This question is inspired by two things:

1. @carsonc’s comment in the hard sci-fi topic about Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars starting off in 2026 (which is right around the corner).

2. I started reading Ministry for the Future (coincidentally also by Kim Stanley Robinson) for the Tildes Book Club, and the titular organization starts in, of all times, January 2025 (as in, right now! The book was a perfect pick for this month).

It got me thinking about how a lot of science and speculative fiction books from the past imagined a future ahead of themselves, and how the passage of time has brought us to or even past those imagined futures.

So I’m interested in specific date milestones from fiction that we have met or passed already. They do not have to specifically be from science/speculative fiction, though I imagine most will be.

CES 2025 kicked off with some big hardware announcements.

• AMD CPUS for desktop, mobile, and handhelds
• Nvidia 5000 GPUs (see separate discussion here)

But what else are people excited (or not excited) for that doesn't necessarily deserve its own thread?

I'm in need of inspiration for tasty and fun food combinations to make myself eat more natural yogurts instead of the preflavoured ones (which I found out are definitely not as healthy!). What are your preferences and recommendations, oh fellow yogurt eaters? Which natural yogurt is superior for such a snack? What do you mix with it and how much? I must know!

I imagine most people don't save or just keep images together with the photos they've taken on their phones. But it would be nice to have a simple place to store and organize those images.

I've seen these recommendations: https://tildes.net/~tech/1l48/pinterest_alternatives , but I don't know if that's the best format. Maybe I'm just overthinking it. For now I only have a folder on iCloud with sub-folders. Quick and simple, syncs across devices, but not super organized.

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 working on an “advice” blog post for tech people at companies that plan to abandon VMWare. The idea is to give the reader an idea of what to expect and to help them plan their migration. The article will be on a vendor site, but I’m writing it with editorial purity. The only promotional component is at the end, where we say, “We can help with that!” and link to a white paper or whatnot.

So, what should I include in this listicle? What advice is important to impart – and why is that important?

References and examples are welcome. Horror stories are good, too. I’m not planning to quote anybody by name so don’t be shy. (I don’t need to explain why they plan to drop VMWare. Nor will there be a discussion about possible replacements. This is a process story that happens before you choose a replacement product/vendor.)

January 2025's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

I saw a similar thread recently and since I also happen to be looking for a gpu, I thought I'd ask here as well.

Soo, I suppose I should start by saying that I really do not know much about hardware. All the computers I had were purchased pre-built and I didn't really open them up apart from occasional cleaning or plugging in a new drive. Either way, my current hardware is as follows:

• CPU: Intel i7-8700
• RAM: 16GB DDR4
• GPU: integrated Intel CoffeeLake-S GT2
• Displays: 2560x1080@60hz and 1920x1080 up to 165hz but usually sitting at 60
• Motherboard: 0NC2VH (from Dell OptiPlex 7060 SFF)
• PSU: 200W

So the 2 things worrying me here are:

1. The PSU power output is probably too low
2. The entire case is kind of on the smaller side, I'm not sure what gpu would be able to fit there (though that's a thing I asked about when buying this pc, and apparently small form factor gpus should be fine?)

As I said earlier I'm really clueless about this kind of things and I'm not sure where to start, so I don't even have any candidates. Generally, I don't do too much gpu-intensive stuff (which is why for a long time I've been fine with an iGPU) and most of the games (2d stuff like various roguelikes or Factorio) I play run fine, but recently I've been playing some more games like Fall Guys or Supermarket Together with friends and it's been a bit frustrating to lower the graphics settings to the very lowest they can be and also decrease the resolution to have them run at a playable framerate (though even Factorio has been having some frame drops recently as my factory keeps growing, but I'm not sure if it's actually the igpu causing the bottleneck).

Any advice would be appreciated! I can provide more information if there's something relevant I haven't mentioned (which I imagine is quite possible)

Edit: I am now instead considering a full upgrade, since it might make more sense as people pointed out

Edit2: a pretty important thing I forgot to mention is that I primarily run linux, so driver compatibility is a big thing for me.

I don't mean that I'm scared by some terrible content on the internet, or that I'm actually afraid of using it. What I mean is the same feeling I often get from open-world games: FOMO, a sense of chaos, being lost and lacking direction.

Internet is inherently like an open-world game. There's so much content available. In your entire life, you won't see even 0.001% of it. This very post will probably be seen by like 100 people at most, which is such a tiny share of all internet users.

I get very anxious thinking about this. People often talk about how they miss "the old internet", which consisted of small websites and had to be explored. To me, that sounds like hell. I don't want to explore internet. I want to know where something is and how to find it. Information is on Wikipedia. Opinions are on Reddit. Et cetera. But the internet doesn't work like that - there's so much stuff that I don't even know how to grasp it.

