Congratulations to McLaren! First Constructors' Championship win since 1998!

Great drives by Sainz and especially Leclerc. Starting from P19 and ending P3 is beyond impressive.

Hamilton came alive this race, ending P4. End of an era. I'm sure he'd've liked a podium to end his time with Mercedes, but still a hell of a drive, moving up 12 places from the start.

Felt bad for some of the guys who were or may have been in their last race: Bottas, Lawson, Colapinto, and Perez all DNF'd unceremoniously.

With that, the season is officialy over. I, for one, am glad. It's been a long season. For US folks, enjoy sleeping in on the weekends again for a few months. Looking ahead, 2025 pre-season testing is in Bahrain, Feb. 26-28, with the first race of the season in Melbourne a couple weeks later. See you all next year!

Next race:

Australian Grand Prix
Albert Park Grand Prix Circuit (Melbourne)
Sunday, March 16, 2025

Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

I received an email this morning from the good folks at the WHE entitled: Perplexity AI Partnership to Improve History Education

In it, their CEO Jan van der Crabben, writes:

As the most-visited history encyclopedia globally, World History Encyclopedia is pleased to announce a strategic partnership with Perplexity.ai.

…

As artificial intelligence (AI) tools based on large language models become increasingly accessible to the public, growing concerns have emerged regarding the quality of information provided by these tools. These AI systems are typically developed and trained using publicly available internet information, often without robust verification processes, and frequently generate inaccurate results.

There are also significant concerns about the business models of AI companies, which utilise content developed and meticulously checked by providers like World History Encyclopedia —a non-profit organisation— without obtaining proper consent, without providing compensation, and without offering appropriate attribution.

Perplexity.ai is an AI-powered search and answer engine that combines the capabilities of a search engine with artificial intelligence. Unlike most other AI systems, Perplexity clearly cites its sources, providing users with an easy way to verify the accuracy of its answers.

In alignment with our goal of being a trusted resource of accurate and objective historical information, we are excited about this partnership. It will allow us to develop tools based on the Perplexity API to make the content in World History Encyclopedia easier to find, browse, and access. We aim to develop educational AI tools for history learning in close collaboration with teachers to augment the World History Encyclopedia website for students.

The partnership will also enable World History Encyclopedia to use artificial intelligence to enhance our human review processes more efficiently. This includes improving tasks such as fact-checking and plagiarism detection.

Additionally, Perplexity is the first AI service that allows providers of information like World History Encyclopedia to be compensated fairly for the AI use of that information. We will receive a share of advertising revenue generated on the Perplexity platform whenever Perplexity cites World History Encyclopedia to answer a question.

I have worked with Jan and his staff many times over the last six years and I find them eminently trustworthy and dedicated to education.

What does everyone think of this kind of partnership moving forward? I understand Perplexity might have a slightly different approach that certain folks find promising.

And what kind of content do we think this might be able to generate? I look forward to your comments.

Does anyone have any experience making miniatures? I'm looking to get started and there just seems to be an absolute overload of options for sculpting material: Sculpey, Milliput, Green Stuff, Scultamold... The list seemingly goes on and on. I've seen some great videos by Miscast or Bill Making Stuff, but they can be a little all over the place.

Does anyone have any suggestions or point to any video/written tutorials on getting started?

Thanks!

I do hope one of you thinks of a better title or a more coherent structure for the overall post.

This question was inspired by a comment chain about PFAS in Gore-Tex jackets under a different post here, but it's been a bit of a simmering question for me.

When reading through that thread, my immediate reaction was something along the lines of the following.

Unless you're directing traffic in Seattle or Scotland, wouldn't the amount of time you'd wear the jacket be too little to have meaningful exposure? It's not like you're walking into an oven where the polymers would break down from heat. Further, if it's GoreTex-appropriate weather, you'll near-certainly have additional clothing between your skin and the GoreTex.

