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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.

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.

Goa, Gods, Gandhi and Greed: Lessons in Colonialism from Four Boardgames

from Quillette

It’s an eight-and-a-half-hour drive from Toronto to Indianapolis. And the route, which takes me through Sarnia, Detroit, Toledo and Fort Wayne, is far from scenic. But Gen Con is the biggest boardgame convention in North America, and there’s no direct flight between the two cities.

10 best RPG board games

from

Tabletop RPGs provide some of the most memorable experiences you can have at the table, whether it's cheering at a clutch dice roll, gasping after a dramatic payoff or laughing at the charming antics of Tim the Goblin.

Dungeons & Dragons TikTok Is Gen Z at Its Most Wholesome

from WIRED

A lifelong bookworm and a fantasy geek, Sarah Chaffee had for years admired Dungeons & Dragons from afar. “In the culture I grew up in,” she says, “it was very much like, ‘D&D is devil worship.

Ethics newsletter

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

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.

Google Workers Publicly Launch Union

from VICE

After several years of escalating tension between workers and management at Google, Google workers have publicly launched a unionization effort—a critical step in an industry where labor has become increasingly organized.

The coming war on the hidden algorithms that trap people in poverty

from MIT Technology Review

Miriam was only 21 when she met Nick. She was a photographer, fresh out of college, waiting tables. He was 16 years her senior and a local business owner who had worked in finance. He was charming and charismatic; he took her out on fancy dates and paid for everything.

Why venture capital doesn’t build the things we really need

from MIT Technology Review

The funding model that made Silicon Valley a global hub excels at creating a certain kind of innovation—but the pandemic has exposed its broader failures. I felt bad asking Zack Gray to repeat his story. He was used to it, he said.

The AI Telegram bot that abused women is still out of control

from WIRED UK

Messaging app Telegram is under pressure to crack down on an AI bot that generated tens of thousands of non-consensual images of women on its platform.

Our obsession with unconscious bias created a diversity disaster

from WIRED UK

Bianca Riemer remembers sitting through her first unconscious bias training course in 2011, as a stock market analyst at Morgan Stanley.

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 .

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.

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.

OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindless

from MIT Technology Review

The AI is the largest language model ever created and can generate amazing human-like text on demand but won't bring us closer to true intelligence. “Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week.

I used an algorithm to help me write a story. Here’s what I learned.

from MIT Technology Review

An insight into the way machines make meaning. A few years ago I used an algorithm to help me write a science fiction story.

Introduction to UX writing

from

In a nutshell, UX writing is any text that users encounter while interacting with software. Be it button names, menu items, or product categories, you’re dealing with UX copy, often referred to as microcopy.