This was inspired by a recent post from Your Local Epidemiologist, where she lays out a set of guiding principles for the blog going forward:

• be a steady guide, trying to avoid whiplash
• providing important context - a broader perspective
• staying grounded in evidence
• being clear about what we know and what we don't know
• approaching issues with empathy

She also references the hazard + outrage framework for risk communication. I come from a safety / risk assessment background, so we usually think of risk = severity x likelihood. But as a communication framework, hazard + outrage seems pretty useful, as talking about risk to lay people is always difficult.

Thinking about one's guiding principles, writing them down, testing them in use, seems really useful to me as a way to be more proactive and less reactive in the way that I deal with the world. So then, the questions on my mind for the Tildes community are:

• what are your guiding principles?
• how did you come by them?
• how have they evolved over the years?

Since this is a text post, I'll put mine in another post below so the responses can thread under it. And since I can never resist a quote, I'll close with:

If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values, they're hobbies.
~ Jon Stewart

As is the case with a lot of my questions, "intended for multiplayer" is as open as you want it to be.

It could be that it's a game primarily known for its multiplayer that also happens to have a campaign (e.g. one of the Call of Duty games) or it could be you playing Mario Party against yourself by trading off between your own controllers (we've all done something like this, right?).

Entirely up to you how you interpret the question.

Let us know what the game was, why you played it solo, and, most importantly, how that went for you. Did you like it? Did it give you a novel gaming experience? Were you able to work around any of its limitations? Would you recommend other people try it?

Recently my wife was complaining how her phone has been getting overzealous when flagging incoming phone spam, and as a result she's missed some important calls. It made me think about how easy it is for me to avoid spam calls, despite using a 3rd party dialer on my phone without any kind of spam ID features.

It's because around 15 years ago when Google started letting you pick your own phone number through Google Voice, I (for various reasons) needed to change my phone number. I ended up choosing one with what I thought was a really cool area code, and I've ported that number to every new provider I've swapped to so it's stuck with me since then. It turns out that all the spam callers, bless their hearts, like to spoof incoming phone numbers with the same area code as the number they're dialing. It means whenever I see a call coming from the same area code as my number it's ~100% guaranteed to be spam, and if I see a call coming from the same area code that I actually live in it's ~100% guaranteed to be something actually important (doctor, pharmacy, kids' school, something like that). It wasn't my intent when picking the number (I just wanted the cool area code), but it turned out to also be the perfect spam call ID system. (At least so long as I never move to the place that matches my area code.)

So I'm curious if anyone else has similar stories, where you did something for one reason but it turned out to actually be awesome for an entirely different, unexpected reason?

I’m in between books now, and would like to ask for some suggestions for new books to look at. I use a Kindle and the Kindle app for books usually, so it shouldn’t be difficult to find most books on Amazon.

I’m very close to finishing the Stormilight Archives by Brandon Sanderson and well into The Harrowing by James Aitcheson where i really enjoy both a lot. So if you’ve either read The Harrowing or any of the Sanderson books I’d love some recommendations on books who are in the same vein as these.

Thank you in advance!

This is the tenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Our next book will be Born a Crime by Trevor Noah at the end of February.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

This topic is a part conversation starter, part request for help in finding.

For those that are attempting to keep up with the many weird and sometimes interesting products both announced and teased recently in the field of AR/XR glasses- what are your thoughts?

Examples, off the top of my head, include a number of devices revealed at CES 2024. The Asus AirVision M1- a pair of full-HD display-in-glasses form, similar in many ways to the Xreal lineup. The new Xreal Air 2 Ultra and Xreal One line. Snapdragon's new XR2+ Gen 2 chip for high efficiency portable computing and a successor to the chip used in the Meta Quest 3 headset. The Halliday glasses, which forego any form of waveguide or combining optic and opt to project directly into the eye using a monocular microled projector. And older devices, such as the "open source" Brilliant Labs glasses which have been previous discussed on Tildes.

Personally, I'm disappointed in most (if not all) of these options, but that might largely be because the industry and I have very different ideas of what smart glasses should be. The industry is focusing heavily on social media features- cameras, filters, translation- and even more heavily on AI. Why anybody would want an LLM strapped to their face I do not know. I feel that the goal of full augmented reality (rendering tips and visuals over the real-world) is a noble one, but also not one I am particularly interested in. My ideal device would be purely a heads-up display with a long battery life. The ability to cast notifications and information to a reasonably pretty display, but the freedom to decide what. No cameras, no data collection, no overcomplications- does anyone know of any options that fulfill these criteria?

Discuss.

Hi everyone!