I was bored at work today, so I had plenty of time for rumination and introspection. What I found so far is that my instinctive skepticism toward health-conscious rhetoric has these primary sources:

1. I listened to Stronger by Science's six-hour deep dive on aspartame. Their eventual conclusion is that aspartame does cause bladder cancer in rats & mice, but the equivalent doses for humans make fears over its use into a major nothingburger. A human would need to spend a year chugging down five gallons of Diet Coke each day for the elevated cancer risk to be statistically meaningful.
2. When I catch someone trying to be convincing in an area where I lack domain expertise, I judge them by their overall demeanor and (if I can catch on) general rhetorical logic [in that order] long before I consider the truth of their specific claims. The IRL people I've met who are most stridently into wholesome natural living have fervency and lack of appreciation that it's the dose that makes the poison to the degree that it makes RFK discussing vaccine policy sound grounded in reality by comparison. Perhaps if they were born in a different society, they'd make excellent temple priests who ensure no lazy shortcuts or "it's all we have available" excuses are made when it's time to ensure a full harvest. Instead, they're the kinds who play 50 million questions and have genuine concerns that the radio waves that connect my wireless headphones are giving me brain damage or control. [To be fair, there is some large selection effects here. My hobbies have a habit of attracting those who are so open-minded that their brains fell out. Since online interactions strip the majority of demeanor and previous interactions, I judge online strangers with strange opinions way less harshly than IRL contacts unless they've gone out of their way to be obnoxious. IRL, I'm exposed to a lot more generic chemicals bad rhetoric than in my usual online bubbles. ]
3. Based on 1, unless I have preexisting trust with a particular journalist, layman's science journalism—when it's performed by journalists dabbling in science rather than scientists trying their hands at public communication—is far too likely to overblow a headline or misrepresent the research conclusions. "Here are 30 links to news articles" doesn't appeal to me because 25 of them are probably copying each other (that's just how internet journalism works). It's highly unlikely that all 5 of the remaining links misread the original paper, but I'm not reading through all those (perhaps AI summarization could help here—at the very least it could identify commonalities and outliers for manual examination later).
4. Related to 2, two additional SMBC comics that share my attitude: Vitamin Water v. Butter and Pronounceable Ingredients Only

That said, sometimes the health nuts are correct. As it turns out, all the coughing smokers do is a strong sign that smoking is bad for your lungs.

What are some heuristics to sort health tips that get passed around without citation into one of the following buckets?

1. You'll notice the improvement within a week once you've finished withdrawal. Smoking, boozing, eating meat or alliums at dinnertime, and heroin are in this bucket.
2. The effect is real and significant, but you may not notice the impact until at least a year has gone by, if ever. Seatbelts and bike/horse helmets are the two examples that immediately pop to mind.
3. Technically non-zero, but ultimately trivial. The opening aspartame example would fit. In a similar line to doctors who recommend against treating prostate cancer because the treatments would shorten your lifespan by more than letting that cancer run its course and waiting for a heart attack or totally unrelated cancer to do you in, these interventions are meaningless to anyone who uses motor vehicles regularly.
4. Playground rumors or outright disinformation. Vaccines causing autism and yellow 5 as an HRT supplement b/c it shrinks your testicles belong in this wastebin.

Circling back to the impact of PFAS in Gore-Tex that inspired today's thinking, my layman's estimate that the effects on the factory workers who make a career out of working with the stuff is a low 2 when following proper safety procedures. Without them, a definite 1. For wearers of the stuff, a solid 3.

One final reason I may have been so fired up on this topic is that I listened to a highlight reel from a Congressional hearing round table on food & pharmaceutical safety last week. During the testimony, I had a nagging feeling that at least half of what they said was true, but the truth percent is below 75, and I had no idea which was which because all claims were presented with the same urgency.

What you got:

Top 5 Artists

1. Billie Eillish
2. Lana Del Rey
3. Addison Rae
4. Sabrina Carpenter
5. Dua Lipa

Top 5 Songs:

1. Aquamarine - Addison Rae
2. CHIHIRO - Billie Eillish
3. LUNCH - Billie Eillish
4. Espresso - Sabrina Carpenter
5. National Anthem - Lana Del Rey

Minutes listened: 52,691

Here were my predictions from a month ago

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I've been researching internet privacy and fell down the rabbit hole of...well, internet privacy. I started with deleting Facebook/Instagram and switching to fire fox + plugins. I would like to make more improvements but I really have no idea how, it started with deleting socials and next thing you know I'm looking at LineageOS and de-googling.

