Liberal, Briton, FBPE. Co-mod of m/neoliberal

  • 0 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • theinspectorst@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Only seven EU countries require parties to reveal identity of all private donors
    7·
    5 months ago

    Well of course - publishing the identity of all private donors would be madness.

    Small donors should be allowed to donate freely without their name appearing on the internet for all their friends, neighbours, employers, journalists, rabble-rousers, etc to see. Someone donating a few tens or hundred of euros to their local candidate doesn’t create a risk of influencing (or appearing to influence) the candidate’s political platform; and we should be positively encouraging small donors, as I’d much prefer a political system where politicians relied on many small donations to one where they relied on a handful of millionaire donors.

    It’s big money donors - the ones stumping up enough money to potentially influence the candidate - that parties should be required to disclose.

  • theinspectorst@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.world•UK’s Sunak promises mandatory national service for 18-year-olds if elected [26 May 2024 | Al Jazeera]
    5·
    5 months ago

    If you’re not doing great, wouldn’t it make more sense to try and weather the storm and work to make things sunnier before the next election rather than call for an election amidst the storm?

    The latest possible date the election could have been is January 2025, but that was practically very unlikely as i) there is an extremely sharp generational divide in voting intentions (far sharper than in most Western democracies) and January would have meant the Tories having to get their elderly core voters to the polls in the middle of winter, and ii) a January vote would have meant a campaign running over Christmas, and everyone would have punished Sunak for that. The widespread expectation was for an autumn election.

    It’s unclear why Sunak jumped earlier but likely a combination of various factors:

    • them being worried the economy will not get better by the autumn (so avoids going to the polls after a summer of bad economic news);

    • going early means their main opponents on the right (Reform) don’t have time to get their act together and select candidates in all seats (which they would have done by the autumn);

    • their flagship immigration policy is controversial and expensive, yet likely to have an underwhelming impact on illegal immigration levels, and they’ll look like complete idiots for centring an autumn election on a ‘stop the boats’ slogan if there’s another summer of small boat arrivals in the meantime; and

    • Sunak personally is fed up - he’s very much a political child of the far-right (an avowed Brexiter long before Boris Johnson or Liz Truss converted to the cause) yet the far-right of the Tory Party don’t see him as one of their own and have been constant thorns in his side throughout his leadership - he may just want out at this stage.

  • theinspectorst@kbin.socialtoTechnology@beehaw.org•What do you personally use AI for?
    5·
    6 months ago

    I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

    You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

    You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.

    Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.