Kenna Hughes-Castleberry writing for Ars Technica:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). A game of creativity and imagination, D&D lets players weave their own narrative, blending combat and roleplaying in an immersive gaming experience. And now, psychologists and therapists are working to turn it into a tool by exploring its potential benefits as a group therapy technique.

Research is still in progress to determine if there are links between playing D&D and enhanced empathy and social skills, but the real-life impact of D&D therapy is slowly gaining traction as staff of counseling practices that have embraced D&D group therapy say they are witnessing these benefits firsthand.

As an avid D&D player in my youth in the 80s all I can say is, damn it took everyone 50 years to get with the program. For those who don’t know what we are going on about -

This was Stephen Colbert’s opening monologue of his interview with VP Kamala Harris.

Good evening. It has been a tradition at the late show since yesterday to that the major party candidates sit down with me for an interview in October. We invited Kamala Harris to be our guest this evening, and she accepted. That interview in a moment. In the interest of fairness, we also also invited former President Donal Trump to go fuck himself. He declined our offer.

You just know this is what Scott Pelley really wanted to say…

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are. — Montesquieu

Montesquieu knew that comparison is the thief of joy well over three hundred years ago. So get off social media, stop worrying about what everyone else has and appreciate the wonderful life you are living today.

Happiness is not a feeling. Happiness is a choice.

Hamilton Nolan writing for How Things Work:

The culprit is the car. More specifically, the culprit is America’s decision to design our cities around the car. Predicting the future is almost impossible, but one of the few predictions that I feel very confident in is that, a century or so down the road, people will look at modern car-centric America with the same disgust that we feel when we hear about old timey cities without modern sewage systems, where everyone just dumped their chamber pots in the street. “Whoa, that’s fucked up!” people will marvel from their quiet, pedestrianized cities of the future. “They couldn’t walk anywhere.”

[…]

Americans unlucky enough to grow up in more recently built towns and exurbs are stuck having their entire lives defined by the spatial needs of cars. Their neighborhood density is low, their mobility options are limited, and the most urban-esque experience they ever get growing up might be playing with friends on the pavement of a suburban cul-de-sac. Never will they “walk” to a “corner store.” Always will they drive to a Target. If there were ever any beautiful nature along the way, now there is only highway and billboards and shredded semi truck tires on the side of the road. Sad.

All it takes is a trip to cities like Copenhagen, Antwerp, and Seville to realize how the American obsession with cars and gas powered toys is out of control.

Annie Karni, reporting for The New York Times:

During an event at Duke University, Ms. Cheney told students that it was not enough for her to simply oppose the former president, if she intended to do whatever was necessary to prevent Mr. Trump from winning the White House again, as she has long said she would.

“I don’t believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Ms. Cheney said, speaking to students in the hotly contested state of North Carolina. “As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”

The room erupted in cheers after she made her unexpected announcement.

I have so much respect for Cheney. Liz Cheney took this principled stand while she was one of the most influential Republicans in the nation. I get being a conservative, politically. I get being opposed to the Democratic Party, politically. Liz Cheney is a conservative and — like her father — endorses very different policies than Kamala Harris. But (lowercase ‘d’) democratic politics ought to be viewed very much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are in psychology. Some things matter more than others. And nothing — not climate change or the environment, not reproductive rights, and certainly not fucking tax rates — nothing matters more than support for democracy itself and the rule of law. The only way we’re going to get those other things right — which are really, really important — is through democratic governance and the rule of law.

I don’t support or endorse a Reagan/Bush/Cheney political viewpoint, but that viewpoint is coherent. Trump espouses no coherent views at all. He literally tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. He’s a criminal. He’s mentally deranged, decrepitly old, and failing before our eyes. With Trump as a candidate and still in contention - not liking the Democrats is not high enough on the political hierarchy of needs to cast one’s vote for anyone but Kamala Harris

Nancy Friedman’s word of the week:

Tim Walz has tonic masculinity. Confident. Decent. The kind of man who…would start his job at the White House ‘being asked about national security and the tax code and end with him wearing a headlamp up in the attic fixing some old wiring.

When Bill Clinton spoke at the Democratic National Convention this week, he shared an economic claim that seemed implausible:

You’re going to have a hard time believing this, but so help me, I triple-checked it. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear I checked this three times. Even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans one.

Is that true? Actually, yes.

According to the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 51.5 million jobs have been added since January 1989 and roughly 1.3 million of them were created while a Republican president sat in the White House.

Democrats 50, Republicans one.

