When playing solo D&D, try making full on characters for the major NPCs. This can be more fun because (a) making characters is fun, especially higher level ones, and, (b) you get more faceted NPCs instead of just stock, one-dimensional characters.
I’ve been playing through Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden and I applied this one of the duergar dwarves, Durth. In the published adventure, he’s a Duergar Mind Master.
Enterprise AI, D&D with ChatGPT, & DevBurgerOps
Lots of original content this week, starting with this prediction about “enterprise AI”:
I also made these since last episode:
Another go-round at figuring out playing D&D with ChatGPT. It went pretty well! Here’s my retro/analysis of it, and here’s the actual play session with inline commentary.
I was the guest co-host on this week’s Cloud Foundry Weeklywhere we discussed the new features in the Tanzu Application Service 6.0. We, of course, spent a lot of time on the generative AI beta stuff that’s included.
Amazon Isn’t Killing Just Walk Out But Rather “Pushing Hard” On It - Hmm, hopefully we’ll see some nuanced corrections in all them news outlets…
Notes on how to use LLMs in your product. - “Even the most expensive LLMs are not that expensive for B2B usage. Even the cheapest LLM is not that cheap for Consumer usage – because pricing is driven by usage volume, this is a technology that’s very easy to justify for B2B businesses with smaller, paying usage. Conversely, it’s very challenging to figure out how you’re going to pay for significant LLM usage in a Consumer business without the risk of significantly shrinking your margin”
The Art of Product Management in the Fog of AI - “before products launch, it’s critical to run the machine learning systems through a battery of tests to understand in the most likely use cases, how the LLM will respond."
‘This shit’s so expensive’: a note on generative models and software margins - “The fundamental problem with generative models is that they are 10x too expensive to work with the industry’s default business models and structure. Either these companies who are going all-in on ‘AI”‘need to fundamentally change everything about how they work – laying off a bunch of people won’t make ML compute 10x cheaper so they’d need to change the org to survive on razor-thin margins – or they need to discover some undefined magical way of lowering compute costs 10x. So far they’re opting for magic."
Enterprise AI is a feature, not an app
An enterprise AI strategy probably means adding AI to your existing apps and workflows, not just standing up a stand-alone AI app. We experience generative AI as chatbots in the consumer space - and they’re great! - but this doesn’t seem like the best approach for business applications. Think about search. We don’t even notice it now, but at work, search is built into existing apps, it’s not usually a stand-alone app that tightly integrates with and links into existing apps.
Tuning the Prompt for Solo D&D with ChatGPT
For about 7 months, I’ve been playing solo D&D with ChatGPT. I prompt ChatGPT to be the “ChatDM.” It sort of works, and at least, it’s fun enough to keep doing it and working on making it better. Here’s my most recent overview of what works and doesn’t work, based on a longer play session this week:
In addition to the obvious prompting to play as a DM, there are a few things you have to be specific about.
How to use AI to solo play Dungeons and Dragons - Lab Notebook - Playing a Goblin Ambush
Is ChatGPT good at being a Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master? I’ve been experimenting with this for a while now. I do this because (1) it’s fun, and, (2) it’s a good way to understand what generative AIs can actually do, how they do it, and how to work with them. They’re not as fantastic as everyone makes out, but they’re fun.
Here’s my tips and commentary on my experience doing this:
Forrester: IT departments are blowing their cloud budgets | Computer Weekly - “Nearly three in four (72%) of the IT decision-makers polled reported that their company exceeded its set cloud budget in the most recent fiscal year. Among the areas experiencing an acceleration of cloud deployments are: applications/workloads in IT operations (54%); hybrid work (50%); software development platforms and tools (45%); and digital experiences (44%).” // vendor-sponsored // has ranking of causes.