Dave Morris

Just a heads up if you follow me: DaveMor34967909 is a fake account that has cloned my photos & bio, but @Twitter don't seem willing to do anything about it. If it asks you for money or bank details, don't fall for it.

A brief intro to the #Vulcanverse (including a short demo). #openworld #gamebook #soloRPG fabledlands.blogspot.com/2024/06/growin…

A $30mn lesson in patience as.ft.com/r/2bfcf49e-6d4…

From THE GOD DEBATE: Me: The more religious the society, the worse the problems are. And if you don't believe it, consider some of the world's most irreligious societies, like Norway, Netherlands, and New Zealand. They're pretty nice places to live. Now consider some of the world's most religious countries, like Afghanistan and Congo. Those are places that people want to get out of. This is also true in a comparison across American states. The more religious, the more dysfunctional. Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT): What we should wish as Americans is to be neither Afghanistan nor Scandinavia, but to be the United States of America, which as a culture has always done an incredible job of balancing some of the absolute, definite benefits of modernity, including religious toleration, a respect for pluralism, a refusal to simply sort of impose the totality of one religion's theological doctrines on society with an abundant faith in a cosmic purpose for the human race. And obviously there are downsides to religious intensity. Those downsides are often manifested in zealous intolerance. There are also serious downsides to religious indifference, which are often manifested in anomie, drift, and despair. And it is simply the case that if you look across the developed world today, there is a strong correlation between secularization and a kind of loss of faith in human purpose and the human future, manifested most starkly in the declining birth rates that make it extremely unlikely that Dr. Pinker's predictions about the inevitable triumph of secularism and humanism over religion will come to pass, because the secularists and humanists don't seem to be making the basic choices that would enable the continuation of the human race.

@linkprime9 @learning_yohei Where do Americans get such quaint notions about the rest of the world? Fox News, I guess.

@learning_yohei Considering that Arabic will soon be the primary language in the UK, you should learn American English.

I’m Japanese and studying English. Which god should I believe in: American English or British English?🇺🇸🇬🇧😵‍💫

@learning_yohei Britain is another island nation. I find I have more in common at a societal/cultural level with Japanese friends than with American friends.

Gravity and quantum physics are fundamentally incompatible General relativity works perfectly well describing space, time, and gravity. Quantum physics works perfectly well describing the other forces. So why can't they work well together? bigthink.com/starts-with-a-…

@CastlesofImagin @chemoumbria @claudeai Ah, then you've never tried Claude Code. It makes fewer mistakes than any human editor I ever worked with.

@RealDaveMorris @chemoumbria @claudeai I would never trust it to do that. Plus I feel like it would take longer to recheck than just try to do it myself.

#Gamebook readers -- do you prefer a physical book, an ebook, or an app? Or all of the above? youtube.com/watch?v=7pKAjG…

@hurtado_teofilo I agree, although I am getting crowded out of my own house by all the bookshelves!

@RealDaveMorris Physical books, of course!

@ringlas The Fabled Lands CRPG does what digital versions of gamebooks should do -- not just a port of the print content, but (like Sorcery) a new thing inspired by and based on the book.

@RealDaveMorris Somewhat touching upon that in my latest blog post! My heart wants an app, my mind wants a book. :) primegames.bg/en/blog/destin…

@GrayMouther Good point! A gamebook in print feels like its own thing, whereas an e-gamebook is basically The Thaumaturge without a fully animated world and only 5-10% of the story content...

@RealDaveMorris Physical. I’ve played and enjoyed digital game books but they start to feel too much like outdated/underdeveloped video games. In book form they feel more portable and convey no such misrepresentation as to what they are/aren’t.

@CastlesofImagin I maybe fret more than I should about whether to design for print or digital. Any print book can easily be hyperlinked for Kindle/PDF or turned into a PWA, but I still haven't figured out how to do a print version of my Frankenstein app because it was designed for the screen.

@RealDaveMorris I have a fondness for online gamebooks, but nothing beats flipping back and forth on real pages. That is partly why I prioritized the print book even when I made PDFs, Kindles, or other options available sometimes.

@CastlesofImagin @chemoumbria More of a technical challenge before we could just tell @claudeai to make the app version while we went down the pub :-)

@chemoumbria @RealDaveMorris I enjoy making the online linked versions of my gamebooks. It's an interesting technical challenge. It can be a rewarding reading experience. But I prefer paper too.

Not "get shirty". It's a postman, so the term is "get shorty".

I assume the postman may be dyslexic, as he often gives us letters for a house in a different street. But he shouldn't get shirty with a member of the public for complaining. They're not shaming his inability to read, just asking that their mail doesn't go to the wrong house.

Jeff Bezos on the exact moment he realized he would never be a great physicist: "I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I went to Princeton. I was a really good student, I got A-pluses on almost everything. I was in the honors physics track, which starts with 100 students and by quantum mechanics it's down to 30." Then came the homework problem: "I can't solve this partial differential equation. It's really, really hard. I've been studying with my roommate Joe, who was also really good at math. The two of us worked on this one problem for three hours and got nowhere." They decided to visit Yasantha, the smartest guy at Princeton: "He was Sri Lankan. In the Facebook, which was an actual paper book at that time, his name was three lines long. I guess in Sri Lanka when you do something good for the king, they give you an extra syllable on your name. The most humble, wonderful guy." Jeff continues: "We show him the problem. He stares at it for a while and says, 'Cosine.' I'm like, 'What do you mean?' He says, 'That's the answer.' I said, 'That's the answer?' He said, 'Yeah, let me show you.' He sits us down, writes out three pages of detailed algebra, everything crosses out, and the answer is cosine." Jeff asked if he solved it in his head: "He said, 'No, that would be impossible. Three years ago I solved a very similar problem and I was able to map this problem onto that one. Then it was immediately obvious the answer was cosine.'" Jeff reflects: "That was an important moment for me. Because that was the very moment I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist."

Textual analysis suggests Dickens may have written Barnaby Rudge with the help of the Analytic Engine.

When you wrote that #gamebook 35 years ago and the flowchart (long gone) was hand-drawn on pieces of paper, and you need to reconstruct it, it's time to turn to @claudeai. A week's gruntwork done in ten minutes.

This sure isn't the 21st century I used to dream of when I read TV21. More like the 21st century BC.

Joscha Bach says consciousness is not a mysterious extra ingredient. It is a model of what it would be like if you existed. The self is virtual by definition. It can only run inside a system capable of simulation. This does not make it less real. It makes it substrate-dependent in exactly the way software is. The hard problem may not be hard. It may be a category error about where to look.