Tim Walz’s acceptance speech at at the DNC:

And we made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch everyday. So while other states were banning books from their schools we were banishing hunger from ours.

Perfectly sums up the priorities of the two parties. This November vote for the ticket that prioritizes democracy and the american people - vote for the Harris / Waltz ticket.

Stephen Ornes writing in Quanta Magazine:

To see why, consider an important metric that tallies up how much room a system will need to store data. You start with the base of the number system, which is called the radix, and multiply it by the number of digits needed to represent some large number in that radix. For example, the number 100,000 in base 10 requires six digits. Its “radix economy” is therefore 10 × 6 = 60. In base 2, the same number requires 17 digits, so its radix economy is 2 × 17 = 34. And in base 3, it requires 11 digits, so its radix economy is 3 × 11 = 33. For large numbers, base 3 has a lower radix economy than any other integer base. (Surprisingly, if you allow a base to be any real number, and not just an integer, then the most efficient computational base is the irrational number e.)

In addition to its numerical efficiency, base 3 offers computational advantages. It suggests a way to reduce the number of queries needed to answer questions with more than two possible answers. A binary logic system can only answer “yes” or “no.” So if you’re comparing two numbers, x and y, to find out which is larger, you might first ask the computer “Is x less than y?” If the answer is no, you need a second query: “Is x equal to y?” If the answer is yes, then they’re equal; if the answer is no, then y is less than x.

The real advantage is being able short cut many conditional statements at the hardware level. However this would involve a complete re-working of the binary foundations the industry has been built on over the last 50 years.

CLIVE THOMPSON writing for Wired:

I WAS ENTERING the miseries of seventh grade in the fall of 1980 when a friend dragged me into a dimly lit second-floor room. The school had recently installed a newfangled Commodore PET computer, a squat and angular box that glowed in the corner. “You gotta try this,” he told me, and handed over a piece of paper on which he’d handwritten a program.

I plunked it out on the PET’s chunky mechanical keyboard.

typed “RUN,” hit Enter, and watched as my name spilled down the screen in bright green-on-black text, over and over.

For a 12-year-old in the pre-internet era? This was electrifying. I had typed a couple of commands—ones that seemed easily understandable—and the machine had obeyed. I felt like I’d just stolen fire from Zeus himself.

I had a similar experience when I was 9 and one of my uncles purchased a Texas Instruments TI-99 / 4a machine. It was the summer of 1983 and one hot summer afternoon - I sneaked up to my cousin’s room and entered the following:

1
2

10 print "I am great"
20 goto 10

And here is the output - you can try it yourself on a web based TI-99/4a emulator:

Those 2 initial command lines set forth an entire generation of coders that built the modern internet.

Vice President Kamala Harris has debuted her first ad for her presidential run and its a much need improvement in Democratic messaging. It’s a rebranding of what the vision of freedom means under a Harris Presidency:

• Freedom is clean drinking water
• Freedom is good public education
• Freedom is fair wages
• Freedom is policing by consent
• Freedom is gun control
• Freedom is fighting climate change
• Freedom is a decriminalizing poverty
• Freedom is easy and secure voting

Compare that to the “freedoms” that Republicans are pushing for in Project 2025:

• There is the freedom to control — to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.
• There is the freedom to exploit — to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.
• There is the freedom to censor — to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.
• And there is the freedom to menace — to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

The Harris ticket is reframing Freedom to what it means to the everyday citizen. And the Republicans are panicking because they are exposed in their indefensible authoritarian ambitions.

Harris for President.

Loz Blain writes on the greatest product designs of the last century:

Leo Fender and his team have made indelible contributions to the arts. The list of innovative Fender products that have gone on to be generational icons is staggering. Telecaster, Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Twin Reverb, Deluxe Reverb, Bassman, Princeton, 5E3 Tweed, P-Bass, Jazz Bass … You’ve seen these names behind just about everyone who’s been anyone since the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll.

And towering over all these giants, the mighty Strat. It remains enticing and intimidating in equal measures to me. It’s so easy to enjoy in all its many forms, there are so many rabbit-holes of tone and style to go down in this one machine, and it becomes unnervingly articulate the better you learn to use it.

But the better I get, the more those iconic tones start to taunt me. So many greats have made this guitar their own that I’m forever hearing hinted echoes of their work through my own amp, snapping me out of my reverie as I notice how much I pale in comparison. That’s part of the weight you take on your shoulders when you pull a Strat out of the rack: if you’re not sounding like the greatest that ever did it, it’s not the guitar’s fault!

