Welcome back to the good news thread where we share the news that makes us happy, brings us joy, or is maybe just super cool. Personal news is also welcome!

Note:For this thread, even if something happy also reveals the sadness at the heart of the world, we're going to focus on the joy here.

Personally - and keeping it spoiler free - I thought Season 4 was much better than I expected it to be. It felt a lot more sincere and there was just a lot more going on than in some of the other seasons.

Wondering if anyone had any thoughts they want to share?

I recently finished The Crippled God and loved the book and the entire series. I'm already looking forward to a reread through the series to notice new things and see how events play out from the perspective gained after finishing the series.

I'm still trying to get my thoughts in order for this whole series, but I had some questions that I thought would be interesting to hear from people here after talking about it a bit with my coworker.

What were some of your favorite characters?
Favorite moments?
What did you not see coming?
How did you feel about the perspective shift on the Crippled God as the series progressed?
Have you reread the series, and did you enjoy it more during an additional read?
Anything else fun you'd like to talk about for these books

Please note, this is a discussion of the 10 Malazan Book of the Fallen novels. I've yet to delve in to the rest of the Malazan series, and I am taking a break before I start on the Novels of the Malazan Empire series.

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.

This is the first Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twentyfirst overall. We are discussing Fire on the Mountain by Bissen. At the end of February we will discuss The Truth by Terry Pratchett.

This is the first time that I as your coordinator have not finished the book myself. It was not my cup of tea and I might or might not add my impressions to the discussion.

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.

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.

Let me start off by saying that I'm exhausted by AI hype. Being interested in LLM agent technology (AI agent hereafter for brevity) means skimming over a lot of hype for one or two useful, semi reality based, bits of information. Maybe the part that I find the most frustrating is how effective the hype is. I don't know if there's ever been a hype cycle like this. Probably a big part of the reason for that is the internet has already proven, within living memory for most people, that technological revolutions really can change everything. Or mess everything up. Either way they generate a lot of economic activity.

So this post is not that. I'm not going to tell you about how AI agents are the second coming for Christ. I'm not selling anything.

Fairly early into learning about AI agents I wanted a way to connect to the agent remotely without hosting it somewhere or exposing ports to the internet. I settled on tailscale and a remote terminal and moved on, I rarely used it. Somehow the tiny friction of "Turn on tailscale, open terminal app, connect, run agent" was enough to make it not feel worth it.

I know I'm far from the only person who had the same "I want it remote" thought, the best evidence: OpenClaw. It's just one of those things that everyone naturally converges on.

If you're not familiar with OpenClaw, the TLDR is: Former founder with more money than he'll ever need vibecodes a bridge between instant messenger apps and LLM APIs. Nothing about it is technically challenging or requires solving any particularly hard problems. It almost immediately becomes the fastest growing GitHub repo of all time and is currently at number 14 for number of stars. It blew up the (tech) internet like very few things ever have. Within months he was hired by Open AI.

OpenClaw now does more than just connect messaging and agents, but I believe that one piece is the killer feature. My tailscale terminal solution, combined with a scheduled task or a cron job and some context files could already do all of the things that OpenClaw can do, and countless people had already implemented similar solutions. But I think it was the tiny bit of friction OpenClaw removed that was responsible for a lot its popularity.

I thought that was interesting but I have no interest in the security nightmare that is OpenClaw, or the "sentience" vibe for that matter, so I built my own tool.

Essentially it's just a light secondary harness combined with a bridge between Signal and Claude Code. It does some other things too, things I wished existing harnesses did, some memory and guidelines, automated prompts and reminders to wake the agent up and have it do stuff, some context to give the agent some level of persistence, make it less LLMy, less annoying. None of that is particularly interesting though.

Once I got it working (MVP took less than a day) and started playing with it, the OpenClaw phenomenon made a lot more sense. Somehow having the agent in a chat interface, with almost zero friction (just open the chat and send something) was cooler than it had any reason to be.

I can't explain it any better than that at the moment. Not only was it kinda fun, it lent itself to a whole range of "what ifs". What if it could do X? What if I wrote a tool that gave it Y capability? I've been experiencing that for some time, but somehow agent in your pocket has a different feeling.

Here's an example of a "what if". What if it could do our grocery shopping? I definitely want that. I already had a custom browser tool that I built for agent coding assistance so I was most of the way there. It was just a matter of teaching the agent to login and navigate a website, something they're already trained to do. Some hand holding, a few helper scripts, and an evening's worth of hours later and I had it working. The agent can respond to a shopping request by building a shopping list based on our most recent orders, presenting it to us for approval/edits in a Signal group chat, doing searches for any additional product requests and adding the finalized order to the cart. It could also checkout the order and schedule the delivery time but I'm doing the last 2 clicks manually for the time being. It's an idiot savant, it seems like a bad idea to give it access to my credit card. Maybe eventually.

The fact that I can handle shopping with a couple of signal messages feels effortless in a way that handling shopping by connecting to my PC terminal remotely via tailscale terminal wouldn't have. Especially when I can include people in the loop who have no interest in tailscaling anywhere. Everyone can use messaging apps.

I imagine before long solutions like this will be built in, either in the grocery websites and apps, or into the frontier harnesses themselves. There will probably be agents everywhere, for better or worse. Probably I'll wish that the agents would all fuck off. In the meantime it's exciting how easy it is to get these tools to do useful things.

Hi friends,

Given the current state of AI and other technologies, do you consider higher education to still be worth pursuing? For those of you with children, will you be advising them to go to college?

I’m asking because I am enrolled in a masters program for statistics and have ~2 years left. I’m concerned that by the time I’m finished, the degree won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on. Like many of you, I work in software. Some days I think I should be learning an entirely different skill set in a non tech related field to diversify my value instead of doubling down on a potentially dying field.

I am not really interested in “you should pursue education for the sake of education”. While this is probably true, at the end of the day I need a way to make money to survive and education is the historical way of increasing one’s value in the job market. Furthermore, I can educate myself for far cheaper if education from a university is no longer considered valuable.

Anyone else in the same boat? Am I being dramatic? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like liberation, archive today and spaces.third. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was at a loss.

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!

On Monday I was in my local mall and there was one of those gem / crystal shops. I have no idea how these people make rent and salaries, so I figured I'd take a little look around.

I ask the dude for a stone to make me happy and he gives me a few options then suggests this other luck / wealth one; $3! Well, me, being a genius, bought both and immediately bought a lottery ticket.

Wednesday rolls around and I just checked the numbers. After nearly 20 years of never winning anything more than a buck or a free ticket, I won $108 (4 8 15 16 23 42 oh my!)

If we ever do a meet up, I'm gonna be 30lbs heavier with all the rocks in my pocket. I really need a stone for tagging this nonsense post...

This is the ninth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing The City We Became by N K Jemisin. Our next book will be Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson at the end of January.

