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Gaming newsletter

Occasional games related stories I notice across the internet, sign up for the newsletter version, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Indie RPGs show roleplaying can - and should - be far more than Dungeons & Dragons

from

Dungeons & Dragons is such a behemoth in the tabletop roleplaying game scene that it’s become a synecdoche for the hobby itself; to many, “D&D” and “tabletop RPG” are one and the same. The game is massively popular.

RuneScape saved her life. Fifteen years later, she’s still playing

from WIRED UK

When Allana turned fourteen, the limits of her world shrank to the four corners of her bed. A heart condition kept her between hospital and home. She could not attend school or make friends. She was lonely. She could not live like a normal fourteen-year-old.

Things I Learned about Writing Knowledge Base Articles from Reading Board Game Manuals

from

Almost everyone has played a game in their life. Maybe it's Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders as a kid, Spit or card games in grade school—or perhaps you're royalty of D&D.

The Best Tabletop RPGs Of 2020

from Game Informer

Many tabletop role-playing enthusiasts had to make big changes to their playstyles in 2020. Whether it meant suspending long-running games, moving to virtual play sessions, or playing more with those they lived with, it’s been a challenging time to get a fix of that dice-rolling goodness.

Worldbuilding: Fantasy Religion Design Example

from

Working through the Fantasy Religion Design Guide, our first step is to decide on the scope of religions on the world we are creating.

Worldbuilding: Fantasy Religion Design Guide

from

Depending on your campaign setting idea, in the early stages you may only need a bare minimum of details about your religion.

Ethics newsletter

Occasional ethics related stories I notice across the internet, sign up for the newsletter version, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Auditors are testing hiring algorithms for bias, but there’s no easy fix

from MIT Technology Review

I’m at home playing a video game on my computer. My job is to pump up one balloon at a time and earn as much money as possible. Every time I click “Pump,” the balloon expands and I receive five virtual cents.

Want to make your company more diverse? Consider quitting

from WIRED UK

In 2021, organisations of all kinds will realise that they have to make racial justice a core part of their mission, not just an add-on.

‘Weird new things are happening in software,’ says Stanford AI professor Chris Re

from ZDNet

Wednesday, Re, who is a Stanford University associate professor of computer science, gave a talk for the University's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence institute.

The battle inside Signal

from The Verge

On January 6th, WhatsApp users around the world began seeing a pop-up message notifying them of upcoming changes to the service’s privacy policy.

Muslim scholars are working to reconcile Islam and AI

from WIRED UK

Conceived in the research labs of the Silicon Valley, artificial intelligence is deeply rooted in secular ideals of progress. Yet – as AI goes global – advocates of different ethical traditions are weighing in, often calling for greater regulation of the technology.

Artificial general intelligence: Are we close, and does it even make sense to try?

from MIT Technology Review

The idea of artificial general intelligence as we know it today starts with a dot-com blowout on Broadway.

Language newsletter

My curated recommended articles on linguistics, natural language processing and interactive fiction.

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below, updated regularly .

How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

from The Guardian

The Guardian’s style guide was originally published in 1928 as a physical book, and is available to everyone on our website. Over time, it’s grown bigger and more complex, containing guidelines on important topics that we want to get right.

Building an Intelligent Voice Assistant from scratch

from Towards Data Science

In my article Home Automation with Alexa, we learned how to emulate IoT devices and control them remotely using a Voice Assistant device. There, we used an Echo-Dot that “wake-up” every time that the word Alexa is spotted. But, how a voice assistant works?

The best sci-fi and fantasy books of 2020 to catch up with

from Polygon

2020 was quite the year for science fiction, but it wasn’t all about escaping to other worlds.

from

Garbage Language

from Vulture

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. I worked at various start-ups for eight years beginning in 2010, when I was in my early 20s. Then I quit and went freelance for a while.

The untold story of GPT-3 is the transformation of OpenAI

from

A program that can automate website development. A bot that writes letters on behalf of nature. An AI-written blog that trended on Hacker News. Those are just some of the recent stories written about GPT-3, the latest contraption of artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI.