row 1) and the corresponding power (row 2). Total the power of all party members. Find greatest power (row 2) that is less than or equal to the total party power. Find the corresponding Encounter CR (row 3). This is for a moderate difficulty encounter. Adjust +/- as needed.
Use selected ECR as level (row 1) and find matching (ECR) power (row 2).
Select one or more enemies whose total power is approximately ECR power.

To find XP, use selected ECR for vertical column, and use enemy CR for horizontal column. Divide XP by living party members, rounding down.

        Monster Level
ECR 0.25 0.5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
1 75 150 300 600 900 1,350 1,800 2,700 3,600 5,400 7,200 10,800 14,400 21,600 28,800 43,200 57,600 86,400 115,200 172,800 230,400 345,600
2 75 150 300 600 900 1,350 1,800 2,700 3,600 5,400 7,200 10,800 14,400 21,600 28,800 43,200 57,600 86,400 115,200 172,800 230,400 345,600
3 75 150 300 600 900 1,350 1,800 2,700 3,600 5,400 7,200 10,800 14,400 21,600 28,800 43,200 57,600 86,400 115,200 172,800 230,400 345,600
4 75 150 300 600 900 1,200 1,800 2,400 3,600 4,800 7,200 9,600 14,400 19,200 28,800 38,400 57,600 76,800 115,200 153,600 230,400 307,200
5 63 141 250 563 750 1,125 1,500 2,250 3,000 4,500 6,000 9,000 12,000 18,000 24,000 36,000 48,000 72,000 96,000 144,000 192,000 288,000
6 57 113 225 450 675 900 1,350 1,800 2,700 3,600 5,400 7,200 10,800 14,400 21,600 28,800 43,200 57,600 86,400 115,200 172,800 230,400
7 44 99 175 394 525 788 1,050 1,575 2,100 3,150 4,200 6,300 8,400 12,600 16,800 25,200 33,600 50,400 67,200 100,800 134,400 201,600
8 38 75 150 300 450 600 900 1,200 1,800 2,400 3,600 4,800 7,200 9,600 14,400 19,200 28,800 38,400 57,600 76,800 115,200 153,600
9 29 63 113 253 338 506 675 1,013 1,350 2,025 2,700 4,050 5,400 8,100 10,800 16,200 21,600 32,400 43,200 64,800 86,400 129,600
10 24 47 94 188 281 375 563 750 1,125 1,500 2,250 3,000 4,500 6,000 9,000 12,000 18,000 24,000 36,000 48,000 72,000 96,000
11 18 39 69 155 206 309 413 619 825 1,238 1,650 2,475 3,300 4,950 6,600 9,900 13,200 19,800 26,400 39,600 52,800 79,200
12 15 28 56 113 169 225 338 450 675 900 1,350 1,800 2,700 3,600 5,400 7,200 10,800 14,400 21,600 28,800 43,200 57,600
13 11 23 40 91 122 183 244 366 488 731 975 1,463 1,950 2,925 3,900 5,850 7,800 11,700 15,600 23,400 31,200 46,800
14 9 17 32 66 98 131 197 263 394 525 788 1,050 1,575 2,100 3,150 4,200 6,300 8,400 12,600 16,800 25,200 33,600
15 6 14 23 53 70 105 141 211 281 422 563 844 1,125 1,688 2,250 3,375 4,500 6,750 9,000 13,500 18,000 27,000
16 5 10 18 38 56 75 113 150 225 300 450 600 900 1,200 1,800 2,400 3,600 4,800 7,200 9,600 14,400 19,200
17 4 8 13 30 40 60 80 120 159 239 319 478 638 956 1,275 1,913 2,550 3,825 5,100 7,650 10,200 15,300
18 3 6 10 21 32 42 63 84 127 169 253 338 506 675 1,013 1,350 2,025 2,700 4,050 5,400 8,100 10,800
19 2 5 7 17 22 33 45 67 89 134 178 267 356 534 713 1,069 1,425 2,138 2,850 4,275 5,700 8,550
20 2 4 6 12 18 23 35 47 70 94 141 188 281 375 563 750 1,125 1,500 2,250 3,000 4,500 6,000

Robotic traffic cones.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...

I always ask two questions:
1. If you were a hacker trying to break into a website using SQL injection, what would you type, exactly?
2. How do you prevent SQL injection, exactly?

