I am looking for a new mouse that meets the following:

Must have:

• at least 3 (ideally 5+) programmable buttons on the top (not the sides), preferably to the outer edges (of the top), rather than in the middle
• those top buttons should not be right-handed-biased (most that I've seen put more additional buttons beside left click, and fewer near right click)

Nice to have:

• Can be configured with Linux; but I don't mind temporarily using Windows or OSX for initial and a once-in-a-while setup
• not too many buttons on the sides, since I won't be using them, so that would just drive up the price for features I won't use

I am currently using a Logitech G300s (images from DDG). I am very satisfied with it, as it meets all my criteria, but one of my primary mouse buttons is starting to unintentionally double click (on single click). I know that that is a common problem with mice in general, but I don't want to bother with DIY fixing, especially any operation that involves soldering. Prior to that, I used a Roccat Kova (images from DDG) which had only 3 additional buttons on top.

I would just buy another G300s, but it's not in stock any more anywhere that I've looked, presumably due to its age.

I've done a little websearching, and have asked ChatGPT, but everything I've come across either is biased to right-handed users, or doesn't have enough buttons on top. Most options I've seen have many buttons on the sides, but that's not the way I mouse (I move the mouse with the thumb, and ring and pinky fingers).

Hey - I'm wondering if we've got any real-life recommendations for AI's out there?

I'm not looking for a list of AI's - they're everywhere! What I'm interested in is whether and how anyone here has started to use an AI on a regular basis to the extent that you consider it genuinely useful now?

For example,

• At work with have a ChatGPT3 wrapped app in Slack which I use quite often to improve summaries and formal comms I write. I think everyone knows it's basically good at that.
• I use Pi.ai as a "sympathetic" and filtered advisor for more sensitive topics relating to mental health that I have to deal with - it's useful insofar as I'm less worried about hallucinations or bad output when I'm using it. This might be misplaced confidence to be fair, but I've not had a bad experience with it so far.
• I use ChatGPT built into Apple Intelligence more and more since getting a device capable of using it. I think the use case I'm most warming to is that "search" is less and less useful nowadays because of blog spam and assumed corrections to my searches. I can use ChatGPT as a replacement to search in a growing number of use cases.

What I'm wondering about:

• Gamma.app promises to be a .ppt replacement via AI. I'm skeptical. I have to summarise and present a lot of content at work. Having a means of an AI doing some of the lifting here would be incredible, but I remain unconvinced.

Any sites/services you use regularly and effectively that you'd recommend?

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!

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!

This is going to be a rant with a question at the end, asking how to end this infinite loop of nondelivery?

So my friend bought a new laptop from Lenovo back in December. It was supposed to be delivered by UPS but of course they were going to attempt to deliver it while my friend is at work.

He attempted to have it delivered to a relay point and the website agreed to this. The relay point never received it. When we called customer support, they said they can’t deliver it to a relay point. Despite the site letting us reprogram it to one.

Next, I chatted with Lenovo and they were like the agent cannot talk to UPS directly. There is an internal department that handles this, according to them. It will take three to five days for the investigation. No news after five days.

We called UPS again and they said they would deliver it on Monday. And then eventually on Wednesday before 1PM. My friend took half day off in the morning for this. The delivery guy called my friend at 3PM to deliver it. He asked to reprogram it to Friday. The deliveryman agreed. And now we are waiting.

If this package still doesn’t arrive, two weeks later, I am going to lose my mind!

This is even the abridged version. There was one point where the customer service person told us to go get it at the relay point when the website clearly said it wasn’t there.

I don’t understand how delivery companies like UPS fuck this up and insist on delivering during the workday.

What or how do you manage this endless circus of customer service representatives not being accountable for contradictions? Has someone cracked the code and figured out how to get it delivered at a proper time?

So, I got convinced by a KC fan to buy KC 1 cause at least it was only 5 bux so not much of my money was going to Daniel Vavre (and I'm sure there some other fuckheads working for KC since he's director and probably gets to bring in a few people to work under him). But I admit, I really really love the game. Even though I detest him, I have to admit he knows how to make a good rpg. In fact it is one of the best action based (vs turn based) rpgs I've played (I definitely think it rates much higher than Witcher and I even like it over Elder Scrolls).