As a legacy, though, what a gift to music. And while the team was invaluable to the process, there’s one fella’s name on the headstock. I reckon Leo Fender could rest easy if the Stratocaster was his only contribution. There are surely better guitars some 70 years after its debut, but there are none greater.

No. I would argue that there is no greater guitar designed. The Fender Stratocaster is perfection. Even today, 70 years on, it still feels a designed today. Here is an example released by Fender:

David Dayen on car dealerships:

F&I is the profit center of the dealership. Jase explained that profit margins per vehicle sale run between five and ten percent. In other words, if you want to make $1 million in additional profit, you have to sell $10-$20 million in additional inventory. That’s as many as 500 cars, when the average dealer is selling 100 to 200 cars a month. To do that, you need more salespeople and a bigger lot, with uncertain outcomes for all that expense.

But raising F&I, Jase says, is 100 percent profit. The same labor and operations costs are in place, whether you sell more warranties and insurance or not. That’s not theoretical. The 2023 annual report for Lithia Motors, a nationwide dealership network with 298 U.S. locations, indeed lists its profit margin for F&I at 100 percent. Lithia’s 2022 annual report says the same thing.

One of the biggest tools in the F&I toolkit is delay. Usually, a customer comes out of sales with some sense of the monthly payment. “Once you have the person committed to that payment,” Jase said, “it’s up to the finance person to maximize profit… We have people in the box. They’re boxed in, they can’t go anywhere. Don’t let them out of the box until deal is closed.” The extended wait time sealing the deal creates a sunk cost that customers don’t want to repeat by starting over somewhere else. And it wears down their defenses to every new offer.

Jase has a name for the overall process: The Dealership Triangle, with each point funneling the customer to the next step. The seller is pushed from sales, where installation extras are added, to F&I, where more extras and markups happen. And a major goal for F&I is to sell a service contract—a catch-all term that includes warranties or other insurance bundles—thereby creating a service customer. By Jase’s estimation, more than three-quarters of all buyers maintain brand loyalty by buying their next car at the dealership where they have a service contract.

It’s unbelievable how many people get fleeced at the car dealership. In 2024, the average car payments for new, used, and leased vehicles are $735, $523, and $595, respectively. That’s an awful lot of money to be paying on a depreciating asset!

This is why I follow these rules when buying a car:

• Only buy what you can afford - This means no loans. Pay in cash.
• Never lease - Leasing often leads to higher long-term costs and restrictions.
• Buy the base model with the standard options - Most modern cars come with everything you need in the base model; anything extra is usually a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.
• Negotiate on the out-the-door price - This should be lower than the sticker price.
• Do not buy extended warranties, upgrades, or add-ons - These often provide little value for the cost.
• Be ready to walk - Remember, you are the buyer. It’s your money, and you are in control.

By following these guidelines, you can avoid getting fleeced and make a smarter, more economical car purchase.

In George R.R. Martin’s fantastical land of Westeros in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, the spectacle of dragons breathing fire captivates his audience through a blend of myth and fantasy.

The images of dragons unleashing torrents of flames on the new series of House of the Dragon got me thinking: if dragons existed, what real-world biological mechanisms and chemical reactions might they use?

As they say nature is stranger than fiction. In this case nature perhaps has an answer:

A dragon could draw on some chemistry used by the bombardier beetle. This insect has evolved reservoirs adapted to store hydrogen peroxide (the stuff you might use to bleach your hair). When threatened, the beetle pushes hydrogen peroxide into a vestibule containing enzymes that rapidly decompose the hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen.

This is an exothermic reaction, which transfers energy to the surroundings, and in this case raises the temperature of the mixture to almost boiling point. The reaction is so aggressive it is sometimes used to propel rockets. The increase in pressure caused by the rapid production of oxygen and the boiling water forces the noxious mixture out of a vent in the beetle’s abdomen and towards its prey or threat.

If employed by a dragon, this reaction has a few nice features. It would create the high pressure needed to drive the jet of oily fuel, the exothermic reaction would heat the oils making them more ready to combust, and most importantly, it would generate oxygen that would drive the combustion reaction.

All the dragon would need is some sort of biological equivalent of a petrol engine carburettor to mix the oil with the oxygen and create an explosive mix. As a bonus, the erupting mixture would probably form a fine mist of oil droplets, like an aerosol, which would ignite all the better.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich on Project 2025:

One key goal of Project 2025 is to purge all government agencies of anyone more loyal to the constitution than to Trump — a process Trump himself started in October 2020 when he thought he would remain in office.