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.

Eagleson's Law states

"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else."

I keep reading how fewer and fewer of the brightest developers are writing code and letting their AI agent to do it all. How do they know what's really happening? Does it matter anymore?

Curious to hear this communities thoughts

Studios these days tend to make a lot of movies reusing existing IPs because that's what they know will sell.

You have the "new entry in a long running franchise" kinda IP utilizing movies, like say Alien Romulus or the latest MCU film.

Then you have the "legacy sequel" and "remake", when there might have been only 1-3 original movies, and they bring it back 15+ years later. These are often called "cash grabs", "disrespectful to the original", "unaware of what made the first one good", or something similar. Other times, though, they can be genuinely good, if not better than the first one in some ways.

The Naked Gun (2025) is the one that inspired this post. I went in without any expectations, and I thought it was a great time. They had some really good jokes about life in the 2020s (such as Tesla door handles being death traps, for example) that I thought were delivered very well. Also, since the genre of parody movies in the style of The Naked Gun or Airplane essentially died off, having a new one felt actually necessary unlike many phoned-in legacy sequels.

Another example that comes to mind is Blade Runner 2049. Before it came out, the idea of a Blade Runner 2 was so ridiculous, I believe it was a throwaway South Park gag. People assumed that if it ever came out, it'd be a cash grab. But it ended up being so good, I've heard people argue in places like Tildes that it's better than the original.

The third example I can think of is Top Gun: Maverick. Ever since it's release I've see a lot of people online sing its praises whenever it's come up. In fact, there is a night-and-day difference in the Rotten Tomatoes score for the two films, with the original having a 59% and the legacy sequel having a 96%.

Can you think of any other legacy sequels or remakes that hold a candle to the original film(s), or surpass them? Bonus points if it's one nobody expected to be good until it released.

Given some other very strong and interesting discussion on male loneliness recently (I'm intentionally not linking to avoid adding to drama or bringing that tension here), I thought I'd try and spark a discussion on what I see as a major problem that addresses male loneliness significantly without digging into the thorniness of gender norms and responsibilities: the death of third spaces.

There has been a decent amount of writing on the fact that third spaces - spaces that are not home or work where people can meet, hang out and build community - have been disappearing since at least the 90s (and really going extinct since Covid), and that we need to actively recreate them. But I have not yet seen any proposal that I think could be easily replicated and addresses the core needs that third spaces address. In fact, I haven't even seen any agreed-upon definition of what an ideal third space is, or what specific needs they should address!

So, let's talk about it. In no particular priority or order:

• What are some third spaces you enjoy or fondly remember?
• What are the key features of third spaces to you? Do they need to be free, or just low enough cost that people can join in relatively easily?
• What key needs should a good third space address?
• Who should run them? The government? Community groups? For-profit?
• Are there any groups or initiatives that have shown a good formula for re-creating third spaces across their communities?
• How do we ensure people are motivated to join third spaces? We aren't going to get really lonely, isolated people out just by opening up doors most of the time.

Back in the relatively recent years of 2017(or maybe not, that's nine years ago already), smartphone standards were far below what they are today. You could find phones configured with less than a gigabyte of RAM and 16GB of storage could be considered reasonable. Granted, these weren't going to be considered spec beasts during their time, but they were serviceable for the price. However, as compute power increased, these stragglers failed to hold on after being cluttered by user activity like bottlenecked storage or simply higher spec requirements. Thusly, Android Go was born around the tail end of 2017.

I don't intend to make this a history post, but just for the sake of comprehensiveness, Android Go really took stride by doling out optimizations for barebones cellphones and limiting some features like picture in picture and split screen. It really hit it's stride around Android 11 to 12, when phones were still transitioning to modernly reasonable specs.

Mayhaps the most surprising part is that the main constituent of Android Go is essentially a hard-bound toggle set by the manufacturer. But what may be overlooked is that Android Go still exists in the present day. So some developers still end up using it! But why does it still see use in the present day?

In the current iteration of Android Go, phones with 4GB of RAM or less by default are required to use Android Go. But nowadays, we can utilize virtual RAM extensions by allocating some storage space as quick read memory in settings. So this gives manufacturers the power to provide 8GB Android Go phones, making them honestly ovespecced for their on paper capabilities. Often times, these phones have to tone down their bloatware too, so that they don't sap the phone of too much power.
It isn't all upside though, as the aforementioned limitations on multitasking features are arguably the biggest deal breaker.

Manufacturers that use Android Go today are those that have models that cater to ultra-budget and emerging markets. Lower end Motorola and Redmi phones are the ones that are widely available. A notable example are all the phones of Transsion, whose main target market is in Africa and emerging SEA countries.

What's the experience of using it today though?
Aside from the PiP and split screen, The biggest difference isn't really all that strict: the Android Go apps. These can even be downloaded on regular Android and are often just stripped down and more data efficient versions of official Google apps that haven't been given the fresh do-over of Android Go itself. The notable exception is that Android Go will always have Google Assistant, for Google doesn't have plans to release a version of Gemini for Go. Which is ironic as EoL Android phones with lower spec than the current maximum of Android Go(4GB RAM) actually do have Gemini OTA updated on them. Go phones are trying to modernize, so they nowadays have 120hz screens, punch-hole cameras, and enough compute power for everyday. And yet they still compromise by having SD card slots and headphone jacks. The rest is really in the hands of your OEM. Samsung, Redmi, and the Transsion phones all have their little tweaks on the software, some being a little more egregious than most (cough Samsung cough). Motorola should be mostly stock though.

All in all, I just wanted to spread the word that Android Go still exists. Honestly, considering the world RAM crisis, we might actually see more devices on the horizon that utilize Android Go. What're your thoughts?

At a visceral level I hate Art Deco. I'm all for elegance in architecture, but something about it feels so self-aggrandizing, isolating, and hollow. On the other hand, I think Brutalism, when not overdone, is great. A medium sized Brutalist building with a little bit of moss on the outside and an abundance of plants inside, chef's kiss.

1

A few days ago I started watching "Hirogaru Sky! Precure", after seeing someone post a clip from it and being like "its funny how when they say the word white they instead say hwhite". I looked at the clip and was like yeah they do say "hwhite", after which I thought, "hey isn't this the magical girl anime where they have a magical boy?" I got curious, and after confirming that with some random wiki I found, I went and decided to watch a bit of it.

I pretty quickly learned how the show works, it's extremely formulaic. Each episode is 24 minutes long, but out of those 24 minutes probably at least maybe like 6 minutes, or one quarter, is spent on fully copy pasted scenes which are basically fully the same between episodes. The obvious ones are the intro and outro (which is pretty normal for anime), but there are also minutes long transformation sequences where the heroes transform from ordinary people into magical girl heroes by doing a dance while saying some random fancy words while a lot of flashy effects happen in the background. Each* episode also has a monster, that even has the same name every time even though its a different monster every time. Oh also the villain creating the monster has a copy pasted effect. And each of the main heroes has a spell that has a copy pasted effect when they use their special "move".