But I'm not a patient person and I love what I'm hearing about KC 2 (other than the intro quest which with combined with who directed it, will really grate on my nerves cause I'll totally be focused on its treatment of women. Usually I just roll my eyes at that kind of thing or it doesn't even bug me much but when it feels like the director is actually condoning of this kind of behavoir it's different). But part of me is going to feel guilty if I cave and buy it. But, I'm weak (I eat meat and I totally agree with the fact it's unethical both for environment and for how they treat the animals).

Anyone else have a game (or that game) that they dislike the people making it but love the game and if you bought it, how did you resolve it with yourself?

Any poly folks struggling with judgement from family, friends, or strangers? I'm openly bisexual and polyamorous to my friends and some family, and I've been steadily trying to let the veil down more lately. However, I've been feeling resented and mistrusted by folks -- some online and in person. These experiences aren't exclusive to conservative regions, either. A lot of the online hate I've received has been in Greater Boston community spaces, one of the cities with the most non-monogamous folks. I suppose I'm just feeling bad and isolated about it all. Would love to hear about experiences (good and bad) y'all have had!

As the year draws to a close, let's take a moment to chat about the tools we've been using in our various crafts.

• What have been your go-to art/craft supplies this year?
• What have you tried for the very first time?
• Have you returned to using something you haven't touched in a long while?
• Have you been pleasantly surprised by something?
• Has something disappointed you?
• Was there something you dreamed about making art with, but couldn't get for some reason?

Last year's thread: 2023 art supplies highlights

Hello! Could you please recommend some hard science fiction books? I am struggling to find a good one. My favorites are Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts, but I have failed to find anything similar.

I also enjoyed The Martian by Andy Weir and The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, though in my opinion, these aren't quite what I would call hard science fiction.

Additionally, I enjoyed books that blend fiction and non-fiction, like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

What are your favorite hard science fiction books?

The question is a bit more nuanced than the title suggests, which I kept succinct for clarity’s sake.

Are there any of you living off of their original art? By this I mean works that you create according to your personal vision, and without a “list of requirements“ for you to fulfil. So, if you are a visual artist - you paint/draw/design what you want, how you want, when you want. As a musician, you play the same. Etc.

Why I am interested in this topic: I struggle to call art a hobby, since I am borderline depressed whenever I don’t engage my mind & hands to create something. But from an outside view, that’s how it looks. I work a day job, and make whatever time I can for my art. I don’t earn any money from making it.

I’ve had some experience in the past with creating visual media as a commission, and it is definitely something I am not interested in pursuing.

Therefore, if there’s anyone here who makes a living off of art, without compromising their vision, I am really interested in hearing your story & advice for how someone else can get to the same point.

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 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?

Last night while my wife was going through my Spotify to pick a song to listen to while I was driving, she mentioned that 90% of my library consists of instrumentals. (Most of which are game OSTs) I find it much more pleasant to listen to, instead of song with lyrics.

Which made me wonder, there might be some hidden/not so hidden gems that I might be missing out on!
Please share your favorite game OSTs with everyone. (New gems, old gems! Either the entire OST or even 1 song of a game! we don't discriminate!)

Bonus point if it's on Spotify

What I currently listen to:

• Armored core 6
• Shadow of the Erdtree
• God of War: Ragnarok
• Nier: Automata
• Devil May Cry 5
• Celeste
• Scarlet Nexus
• Zenless Zone Zero
• Silent Hill
• Flipwitch (Which I understand to be an 18+ game, which I have NEVER played. I just happened to find the OST on shuffle and it got me addicted. Try the song "A Witch's Thoughts")
• Cult of the Lamb
• Fable
• Atelier series

What were your favorite games that you played, and why did you feel that way about them?

They do not have to be games released in 2024. Anything you played this year is fair... game.

So I've hit on this a bit before here, but it's been a while—I stopped looking for jobs last summer & spent the rest of 2024 getting some things sorted in my own head about what I actually wanted to be doing, what I valued, and why I wanted to change anything in the first place. I love my job, not just because it's remote but honestly mostly because it's remote, but it does not pay enough & may not for a long time, so I have sort of collected together online weekend/evening/contractor part-time gigs on top, which altogether come out to around 90k. After all my soul-searching (& getting on the millenial ADHD meds train, whew), I'd reeeeally love to focus all of that into one job instead, as the downfall of the gig economy approach is not just the time investment required, it's that there's no opportunity for advancement—if I could keep one or two side hustles going, great, but that way I'd be free to let them go as needed as well, which would be a huge relief.

So that's the source for my very specific number; I would of course take more money lol.