Though I mostly hire senior developers with years of experience, who claim to be great database developers, only about 25% can answer these two questions correctly.

On Question 1, they usually tell me they would try typing a SQL query in a data field. But when I press them to tell me how they get it to be treated as a command rather than as data, they usually don't know that it's really just an apostrophe followed by a semicolon.
On Question 2, they usually tell me the data should be sanitized, to prevent SQL statements from being entered. When I get that answer, I ask them what they would do, if the field is *intended* to be a place to store SQL statements (such as a Jira comment field). Most have no idea that using query parameters is *the* way to protect against SQL injection.

If senior developers don't know these basic facts about SQL injection, it's no wonder our devices and systems are rife with vulnerabilities. Personally, I won't hire a developer who can't answer those two questions correctly.

Pass. No thank you. That’s simply projection. Take a careful look at exactly what Marx called “fascist”:

- Sanctity of individual life
- Blind Justice
- Judging by merit, productivity, or actual need instead of identity
- Decentralized policing, judiciaries, and government
- Property rights
- Individual agency
- Free speech

Yet every nation in modern history that has forgone these supposedly “fascist” ideals? It’s been an ACTUAL authoritarian totalitarian mess - plus always impoverished in comparison to its “fascist” neighbors, usually also violent, and often genocidal.

Again. No thank you.

...deserve people who think certifications are meaningful.

OK, so they are meaningful, but not in the way companies think.

Certifications mean that the person is
1) able to take a class
2) able to retain enough to pass a test

That's not nothing, granted. But does it mean that the person actually knows, in this case, how to administer an Ubuntu system? Nope, not even close.

My cousin took one of these classes and got certified. But I would *never* trust him with my computer.

Just ask my wife!

Every new technology is both positive and negative. Usually, the greater the positive benefits, the greater the negative side effects. AI isn't any different. It has a potential to do great good, and great harm. I want to understand what exactly those are.

For example, my extensive use of AI has shown me that many of the imagined negatives are simply overblown fears. For example, the notion that AI will take away most or all of human work, is ridiculous. Also, the idea that AI will soon become "super"-intelligent is equally ridiculous.

On the other hand, there are some real concerns. Bad legal briefs have already gotten lawyers into a lot of trouble, and are clearly damaging to the legal profession. Also, AI will probably enable new attack vectors for malware.

On the bright side, AI *does* have the potential to save people a lot of work, especially drudge work. It can be a great research tool, if the research is done with a clear understand of the flaws and limitations of AI. It will likely end the practice of burdening students with excessive homework.

I am neither terrified nor exuberant about AI. I *am* cautious and optimistic.

Whatever we think of the technology, or of the copyright or legal issues, or the impact of the technology...the tsunami is here. The genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back inside.

Given that it's here, I want to be ahead of the game, to understand what it's good for and what it's not good for. I want to understand what ways it's helpful and what ways it's unhelpful.

This kind of understanding can't be achieved by standing on the sidelines and avoiding the technology. It takes time and a lot f effort to really get to *know* the technology.

I approached the Personal Computer in the 1980s, and the internet in the 1990s, with the same philosophy. It's served me well, leading to an interesting and lucrative career. For all the same reasons, I'm not shrinking back from this new wave of technology, even if it does make a lot of people nervous.

Real conspiracies are perpetrated by people that can be named, who take specific actions to accomplish goals of their own.

By contrast, conspiracy *theories* are vague suggestions that the most straightforward explanation *couldn't possibly* be true, without any actual evidence.

This mumbo-jumbo about LLMs becoming aware because of some "behavior" that hasn't yet been explained, is the same as these vague conspiracy theories. Until the "researchers" can show details about how this "behavior" occurs, they've got only dramatic suspicions.

By the way, we can make regular software that "behaves" this way too, but that wouldn't be an indication of consciousness or willful behavior.

Exactly! We are soooooo cool! Not square at all!

Bad Elmo! Bad Elmo! Nerds suck!

Exactly. Perspective matters.

The accompanying riots across dozens of cities over several months, with mass looting - including hundreds of pharmacies in Philadelphia alone, significant arson, and billions of dollars of total societal damage? That’s a drop in the bucket. That’s indeed 97% peaceful in comparison to the total number of GF protests - ergo “mostly peaceful”.

