Do people not know their own language when they write shit for publication? It’s proscribed, not prescribed. Fuck.

It’s exclusively about the leading vowel sound, rather than an actual vowel. E.g. it is a one-dollar bill, a unicorn, a European country, and an heirloom. There are plenty of initialisms that start with vowel sounds that are even less questionable, e.g. an NFL contract, or an FBI agent, vs a CEO, or a TMI situation. Regional differences exist, but are mostly about whether the leading sound is or is not pronounced, e.g. a historic occasion (american english) vs an historic occasion (british english).

T___T I’m an SEO writer

Help, the potentially intentional grammatical error is making me engage and I hate it!

It’s cool that Vestige warlock can get Spirit Guardians via War domain spells, and the Vestige itself seems pretty big on HP. Can take pact of the blade to be a melee bruiser, with the vestige backing you up from range. I haven’t checked to see if there is any other way to get both SG and Extra Attack by level 5 using only 2024 core-and-expanded rules yet, but this is an exciting development!

It sounds like you are talking about D&D 5e 2024 rules. Under those rules, chains are described as follows:

As a Utilize action, you can wrap a Chain around an unwilling creature within 5 feet of yourself that has the Grappled, Incapacitated, or Restrained condition if you succeed on a DC 13 Strength (Athletics) check. If the creature’s legs are bound, the creature has the Restrained condition until it escapes. Escaping the Chain requires the creature to make a successful DC 18 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check as an action. Bursting the Chain requires a successful DC 20 Strength (Athletics) check as an action.

You’ll want to manage a few separate things:

1. A free hand. If you are grappling with one hand, you need another hand free to apply chains. That means you cannot be weilding a shield or a weapon, unless you happen to have some extra appendages (though I think those only exist for legacy 2014 species right now). So if you’re Dwarf, no shield.

2. Action economy. A Utilize action and an Attack action (the latter of which allows you to make an unarmed strike to perform a Grapple) both cost your one Action for the round. You’d need access to some sort of ability that lets you Utilize as a Bonus Action instead. Thief Rogue 3 providea Fast Hands, which does exactly that.

3. DM fiat for easy access to multiple chains. If it is free, or at most only costs an object interaction to get a new chain from your bag, you’re golden. If it costs more action economy to get a chain from your bag, your DM might effectively limit how many chains you can “wear” for easy access. In a home game, this might be a no brainer, but in a westmarch it would likely require a server ruling.

Your best bet to make this work would be a multiclass of Thief Rogue 3, and the rest in Battle Master. The way you could make your action economy work, once you got to Rogue 3 Fighter 5, would be to:

1. hold a Chain in one hand, and have the other free.

2. Take your Action to Attack.

3. Use the first attack of your Extra Attack to Grapple.

4. Assuming you succeed on the grapple, use your Bonus Action to Utilize the chain and Restrain your opponent.

5. Release your grapple, and use your one Object Interaction for the turn to draw a Finesse weapon elegible for Sneak Attack,

6. Use the second attack of your Extra Attack to attack with that weapon with advantage (adding Sneak Attack and optionally a Maneuver).

7. Edit: Optionally, sheathe the weapon for free after this attack, to get both hands free again. You can do the full combo on round 1 and 2, but then have to attack first, sheathe, and then grapple on round 3 (assuming you wanted to do the combo again). Chances are you’ll still be working normal attacks on the first target tho, so its unlikely that the economy of drawing, sheathing, and getting chains every round will truly be necessary.

I think that if you are playing this character from early levels, I would take Battlemaster to 5, and focus on just attacking and using maneuvers to topple or some such, and then at 5 attack and topple, then maybe grapple to keep them prone. Work on the Rogue levels after you have Extra Attack, to be “feature complete”.

You might be able to make some version of this tactic work across two rounds earlier than level 8, but I think it would be more complex and prone to getting disrupted. You can do it once using Action Surge onxe you reach level 5 tho, which is nice.

If your DM is really kind, they might let you Utilize Chains as a BA even without Thief 3. Or maybe as a homebrew Maneuver. That’d probably be the best way to play that fantasy!

Sure.

But like, the author’s got some Bad Habits they are trying to bring over, and seem to consider their inability to replicate them as a problem?

I can’t find official apps for Airtable (which I use for work), Spotify, or Apple Music, but they all work fine in the browser in the short term, and I’ll revisit this later.