With my favorite F1 commentator joining the indycar crew and MBS acting crazy in F1, I want to dive into indycar a little bit this season.

I’m located in Belgium, when I checked the indycar live website it seemed like I won’t be able to stream indy500 here? (I don’t even know what indy500 is as opposed to the other Indy series? Which series should I follow? Who is awesome? Who is the stroll of indycar?)

I think it’s clear I’m a total noob here looking for some guidance. Any help is welcome, thank you!

I was talking to the other guitarist in one of my bands about the hedonic treadmill the other day. And he said to me that despite owning his swanky Range Rover for over 4 years, every time he gets in it he feels like a kid and is excited by it.

I think continued delight in the things that we already have is a really important attitude to take in life, and so I wondered what things my fellow Tilderen (yes, I'm refusing to budge on the nomenclature until I see at least one other person use it) have which they still feel the magic of owning, even after a long time.

This topic is for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app.

I'll summarize the major updates at the start of each similar topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

Recently:

Version 1.2.2 (Dec 5, 2024):

• Added advanced settings to auto-vote on topics when opening them
• Added advanced setting to hide "Reply" from text long-press menu
• Fixed inserting markdown links with parentheses
• Fixed UI bugs in profiles
• Fixed crashes opening certain topics

Happy Thanksgiving! Three Cheers version 1.2 is out for Android and iOS! (Nov 27, 2024)

• Save drafts of comment replies, edits, and private message replies
• Manage drafts via Settings
• Improved some error messages

Does not yet support saving drafts of new submissions

I know some of you were hoping for topic submission drafts, but I wanted to release what I've implemented so far with comment drafts. This version took a decent amount of time to develop, and I didn't want to delay it further by adding submission drafts in this release. Thanks for your patience!

Previous topic: September 2024

Where to get it

Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

Or sideloadable APK at https://www.talklittle.com/three-cheers/

iOS version on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/three-cheers-for-tildes/id6470950557

Join TestFlight for iOS beta testing: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

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?

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!

Given that it's a day a lot of people want to escape, I figured I may as well ask. I've been thinking about it for a while and I'm torn between some of my favourite sci fi or fantasy worlds.

Where would you go? What would you do? Any caveats, or would you just take a portal and hope for the best?

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I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts who watched through the basho.

I don't have all my thoughts together yet but wanted to post this after watching the last day of the basho to get the ball rolling on any discussion.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

I'm one of the moderators of a small / medium community. I've been doing it for around a year, with no prior experience at moderating or helping to foster an online community.

We have a section for jokes and humour, and somebody posted one of those "train dilemma" memes. It gave the choice of letting the train hit one of several groups of people. It was general enough to not name anyone specific. The options were similar to:

Let the train hit:
a) Nintendo developers
b) Sony developers
c) Microsoft developers

Fine. A bit crass, but hardly shocking.

A commenter then replied by stating they don't mind which, so long as x well known developer is shot.

Now that really threw me.

The moderation team have been divided over it, although not strongly so. We are all generally in favour of removing it. But we are concerned about over-stepping and of course the topic of free-speech has arisen.

As it came up with us, I'll also mention that there are no specific rules of the website, or this specific sub-community, to state such humour is disallowed.

Where is the line drawn with free-speech? We would certainly remove anything pro-fascism, racist, homophobic or grossly offensive, but we do have rules that cover those.

I'd be really keen to hear any views on how you would approach this and how you would justify your decision.

To be honest I have some problems explaining what I mean, which might be why I can't find a solution or explanaition for it.

I use firefox on Linux and out of habit i highlight text while reading it. I always did that and it helps me to read a lot faster and to relax my eyes while reading. It's something i don't think i can get rid of, even if I tried, it's just so deeply burned in.
As well I use to scroll the text I'm reading to the top out of the same reasons or maybe it's just habit as well, but I realised I cannot get rid of it as well :-)

So no to my problem:
Usually this works flawless, i can highlight text and have the cursor where I'm reading in the topmost visible line. But for some strange reason this does not work in the "new" wikipedia layout. where if I highlight text in the upper third of the page it scrolls upwards quite fast which just fucks up everything and makes my day bad. (this behaviour is not present in the old design which e.g. the germand wikipedia still uses)

Is it me?
Is it my browser?
Is there a way to get rid of this, so I can keep my workflow while reading and learing on wikipedia? Is somebody else observing this behaviour?
Where can I even start to look for a solution? I don't even know what to look for.

It truly bothers me, as I'm close to every day on it, and it might be my favorite website.
I heard there is a way to switch to the old wikipedia layout, which might be a workaround. But I actually like the new Layout a lot, so if there is a way to avoid that it would be great :-)