I’m just going to move on

That’s my point. They’re doing a self-sabotage. Some of them will then complain that they’re not getting good matches and messages, but a big factor is they’re not giving potential good matches anything to work with.

I don’t really have a lot of empathy for people who don’t want to learn a new rule system.

First off, most of those people barely know 5e to begin with. You could swap them into another system and they’d probably perform about as well.

Aside from that, maybe they don’t mean to sound anti-intellectual, but they kind of do. It’s okay to read and learn new things. I’ve had potential players put up more of a fight than it would’ve taken to just read the thing.

Related, I think there’s like a literacy crisis. Many people don’t seem to read or think great.

So many people see the prompt “what I’m looking for” and write “my keys”.

A. That’s not a terribly funny joke. It’s fine, but not great.

B. It’s not original.

C. You are wasting valuable space. Now the other person has a little less information to make a good opening message. Do you really want that many people messaging you about your keys? Really? Why are you setting yourself up for unhappy outcomes?

Most people don’t think very hard about this, and hope it’ll just work out.

Meetup.com ? They’re still around.

One problem is users are selfish idiots. They won’t go somewhere that doesn’t already have a lot of users. They don’t care that going there now moves it closer to having a lot of users, so in a few months it’ll be good and vibrant. Most people can’t even think an hour ahead.

Another problem is that there are many scammers and bad actors. You need to deal with them, and convince your real users that the scammers are dealt with.

Lastly, in this capitalist hellscape everything is expensive. How are you going to run a big service that’s got low latency and high quality?

Sure, could be. They didn’t have any automated checks, and I saw errors like “that’s too many parenthesis” and “you’re trying to use a library you didn’t add to the dependencies list” sail through.

I feel sorry for you and hope you cna find more fulfilling work that will let you grow, but I dont’t know what the job market is like right now

Where I work, there’s really no emphasis on code quality or testing. There’s also like no mentorship or senior developers leading the way.

They hired a guy with 1-2 years of experience and I feel really bad for him. Not only is he learning very little, he’s learning actively bad patterns. No one is teaching him about automated testing. Code reviews are just “you skim it. Don’t spend more than 30 minutes”.

Management of course loves LLMs and wants more usage.

Except when actually trying to make a match, it’s more advantageous to literally swipe right on everyone to maximize matches and then unmatch if you match with someone you aren’t interested in.

This isn’t true if their system punishes people for swiping “yes” on everyone. While I can’t be certain that’s the case, it seems very plausible it is. Swipe yes on everyone, your profile is down ranked, you don’t get as many good matches.

Additionally, tinder and hinge only allow you a limited number of yes swipes per day. If you blow them on the first ten profiles, you’re going to have worse results than if you spend a little longer looking at profiles.

Furthermore, on hinge, you can send a message with your like. Your chances of having a conversation and date go way down without a good message.

Thinking about my friend group, about half the people met their long term partners on dating apps. The other half is a mix of work and large social groups (eg: people who all go to certain kinds of music festivals)

I guess it varies by age and region.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/08/20/key-takeaways-on-americans-views-of-and-experiences-with-dating-and-relationships/

While meeting partners through personal networks is still the most common kind of introduction, about one-in-ten partnered adults (12%) say they met their partner online. About a third (32%) of adults who are married, living with a partner or are in a committed relationship say friends and family helped them find their match. Smaller shares say they met through work (18%), through school (17%), online (12%), at a bar or restaurant (8%), at a place of worship (5%) or somewhere else (8%).

Some other sources I’m seeing say it’s as high as 60% of couples met online.

I think dating apps are mostly used for hookups

This isn’t especially true. Maybe Feeld and Tinder are less “serious”, but the idea of dating apps is mainstream enough that you find all sorts of people and goals.

The capitalism and for-profit nature does make them all kind of suck, though

The top of the funnel I could see an argument for not putting a lot of thought in. You’re just trying to get a pool of potential matches. (The apps are cruel for making you pay for this and not just giving you the list up front)

But once you do have a match, you have to put in some effort to stand out. A lot of people get a match and all they write is “hey”, and then they go right into the trash. Why would I engage with someone who just wrote “hey” when I could instead talk to someone who read my profile and said something personalized?

Also swiping yes on everyone might do strange things to their recommendation algorithm. Unfortunately that’s a black box, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that puts you in some sort of chum bucket shadow ban situation.

And also, yeah, making you pay for basic filters is a trashy design. Match group should be broken up.

Most of the apps are trashy and don’t optimize for good matches.

At the same time, many users half-ass using them, or deploy a variety of self-sabotage. (No, it’s not that you’re not tall or hot or whatever. It’s more likely your impersonal message didn’t warrant a response)

These two facts together mean a lot of people have truly bad outcomes.

Cool. Been on Pop!_os for a year or so. Not memorable issues. Plays games fine.

Microsoft should be broken up. Even if they walk back some of their AI slop, they’re too big. They don’t fail like they should for releasing a bad product.

guessing there is a correlation with MAGA.

Stupid, selfish, people.

This joke is why I will say to DMs getting railroad-y, “are you sure you wouldn’t rather write a book?”

Interesting. The inability to pan and walk around makes it very different. I liked “walking” around in geoguesser until I found a landmark or something, but I never played competitively or obsessively.

As others have said, working from home has many benefits

• no commute
  • save time
  • save money
  • less risk of disease and accident
  • often easier child care options
• greater control over environment
  • offices are often too hot or cold for some
  • stock own food, drinks, toilet paper, etc
• better pet access. Cat on lap. Dog walk easier.
• easier wardrobe
• several distraction categories removed
  • people walking up to your desk
  • loud meetings

The commute alone is pretty big. If your commute is like an hour, that’s changing your salary from like $x / 10 hours to $x / 8 hours. That’s a big bump. If your daily pay was $1000, that’s like going from $100/hour to $125/hour.

No disagreement here.

I realized when reading one of the other comments that my similarly sized complaint is it creates a lot of potential for problems at the game level as well as narrative when people make their characters in isolation. I kind of assumed that comes packaged with “and you all meet in a tavern”.

Like, everyone makes a fighter and shows up to session 1. The dm’s going to have a head scratcher thinking about balance, and some players might be annoyed they don’t really have a niche of their own. A weird party like that can work, but it’ll be a happier experience if folks talk about it ahead of time.

It can work, as clearly shown by your rather wholesome example and many people’s games. But it’s also leaving a very large surface area for problems. Unlike real life, you can just avoid that by making your characters together.

Maybe I should have said in my previous thread that while the “you all meet for the first time” is kind of cliché, there are more serious problems at the game level. And like it can work if everyone makes a fighter, but you can also make everyone’s lives easier if you discuss up front.

They don’t care about the snow. They care about getting people mad at their enemy. The post, and conservatives more generally, are bad,. dishonest, people.