None of this is actually very important, I am just trying to say that the creators might be trying to go more for quantity over quality. Which is probably pretty obvious also because they are making literally one episode each week? And I do mean each week, I am looking this up right now and apparently the show has been running from 2004 and there have been 1067 episodes during that time, which according to my vibes based calculations means they missed maybe like 3 weeks on average each year. It might also be obvious from the fact that it's target demographics is basically preschool children.

Anyways what I am trying to say that this is slop right? Its kinda mindless, its the same over and over. Oh, but that first day I did watch 9 episodes of it in a row. From a big part it was because I really wanted to see the magical boy show up. But I also can't deny that I enjoy it. I continued watching it the next day, even after I saw the magical boy show up, after all. I think I saw like 15 episodes now (so no spoilers please, haha), and I want to see more. I've been feeling kind of down, hopeless, and without motivation for quite a long time, and the sort of naive positivity in the show at least sort of makes me a bit optimistic, at least very temporarily. And it also makes me almost (or not almost) cry.

At the same time I feel very guilty of liking it. And I've been thinking really hard about why.

The fact that it's kinda dumb is definitely a part of it, but it can't really bother me that much considering how many hours of my life I have wasted playing videogames mindlessly, or watching/listening to Youtube videos which might be even dumber, as an example I probably watched more than 1000 episodes of Northernlion playing the Binding of Isaac. It's kinda just inevitable that people waste a lot of their time, and there's nothing wrong with that really right. Well, when I was trying to fall asleep but instead kept on pondering my thoughts about this I did decide to go talk with my room-mate, which resulted in us talking about this topic, and life in general until like 2 am, I am really thankful that he's the kind of person who I can do that with. Our discussion didn't really come up with a concrete conclusion, we just kinda were like, "yeah life kinda sucks but it's better to not dwell on that, and oh yeah you probably actually kind of need to consume some lower quality media for the higher quality more thinky media to actually hit more" and then I went to sleep.

The second and I think bigger part is that it's literally made for like 8 year old girls. Uhhh, and there's kind of no way around that I think? Like that just feels embarrassing to watch for me. For context, I am kinda basically a guy even tho I am also probably more feminine than most (maybe it'd be fairer to myself to say that I am nonbinary, but you know, if you are nonbinary in a forest where no one can see you are you really nonbinary? yes? yes. but also I am just perceived as just a guy by most people so lets keep it simple.), it still feels basically illegal to like something like this as an adult guy. When I examine this more I do think it definitely shouldn't feel like that. If someone tells me they like Pokemon I don't really find it weird at all, even though it's theoretically made for preschool boys. Or maybe more similar is what I am guessing is My Little Pony, which I never watched, but which a lot of guys on the internet liked pretty visibly. I even met someone who I really respected who told me that he liked the show. And I did feel a bit iffy about that, but also when actually thinking at least somewhat critically I saw no problem with. I guess the same is for Precure. If I think about it, I just feel it's sort of weird, but also just kinda fine. I thought about how cool it'd be to make a cosplay of Cure Wing (the magical boy in the show), I've been getting into sewing, and I do think it might not be that difficult to make. And then I think how I could like be silly and try do some of those dances from the show in that cosplay. But then I immediately think how it's too much. And how embarrassing is that I am even thinking about that. I just don't really know.

2

Just a few hours before writing this post I saw a video by Jeffiot called Peak Art, Peak Slop. I'd recommend watching it, it's sort of related to what I wrote about here, but not really. Very, very, oversimplified it tries to somehow explain why something like Twin Peaks might be better than a Mr Beast video. It basically says that all the edges of Mr Beast videos are perfectly sanded off to make it as easy to digest as possible, which they succeed at very well, but it to really enjoy given closer examination, and so when you watch one you don't even really remember what you watched. While something like Twin Peaks breaks a lot of conventions that make things easy to watch, but which also makes it quite memorable. I do take some slight issue with that -- for example, because I can kind of think of what happens in some Mr Beast videos, for example I think in one he recreates Squid Game, though thinking about it I am not really sure if I even actually saw that video. And for example because I did watch all of Twin Peaks, but also can't really remember all that much that happens in it, though again when in the video Jeffiot mentions some of the things I did think to myself yeah I sort of remember that.

I am definitely taking this a bit too literally and sort of just wanted to try be a bit funny here. In reality I think it's just true that something like Twin Peaks makes you think more, and even though it's made in a way that isn't the easiest to watch, thinking about it is really interesting and makes it memorable. There definitely are parts I can think of immediately since they were so so so memorable -- for example episode 8 of season 3 -- even if I don't fully remember the specifics.

Which finally gets me to my point. Precure made me think a lot too. And I sort of remember what's happening in it, and even if I forget the specifics, I don't really think I am ever completely forgetting that I watched it. So I think after all this it might not really be slop, even though it definitely is a bit low quality, and a bit stupid, and made in a way to be easy to watch. It's sort of in a weird way where the context of me not really being the target audience (I think? like maybe I am being unfair here considering they did decide to have a magical boy after making the 900 episodes or whatever before it so maybe they wanted to expand the audience? I have no idea honestly) makes it be more interesting then it otherwise might be? I think? Like while it's definitely made to be easy to watch I did also describe why watching it makes me feel pretty guilty, so that kind of makes it not that easy to watch, right? Or maybe I am just making stuff up to make myself feel better about watching it.

Ok, this is besides the point but I do want to defend Precure (or at least the 15 episodes I watched, I guess I can't vouch for the 1050 others or however many there are) a bit more. I do still think it's better than something like Mr Beast, since it at least has a genuinely positive message and tries to make people be kind and think about what other people feel, which has to be worth at least something right? Meanwhile Mr Beast instead does basically the most parasocial things imaginable, I guess on the very surface he's giving out money, but like he's using the money that to bribe people to embarrass themselves, or even sometimes harm themselves. So I am trying to say that while both are probably slop, some slop is still better than other slop. Shrug.

I am not really sure which group to put this in? Maybe this should be somewhere else instead? Probably ~anime? Or ~tv? ~life? ~lgbt? Feel free to move this elsewhere, I don't really know.

Personally, I find RPGs to be at their best when they are reasonably short - somewhere between 5 and 20 hours. Games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound seem to come to mind. For more open-ended experiences like Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim I find that I generally lose interest after somewhere between 30-50 hours regardless of how addictive the gameplay is.

I haven't played tabletop RPGs so I don't have anything to say about them, but please feel free to chime in with them as well.

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.