Trump has promised to give rightwing evangelical Christians what they want. Accordingly, Project 2025 calls for withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, expelling trans service members from the military, banning life-saving gender affirming care for young people, ending all diversity programs, and using “school choice” to gut public education.

Project 2025 also calls for eliminating “woke propaganda” from all laws and federal regulations — including the terms “sexual orientation”, “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, “gender equality”, and “reproductive rights”.

Other items in the Project 2025 blueprint are precisely what Trump has called for on the campaign trail, including mass arrests and deportations of undocumented people in the United States, ending many worker protections, dropping prosecutions of far-right militias like the Proud Boys, and giving additional tax cuts to big corporations and the rich.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that climate change is a “hoax”. Project 2025 calls for expanding oil drilling in the United States, shrinking the geographic footprint of national monuments, terminating clean energy incentives, and ending fossil fuel regulations.

Trump has said he’d seek vengeance against those who have prosecuted him for his illegal acts. Project 2025 calls for the prosecution of district attorneys Trump doesn’t like, and the takeover of law enforcement in blue cities and states.

This all sounds over the top alarmist until you read it from the 900-page document prepared by Heritage Foundation:

Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.

As Maya Angelou said:

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

If Trump gets into office, America will be nothing like the America we grew up in.

Mike Elgan’s opinion piece on the AI hype:

The claim that AI improves everything and operates without humans is a delusion.

[…]

AI washing is a deceptive marketing practice that overemphasizes the role of artificial intelligence in the product or service being promoted. The phrase is based on “greenwashing,” coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986, where consumer products are marketed as environmentally friendly regardless of environmental impact.

Products using old-school algorithms are labeled as “AI-powered,” taking advantage of the absence of a universally agreed upon definition for what AI is and what AI is not. Startups build apps that plug into a publicly available generative AI API and market it as an AI app. Big, bold AI projects that are supposed to showcase technology often rely on people working behind the scenes, because humans are the only way to make the ambitious AI solution work.

I have been saying this for since the beginning of the AI hype cycle - its all just smoke and mirrors.

Nikhil Suresh over at Lucidity:

I myself have formal training as a data scientist, going so far as to dominate a competitive machine learning event at one of Australia’s top universities and writing a Master’s thesis where I wrote all my own libraries from scratch in MATLAB. I’m not God’s gift to the field, but I am clearly better than most of my competition - that is, practitioners like myself who haven’t put in the reps to build their own C libraries in a cave with scraps, but can read textbooks, implement known solutions in high-level languages, and use libraries written by elite institutions.

So it is with great regret that I announce that the next person to talk about rolling out AI is going to receive a complimentary chiropractic adjustment in the style of Dr. Bourne, i.e, I am going to fucking break your neck. I am truly, deeply, sorry.

Although I am the “can read textbooks, implement known solutions in high-level languages, and use libraries written by elite institutions” kind of guy - this is how I feel when anyone talks to me about AI changing anything.

The Supreme Court ruled today that Donald Trump may claim immunity from criminal prosecution for some of the actions he took as president in a decision that will likely further delay a trial on the federal election subversion charges against him. The decision was 6-3, with the liberals in dissent.

From Justice Sotomayor’s dissent (starting on page 96):

The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.

Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.

Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.

And in closing:

Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop.

With fear for our democracy, I dissent.

We can never again say that no one one in our nation is above the law. In the United States, the President is above the law. I am in shock.

Lola Murti reporting for NPR:

Grocery store prices are changing faster than ever before — literally. This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds.

“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there’s something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst.

Dealing with skyrocketing grocery prices is frustrating enough, but now I’m expected to time my milk purchases? This adds no value to consumers and only serves as another way for businesses to take advantage of us.

If anyone needed another reason to boycott Walmart, well, now you have it.

Rick Beato nails why today’s music sucks and is getting worse. People have no patience or discipline to learn to play instruments or the basics of music theory. And why would our instant gratification culture bother? Autotune, BeatDoctor, plugins and the new AI algorithms allow anyone to create music with a few keypresses and a well thought out query.

The end result is everyone sounds like everyone else. We aren’t listening to an artists creation - but an algorithm’s generated plagiarized data stream.

As ChatGPT admits:

Creative AI tools can be seen as sophisticated plagiarism software, as they do not produce genuinely original content but rather emulate and modify existing works by artists, subtly enough to circumvent copyright laws.

Imagine if Jimmy Page, Brian May or Kurt Cobain didn’t play their instruments and just typed a query into AI - do you think we would have had albums like Led Zeppelin I - IV, A Night at the Opera or Nevermind?

No. Because nothing like it every existed before - and AI wouldn’t have anything to plagiarize.