I recently discovered https://are.na because someone mentioned it here on Tildes. I signed up, and immediately got that feeling. There's a huge amount of content, and I'm supposed to just explore in until I stumble upon something?

Tildes is one of the few websites where I don't feel that, because the amount of content is relatively small so I have a feeling of keeping it under control. But it also makes me think about how there are countless other small communities like Tildes, and ones that I'll never be aware of - and that's also pretty scary.

Does anyone else feel something similar? I've seen many people talk about similar feelings regarding keeping up with social media, but that doesn't actually bother me, but the amount of communities that can be explored does

Hi all. I need to set up an outdoor CCTV camera and since there seem to be a hundred different brands and as many pitfalls I'm wondering if anyone here can help me navigate that minefield. I have zero experience.

I have the following basic requirements:

• Waterproof: It's outdoors, it will be rained on, plus there will often be high humidity, pollen and dust. It should not get fogged up. (IP66 or higher I think?) This also means there shouldn't be exposed plugs, otherwise it's not really waterproof.
• NOT battery powered. If there's a battery power option, battery degradation shouldn't prevent the camera from working, since otherwise that will massively impact longevity. I'm looking for something that can be wired directly to AC power.
• Wifi support: Comms cannot be wired in this installation. Norm will probably be n (2.4ghz) but ac+ should ideally be supported for future proofing.
• I probably can't buy it if it's not available in Europe (this often excludes some american startups).

With regard to what happens to the footage:

• I think IP streaming would be ideal?
• Abso-fucking-lutely no "cloud" based services. I have no interest in having to bounce footage through the US or china, or paying a monthly fee for unnecessary nonsense. I'm afraid of brands not being clear about this being a requirement before I spend my money.
• Some brands seem to have their own "server"/hub hardware? Why? No! I already own computers, so I don't need to waste money on a proprietary unitasker for talking to my camera.
• I think there are some open standards for camera streaming and open source software for handling the cameras. Support for these would be great. I'm accepting software recommendations too.
• I'm not in theory opposed to SD card support, but I'd rather not have to use local storage at all, and don't mind if it's not an option. If a setup requires storing in an SD card and then reading from it that's not the worst, I suppose (it's not that expensive to replace dead SD cards once every few years).

Optional bells and whistles:

• There is some illumination in the location at night, but some form of night vision would be highly desirable. Optional built in lights are probably also a good idea.
• Microphone is a nice plus.
• Motion detection and human tracking are a nice plus. The camera doesn't have to rotate 360 degrees; probably a ~60 degree angle of vision would be plenty. At the extreme, I'd say more than ~120 degrees is literally useless due to obstacles. (Obviously if an ideal solution has full rotation, I'll just take it.)
• Resolution+framerate (bitrate) can be as high as wireless-n can comfortably handle, but I don't really think I need more than 1080p.

Thanks in advance if anyone knows enough to be able to help.

edit: It's been a surprisingly active thread in a way I hadn't expected. Thank you everyone for the light debate, and I'm sorry if any of this was a source of discomfort. The internet has historically been a safe place to find out things that would be difficult to ask in person even if you know who to ask, and I appreciate the fact-checking, reality-checking, what-have-you that comes with that.

Things like:

• What things felt free to do and not free to do? Was that a quality of law or society? (e.g., freedom of speech, gay relationships, zoning, running a business, jaywalking, etc.)
• Trust or reliability in government
• Educational quality
• Relationship to the media
• What luxuries people tended to have (e.g. modern imported gaming consoles, domestically produced products, number of cars, etc.)

Posting from America here. As the great power politics seems to have heated up these past 3-10 years, it feels like the environment has become more polarized as well. Eventually I started to ask myself what exactly I was supporting or opposing philosophically, in wanting my country to have the largest influence. The measures I came up with were not things that my own country did well on, and often felt like things I couldn't get the most accurate picture on without Russian or Chinese language acquisition. I happened upon a BBC article about new Chinese graduates I guess going through what millennials did in 2008, and found the general similarity of it interesting.

OK, maybe they did something wrong; not actually giving people all potentially available discount codes when you say you will is wrong. But I don't think they did anything wrong by overriding affiliate links, and I think it's dangerous to let people convince you otherwise.

Even if replacing affiniate codes has negative consequences, in the form of lost revenue and uncounted sales, for the affiliates, it is happening entirely in the end user's browser, and in that environment the user has the right to do whatever they want. One can get extensions that strip off all affiliate codes. A user might have a case that their informed consent was not obtained by Honey for one feature or another, but if a user wants to install a browser extension that replaces all the affiliate codes in links they click, they have a right to do that and no affiliate marketer can be rightly empowered to stop them.

If we admit some right to control the user's browser's behavior on the part of affiliate marketers, why would that right stop at interference by Honey? Wouldn't any extension interfering with the sanctity of the affiliate marketing referral data then be a legally actionable offense?