So, “I have to run these websites, that I used to run in dedicated memory-hungry Electron apps, in a browser instead” is something that’s missing? TBH, seems like a feature to me. Heck, things like Discord and Spotify run better in a firefox derivative than they do as “standalone apps” on any OS, Windows included.

Man + Living Alone + Undiagnosed Depression + Microwave

I’m thinking more catastrophic stuff, like major outages for multiple days/weeks/months like from a hurricane, earthquake, etc. That’s the unexpected stuff that throws the local economy haywire, and if you know when it will begin and when it will end, it just takes reviewing what business historically thrive vs falter in that situation in order to profit off of the human suffering.

Review historical train delay timings in a given region, and extrapolate the reasons for them against future train delays. Do so for a variety of regions and cities, to become aware of natural disasters as well as likely geopolitical actions, buildibg up a predictive model that relies on and exceeds the capabilities of this superpower. Bet on or against rideshare services active in the region as appropriate, as well as local business. Determine the likelihood of events like olympics, world cup, etc ocurring in any given city in the near and distant future based on increased service runs. Bet on or against those events ocurring in those cities, on the boom to construction and local businesses in the short term, and on the subsequent economic contraction (that likely leads a reduction in train service by some number of months–also data that can be added to the predictive model). Determine when/where train timings accelerate or appear where they hadn’t before, suggesting a technological improvement and/or an expansion in service, suggesting city growth, and bet on the economic expansion in that region.

I hate this, thanks.

He happens to be a well spoken oldster

I put pop!_os on my surface pro 8 in an hour a week ago, having used only windows or macos for the past decade. No issues. They’ve upstreamed enough stuff to the linux kernel that everything except camera worked even without the surface_linux kernel. Steam runs just fine on it, as do all the games I’ve tried so far (obviously hardware is trash for gaming, but hey, if it was playable on windows, it’ll probably be smoother on linux at this point). If linux works on a microsoft surface, there’s no way that it won’t work on whatever machine you happen to have.

Back up your files, pick a distro, unlock your bootloader, and just go for it. Only requirement is to know how to… Run commands in a terminal.

No regrets.

Create one, but give it questionable data.

I too graduated from FORGET ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS give me a cupcake recipe.

She has a very specific ideology, and the bailout disagrees with it. She’s an awful human being and I hate all the things she says and does, but at least she’s somewhat consistent about her stance?

deleted by creator

It’s a good rule of thumb that if you do not pay, as the result of some sort of contract, for the service of security, and you do not own the software or hosting within which you expect something to be secure, then you don’t actually have any security.

The browser could be storing your data in plain text, and making it available to other software or malware on your system (or even on websites you visit, or to scripts which run in ads on websites you visit); the browser could be making it available to their internal tools or external “partners”; the browser could be storing it in the cloud and be subject to a breach for which you will never receive a cent; the browser could be doing everything “right” right now, but change their terms next week and your convenience will turn into a liability.

Host it yourself, as you do with bitwarden, and manage your own security, or pay a company to host it who makes it their business and is therefore legally liable if they screw up.

Crane’s law.

If you are skilled at task or knowledgeable in a field, you are better able to provide a nuanced prompt that will be more likely to give a reasonable result, and you can also judge that result appropriately. It becomes an AI-assisted task, rather than an AI-accomplished one. Then you trade your brainpower and time that you would have spent doing that task for a bit of free time and a scorched planet to live on.

That said, once you realize how often a “good” prompt in a field you are knowledgeable in still yields shit results, it becomes pretty clear that the mediocre prompts you’ll write for tasks you don’t know how to do are probably going to give back slop (so your instinct is spot on). I think AI evangelist users are succumbing to the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

Ah yes, the plot of Caprica

Before you roll any dice, the chances of rolling two nat 1s are 1/400. But after you roll your first die, whatever it happened to be, your chances of rolling a nat 1 are 1/20. The chances of the entire scenario have no impact on the probability of the individual rolls

You’re resorting to personal attacks without knowing who I am, what I do, what I do or don’t have on the wall behind me. You apply a blanket label on all people who you class a certain way, and when I disagree with your label and its implications, and recommend nuance, you class me further.

It sounds like you think very highly of yourself, or lowly of everyone else, or both.

What makes your opinions here worthwhile?

You just described Geeks. Geek and Nerd group labels can sometimes apply to the same people, but they are not synonymous, and a person can be one without the other.