So here's a dilemma I'm not sure what to do about. It's really minor, and in the long run who cares, but here's the thing:

Today a link was posted whose link is a URL in Japanese katakana characters. Since DNS only supports ASCII characters, those URLs get encoded as punycode. So, the site's URL gets translated from https://マリウス.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/ into https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/.

This is a hacky solution from 20 years ago. It works, but nowadays browsers automatically translate "マリウス" into "xn--gckvb8fzb" transparently, so you never really see the "xn--gckvb8fzb". Unfortunately, Tildes' tag system is one of the parts of the site that only accepts roman characters, so there's no way to tag something with like source.マリウス.

So what do we do here? Tagging something with source.xn_gckvb8fzb is obviously not ideal.

In this case, Japanese in particular has a neat and tidy solution. Romanji. Every katakana character is a syllable, and each syllable has another character or pair or characters using English glyphs. So, マ, リ, ウ, ス is: Ma, Ri, U, Su, or "mariusu", the Japanese pronunciation of the Roman name Marius.

So, if we want to transliterate the word phonetically (ie: in Japanese at least, converting the katakana glyphs directly into their romanji equivalents), we should tag it source.mariusu, or if we want to translate it, it should be source.marius.

A lot of other languages with non-roman letters are not going to be as clean since they don't have a clear transliteration of their character set into ASCII, but in the case of Japanese, I dunno, it seems like it's begging to be converted into romanji. I really just don't know though. It's a dilly of a pickle.

ANYTHING must be better than linking to source.xn_gckvb8fzb since that's literally encoded gibberish not meant to be read by humans. Not quite sure what the alternative should be though.

Anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk.

This is the twelfth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Our next book will be Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky at the end of April.

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. Also, this month will be slightly different. I have been exceptionally busy and didn't finish the book this time. I am hoping that you all who did read it will come up with interesting questions in addition to your comments/ reviews.

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.

(I wasn't sure if I should post this in ~talk or ~tech. I went with ~talk because I feel like I'm about to spend a whole lot of this post rambling. Also, be warned: This is a long post.)

A summary of this post: My personal decision to try to preserve my own online privacy, the chaotic equilibrium that is me attempting to make sense of my feelings towards AI and the current zeitgeist, and the tiny concessions I've had to make in navigating all of this makes me feel, at best, tired, and at worst, a crazy person. I am tired of the direction the internet is going, I am tired of the endless discourse about AI, and my chronic tiredness is all marinating together into a tired admixture of tired chicken soup.

First of all, hi everyone. I don't post here as often as I maybe would like to. Randomly chiming in with a big ol' post like this a bit daunting. Participating in an online community isn't a muscle I flex very often nowadays, which is actually relevant to what I'm about to talk about.

Lately for a long fucking time now I've just been tired of the direction in which the internet, specifically the "corporate web", has been heading. This all started when I first joined Tildes; around that time was when the big Reddit API fiasco happened, leaving a bad taste in my mouth, and it was not long after when AI started to become A Big Thing. If you had asked me why these things had left a bad taste in my mouth back then, I wouldn't have been able to respond with anything articulate, just "big tech bad".

In the three years that have passed, I've developed enough of an opinion and have gone through enough soul searching to give a more concrete answer to why I don't like how things are going:

• Everybody wants my data, and I'd rather not give it to them
• I am tired of finding figurative AI hairs in my figurative sandwich
• Every company wants infinite growth at the expense of everything that made that company good, if it was ever good
• It's really hard to find a third space on the internet these days
• Almost nobody I know cares about any of this

Among privacy-conscious folks and small internet communities like Tildes, none of the above are particularly novel thoughts. And yet I think about all of this frequently enough that I felt the need to post a topic here for discussion. In this post, I'm going to get on my little soapbox, recount how I got to this mind space, and attempt to explain why I find all of this both endlessly tiring and constantly present in my mind.

Everybody wants my data, and I'd rather not give it to them (and almost nobody I know cares about any of this)

In the past few years I've taken the steps realistic for me in order to protect my online privacy. Why? Well, I hate being advertised to. I hate the idea of surveillance-as-a-service. I'm fortunate enough to be able to just pay for, or configure/self-host, things that do the thing they're supposed to do without knowing that I'm a 512 year old nonbinary alien from like, Nova Arrakis Prime the 2nd, Esq. or something (I am not that old, that is not how I identify, and I'm obviously not from there). I just don't buy the idea that everybody on the internet is a consumer who needs to accept this compromise in order to participate. Again, this might not be novel for a lot of you reading.

For me this has involved switching away from Gmail as an email provider, ditching Windows for Linux everywhere, cancelling my YouTube Premium subscription, deleting Facebook/most Meta stuff, browsing behind a VPN, etc. Some things I'm working on going further on; some things, like deleting Instagram, I don't want to do because that platform is how I connect with a lot of my friends. Essentially I've done what's realistic for me.

All of this has worked out fine for me. My quality of life has not measurably changed as a result, other than maybe the fact that it's slightly inconvenient to open up a new browser session and log in to my otherwise-abandoned Google account just to interact with a random Google Sheet someone sent me.

The first bit of mental friction stems from discussions I've had with my partner on this topic. She's also privacy-minded, and so isn't against the idea of taking very similar actions. But she's not in a place where she can just do so as easily as I did, either because it's massively inconvenient for her (all of her data is holed up in Google services), would require a very large mindset/workflow shift (She is not technical enough to switch to Linux without a ton of friction, for example), or would damage her relationships (It's completely unrealistic to get everybody she knows to switch to Signal tomorrow - hell, she doesn't even want to do it herself to message me). I want to be very clear that none of this is inherently bad or a stain on her character or whatnot. My point is that privacy looks different for everybody, especially over time.

Extrapolate that friction out to people who aren't as close to me though, and it feels somewhat like dying by a thousand cuts. Not in the sense of mental anguish, just general fatigue. Over 50% of my communication with my good friends takes the form of them sending me memes on Instagram. I react and reply because I'm not just going to ghost them because of muh privacy. But there's that like 1% of my brain that goes "yeah I wish you wouldn't do that". I have not bothered to ask them to stop, because I don't (yet) care to proselytize to them in the name of privacy at the risk of shutting down what is effectively one of their love languages.

The thing is, they either aren't aware of the degree of data collection going on on every major internet platform, or they don't care. I do not believe myself in the slightest to be superior to them because of this. I don't fault them for either, and I, again, don't care to intervene because I don't want to be the person that gatekeeps the entire internet from them in the name of rebelling against big corpo.

So yes, I would say the majority of my friends are not as opinionated on this as I am. Because of this, I sometimes feel I'm a little crazy whenever I propose to my partner the idea of self-hosting our own file storage, or when I happen to say "Yeah, I try not to use Google Maps really. Why? Oh, I just don't want them to know where I've been". But then I talk with those of my friends who share this mindset, or browse online communities which do, and I feel normal again. And then I bounce between these circles, and I feel, I dunno, weird.

