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I’m trying to build the best TTRPG chronicler: https://loracle.app

Everyone who plays D&D has experienced the moment where they forget key details about the collective story they’re building. From ‘hey it’s been a month, where are we?’ to ‘wait who was this crazy npc again?’, ai is excellent at transcribing, notetaking and building a knowledge graph of your fantasy world.

I’m still building mostly for myself by adding a ton of features I know my friends would want, but also think there’s some ‘there’ there.

The idea is simple: let Loracle record your sessions on discord or upload the raw audio of your sessions, then get a rich personal wiki and session notes you can interact with.

If you’re mid-campaign you can also upload session notes from plain text and it bootstraps a campaign wiki. Then future audio based sessions have a good base of npcs, quests, characters, etc to build off of.

At this stage I’d love feedback more than anything else. Happy to comp a lot of usage to HNers in return for some reports on how well it’s serving you. Email admin@loracle.app for anything and everything.

I’ve been playing D&D for a few years with friends, and over time we’ve built a rich world..full of contradictions because I can’t remember half of the improv I do as DM.

I built https://loracle.app to automatically build a wiki of various entities in our campaign and enable rag q&a with an ai assistant about specific world facts.

157. Very neat! Started a, b, c then found much more success when thinking about biomes (sea, mountains, forest, jungle, etc).

This has always been interesting for me, as I think I have aphantasia but also can vividly experience taste in the same manner as if I'm eating foods.

In other words, if I think about, say, spaghetti & meatballs, I can feel the exact sensation of the taste of the spaghetti & meatballs. I can even vary aspects of the dish without much effort (e.g. adding dusted parmesan, basil, the pasta is more/less al dente, etc). I use this all the time when cooking, as I 'think with my tongue' and pre-taste what I think a dish will taste like as I'm considering what ingredients to add or different techniques to follow.

I think my experience with visualizing taste is what some people can do in their minds eye with images & sounds, yet I can barely visualize any images in my head when I close my eyes. Frustrating, but gives me a bit of hope. In my younger years I did not have this virtual food tasting ability, but I think I slowly gained it by paying close attention to the experience of eating food I made in order to improve my cooking ability.

I wonder if I can pay similar attention to the world around me and develop image visualization abilities over time.

I’ve recently been caught up on noodling on the combinatorics of cooking food. I wonder if a structured recipe format would be helpful to explore the ‘solution space’ of any given dish.

For example, think of all the decisions required to specify a curry dish:

How do you cut/mash your garlic and ginger and onions? (If you even add all of those ingredients)

Do you use whole or ground spices? What about for each spice? Cardamom pods or ground cardamom?

Do you toast each spice?

How long do you cook your onions?

And so on. Eventually you get to an absolutely gigantic amount of options that all generate a somewhat similar dish, but with key sensory differences. They may all be ‘chicken tikka masala’ but I’d argue you’d have a very different eating experience across that decision spectrum.

I think this may also play (specifically for Indians) into the idea that moms is best. It’s probably because mom’s is universally unique and you crave that nostalgia.

Interesting. Also allows for some fun ‘expansion’ in recipes. A leaf node may be ‘chicken stock’ but you could link to a recipe that boils down to that one ‘chicken stock’ node if you want to DIY it.

SRBs were in fact reusable.

Think of the word ‘reusable’ in this case as less a binary descriptor but more of a scale of reusability.

Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle. Also consider rapid reusability was a stretch goal when it was being designed, but we have come a loooong way since, spacex in particular has had it as a driving competitive differentiator for years now.

Another big difference is that NASA post Cold War was a skilled jobs program, with an incentive to do distributed, high overhead work to appease their bosses (congress), while SpaceX has the opposite.

Personally, it’s wild to me to think that the ‘freedom’ to eat meat is ever in question. It’d take such a ridiculously over-the-top totalitarian move to make something like that happen. I just don’t see it as possible, it’d be like banning smartphones.

On the other hand, I do see a world where regulations increase the cost of meat (by making these factory farms do things which improve the livelihoods of the animals, but cost $). But..that’s not taking away freedom, that’s just any other tragedy of the commons regulation that prices in the negative externalities to the action that causes them. (Think: climate change emissions here, not morality)

I think Apple probably already knows what the 2nd or 3rd gen look like mostly now, anyway. They most likely don’t commit to a product line like Vision without a multi year roadmap in place, and have to make a cut line eventually to launch v1 which includes some obvious drawbacks they can improve.

Add on to that, I think they have more of a culture of looking past feedback to figure out the key new tech that’s available now and building towards that, rather than just responding to user feedback directly (though they clearly do that, too).

Yeah there should definitely be a better governance structure preventing employee access without a structural justification like a law enforcement request, customer service request, etc.

As an owner of a model Y, I’m beyond pissed off they’re so lackadaisical with this stuff, to the point where I may just buy a different car.

Varies based on how cheap your electricity is and expensive your gas is but my experience has been about $1000/yr in just gas savings according to my teslas calculations, we don’t commute with it tho, so it could pay off faster for commuters, but still on the order of years to break even.

A big difference is maintenance though. No oil changes, mechanical issues, etc. Just new tires when they’re worn out and occasional problems.

By selling soap for a loss for longer than the competitors can stomach. If you have 10 businesses making $100M/yr, you can lose $1B/yr on soap (by selling a $2 bar for $1) and get a ton of customers who buy your cheaper soap. Eventually, other basic soap sellers will either need to match your prices and take their own losses to match, or hold steady hoping you'll fold.