I have experience in: adult training/instruction, CRM management, writing/editing, process analysis/efficiency/optimization, video/content creation (doesn't really fit with the rest but my resume is kind of nuts unfortunately)

I am really good at: soft skills/written & verbal communication, IT support, learning new things real quick but also very thoroughly & being able to teach them to others, making things work better/faster

I have degrees in: library science/research, education (no comp sci : / feel like that was my big mistake career path-wise, I've tried some online options more recently & am currently making headway with claude as a coding partner lol).

The real sticking point is I am currently remote & would have to make way more than 90k to be willing to go back to an office every day. My current job was an out-of-left-field career move that I wouldn't have even guessed existed, so I am open to literally any suggestions.

My wife of 3 years just told me last week that we're getting a divorce. It completely blindsided me, as there was no marriage counseling or communication about the marriage having problems from them before this, but I can't say I don't understand at least some of their reasons. They made it clear that there was no fixing things or repairing the relationship. They're leaving no matter what I do.

Other than the suddenness, they seem pretty willing to be amicable and compromise as needed, at least to an extent. We won't be able to properly separate for a while it seems like, though it's hard to predict the exact timeline at this stage. I'm currently planning a too-expensive last-minute flight back to the States to stay with my family for a little while, since I need some distance and they can be a source of comfort.

I can obviously hire and rely on a lawyer for handling the legal side of things (which will be complicated, to say the least), but I'm truly at a loss for how to handle it emotionally. I'm in my late 20s but I've never even been broken up with before this. Go hard or go home, ig. I hope there are others here who have good advice to share for this situation, because I don't know what to do now that the bottom has dropped out of my life like this. It feels like my whole future is gone. I was in a bad depressive episode already and obviously that's not been improved by this.

(Also, if one of our closer mutual online friends who lurks here is finding out this way -- sorry, she owns the Discord server so I can't exactly bring this up there. I welcome DMs from y'all.)

Let's chat random tables, fellow game masters!

• What are the random tables you are using in your games?
• Which ones are the most useful for you?
• Are you rolling on them, or do you use them as prompts?
• Did a random table ever lead to an epic moment in your campaign?
• Are there any cool random tables you are holding onto and waiting for that one perfect moment in the future when they'll finally come in handy?

so I have a setup where I have a NUC that has docker on it, one of the containers is my nextcloud that I use for sharing my files across my computers.

I also have a synology NAS which is connected to my NUC via NFS and the files themselves are stored on that NFS file via a docker volume mount.

Hopefully that made sense.

My problem: not often but it does happen where my router has an issue, today it just needed a restart. another time it was cause I deliberately disconnected it from the power not realizing it would mess up the connection between my NUC and my NAS.
Why is this an issue? it causes my nextcloud to freeze up as the files it is supposed to share are no longer available. necessitates me restarting my NUC to get the connection going again.
Thankfully hasn't happened often but still something that can be scary in the moment. My question is, is this just one of the pitfalls I have to accept of utilizing a NAS the way I am or is there a way to connect a Synology to a NUC and ensure router issues don't cause the nextcloud docker instance to freeze?

Imagine that your Steam account (or whatever other type of video games collections you have) gets permanently and irreversibly erased. Which of the titles you used to have would you then buy again without any hesitation?

Hi fellow Tilder Staters,

I write professionally for my job. I've picked up plenty of tips, tricks, and strategies from mentors and managers over the years.

I also have an English degree focused in literature.

But I've never formally studied grammar or linguistics.

Does anyone have a textbook or theory book that they could recommend in this space? I've tried to look around a bit but nothing has caught my eye, and the subject is dry enough that I don't have the time or energy to invest in one of the boring options.

I've tried before to get input on this, but online it doesn't go anywhere and IRL people don't seem to understand. Thought about putting it in the /~finance area, but I don't know that it's really a finance issue, plus things there seem to be wider-scale financial in focus. And there's no /~advice page, so here it is:

I feel like I should be making more money lol. Now immediately, that sounds greedy or either capitalistic/anticapitalistic, depending—I know it does, but hear me out. I have a great job that pays ok but not great, and tons of free time; in my mind, and if I'm being honest in my field, chasing a 5% raise is low ROI and low likelihood of even happening. There is little room for vertical movement, but enough security that it seems crazy to make any changes. Post-college, I have had a pretty varied career background, I am very good at editing, research, training, tech, etc. but I am not an "idea person" and I don't have a lot of marketability or self-promotion ability, it seems like (also no coding abilities, which is always a suggestion; I've tried, believe me, but my brain won't do it). I'd rather edit your book than write one of my own, not because I'm afraid of rejection or can't commit to doing something/run out of steam, but because the steam just isn't there.