Interlude: The AI bubble and my pride as a software engineer

Frankly, I don't know how to feel about AI. This is compounded by the fact that I am a software engineer both by trade and as a hobby.

As a cultural phenomenon, I am pretty sick of it. I cannot stand AI-generated ads, AI-generated media, AI-generated writing, AI-generated whatever. I also cannot stand ads about AI-generated ads, AI-generated media, AI-generated writing, or AI-generated whatever. The last time I was spoonfed information about a topic to a remotely comparable degree was back when crypto/NFTs were the monster of the week. This round of industry hype has felt orders of magnitude more prevalent and exhausting.

As a software development tool, it's... fine. I was pretty against AI-assisted coding at first, but after having learned how to properly utilize it (whatever "properly" means), I've found it pretty helpful as of late. I'll usually hand-write the code and patterns I want the LLM to use, tell it "ok, now do this everywhere", approve/reject its output, and it gets a lot right with an acceptable amount of post-fact correction from me. It's also been useful as a learning tool: These past few months I've been working on a project that involves data mining/parsing a proprietary encryption/encoding format for a reasonably popular video game. I was not comfortable working with binary formats to this extent before, but after several back and forths with Claude and an earnest effort to understand just what the fuck it was writing to my codebase, I feel somewhat more knowledgeable now.

The tension I've had to balance given my above stance: I work at an AI startup.

Everyone around me is AI-pilled out the wazoo. This isn't meant to be an insult. They're all great people whom I get along great with, and I like my company/don't hate our vision enough to jump ship (inhales copium). It's just that I constantly have to deal with stuff like:

• Vibecoded PRs, which I have the wherewithal to push back on when appropriate, but in so doing must balance maintainability vs. urgency (and all that other pragmatism crap that comes with being a software engineer)
• AI-flavored communications - I do a mean ChatGPT impression. "That's an excellent observation. The tension you're feeling isn't imagined. It's real. If you want, I can break down the reasons why people tend to pour the cereal before the milk—just say the word."
• Building the meta-inference layer through a combination of carefully curated ground truths, a robust evaluation pipeline, and a multi-step, quantized agent selection algorithm that's resilient to both external disturbances and continuous platform evolution (this is basically a real sentence I had to read in an engineering strategy document someone put out)

And so, similar to the privacy dilemma I spoke about earlier, I find myself constantly doing mental gymnastics while working here. I am one of a few cynics in a room full of zealots (Again, I'm not trying to paint myself as some pariah here - I'm in this situation by choice, I'm just trying to note the juxtaposition). It would be easier if I just flat out hated the idea of AI to its core - I could just leave and choose not to engage with AI anything - but no, I use it, and I find it useful. In fact I enjoy applying software engineering principles to AI, because it's an interesting set of problems to wrangle.

Again, death by a thousand cuts. Firstly, I hate the prevalence of AI in mainstream culture, and I hate how it's being pushed as a panacea in my industry. Secondly, I don't hate AI as a tool. Thirdly, I'm surrounded by the first thing. Fourth: I have to explain my job to my friends and family. Doing so usually results in them asking me surface-level questions about AI (which I don't mind entertaining), them relaying how AI is god/the devil because it made them look like a Disney character (which I am tired of dealing with), or them asking me what my opinion on AI is (if I were to give them the whole story, it would be this entire post, so I just go "eh, it's fine").

My point with this section: I feel I am constantly doing mental gymnastics to justify the attitude I have towards AI. My stance is somewhat neutral. I read a blog post absolutely glazing it, I roll my eyes. I read a blog post absolutely trashing it, I roll my eyes. I think about AI, I roll my eyes. It's all just so tiring.

And also, as is evident by now, I have an Opinion about all of this. Am I crazy? Wouldn't it be a lot easier if I could just roll over and accept AI for what it is?

Turbo capitalism has fucked up how I navigate internet communities (and almost nobody I know cares about any of this)

The most recent development that's caused me to think about the topics presented in this post is Discord's recent rollout of its identity verification system. There has been plenty of discourse on this topic as of late, so I won't go on about too long about it here.

I view this motion by Discord as the next step in the enshittification of that platform. Given my views I've shared on surveillance capitalism as well as AI's effects on the industry and the garbage shoveled into the world by its most annoying proponents, you won't be surprised that my reaction to this news is negative, and I am currently deciding on whether or not to divest myself from Discord completely.

This decision is a small dilemma for me. On the one hand, muh privacy. On the other hand, I am part of a server centered around that one video game for which I'm working on that side project, and leaving the platform means severely reducing my participation in that community, because there's no way in hell they're moving that server off Discord. I don't know which way I'm going to go. This is also the same dilemma that occurred when I decided to partially divest myself from Meta and the like: Do I care about my relationships with my friends/family more than I care about muh privacy? (Yes).

(I feel like I'm finally getting to the point of my own post here...)

I'm very tired of the fact that these small dilemmas and points of contention have been popping up for me fairly consistently over the past few years. If we all just held hands and prayed I'd have it my way, I wouldn't have to choose between being an outsider in X community and *~\muh privacy~*, and I'd be 6'3" and jacked. But the way the corporate web is developing towards the endless rat race of turbo enshittification, I feel the rate at which I'm going to have to make these kinds of choices is going to be as consistent as it is now, or it's going to go up. Probably until I die.

Epilogue: The side project I was working on

I mentioned I was working on a video game side project. I feel it encapsulates the gripes I describe within this post pretty well, because it contains the following elements:

• Parsing binary data of a proprietary encoding/encryption format (I previously didn't know shit about how to do this, so I used AI to help me do it/learn more about the topic)
• A website which acts as a game database/search tool for in-game entities (I wanted to contribute to a community I'm currently deciding whether or not to somewhat isolate myself from)
• A Discord bot as an alternative method of interacting with the application/a way to submit drop table information, all of which must be crowd-sourced (Discord Bad. I figured I'd just stand up an authenticated REST API and let others do a Discord integration if they want, but still, I wish I wasn't about to force myself to cut this out of my roadmap.)

If you managed to read through all of that, thanks. I've been writing for like an hour, and I feel my ramblings have become more nonsensical than usual.

A summary of this post (copied from the beginning): My personal decision to try to preserve my own online privacy, the chaotic equilibrium that is me attempting to make sense of my feelings towards AI and the current zeitgeist, and the tiny concessions I've had to make in navigating all of this makes me feel, at best, tired, and at worst, a crazy person. I am tired of the direction the internet is going, I am tired of the endless discourse about AI, and my chronic tiredness is all marinating together into a tired admixture of tired chicken soup.

Not just books from the 1800s or 1900s, but even older. 1400s, 800s, 100s, books from BCE, etc. It can be fiction or non-fiction.

