About a month and a half ago I was put on PIP to step up at work. Feedback has been good over the last few weeks but not enough I guess. I was told I was terminated today.

The job market out there is rough right now and I'm not sure what to do. I know a lot of people here have faced similar situations and everything, so I'm wondering if there's any tips/tricks/thoughts anyone has.

I'm an Android developer and was working in fin-tech adjacent work if that's relevant.

I keep seeing this term but I have no idea what it means ?

and what does it actually mean in practice. for example, what it can actually do, it seems to only be used for algorithms and such. not personal computing. I assume I don't understand because I'm unfamiliar with Quantum mechanics

It is past 5 AM as I write this and I am unable to sleep.

She initially brought it up last weekend, right after a date night with fancy dinner and concert. I reacted very, very badly. I got no sleep that night and the next morning we continued the discussion which ended with, let’s try to make this work and check in on our feelings in a week.

We couldn’t really talk throughout the week because her long time friends were getting married this weekend and she was one of the groomsmen. One of the issues she had with our relationship was my codependency on her - not the first time this quality has been observed by her. Part of what I had hoped sparked another chance was talking about all the things I have actively been doing to break free of that. And that aside, it seemed correct to allow her to participate in the wedding plans without worrying about personal life drama.

Check in finally comes Sunday night and I hear what I had feared to hear. I am much better with my reaction this time. I still don’t understand the final (to her) reason why she thinks this won’t work out. For context this is her first romantic relationship. This is not my first but my previous ones were… I’ll just say that I just said yes to suitors even though I didn’t have strong feelings for them. For both of us we were unsure of a lot of things - sexuality, romance, all that, and it was something we’d both find out together. When she came to the conclusion that she is somewhere on the aroace side of the spectrum, I was okay with that. (I think a year ago I posted on Tildes talking about my experience as someone on the ace spectrum.) Her final conclusion is that she feels I could do better with a partner that accepts me for who I already am and can also show it better. I can’t convince her that wanting me to be more confident in myself isn’t changing me, that I don’t need all these things people expect in most relationships. I’m still a little upset that she mentioned the friends’ wedding vows and how she felt she could never give that to me. I don’t see why she thinks my happiness will be greater, because I am telling her that I would be content to just do things with her that current society typically only associates with couples - buying a house, chores, cooking for two. (I know roommates exist and they participate in such things sans maybe purchasing property. but I guess I want the long term feeling of safety over uncertainty.)

Pause: I believe that she doesn’t need a reason at all to end things. I can be upset and bargain but at the end of the day if she feels we will both be happier this way, that’s that. The door is open regardless.

Recognizing that, I still just feel… empty. I moved across the state to move into a new apartment with her. My only friends/aquaintances here are through her. My friend groups are all online, though I did reconnect with some high school friends after over a decade of not keeping touch. But I’m not close enough to most of those online friends to even talk about this to, hence typing it out into the internet void.

I also resent this claim that someone else can make me happier. I’m not saying there aren’t other fish in the sea, but I had never been in the market for fish. This was someone I met online 5+ years ago who I vibed really well with, who I asked out because I didn’t want this to end. It typically ends when they find a romantic partner or another person to talk to who currently shares the same fixation as them at a point in time. I’m not going to go out of my way to find someone who can fit that very particular mold. I already have plenty anxiety as it is because my mold feels alienated enough from society’s expectations of what a long term committed relationship should look like.

I don’t know why I can’t just sleep. I’m fortunate that living situation is not an issue. This is such a first world problem. It is almost 7 AM now and I’ll be getting up to feed the cats and tell her on her way out to pilates that I’d like for us to continue discussing when she’s back, which I hope she is open to.

The blaze has officially ignited!

The November 2025 Backlog Burner is officially live. Use this topic to post about the games that you play.

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• You do NOT need to finish games unless you want to. The point is to try out games and have fun, not force ourselves to play things we're not interested in.

