Oh shit, when they said “around the corner” they really meant it

But even if you grant the two premises there, that TikTok’s data collection is beyond that of other apps, and that said data is given to the PRC to access, this draft agreement’s solution to those problems is “let us access that collected data instead of them”. It implements measures that would affect future changes to TOS and policies, but I don’t see anything about scaling back what’s collected now. From what I can tell, this is just trying to replace who’s steering the ship. If the solution that “stops the Chinese government from spying on US citizens” just changes the government that’s doing the spying, I don’t see how that helps said US citizens in any way. The CPC isn’t the one who can put me on a no-fly list on a whim.

That’s my fundamental issue with this, as well as the relevant proposed legislation; it’s not a good-faith attempt to protect US citizens.

This is missing some pretty important context, in that CPC policy is generally more restrictive around social media and youth usage. This is a country that has legal limits on the amount of time minors can play video games (and I know that’s not unique to China). If you’re making the point, in good faith, that China has identified some specific evil in regards to TikTok, it’s not enough to merely show that they have restrictions on it; you would also need to show how this differs from the way they treat Weibo, bilibili, etc.

So these two provisions caught my eye; under the draft agreement, executive branch agencies (the article gives the example of the DOJ or DOD) would have the ability to (among other things)

Examine TikTok’s U.S. facilities, records, equipment and servers with minimal or no notice,

In some circumstances, require ByteDance to temporarily stop TikTok from functioning in the United States.

In the case of the former, would that include user data? Given the general US gov approach to digital privacy I assume so, and granting yourself the power to do the things you’re afraid China is doing seems appropriately ironic for us.

As far as the latter, I wonder how broadly “some circumstances” is defined. If the language is broad enough, that would open the door to de facto censorship if a certain trend or info around a certain event is spreading on the site right as the government magically decides it needs to pause TikTok due to, “uh, terrorism or something, don’t worry about it.”

I’m also curious how durable this agreement would be. How hard would it be for the next administration to decide to pitch a fit and renegotiate or throw out the deal pending a new, even harsher agreement?

It would seem to me that this is pretty nakedly an assertion of power over an entity based outside the US, and not an agreement meant to protect US citizens in any meaningful way. I think any defense of this agreement as a way to protect privacy or mental health or whatever won’t be able to honestly reconcile with the fact that these exact same concerns exist with domestic social media companies

I’m not on any private trackers. I’d be interested, but not until I have a more dedicated setup; I’m still very much a casual torrenter.

It’s good news then if port forwarding won’t affect my downloads, because that was the only reason I wanted it, but I saw others online say that lacking that feature is what was causing me not to connect to peers shown in my torrent client. Any idea what’s up with that?

Ahh that’s right, so you could actually just dump WIS if you don’t care about saving throw attacks. I forgot they lifted the stat requirement.

But yeah that’s why I put and/or, and it looks like STR would be the pretty clear choice between the 2 for melee damage (since it’s the stat your other abilities depend on). I guess the only other consideration then is when it comes online, since you’re always starting at level 1, and I don’t know enough about the builds there to say

Just be mindful of MAD (multi ability score dependent). Ideally your class or multiclass will rely on one score + constitution; that’s why combinations like sorcadin (sorcerer + paladin) are community favourites, because both classes use charisma. With Barbarian/Monk, you want STR and/or DEX, and WIS, on top of CON, so you’re gonna be spread more thinly there. Also, the unarmored defense from each class probably won’t stack (it doesn’t in tabletop, and I assume BG3 would handle it the same way) because you can only use one calculation to determine your armor class.

If by “viable” you mean “usable” then yes, it will be, especially on lower difficulties (and probably fun!). But if you mean “optimal” or especially strong, then from what I understand, no, not really. But I’m going off of my pretty basic knowledge of each class and how they interact; I could be wrong, and I haven’t tried that combo myself in the game.

It’s been my observation that ambassadorships are often given out as rewards or for other domestic political purposes. The career foreign service people whose job it is to do the real work of diplomacy aren’t political appointees

Well my hope was that it would protect against things like packet sniffing and in case I connect to an evil twin (if I’m using that term correctly). But I’ll be the first to admit my knowledge there is incredibly limited, and I wasn’t aware that it would actually create new vulnerabilities. Would you be able to explain a bit?