If a small blurb about the book could be provided and its significance that would be great.

Additionally, if you could help direct me or provide guidance on where I can get a hold of the book (digitally or physically), that’d be appreciated.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like privacy, andrew mountbatten windsor and audiophiles. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was out of the loop.

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 on an interesting train of thought these past few days. I came across some criticism of a random old movie and I started thinking that the reason why I actually hate most modern movies is because they are all cowardly avoiding having any possible political interpretation for anything that happens in them. I've experienced movies that when the big fight scene starts, I'm falling asleep because I'm just so negatively invested in the characters or what will happen to them. That made me think about why so many boring, bland movies and shows keep being made, and it made me think of an opinion that the biggest reason why studios keep betting on blockbusters that are as boring as possible is that they are dependent on theatrical box office takings because streaming killed post-release revenue streams such as movie purchases.

I think that the reason for this is at least partially a symptom of the death of desire for physical media itself. Why deal with the inconvenience of physical media when you can just press a button and the movie starts playing? But at the same time I don't think this is entirely the fault of streaming services, but the fault of movie companies attempting to exert too much control over how people access their films.

I won't bore you with explanations of the limitations of streaming services. We've all been there, surely. They don't have what we want, the stuff we do want to see is spread out on a hundred different subscriptions, yada yada yada. So why do we not deal with them piecemeal? That answer comes with good news and bad news. Good news: you can! You can both buy and rent most movies that have ever been made. Bad news: it's an absolutely terrible deal if you do.

Right now there's at least three major services that allow you to buy digital movies: YouTube, Apple TV / iTunes Movies, and Prime Video. There's also the vestiges of the industry's "digital movies" initiative called Fandango at Home, previously Vudu - the one where you'd use a code you got with a DVD that said it included a digital copy. The problem with all of these services is obvious: if you buy a movie from them, you don't actually own it. They can and will take away access from you at any time for any reason they see fit.

There's an obvious solution to this: rental. It doesn't matter if they de-list a rental because you never had the illusion of ownership to begin with. But that has it's own problem: it's way too fucking expensive.

To put things into perspective, Blockbuster, before it closed down, would let you rent new releases for between $3-5 for a 1-2 day rental, while older movies could be between $1-3. Granted, this was before a lot of inflation, but those rentals also had the costs of running a store in expensive commercial real estate as well as the people who had to manage it, the cost of purchasing the media - sometimes at retail prices - and the cost of maintaining them (rewinding cassettes, cleaning and resurfacing discs, and replacing worn media).

Lets compare the cost of renting on Prime Video today.

Dicks the Musical is a somewhat niche movie unavailable to watch on streaming sites that came out more than two years ago, and the current price to rent it is $4.99. Five bucks. I should mention this is for a movie that I already watched on Hoopla via my library card for free.

Batman Returns is a blockbuster from 1992 and is available for $3.99. Four bucks. You get a one dollar discount if you want to watch something 30 years old. Fantastic.

The category that will really open your eyes is new movies. Zootopia 2 just became available for digital purchase, with no physical editions, and is not yet available on Disney+. If you want to purchase the film, it costs $29.99. Rental is $24.99. Frankly I cannot imagine a world in which the number of people who would pay for that rental exceeds the number of people who opted to pirate but would have paid if the price was at least half that.

If you forget that the major studios own their own streaming services, then this math really doesn't work out. Surely they are getting more money per stream through purchase and rental than they are with the fractional payment they would get from licensing it.

But of course you have to remember that they do own their own streaming services - it's part of why everyone's complaining after all. The major producers, by discouraging short term rentals and pushing streaming services (note that Prime Video will try to sell you one of those subscriptions if the title is available on one), they are attempting to move from producers of cultural products to yet another industry of rent seekers.

Was there ever a write-up on why Tildes was architected the way it was? For example, why Pyramid instead of the usual suspects like Django or Flask? I'd be curious to read the reasoning from the developer(s) themselves.

I typically don't play these kind of games, the few times I've played Souls games, I found issues I had with every game I've played more or less, I've tried Demon Souls around the time where Dark Souls was a thing on PS3, it didn't take too long to get used to the general idea and flow of the game, slowish/sluggish controls on purpose, overall being very difficult, parrying being something that could make or break battles, healing items are consumables that you need to farm, dying makes you lose souls, EXP is the currency, etc.

It's been so long since I've played it, but I recall it being an interesting enough experience to stick around for a little bit, Bolterian Palace being somewhat memorable from the first 2 zones or so including the first area, but I absolutely did not finish it.
I've played the first part of the game by myself, but ended up watching my friends play it more than I did play it, so I ended up knowing that Shrine of Storms has that weapon that makes farming souls super easy, I ended up going there.
Then I encountered the rolling skeletons, I don't think I was aware at the time that Turpentine is how you fight them ,so I had miserable experience there, I think at the end I got tired of it that I ended up just quitting the game to reload to not lose my souls and halve my HP, which in hindsight, I didn't know that. you take half damage as a soul(iirc) at the time and compounded with the PS3's insanely long loading times, which eventually made me to simply quit and never return to it, not having shortcuts also doesn't help, killing the same mobs over and over just to try fighting a boss once isn't fun.

I've not played Dark Souls 1 or 2 myself, so I have nothing to say aside from that I've seen my friends play PvP a lot in DS2, and that Bed of Chaos apparently is a rushed boss by the devs to complete the game, and it shows.

Despite what the title may imply, I did play Bloodborne a little bit, I did get to the first boss(Father Cosguine?) and getting a parry on him was one of those memorable moments for me playing the game, but phase 2 happened, and I'm going to blame the camera or locking-on for my death because 3D games from that era had dogshit cameras.
I have also seen some of my friends play the game, and the weapons BB has looked so fun, of note is the Chikage, which I wanted to use when I played BB, but apparently it's not a good weapon to get on your first run of the game.

Might be worth noting that I gave Little Witch Nobeta a try to see how non Fromsoft Souls-likes are like, I also didn't really go back to it after defeating the first boss.

Then a year or two ago I decided to give Elden Ring a go, being pushed to it by an irl friend.
I rarely get a game and go "Wow I regret buying this", but ER was exactly that.
As usual, I did see a friend stream it in discord or play it while I'm at their house, so it's not that I didn't know what I was into, but I assumed it would be similar to my previous experience with souls games.
 
I picked up a Sorcerer, so my spells are barely better than hitting things with bare fists, my melee weapon is adequate at best, and my base stats were sort of gimped, I leveled up Intelligence to make my spells do more damage and for mobs, they are ok. I leveled up Dexterity as my main source of damage and that was... ok enough, at first.
 