If anyone has any suggestions on where to go next while staying realistic/not going crazy, i would love to hear them. I am not really sure where to set my expectations, basically I would like to have more control of my data. The other day Google photos gave me a memory recap which kind of creeped me out! I am suddenly not fond of whatever is going on under the surface of Google photos that's making collages and trying to sell my photo books. Also g-board giving me a pop up in the text prediction row asking me to rate the app??? Ew.

I am a fan of self hosting and run a small NAS (open media vault) but this too quickly turns into the privacy spiral and leaves me thinking I should throw my phone into a river and live in the forest. Would love to hear your thoughts/advice/opinions!

With Christmas around the corner I'm wondering if anyone has tabletop/card games they enjoy that are quick to play (in my mind less than 30 minutes). I enjoy longer games like Betrayal at House on the Hill immensely, but I'd like to add some games to my collection that are fun and light hearted, easy to learn, and idealy travel easy. I often play games with family over the holidays and want some that aren't as intimidating for my parents and older relatives to pick up and try. I often played with at least 2 other people, but I've been looking for fun 2 player games as well.

Can you please share what the gameplay is like and what you enjoy about playing it? Thanks all!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like three cheers, fintech and tunnel of fudge. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was alert.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

I've always found this to be a fun conversation topic among geeky, mechanically-inclined, or DIY-enthusiast friends, and it might be interesting to what see bubbles up from the Tildes crowd:

Other than standard things like dishwasher detergent or window cleaning spray, what chemicals or other substances do you keep at home? And what do you do with them? And if you need to take any special precautions for storage, use or disposal, what are those precautions?

Mine are not actually all that interesting, but I'll start:

• Powdered citric acid - for descaling plumbing or kitchen appliances
• Acetone - cleaning gunk off of all sorts of tools, labels off glass items, etc.
• WD40 - cleaning greasy car or bicycle parts
• Glycerin - making "fog juice" for a fog machine

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Hey Tildes, I'm super super out of the loop for gaming PCs. If I wanted to play AAA games like Stalker 2 on higher (!) settings, what kind of specs am I looking at, ballpark prices, makes that are good vs red flag don't buy? Everything seems way too expensive now I guess due to demands for AI and crypto stuff. Does it maybe make more sense to wait half a year or won't get any better?

Thoughts on GeForce rtx 4070? Need some kind of solid state hard drive, and it'll be a windows box it looks like for games. Or has Linux OS for gaming a good contender now esp when paired with steam ?

I should have done my homework well before cybermonday etc, but figure even weeks of work still isn't as good as copying you guy's homework. :) thanks in advance

Edit: Thank you everyone :D I've been leaning on the community for two big things this week (this, and learning to type software) and you guys really came through like eagles at Mt Doom.

Person I am asking for read all your comments, checked out a ton of sites you guys suggested, and
ended up finding a BlackFriday/Cyber Monday deal for a laptop with (reads sheet)

GeForce RTX 4080 Ryzen 9 7945HX 32GB 1TB SSD 240Hz 16" laptop

price was $2500 CAD ($ 1785 USD) + taxes. (non affiliated product link here)

many thanks again~

The other day I had to get new glasses, and I braced myself for my lenses to be incredibly thick and expensive to boot again - but then I had them made, they look normal, and they barely cost me a Benjamin. Clearly, the optometrist crowd has made some major developments in the past decade or so, which leads me to ask - if you're working in an industry most people don't really think about, what's happened in your space in the past ten years?

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Could someone please recommend a text messaging app for Android that is reasonably secure?

Verizon is discontinuing their native texting (SMS) app. They recommend switching to Google Messages, but I would not like Google to have access to my entire text messaging history. I tried Signal, but my old messages don't transfer over (minor problem), and almost none of my family are willing to switch to Signal (big problem). When I search for advice, I get a bunch of AI slop articles and advertisements. So I figured I might have better luck asking here: Is there any text messaging app for Android that works well and isn't going to hoover up all my data?

I'm looking for something new to read, so I'm just selfishly posting this in the hopes that it works.

Doesn't have to be your all-time favourite I guess, if you can't decide. Feel free to do multiple books too, or maybe just whichever is on your mind a lot recently.