I don't feel the need to change careers, but I am also feeling super unfulfilled. I've worked on doing things to try and fill that gap, hobbies/other pursuits/etc, but I am haunted by the fact that I am using such a small part of my bandwidth, when it seems like I could be outputting at 2x or 3x and earning similarly. I've applied for contract work, freelance, all that stuff, but it is spotty pay at best—what I want, short of a medieval patron/wealthy benefactor, is a second job I could do on top of this one. Which leads me to side-hustle-type rabbit holes on starting an Etsy shop/a YouTube channel/a Patreon page. But when it comes down to it, I don't actually feel any passion about doing any of those things, and I can't get a narrow enough niche figured out to even come up with a potential audience. I've avoided specializing because I wanted to do all kinds of things, and now I've done that, and I feel like maybe it was a mistake. I just want to have the resources available to do what I want. Bills are paid, life is good, but I feel like I am spinning my wheels: even writing this out is like a roller coaster of feeling shame that I'm not satisfied or that I'm ungrateful, then being frustrated I can't make it happen the way I want, on my own.

Because see, I didn't say I deserve more money; I want the opportunity to earn more money. There are a ton of things I would be perfectly happy doing for a living, or for a second job. And more money might not even help—if I was a trust fund baby I be in a similar situation. But what the fuck should I be doing then? I guess what I really want is for someone to say "Hey, I need this job done, I'll give you $XXk a year to do it" like it's 1980, and then I know I am serving a purpose? And I wouldn't feel guilty about time left over, because the job is Done. But part of me is afraid that, even if that somehow magically materialized, I would feel the exact same way I do now.

so what do tilderinos?

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.

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 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!

So during covid pandemic, a big issue that I kept hearing about in the news and on the Journal podcast was that the economy is hot which is bad and causes interest rate spikes from the Fed if you are in the U.S. or Bank of Canada if you are in Canada.

tbh, I never fully understood that. we live in a consumerism, materialistic and capitalist society. i thought that people buying non-stop was what corporations and American govt valued, hence why we are hit with ads everywhere we go. and yet it was somehow a bad thing and was causing economic issues?

so I looked into it and came across a reddit post that basically explained it in simplistic terms like this:
the iPhone costs 1,000$. now, if not many people can afford the iPhone cause it's out of budget, what that implies is that not many people have 1,000$ which means that 1,000$ is hard to get which raised the value of the dollar, which is good for the economy.
If a lot of people can afford the iPhone, it means lots of people can afford to spend 1,000$ which means it's not as unique position to be in anymore, to have 1,000$ in spending money which apparently makes it worth less, cause more people have access to such funds.
Moreover, besides lowering the value of the dollar, more people being able to afford the iPhone is apparently also not a tenable situation cause apparently supply for iPhones could not meet the demand if it's suddenly now in so much more demand, so the value of the dollar going lowering is not only bad for the economy, but also has an effect on supply-chain issues.

Now, if I understand correctly, during covid and shortly after, the stimulus checks were given to people, both middle and lower class. the stimulus checks allowed for lower class to be able to afford more basic necessities from what I heard. This also however, also caused middle class people to be able to afford both more basic necessities and also to spend on luxuries (gonna continue with my current example of the iPhone). So the lower and middle class people having more spending power to be able to afford their necessities and maybe splurge a bit on luxuries causes the value of the dollar to go down cause now things are more affordable to people. and the value of the dollar going down causes wall street/the fed to freak the fuck out. and this causes them to raise interest rates, which has a domino effect of causing unemployment which obv leads to less people having spending power which causes a dampening effect on how much people are buying which brings the value of the dollar back up and the Fed is happy again.

I know I have probably oversimplified some parts cause I am not an economics person and God forbid the Journal podcast actually do their job and breakdown how the economy is screwing people so most of what I know comes from online research and what I can glean from the news but is anything I said incorrect?

cause if what I said is correct, that means that whenever the government keeps saying "the economy is fine" in response to people saying the times are tough, I get confused how that's a counterargument from the govt and not actually a subtle confirmation that times are tough for people. cause what it actually means is "the value of the dollar is fine, but the people are hurting cause that is needed for the dollar to be fine"?

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?