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Sao Paulo Grand Prix
Autódromo José Carlos Pace
November 7-9, 2025

Next race:

Las Vegas Grand Prix
Las Vegas Strip Circuit
November 20-22, 2025

I've been working through my read list and for a while everything was either phenomenal or good enough to entertain.

Then this one. My goodness. I don't like the author. I don't like the narrator. I don't like the other of two characters in the story (so far). I'm piqued by the central mystery, but I can just tell that this is one of those stories where the mystery is going to remain an abstract MacGuffin around which the characters and their flaws are explored. I can't imagine any of this will turn around, but I'm on chapter 3 and about a third of the way through.

So now I'm faced with the choice to finish or abandon. I've been trying to finish it because a friend of mine mentioned having a personal policy of finishing every book she starts, and I am inspired by that. But so far it's just lead to reader's block.

I'm going to get through it, because I'm stubborn, but I don't think I'll enjoy it. Has anyone else ever hate-read a story? What was it? I'm happy to share the one that spawned this thread but only if people want to hear about a book that I've judged in the first third.

(this is all light-hearted, I wouldn't read it if I really hated it that much)

Hello!

I recently reworked my setup such that I have my drive which holds the operating systems (dual boot of Windows 11 and Linux Mint Cinnamon) and another drive which holds all my actual data. This is my first dive into trying to move to Linux as my daily driver but I'm noticing some performance issues.

The first thing I noticed is that transfer speeds are much less than expected. Copying a large file within my data drive I get about 300MB/s on Linux, which is pretty slow for M.2 drives- I get about 10x that speed doing the exact same operation on Windows. I could be okay with this but I also noticed that some video files, like the 4K mp4s off my phone, are virtually unplayable. They'll run at maybe 1fps and/or bog down the UI so much I cant even use the seek. This is the case in both the default media player and VLC. These same files play with no issue on Windows.

I suspect the reason for all this stems from my data drive being NTFS, though my file system and Linux knowledge is pretty weak so this is just a theory. Any ideas / best practices that might help me here?

Hi Tildenauts,

There's a custom at Tildes, that sort of grew organically out of "what should we call ourselves?" threads, to refer to fellow Tilderians in ever changing ways. This happened because there was no obvious, non-cringy answer and anyway who cares? That's my read on it anyway, I didn't follow closely. Plus the idea of online in-groups is kinda cringy itself, but also inevitable because we're humans. The whole concept begs for ironic resignation.

Anyway, fellow Tildinites, it occured to me that I've been coming here on and off for a long time. Since not too long after it launched I think. And it's been great. I consider Tildes a huge success in its mission, or my interpretation of it: be a comparitively intimate forum where people are thoughtful and less reactionary than elsewhere online. Throw in a (just) large enough userbase to include a wide variety of life experience and perspectives and you've got an oasis in an ever more polarized and reactionary internet.

Tildes reminds me of earlier internet forums, when the tone, pace and motivations for online communication were less capitalized, in various senses of the word. Niche subreddits during Reddit's golden era are another example. It's a better vibe. I'm guessing that, during the various Reddit exodii, a fair amount of people who share that nostalgia ended up here.

I even have some nostalgia for the early days of the platforms. MySpace! Early instagram was gorgeous. Even Facebook had its moments. My social media participation has always been below average, unless you count the years where any online socializing was unusual in the general population, but it's been a semi-consistent part of essentially my whole adult life both personally and professionally. Thinking about online socializing, it's funny how it's sort of its own thing. Kind of in its own social category, a new one that we recently invented. Maybe, in part, it's because the internet is a sort of buffer, and in those buffered interactions we're all a little different. In both good and bad ways. Lately it feels unbalanced towards bad, but perhaps it will swing back.

It feels like the Tildian moderation strategy, and guidelines, have successfully created a culture that's now self sustaining to some degree. And I think that culture is pretty great. It's not perfect, in the way that nothing people do can ever be perfect, especially where communication is concerned, but it's beautiful and I'm grateful it exists.

So, cheers to Tildes! I'd love to hear what other Tilderianites think about Tildes.

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!