In fact the whole year was demonstrably 100% peaceful assuming that the 2020 Democrat National Convention’s speeches are at all the proper gauge. After all, most of these speeches were given by the most educated perceptive Ivy League trained leaders of our time. These had zero mentions about the previous months of widespread rioting, so, obviously, the riots were a nothing-burger.

Elmo must be stopped!

- Elmo monopolizes 90% of the entire world’s space cargo by weight, and capitalistically charges less than the competition!

- Elmo demands fixed priced contracts instead of cost plus, which is inequity in a nut shell. He makes it impossible to charge for overruns and so fails to equitably support more workers, and fails to equitably rake in extra cash that could be donated to NGOs.

- Elmo has childishly figured out how to get freight costs 90% lower than standard tech (next gen Starship) - currently at least 50% lower (Falcon). That’s lazy! His “efficiency” is simply code for purposely avoiding work!

- Elmo could instantly eliminate all world hunger, stop Putin, and make everyone in the world rich, but instead has built and launched the world’s largest and most capable satellite communications network.

- Elmo gets more money from private means than government contracts, and relies far less on subsidies than the competition, which obviously means he’s a fascist!

Elmo should charge ten times as much and use the money for good!

Progressives, just like conservatives, recognize their take is biased to one side on a wide variety of individual topics but, unlike conservatives, fail to see when their bias is systematic. This is particularly notable in a variety of ways:

- Progressives see Fox as right leaning, as do conservatives, but assessing media like Wikipedia and NPR reveals a schism: conservatives see Wikipedia and NPR as distinctly left leaning while progressives see them as close to neutral. The schism is only made obvious to progressives when they’re instructed to carefully use a rubric of individual issues for assessment instead of simply using “vibes”: Israel, lockdowns, teacher unions, defund the police, etc, etc.

- Media Matters similarly uses holistic “narrative” to judge media bias, thus largely aligning with progressive assessments of Fox and NPR, where-as All Sides empirically and systematically assesses bias by uses a rubric of positions on several individual issues to judge bias, thus aligning with conservative assessments.

- Not coincidentally, the Critical Theory and Postmodernism that’s particularly dominant in “elite” soft science academia both explicitly claim “narrative trumps empirical observation” or even “empirical observation is a tool of bigotry”. This aligns with the progressive “vibe” approach of assessing NPR, Wikipedia, and Media Matters as neutral.

- Wikipedia’s political drift over the last ten years is a particularly illuminating example of this phenomenon. Its official “perennial source” list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... has evolved over the last decade or so to green light virtually all distinctly left leaning resources as “neutral” (The Guardian, CNN, NPR) but red lights, or at least yellow lights, almost all right leaning resources. All Sides itself empirically explores Wikipedia’s alignment in https://www.allsides.com/blog/... , where applying its issue based rubric across several thousand of articles was found to yield a three to one ratio of left leaning sources versus right.

The systemic bias of supposedly neutral mainstream media, Media Matters fact checking, and soft science “elite” academia becomes ludicrously obvious after examining the highly aligned Biden era CNN, NPR, soft science academia, and progressive positions on a wide variety of topics:

- The border is secure.
- The inflation is “temporary” and “small”.
- The Steele Report is credible.
- The laptop is a Russian plant.
- The lab leak theory is propaganda.
- Opposing long term lockdowns is unscientific.
- Biden is fully mentally competent.
- Defunding police is a great idea.
- The GF riots were “mostly peaceful”.
- Judging by identity instead of merit is democratic.
- Extremely adult books in grades schools are appropriate.
- Support defunding, oppose school choice, oppose VoterID, and support illegal immigration.

That last bullet point is particularly illustrative of the blind spot. Per Gallup, the progressive view on each topic - defunding, school choice. VoterID, borders - not only opposes conservative views, but also opposes the majority of Black Americans.

I'm also fully remote, in a company that is generally skeptical of remote work. But like you, my contract says my position is remote, with no fine-print caveats. My entire team is also fully remote. Every one of them would quit rather than move to a city where the company has one of their offices. Over the past 3 years, we have become known as one of the highest performing teams in the company. So much for the nay-sayers who assert that you can't be productive if you're not in the office.

Texas, with its well-deserved Big Oil reputation, also happens to be *by far* the nation's leader in wind energy, with 3x more than any other state. And it will soon be #1 in solar as well. This is much to the chagrin of many in the state government, but at this point, the horse has left the barn, it's too late to clamp down and stop the rush into renewables. The very lack of regulation is what has allowed wind and solar to flourish in the state.