Eventually, they are either sold to Amazon or fold, and Amazon can increase the price to $2.20/bar and mint another $100M/year for the next industry to attack with $1.1B. Rinse & repeat and eventually the customer is charged some percentage more for the same product once the competition is kowtowed.

None, but many die prematurely from air pollution.

I feel like generative AI interfaces should use a font like this for code. It can give a subtle 'hmm maybe I should double check this' vibe.

OpenAI was founded in 2015, well before those models were created.

yet my place in the leagues remains nearly unchanged. So either everybody also really started "engaging" with the site much less, or they simply left.

In my experience, Duolingo puts you with other folks who had a similar score to you in the previous league. I at one point was learning Italian aggressively, getting multiple thousands of points a week. I then had a week of vacation where I only did one lesson a day (totaled ~100 points that week) and was demoted. The next week, everyone I was paired with had faaaar fewer points than 'usual'.

There’s a big difference between a query for a fact and a query for a problem. Search engines probably make the big bucks on the latter (users with problems likely spend $ to solve them). I can see the middle man affiliate blog doing poorly because of LLM query responses, but advertisers will probably pay handsomely to have their products recommended after a user prompts the language model with a related query, or conversation.

All of those ‘bad’ thing in launches serve a marketing purpose. Scarcity makes consumers think something is in demand. Additionally, every day of stockpiled inventory costs money.

no need for software updates because everything was properly designed to work with the hardware before the vehicle was sold.

I think there's your answer. That's hard to do, and software mistakes cost a lot of $$$ and time to fix. You have to go into a dealership/service area to get any updates.

Also, the vast majority of Tesla's customers are attracted to the idea that their car will continuously update itself and get better over time.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. GP made a decent effort to try to find this clause, couldn't, and you're effectively claiming they're full of it because it's gotta be in there.

A more hacker-newsy way to approach this would be to either find the clause yourself (and earn your upvotes the hard way), or perhaps admit your baseless speculation was, indeed, baseless.

I’ve always been surprised there aren’t haptic gloves with accurate feedback for VR/AR. It feels kludgy to hold a big plastic brick. Problem is, I just don’t know where to start cracking the nut, never had any hardware experience.

Disclaimer: I am a Googler voicing my own opinions about our products.

Google really does use all of its own products internally. In fact, I've had a FAR better experience inside Google than outside of it. When 100% of your work happens on chat/gmail/docs/other internal tools, it's pretty seamless. We rarely dogfood external use cases though, where users don't fully drink the Kool-Aid.

They claim that, by taking money from police and putting it toward social programs, they can eliminate the need for heavy-handed policing in the first place. But the social programs are an afterthought.

This feels like a strawman. I don't think it's surprising that there's a rise in crime when police are defunded, especially when those social programs aren't enacted. I think most reasonable progressives who support defunding the police also recognize the whole point is to shift investment away from punishment (police) into aid (social programs) to deter crime. It takes years for that to happen, and really needs to happen on a societal level to provide opportunities that otherwise 'career criminals' do not have which leads them down that path.

(GP here) I generally agree with this. It's why I wrote 'in the eyes of most'. IMO liberals are bad at defining their own opinions in the court of public opinion, and often are viewed as !Conservative, even if their views are more nuanced.

If I had to guess, it's something along these lines (again I'm just guessing, these are general social sentiments that I observed over the past 2 years):

1. Trump mismanaged the pandemic, this resulted in cognitive dissonance amongst his supporters. (they like him but their brain doesn't like the feeling that it was wrong)

2. A 'convenient' explanation to avoid this dissonance is COVID is a Chinese bio-weapon. They (big bad China) released COVID to make Trump look bad and to kill Americans.

3. Liberals, seeing through this, push back on this generally unsubstantiated claim (at the time and potentially even now) that COVID is a bio-weapon. In the eyes of most, Liberals have taken the side of 'COVID is a natural random mutation, not a lab leak'.

4. Now whether or not it's a lab leak or natural is a political game, where your team wins depending on where the facts finally lie (or if you can manufacture enough support for your 'side').

5. See: Rand Paul v Fauci in various senate hearings about gain-of-function research and funding for a Wuhan lab & generally liberals trying not to talk about it because it would be another example of them 'lying' in the eyes of conservatives (think 'masks don't help' but alllll over again).

I’d love to see an international orbit allocation similar to how the fcc regulates spectrum.

Also with the cost of sending a satellite to space about to potentially plummet (starship?), wouldn’t it just make sense to make a lot of cheap satellites that you throw up in a low enough orbit that a collision would only require a few years til the shattered pieces de orbit and burn up? We may be on the cusp of a revolution on satellite technology as the engineering work going into each individual satellite drops precipitously and the turnaround time becomes weeks not years. I could see a similar Cambrian explosion in satellite tech from cheap space access similar to when we went from mainframes to pcs. Thoughts?

So what’s your proposal?

Generally the #1 problem faced by homeless people is a lack of housing. Issues 2-10 will require support and help as well if we care about rehabilitation and reentry into society. Even if flawed, giving these people homes in converted hotels is likely better for them and for us than not doing that. So what else shall you have us do? Less, hoping we can ‘fix’ them with some good old fashioned tough love? (Hard to argue plenty of places haven’t done that to…basically no effect) Or, more, with learning and fixing mistakes along the way?

The general concern there is a rocket malfunction spewing spent fuel rods over a large terrestrial area before it gets the chance to reach the moon.

Not only lose an employee, but lose future employees as well. I'll never work for Amazon because of this crap, and I know I'm worth well more than $300k/year to them.