I didn't get to Margit until a couple of hours in, I was wandering around and activating Lost Graces, just to avoid combat.
When I got to Margit, I died a lot but I did have some fun, it didn't feel unfair as much as it felt like my weapon limiting me and my spells barely tickling the boss.
Similar to how my previous Souls attempts went, I stopped playing, until one day I did accept my friends assisting me with the game instead of trying to do everything solo, and we felled Margit but with minimal intervention from my friends, we then got to Godrick and I don't remember much aside from the stairs and the stupid hitboxes.
After Godrick though, my lack of damage was even more apparent in the overworld areas after him, I can't really pick most battles in the world by myself because almost everything there is a group of enemies that notice you when you start attacking one of their group.
They handed me these souls giving item to level up my stats but despite leveling up a fair bit, my damage still felt pitiful and I didn't want to over level. When we called it a day that day, I never really returned to Elden Ring and I don't plan to, I "got" Souls games even less after that. Nightreign however seems to be a much more interesting game in general.
I think you'd need to be a big fan of Dark Souls in the first place to even find fun with ER.
 
This leads us to the past week or two where the same friend that got me to buy ER convinced me to play Dark Souls 3 with seamless co-op in memory of a recently deceased friend who has played the PC Souls games except DS3.
 
And I'm having fun, for change? I'm getting, guided, sure, and I'm not having the full experience by hitting the noob traps, and the bosses seem to get mowed down by playing with more experienced players.
Maybe it's a change in mindset, or maybe I'd only enjoy Souls games co-op.
My issue with DS3 however, is that everything looks the same to me, as in I'd get lost very easily because of how similar everything looks, which is in contrast of what I remember Demon Souls being like.
Not having a map of sorts makes me it difficult to navigate areas in games like these.
 
 

Given my struggles with the other Souls games, the fact that I really like what I've seen from BB's gameplay, the weapons, the fact that you can parry at range, what I've read of the story and lore that makes it very compelling. Are there any tips or ways that I can change my perspective so that when/if I undust my PS4 and my friend's copy of BB, I can have fun? I get that I don't need to like Souls games, but this feels like it'd be my best shot.
 
I don't intend to play it co-op because of both wanting the "full experience" and my PS4 can be modded on its current firmware.

I occasionally watch some travel videos and lately I've been getting a lot of videos of middle east countries on YouTube, I'm just curious why. I know there have been some new developments like the shebara resort and Ain Dubai. but is that the only reason?

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.

Intro

Honestly this is just something i've been ruminating about recently with the new Marathon game on the horizon.

I've consumed a lot of sci fi compared to a normal person, and probably not that much compared to a serious fan. Wolfe, Asimov, Ellison, Sanderson, Card, Strugatsky, Crichton, etc for novels. Blame! jumps to mind for Manga, and I'm sure I could name shows and movies for quite some time even ignoring adaptations and re-tellings.

In general, I like novelty to some extent in my narrative media. Once you've seen enough, you see the patterns, and that can ruin some of the fun. You can have people who just execute a well known narrative perfectly, but it's nice when you stumble across something doing things you haven't seen before, or doing things you'd thought of but hadn't seen executed.

Video games have the potential to do some interesting things, but it's not a surprise that for FPS especially it gravitates to Power Fantasy. "OH GOD EVERYTHING IS WRONG! QUICK HERE'S A SHARP STICK INVADE HELL!" started with Doom (with 2016 actually having some great Pixaresque storytelling itself) and obviously does it well. Being the lone fighter vs hordes is at the bare minimum a fun gameplay loop.

The Games

However there are a shocking number of interesting or well executed plots in the genre as well. I think the big 3 that stand out to me are System Shock (which is sorta cheating as it's also an ImSim), Half-Life, and Marathon (but honorable mentions to both versions of Prey and E.Y.E. and I'm sure I'm forgetting others).

I'm going to skim over System Shock as "oh no the AI has gone crazy and evil" has been done before, and done better (in the same year...by another game on this list). Suffice it to say that Shodan is still a wonderful take on the whole concept. However System Shock does devolve into a larger power fantasy (save the day, stop the bad guy) despite starting as a small and helpless fool.

Half Life, in comparison, you spend most of the time running around doing your best to even figure out what the fuck is going on, and ultimately fail to accomplish much of anything meaningful. The Combine is so soul crushingly vast that even some super fighter like Freeman (which itself has always been odd) amounts to little more than a blip on a dashboard somewhere (as the 2017 spoiled HL3 ending showed...although I can find no working link to that as of right now).

Likewise Marathon, which has some fantastic storytelling in its use of terminals, has you as the objectively broken superhuman slaughtering enemies left right and sideways, and yet you're little more than a Rook or a Bishop for something SO much larger than you, only to find out that it's stumbled upon something even larger than it.

I won't dive into every detail (lots of good ways to do that. Mandalore, Emms, and the classic story website ) but Marathon takes the vastness of space, the standard "what if the AI went nuts/sentient", and so many other tropes and combines them into something quite unique. It's got the feelings of cosmic horror without falling back on "oh look its Lovecraft again" and I wish more games would take notes. Naturally Bungie even then was famous for connecting ALL their lore and that's probably part of it, but I also suspect any payoff for that is long gone after decades of riding the Halo and Destiny "what if heroes shot more bad guys" plan.

The End

With a new Marathon proper finally on the horizon, I'm more optimistic than I should be. Logically I know this is the company that made Destiny and they're still looking to just milk profit out of these things. That said I don't mind it being an extraction shooter or possibly a retelling (or alt telling...) of the Marathon story, and they even seem to understand the vibe that should be underpinning all of it. Either way it had me thinking about just how well the original Marathon and Half Life immersed you into the scale of what you were dealing with by letting you be the badass you are in just about every other game, and having it basically not matter. Either because your deeds accomplished nothing in the scheme of things or because your agency is utterly denied.

I think what really drew me to these games was finally seeing the idea of something like Lovecraft without the literally copy paste of the small port town and the tentacled cthulu monsters. I'd love to know what other games really stood out to people when it comes to SciFi and/or Cosmic Horror specifically. Or if you just agree/disagree on the ones I've rambled about.

So I recently put out a custom map for Beat Saber that I had started work on when the internet was cut for 14 days 20 days in Iran to pass the time.

Gameplay video of the map, Odysseus from Epic The Musical

Everyone I sent it to enjoyed it a lot and I got the happiness that I needed.
One of them recommended to send it over to some twitch streamers as well because some of them have a bot that lets you recommend maps.

I've never used twitch, I found a steamer, made an account, sent it in the chat and had my chat at messages tts'd in the stream. It was absolutely lovely seeing their reaction and it had made my night.

Then I noticed that my 'thank you!' messages didn't tts, huh weird. After watching them for a bit longer I thought maybe I'll send some other stuff I've made their way too. Aaand it didn't send, the chat message sent but the bot response didn't come, a bunch of testing later I found i was shadow banned.