My previous phone was a pixel. My tech life generally is a weird mix of things that are bad for privacy that I accept for convenience but also in other ways I choose to sacrifice things to protect privacy.

Does not registering the phone with Samsung actually cost me any functionality as a user?

There's a million of these adaptations, both direct adaptations of Scrooge himself, and parodies featuring various other characters. Which one did you grow up seeing the most? Which one do you find yourself coming back to? I just rewatched the Patrick Stewart one myself, which is the one I've seen the most.

I am wondering what people are listening to this holiday season and hoping to build a playlist BEFORE Christmas Day. I have no particular allegiance to Christmas or any other specific holiday, but it’s fun to have a certain category of songs I only really listen to for one month of a year.

To start, I’m a big fan of the band BROS and they have a few small Christmas albums. Their artist page on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bros/1151563604

Their actual website: https://dinealonerecords.com/artists/bros/

Recently I've been watching the show Jet Lag on Nebula. It's an entertaining little reality show where people compete in contests which require a lot of travel, especially in commercial aircraft.

I've noticed that they are really really traveling a lot for a frivolous reason and having a huge carbon footprint. (Yes I understand that the flights they go on are booked anyway and would fly if they weren't on them, sort of).

During the show they sometimes use a graphic to show the travel distance and then also mention that they are using Gold Standard carbon offsets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Standard_(carbon_offset_standard)

I've read a bit about carbon credits and carbon offsets before. I think it seems like a bit of a boondoggle to let people with money greenwash their activities. Has anyone here researched this and come up with a different conclusion?

I think maybe this is a very newbie question to ask on this Tildes group.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

I'm open to hearing from folks who have used iOS longer than me. How is the iOS dialer so terrible when it's supposed to be the primary usage of a phone, calling people?

1. Why can't I type the letters of a name in my contacts list, eg "5-2-6" for "JAM" and have all the "James" show up? Android has had that since forever because it's not rocket science.
2. Why can't I type to correct a digit in the middle of the number dialed? Or correct a number I've pasted in?
3. Seriously, is there no way to replace the dialer with something better? And if there is and I just missed it, what are your recommendations?
4. Same question for the god-awful contacts list. I use Google Contacts, have 3 google accounts in which the contacts are… and the syncing seems piss-poor.

Ok, this turned out to be more of a rant than I anticipated. I've gotten to like iOS quite a bit, especially because the android ecosystem has become a very "worst of both worlds" option. But man the dialer's shit. Someone please tell me I'm missing something obvious.

There was a thread about shows with a great beginning and a comment in the thread made me want to ask, what about the opposite? Shows with a really satisfying ending that feels like they wrapping things up in a satisfying way?

A pretty quick work trip has been planned. I will fly into Heathrow Saturday morning. I'll have until Sunday evening to get to Warwick. I'll be in Warwick for 5 days before flying back out the next Saturday.

I'm looking for any general advice but also if there is anything specific to the following:

• I'm going to book my own hotel in London the Saturday night I fly in. Saturday and Sunday are essentially my "tourist" days. Where is good to stay? Not too concerned with price.
• I'm taking a train to Warwick and mostly have that figured out but is there an app or pass that I should add to my Apple wallet for transit around London?
• I like museums of all types. Are there any in particular I should check out?
• Any classic pubs or restaurants I should try to get to?
• Once the week starts I don't think I'll have much time to do touristy stuff and I won't have a car. Any recommendations on things around Warwick/Birmingham that I can get to some evenings via train or bus?

I've made a strong effort toward intentional news exposure by trying to limit the times I run across news articles. This has "minimized" my exposure to the times when I specifically look to read news sources.

I'd be curious to know if anyone here is accomplishing something similar by filtering out Tildes tags and, if so, what does your list look like? Seems to be a hard balance between quieting the unwanted news posts and not limiting exposure to posts and articles I'd like to see.