I heard about i2p during my search; I’m interested in it. Would it work with the arr suite when I get into that down the road?

Does it not impact downloading? I thought the lack of port forwarding on my VPN was what was causing me to not connect to seeders even though qBittorrent shows them

Good to know about AirVPN. I don’t have a ton of knowledge when it comes to networking, so I would appreciate something that’s simpler to configure and run

I’ll check it out! I’ve used trustworthy compilation lists to pick my PSU and PDF software so I don’t see the problem hahaha

Ah damn. From what I understand, that lack of port forwarding is what’s hurting my download speeds on torrents. Windscribe wasn’t on my radar though, I’ll check it out

This is from the community on Reddit. You should be able to grab the torrent file for whichever 5e book you want from there. I would also recommend 5e . tools like the other commenters, even as just a separate reference; as a DM I’ve found it way easier to pull things up quickly, even if I legally own the book that has whatever spell/mob I’m looking for haha.

It looks like Party Limit Begone is the only active one right now. I haven’t tried it in multiplayer myself (though that is supported up to 8 players), but something to note is that unlike in DOS2, there are some clear moments in the game where a party larger than 4 will break things; this can be handled easily enough in single player through sending people back to camp, but I don’t know how that would work in a multiplayer game. Also, because BG3 is gonna be receiving regular updates, your campaign will break until the mod author updates each time.

And yes, if you want challenging combat 7 people will make Balanced too easy

So I’m looking to finally build a dedicated plex server, instead of using my personal desktop, but I’m having a hard time deciding on components (for a tower). I would say 3 simultaneous 4k remote transcodes would be the goal.

There are some 12/13600k and Arc A380 bundles on Newegg that have caught my eye; at the very least I think I’d like an A380 to ensure AV1 10-bit support for the future. Am I missing out by not hunting for the perfect deal on an old Xeon or something off of eBay? I’m not really familiar with server components, and I don’t know to what extent I would benefit from ECC RAM.

I also figure that a hard drive array (RAID or Unraid) would be best, because it’ll be more than enough speed for my application and give me some data protection. But I could use some guidance on the exact best combo for video streaming.

Finally, OS; I’m most familiar with Windows, but the I’m willing to try something Linux if there’s enough of a benefit

Actually in my current run (on Balanced) I’ve found that I can’t really do that. If I group sneak towards enemies I can attack with one of my characters, they leave hiding to make the attack, and then typically get spotted and start combat (unless it’s from far enough away that they can re-hide and attack again before the target gets within sight). Then all the involved characters roll initiative, and my character that attacked doesn’t have an action for that turn. Any other members of my party that are hidden can still attack out of combat, but the same situation occurs; they leave hiding to make the attack, get spotted, roll initiative, and then when their turn comes around they don’t have an action (haven’t had the chance to see how this works with extra attack). This could probably be cheesed with super favourable terrain and some pre-planning, but I think at that point you’ve more or less set up an ambush and it’s ok to get some extra benefit out of that.

IMO this is a pretty good way to handle it within a video game context, because it limits the cheese while not totally removing player agency by possibly undoing your attack. Like you said it’s different to how that’s handled in tabletop, but as a DM I’m able to explain how initiative is literally a skill check to see how quick on the draw you are, so my players hopefully don’t feel as cheated if they want to attack first but can’t act before the enemy. I do enjoy how the player urge to get as many free attacks in as possible at the start of combat is the same in both games hahaha.

It sounds like one solution to this would be having the entire party enter turn-based mode, with members either being in or out of combat. It seems like that would be a very easy change to make, because turn-based mode can already trigger automatically, but the question would be how well that all blends together while you’re playing. I think that should be tied to difficulty; in Story you can cheese like you do now, while in hardcore (or whatever it’s called) you always enter turn-based.

I this is partly the consequence of adapting a tabletop system to a video game. In DND your DM obviously wouldn’t pause combat indefinitely while the rest of the party messes around, but a DM can account for out-of-combat shenanigans much better than a game that must use pre-defined systems.

Yup! I had Gale learn the spell and now I use this more than regular Find Familiar