PJ Coffey - They/Them @[email protected]
@homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
3.5K followers 790 following 23K posts
💛 I make tools for GMs for 5e, A5e, and Free5e 🤍 I do developmental editing and design. 💜 I broadcast TTRPG news and support indie devs and artists. 🖤 I chat about funding and publishing TTRPG books. http://Homebrewandhacking.com
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homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
"I followed this profile" reaction table (2d6)

Hostile
2- You're selling AI or investment opportunities
3- You're on BS to talk about US politics
4- You expect me to auto follow back

Unfriendly
5- You don't use alt-text
6- You haven't filled in your profile

1/2
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
I already have a very strong brand of doing "woke" things like being opposed to bioessentialism and being impolite to people who think it's acceptable. Just makes me want to play the Giant robot games more.

And hating on AI and solving moral conundrums are two of my favourite things. 😀

So both!
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
You can't scope, let alone build something you can't define.

And there's no definition of "general intelligence" not mired in racist pseudoscience.

I've only known that since the 00s.l because I read the mismeasure of man by Gould. Great book.
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
Well, that's the issue, people keep assuring me that LLMs have this but that's neither my experience nor the science.

So I don't think people _do_ understand that "general intelligence" does NOT exist.
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
I'd hope not. Although it would handily tell you that you and that person won't agree on important things, so you can just block them and move on with your life. 😀

Principled moral stands are nice to see in this day and age!
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
The reification of g for general intelligence (treating an abstract concept as though it had a real measurable IRL existence) has been a problem for decades and has also been thoroughly discredited evidentially. But US racism persists in trying to make it happen.

(It's the basis for IQ tests.)
shannonvallor.bsky.social
Since it resonated with the audience, I’ll recap my main argument against AGI here. ‘General intelligence’ is like phlogiston, or the aether. It’s an outmoded scientific concept that does not refer to anything real. Any explanatory work it did can be done better by a richer scientific frame. 1/3
shannonvallor.bsky.social
This was a truly heartening day, with deeply thoughtful challenges to the dominant narrative framed around AGI, coming from across disciplines and perspectives. Felt like the tide might finally be turning a bit, at least among the scientific community. Thanks @royalsociety.org!
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
Another great blog from Brett Devereux.

This is part of a series looking at how peasants actually lived (and why they made these choices).

Certainly in terms of world- building, I'll now feel obliged to mention the sheer number of people doing spinning. #TTRPG

acoup.blog/2025/09/26/c...
Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVd: Spinning Plates
This is the fourth thread of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers, who make up a majority of all of the humans who hav…
acoup.blog
Reposted by PJ Coffey - They/Them @[email protected]
fasterandworse.com
the "it's just a tool" thing is another example of this. Being *just a tool* is to fail as *intelligence*

Anything less than:

request: "do this"
result: "it is done perfectly"

is a failure
fasterandworse.com
Replacing the search bar with the LLM as an *interface* to the documentation is an objective assertion that the LLM does not work.

The LLM promise is to be an oracle, not a librarian.
davidgerard.co.uk
Salesforce replaces help with Agentforce AI — customers outraged

You WILL love Marc’s pet robot

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BUu... - video
pivottoai.libsyn.com/20251008-sal... - podcast

time: 4 min 24 secMarc Benioff of Salesforce in a silly hat
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
Druid has used conjure animals to summon octopi and cast an ink cloud.

Completely blinding our front line.

*sad trombone noise*

But then the enemies swam past which enabled flanking and a wall of coral to be dropped into them.

With a double crit as my last roll of the campaign...
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
IDK, you sometimes come across fellow travellers who communicate the same way, right? 😀
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
Oooooooffffffffff

Feel that one in my bones.

It requires constant masking in person and the verbal equivalent of 😀 😀 😀 ❤️🧡💛 and smiles and ❤️🧡💛 🌈 🏳️‍🌈 🌈 🏳️‍🌈 and it's _exhausting_.
Reposted by PJ Coffey - They/Them @[email protected]
melissainau.bsky.social
Do you teach boardgames? We have just launched a survey asking about your experience! It takes about ten minutes to complete - please share!
Survey link: go.unimelb.edu.au/45qp
Image text reads:
Do you teach board games?
We invite you to complete a short survey for academic research into people’s experiences of teaching boardgames, at home and elsewhere. 
The survey takes about ten minutes to complete.

To find out more, please use the QR code, 
visit  go.unimelb.edu.au/45qp 
or email hybrid-games@unimelb.edu.au 

(University of Melbourne Human Research Ethics Approval 33778)

There is also a decorative image of game pawns and dice, with a magnifying glass on top, as well as a QR code which points to the given link.
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
/ watch her sink into the deep/
/ as her fangirls rave/
/In other words/
/Drag her do/
/In other words/
/she's not for you/

Why would you earworm me like that? You monster? 😉
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
Kindle to let me read non-Amazon books, whereas Kobo just lets me add them and read them from my phone. ❤️

Anyway, that's a weird ramble. Any thoughts from followers/booksky? Or questions/recs/rec requests about books? 😀

/T
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
Not giving them more money seems like a plan.

Currently I'm looking at Kobo Unlimited which offers books and audiobooks. I notice there's also a £6.99/month subscription which is looking like great value (Audible is shitting the bed with AI Narrators and £8.99/month).

Also, I could never get /3
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
I use the Kobo app because I need my phone in my hand a lot of the time to manage anxiety, so might as well read a book!

Kindle is a smoother interface, often, and Kobo has no dark mode which is an offence against God and man.

However Amazon is clearly working towards holding my library hostage so
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
You may not know this about me, but I'm actually a lot more into books than anything else.

And that's coming from someone who has written, edited, and crowdfunded, a fair few TTRPG books.

So, I'm looking at Kobo. For reasons (link related).

blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2025/02/25/a...

1/
Amazon Keeps Finding New Ways to Anger Kindle Customers
From forced software updates that keep breaking things to suddenly removing the ability to download purchased ebooks, Amazon has done a number of things to
blog.the-ebook-reader.com
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
This accessibility advocate...

bsky.app/profile/thin...
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
For those oblivious:

Accessibility advocate: permabanned

Transphobe and harrasser: still welcome

*sigh* I wonder when they'll bring in the bots?
derek.bike
lots of people know Łink from what he did to promote alt text usage here. this tip about pretending you’re describing an image over the phone has been burned in my brain since i saw it
homebrewandhacking.bsky.social
IDK... I don't think that's a proper Mork Borg layout...

I can read it... 😉