With the recent news about Synapse, I am a little on edge with the safety of my money. I am currently living in France for school, and am hoping to immigrate here permanently. All of my savings is in USD, so I need a way to easily and cheaply convert between USD and EUR, and be able to spend EUR locally. After a ton of research, I decided to move almost all of my banking to Wise. They don't offer traditional banking features like in-person branches or checks, but I didn't use those anyway. I can get a local bank number in any of the many countries they support. The savings account APY is insanely high (higher than I have seen from even the best high yield savings accounts. I have a debit card that allows me to spend directly from any one of my bank account currencies, and auto convert to other supported currencies. And the USD account is insured by FDIC passthrough insurance.

In the thread about the Synapse collapse, people were saying that passthrough FDIC insurance doesn't always mean that the customer's money is actually insured. And apparently some fintech services will just lie about what is covered by FDIC insurance. I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea how to validate Wise's claims about passthrough FDIC insurance.

I was recently able to open a France bank account, which was surprisingly difficult. (To open a bank account you need proof of address, like a cell phone or electricity bill. I don't pay for utilities in my school apartment, and to get a cell phone plan I need a bank account. That was fun to try and navigate.) I have these bank accounts currently: my Wise account with US USD, Belgium EUR, and UK GBP, a US Credit Union account, and a French EUR bank account. My US credit union and French banks give a very low or zero APY, so keeping my money in my Wise accounts is preferable for that reason. But I also can't afford to loose all my savings if Wise collapses. My question is this: Is Wise safe enough for general money storage, or should I use it just for converting between currencies and keeping a small amount for spending? If Wise isn't safe, what about another similar product? I have heard of Revolut, but I didn't do much research since Wise seemed better for my use case.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like chrome, users and wicked. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was researching.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Good race, fun race, but overshadowed by the baffling stewarding decisions and race direction.

What appeared to be a mirror that broke off a car is in the middle of the track, and no VSC or something to grab it? Then two cars get punctures, possibly from driving over that debris, one right after another in basically same place, but no safety car or anything called until a few laps later?

Then add on the harsh penalties. Plus Max's weird penalty for impeding-but-not-really from yesterday where he lost P1 after quali. As it's said, nothing as consistent as the inconsistent stewarding.

On a positive note, glad to see Zhou finally in the points! On his penultimate drive, no less. Only Sargeant and Bottas remain without points this year. Maybe Bottas will get some in his final race.

At least we'll get a down-to-the-wire championship showdown in Abu Dhabi. Ferrari vs McLaren for P1 in the WCC. Who are you all rooting for?

UPDATE: That was likely Ocon's last race with Alpine. Rumor, which Sky Sports appears to be confirming, is that he'll be out in Abu Dhabi, with Alpine reserve driver, Jack Doohan in for the last race. This is so Ocon can do post-season testing with Haas.

Next race:

Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
Yas Marina Circuit
Sunday, December 8

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I recently upgraded to a pixel 9 pro and noticed that the higher resolution resulted in text that was often too small.

I went to my settings and increased my font size to 125%. However, I noticed that this doesn't seem to apply to titles on Tildes, at least not in a uniform way.

It's hard to say without going back to my old phone, which I can't easily do right now, but I do think I recall title font size varying depending on the length of the title. But perhaps the difference wasn't as drastic on my old phone due to the difference in resolution? Perhaps the titles with smaller font sizes were still easy to see so I didn't really notice? It's just very noticable on this phone. I don't want to increase zoom on Chrome for every website just to solve this issue.

Ideas?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

for some time now, this is a question I have pondered alot.

I was not unfamiliar with the slave history of the U.S. and knew it was a big reason for the Civil War, I became more aware of the current racial issues in America courtesy of The Daily Show and the George Floyd riots (along with binging Watchmen) turbo-charged my desire to know more about it.

and I read Night by Elie Wiesel when I was in high school and recently read Maus, neither of which are shy to fully express the horrors the Jews went through in the Holocaust.

And the recent discovery of unmarked graves of Indigenous children from Residential school in Canada have sent me down that rabbit-hole of learning exactly what the catholic church was up to in these parts.

But I think where I get stuck is I believe that everyone is capable of empathy for a fellow human being. besides the psychopaths and sociopaths, I think we all have an innate capability to care when we see someone crying or in a bad place.

And yet, those atrocities suggest that we can be condition to turn off our ability for empathy to quite an extreme degree? Is that something that can happen to all of us?

Not sure if this thread will be taken down as I don't know the potential for this to start a good discussion, just wasn't sure where else to post it.