I've been working on a few artistic endeavors recently, and have found myself grasping for inspiration. Tildes has such a lively group of creators, as we see many put on display every year in November, and I'd love to know where you all draw your inspiration from! I'm leaving this purposely vague, anything is on the table: people, places, objects, ideas, music, whatever!

You can pick just your five favorites or whatever you think is "most important" to keep or anything. The criteria is yours to decide!

Edit: Might as well add my own picks.
Hercules
Tarzan
The Emperor's New Groove
Lilo & Stitch
The Lion King (I'm not a huge fan of TLK as a film in general but I can't deny the soundtrack is too good to lose)

If the soundtrack weren't a sticking point for TLK, my fifth pick would be Brother Bear.

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.

Game designers of tildes, lend me your aid.

My BIL, the life-insurance salesman, has decided to splurge on this year's family reunion and he is renting a castle in SW Ireland next summer. I have been given the task of designing and running a murder-mystery game on one night for the ~20 people who will be staying there. Salient facts:

I refer to my inlaws as the barking and snapping (Irish surname)'s. Hilarious but sarcastic to a fault. They have little patience for depth or lore or much historical detail. This will most successfully be a game of nasty betrayals and sudden twists and turns.

There's something like 18 rooms in the castle, with extensive grounds. But alas we will be there at the beginning of July so there will most likely be a lack of atmospheric ground fog. I love a good outdoor setting, so I will most likely try to get people running through the woods and across the lawns.

The family loves their games and takes them seriously but I figure this shouldn't last more than a couple hours or they will lose focus.

I haven't conducted one of these before but I have plenty of relevant experience. I want to keep it simple with a streamlined and elegant ruleset... but it's important to also find a moment somewhere near the end to scare the living shit out of all of them.

What I have so far: Discovering the Dead Body kicks it off. A couple obvious clues and a couple less-obvious ones will get people haring off into different rooms.

Each "player" has two modes. If the lighting is normal then they are playing as themselves and actively searching for the killer. If the lighting, however, is blacklight and the person within wears a black veil then they are ghosts, and must share a clue from a list on a card. All players will be ghosts at some point, including the Dead Body. If they enter a room with blacklight, on goes the veil.

I want to incorporate the history of the locale, as well as that of deeper legends. I mean, it's fucking Ireland. But I don't want the Disney version. One of my most successful history videos is about ancient Ireland so I'd love to incorporate something of the actual historical record instead of just a bunch of Celtic fantasy bullshit.

Some will be drunk, some sober. All will be barking and snapping. Piling on some poor defenseless unfortunate (usually one of the younger aunts or uncles or cousins) is their favorite entertainment. Subplots that subvert that bullying dynamic are also welcome.

Have any of you created an experience like this? How did you approach it? What kinds of ideas does it inspire in you?

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!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like heritage foundation, net neutrality and stimulation clicker. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was experiencing FOMO.

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!

I've been the sole developer for my company's website for over a decade now. It's gone through a bunch of evolutions throughout the years, but I've been sidetracked lately and have let things stagnate as far as maintenance goes. Now, I'm looking to do some upgrades for security purposes and I'm trying to wrap my head around everything.

Some facts:

• PHP 8.0.12
• MySQL 5.7
• Symfony 5.4
• Web server is currently Apache only because that's what I've always used. I'm open to nginx or other options.
• Running on a Google Cloud VPS with Ubuntu 20.04
• I also use Google Cloud Storage to host thousands of images

My first thought was to take baby steps and start by upgrading Symfony as much as possible. However, the next major version (6.0) requires PHP 8.0.2. Symfony 6.1 requires PHP 8.1. Symfony 7.2 (the current release) requires PHP 8.2. So, then it just makes sense to upgrade PHP to the latest version.

However, I am terrified of upgrading PHP in the current (outdated) Ubuntu environment. So I might as well upgrade the distro while I'm at it.

And then, MySQL 5.7 is no longer supported, so I might as well bring that up to date too (8.0, I believe).

There will be no baby steps. I'm gonna have to just upgrade everything all at once. Which then leads me to my next question: should I stick with the self-managed VPS, or is it time to look at something like Google App Engine or Fly.io that is a little bit more managed and "locked down" than what I'm doing right now? Should I look into just going with Docker instead?

Put another way, if I'm going to start from ~scratch, what's the modern best practice to host all of this, given that I'm going to have to upgrade a bunch of different things all at once? (Turns out the "baby step" of upgrading Symfony will actually have to come last since I need to hit these prerequisites first).

