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Dungeons & Dragons played an outsize role in popularizing fantasy literature, ideas, and themes, as well as inspiring many of its devotees to create their own. Roleplaying, as a formal activity, owes nearly its entire existence to the phenomenal success of D&D. Even more remarkable is the extent to which the computer and video game industry, which is bigger and more profitable than the music and movie industries combined, owes a huge debt to the example set by D&D....

Powerful and cautionary story. I wondered for many years, how all of this could have happened. How people like my grandpa turned into monsters and people around him watched or turned into monsters with him. The last years made this very clear. More here.

I think I like his take on the topic.

NTS Radio is a family of like-minded and passionate individuals, dedicated to supporting exciting music and culture through online radio and events. NTS uncovers the best of the musical past, celebrates the present and cultivates the future of the underground music scene, and prides itself on being open-minded and experimental. (source) I’m certainly a latecomer, but NTS Radio is the bomb. I have not opened Spotify (whose algorithm I find dull and repetitive) in the last week, not even once....

Upon his death in 1543 in Frombork, Poland, Copernicus was buried in the local cathedral. Over the subsequent centuries, the location of his grave was lost to history. There were several unsuccessful attempts to locate Copernicus’s remains, dating as far back as the 16th and 17th centuries. Another failed attempt was made by the French emperor Napoleon after the 1807 Battle of Eylau. Napoleon held Copernicus in high regard as a polymath, mathematician and astronomer....

The goal of the pg_rman project is to provide a method for online backup and PITR that is as easy as pg_dump. Also, it maintains a backup catalog per database cluster. Users can maintain old backups including archive logs with one command. We’ve always been doing our Postgres backups the rudimentary way via pg_dumpall, which works and is purely logical (one can restore across different Postgres versions), but pg_rman maintains a catalog and has point-in-time recovery....

Professor Ethan Mollick’s Signs and Portents analyzes what AI has achieved, what the effects have been so far, and what we might expect in 2024. To ground ourselves, we can start with two quotes that should inform any estimates about the future. The first is Amara’s Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Social change is slower than technological change....

Simon Wilson, who’s recently been my go-to person for all AI-related stuff, has an excellent 2023 AI round-up on his website. 2023 was the breakthrough year for Large Language Models (LLMs). I think it’s OK to call these AI—they’re the latest and (currently) most “interesting development in the academic field of Artificial Intelligence that dates back to the 1950s. Here’s my attempt to round up the highlights in one place!...

For those who don’t know me, I’m a demographer. I study population. And my first love in fantasy was, of course, Middle Earth. How many people live in Middle Earth? Being a demographer, I was mainly interested in the data side of things. Tolkien is frustratingly vague about population. He almost never gives us estimates of settlement sizes, and many of the larger metropolises of Middle Earth (like Pelargir) never actually appear on the page....

The Guardian’s The Winterkeeper: A Lifetime Spent Protecting Yellowstone National Park is a beautiful short documentary I truly enjoyed watching. A little research on Steven Fuller, the protagonist, allowed me to dig out some promising reading material.