I work in IT, and was the caregiver for both my parents as they aged. You'd think I would be the one that people turn to to ask this question, and yet I have been utterly frustrated by my attempts to find such.

I have a few folks who are extended family and friends that are now in the early/mid stages of different forms of dementia, and a real pain point is that they no longer have the capacity to recognize ads, and will unfailingly click and install scam apps via the Apple store. Think things like 'cleaner' apps that have a $50/week subscription fee, and other abusive tactics. The #1 subject I get called about is some ad popping up after they've finished a puzzle, and now they think they're out of space, and in a panic.

This is not a small problem. The coloring and puzzles they can still do bring them happiness and stability through their day; removal of the ipads entirely causes them a lot of stress. (TV is nothing but ragebait, and a non-starter. They do have books on tape, but get tired of listening rather quickly.)

I have been completely unable to locate ad-free, paid versions of these types of apps. I'm not looking for free. I don't care about the cost. I just need apps that only do what they say they do, and don't have unexpected pop-ups, ads, or anything else, and I thought perhaps the folks here might know of some.

Any ideas?

[edit] Only five hours in, and I've already gotten more insightful, helpful responses than anywhere else I've asked. You all are the best.

Seeing the courts go after Google's monopoly and the unintended consequences to Mozilla (and therefore Firefox) that can happen if the courts make it illegal for Google to pay to be the default search engine, it goes me thinking about Chrome/Chromium.

I know that the courts are trying to force Google to give up its control of Chrome (I don't even know how that is possible for the government to tell a tech company that it is not allowed to develop a tech product it created itself) but it seems to me that Google maintaining Chrome is not really a problem in and of itself. there are many browsers available to folks and if you as a user want to be completely plugged into the google ecosystem at the detriment of your online privacy, that is your choice to make.

the real issue seems to me that a user should have the exact same experience browsing a google website on chrome vs an alternative.

But that made me wonder if (like stopping Google being able to pay to be the default search engine) Google was forced to give up its control of Chrome, what are the possible negative consequences of that to users? and would forcing Google to instead relinquish its control of chromium alleviate those issues?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

In lieu of individual presents this year, my family is doing a present swap/steal. What are things you may want to get in the $50-$75 range?

Flying so all my typical ideas would be difficult. Looking for inspiration. Also a chance that it comes back home with me...

• Chefs knife
• Bottle of booze
• High quality version of something common
  • Flashlight
  • Scissors/kitchen shears
  • Blanket
• Simple tools
• Pocket Knife

I am a guy (I don't really feel as being very masculine at all, but also not feminine, and I do feel kinda close to the nonbinary community, but I just don't really care, so I just stick with the default that was assigned to me to make things easy for me), but I don't really like my facial hair at all. Even when I do (what I think is) a pretty smooth shave in the morning it just ends up being ugly again by the evening. I'd much prefer to not have to deal with facial hair at all. So I was wondering if laser facial hair removal might be an option for me. I have dark hair and light skin, which from what I've read should be the combination on which it works the best.

I am a huge overthinker of everything, so I already did quite a bit of research myself, and thought about it for a number of weeks, but as with most things it's not easy to find a conclusive simple answer that it's good or bad. I've seen people say that it works amazing, others that it didn't do much, I've seen a lot of people say that it's not permanent, I've seen people say that it damaged/scarred their skin, I've even seen people say that it made them have more facial hair instead!

So I'd kind of like to hear if the people of Tildes have any experience with it. Did it work well for you? Do you still need to shave your face every day afterwards? Did it cause any issues?

Hey Tildes, I learned to touch type with ye olde Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing CD-ROM that came with my first home computer (I'm not quite THAT old -- what was what we could afford).

Can you recommend a better / newer / snazzier / rizzier typing program for a teen / child?

Online or offline are fine, paid is fine. What do you like about it and what didn't you like about it?

Edit: Side note: how did y'all learn to type? Anyone here doesn't touch type (eg, not using your eyes) and use some other kind of keyboard configure or other tech? For Cantonese Chinese language, more young people are starting to use alternative methods even beyond the numpad Q9 and go straight to "speech to text" using their phone software. Curious about your languages and input.