Please let me know if I've left anything out. PS, security is a pretty big concern for us because we manage user auth, so I'm all for anything the cloud providers can do to take some of that responsibility away from me.

Hey all!

So I was thinking of how when looking at privacy, having a platform being a walled garden (i.e. data not being found on search engines) can feel like a worse experience for what is regarded as the open internet.

I don't have a solid solution for this. So my question to you is,

How do you respect privacy while sharing content for search engines on a platform?

I'd just like to say that I never make meta posts like this one, but for some reason this topic has really struck a chord with me on this Wednesday evening...

We recently lost a user from Tildes. I don't know which day, but I'd already noticed they weren't around a few days before I did some digging into it. The names here are not important. But this user had been a prolific poster over the last six months. As someone on Tildes who does a lot of tagging, they were high up on my 'user interaction list' in the passive way that comes from amending tags can do.

Some departing users leave all of their contributions behind, along with their username, never to be seen from again. Perhaps they regenerate with a new handle or perhaps they find pastures fresh elsewhere. Some users take all of their topics with them, along with the conversations, the ideas, the thoughts, and in my mind a little piece of the Tildes community. The latter is what happened here with our prolific user.

This has made me unusually sad. There are lots of users I miss on a personal connection level, whether that be the status they held in the community, or simply missing the elegance of their prose. Sometimes they return and I smile at my keyboard. Sometimes I check how they're doing by looking on Reddit. The sadness here comes from a feeling that when a prolific user leaves with their topics, it feels like a library user leaving the country with their borrowed library books. I've never been very good with analogies.

People talk about link rot and video game preservation and the walled gardens of the internet and it feels like this mourning over lost information from a link aggregator with a close-knit community bound up in it fits in there somewhere in the discourse.

In a comment to this topic I'm going to link to as many of the lost topics as I was able to find. These will be direct links to the articles, not to the Tildes discussion. I don't want this act to feel like grave-robbing by linking to deleted Tildes pages.

This is the end of my hopefully only foray into meta posting. I don't think I have the wordsmith-ery for it.

I got this error message this morning when making content ( replying to a thread ) first thing in my Tildes.net session

https://paste.pics/SN1N0

Oddly, I didn't have any trouble making a new thread ( this one ), just replying to existing threads.

It happened on only the second comment I tried to make this morning.

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.

I've been self-hosting for a few years. However, now I have a single server hosting all of my things whereas, before, I had multiple old machines physically isolating services. I'm getting ready to host a game server or few (at least one for Tilde) on this machine.

While I'm not a neophyte to Linux, I'm not a guru and definitely not an infosec expert.

Given that, what steps do you take to secure a Linux server, LXCs, and docker containers that are receiving port-forwarded internet traffic?

FWIW, I expect I'll have an LXC running docker containers. I can instead run a VM doing same.

Advice welcome!

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 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.

Happy end of year, everyone!

I saw a comment today on Tildes that reminded me of a type of thread that I really enjoyed back on Reddit: end-of-year awards. Those were typically in individual subreddits and involved a lot of specifics and inside jokes related to that community, but I think Tildes is a small enough place where we could do one site-wide. (Full disclosure, I am not sure if this is a great idea and am open to any and all suggestions.)

Brief explanation:

• For starters, there are no actual awards to give out, sorry. Just some pats on the back and maybe some street cred to go with it.

• The purpose of the thread is mostly to highlight cool, helpful, and interesting things or users you've seen here on Tildes in the last year. This thread is hopefully a gateway to those interesting posts/comments/discussions that you might have missed.

• Top-level comments should be an award category (for example: Most Interesting Thread, Best Discussion, Most Helpful Comment, Funniest Joke, Most Helpful User, Best Prediction, Favorite Recurring Thread, etc.) Note that none of these examples are negative because again the goal of this thread is to highlight awesome stuff that others might have missed over the last 12 months.

• Responses to those top-level comments should be the actual nominations, preferably with a link to said comment/thread, and a quick explanation as to why you think it deserves recognition.

• Upvotes serve as the votes for each category, though I encourage you to vote for as many nominees as you'd like since the awards aren't real and the points don't matter.

That's pretty much it. I'll post a few comments as examples, but hopefully it should be pretty straight-forward. Feel free to add your own award categories, and please nominate as many users/comments/threads as you'd like!

If this thread helps at least one person discover a helpful thread from 6 months ago that they might have missed, then I'll consider it a success.