A bit more searching and I found that VPNs are the cause. So changed from TOR to Express and tried again, no dice.
Made a new account with Express and tried and success! But only for 4 messages total, then shadow banned again.

I got a friend's dedicated v2ray server and tried with a new account and my messages were sent again. So I went to a bigger streamer who was also doing the map requests and sent my map... Only to see I'm shadow banned again.

At this point the joy I had felt from seeing others enjoy what I made was gone, replaced by a familiar sadness, the same type of sadness I had gotten when the internet was cut and essentially a one way communication not too long ago.

It's a pain. these sites don't load without VPNs, I had already spent a whole hour trying different VPNs to get the 7mb map to upload to the site (and experienced like 30 errors in the process), then had to try out a bunch more to get the file to upload in Discord (with a bunch of VPNs I can only send messages, files don't upload), and then I experienced the happiness that came from seeing a live reaction and wanting to experience it more, only to have it wiped away.

I want to start work on the next project, i have so much in my mind that i want to put out into the world, but it takes time to switch back to the mentality of "I'm making this for myself and others may never see it" that I had to adopt to get back to creating.

Edit: seems a whole week has been removed from my memory, the outage wasn't two weeks

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like discord, mastercard and captcha. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was scratching their noggin.

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!

Happy February readers. This month we are reading The Truth by Terry Pratchett. This one focuses on the newspaper business of Ankh Morpork and Pratchett himself had worked as a journalist.

Have you found the book? Have you started? Do you plan to join us this month?

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.

Experiences, past or present? Age, medical, genetic, no reason? Anything worked for you or a waste of time / money ? What works, what doesnt, or just acceptance?

Intended for open discussion for everyone interested

I am currently reading my way thru Ted Chiang's guest column in the New Yorker, about why the predicted AI/Tech Singularity will probably never happen (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/why-computers-wont-make-themselves-smarter). ETA: I just noticed that article is almost 5 years old; the piece is still relevant, but worth noting.

Good read. Still reading, but so far, I find I disagree with his explicit arguments, but at the same time, he is also brushing up very closely to my own reasoning for why "it" might never happen. Regardless, it is thought-provoking.

But, I had a passing thought during the reading.

People who actually use LLMs like Claude Code to help write software, and/or, who pay close attention to LLMs' coding capabilities ... has anyone actually started experimenting with asking Claude Code or other LLMs that are designed for programming, to look at their own source code and help to improve it?

In other words, are we (the humans) already starting to use LLMs to improve their code faster than we humans alone could do?

Wouldn't this be the actual start of the predicted "intelligence explosion"?

Edit to add: To clarify, I am not (necessarily) suggesting that LLMs -- this particular round of AI -- will actually advance to become some kind of true supra-human AGI ... I am only suggesting that they may be the first real tool we've built (beyond Moore's Law itself) that might legitimately speed up the rate at which we approach the Singularity (whatever that ends up meaning).

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like nuclear power, animalist and pivot. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was perplexed.

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!

Preemtively this is not about Linux but it does serve as a basic example of a low effort, low cost switch that I personally consider ultimately beneficial long term. Not even necessarily for itself but how it captures the pre Windows 10 mindset of sw being the tool for the user.

The old joke of in Russia the television watches you is relevant here. On multiple levels.

Other and an even easier thing to do would be to switch from Chrome to Firefox as an unideal alternative still but with less default problems and better options to possibly switch to later.

These are only examples and are not important by themselves. What is important, is how these attitudes enable ever less effort and attention to be placed on the end user in mainstream sw.

A lot of the time whenever there is any mention of switching to Linux there is a lot of talk about how you cannot expect normal people to want to follow even the basic steps and possible but unlikely troubleshooting needed to get it to work. Where society is concerned opinion is reality. The sw and hw are magic black boxes that cannot be understood so the consensus is to avoid trying to understand even the superficial basics that would be considered trivial even a decade before.

Neither it is likely to change closer to the ideal of just working than it already is without further adoption. It is not a problem of Linux but of insufficient support by third parties creating edge cases.

I admit that it is unlikely this changes. There is no societal acceptance for it and arguably more important for the individual topics of financial literacy, basic involvement in governance or medical awareness have abysmally low knowledge levels generally.

Voting is the most basic, least effort way to have some effect and yet two thirds turn out is usually considered large.

I happened across Veronica Roth's blog post via GoodReads about a book tour for her upcoming book Seek the Traitor's Son. She'll be visiting various places around the US and UK. I can't say I've ever really thought about going to a book signing or a book tour, but recently I've been thinking it would be a nice change of pace to go to an event like this and support an author or other creative this way. Roth is not first on my list, but it did get me thinking about how to find other events and hopefully get my hands on some cool merch as well.

Do you know of any creatives (but mostly authors, since this is ~books) who are doing tours this year? How do you keep informed about dates of book tours and festivals?

Dear Tildes Team:

I've been a long-time Reddit user, but lately it's been feeling more
and more like Facebook. Suggested posts, hidden comments, and the
subreddits I actually subscribe to are buried under irrelevant
algo-suggested junk. The concept of Reddit is great, but its execution
is done by a public corporation nowadays and its enshittification has
been notable.

I've been looking for a simpler, less commercialized place:
chronological, user-curated feeds, thoughtful discussions as opposed
to endless low-effort memes, and in general, absence of corporate
nonsense to push engagement metrics and ads.

Tildes seems to fit the bill. I like its focus on quality over
quantity, clean and simple interface, and eemphasis on real
conversations. It seems it's the kind of place I'd actually enjoy
spending time on again.

I'd really appreciate an invite if there's any room. I am also ready
to answer any questions or provide whatever info you need.

Thanks for keeping a corner of the internet sane.

Best Regards,

I just remembered this site from a few years back, maybe during Covid times? Clearly at some point the decision to delete my account history was made...

The state of the internet now makes me so deeply anxious. Scrolling Instagram makes my head feel like sludge. I stopped using reddit about 7 years ago. Never really found my crowd on IRC. So back here I am, hoping to find some signal in the noise and to calm my mind.

Has anything changed much here? What should I check out?

When I mean underrated I mean underrated. Few self-imposed rules on this: no movies that had big award nominations and no movies that have above a 60% on RT.

1. Amsterdam (2022)

Directed by David O. Russell, this movie never had a chance. Post-metoo O. Russell is persona non grata. However, this film continue his trajectory that he had with the Jennifer Lawrence trilogy (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, and Joy). Which analyze American perseverance in the face of hopelessness.

The main characters here played by Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington are all a found family of outsiders who don’t fit anywhere else but with each other.

The film was savaged by film critics, earning a 31% on RottenTomatoes. In spite of film critics having their knives out for O. Russell, it is one of the most prescient films of the decade about the rise of fascism in the U.S. And contains perhaps the best performance of Margot Robbie’s career.

2. A Rainy Day in New York (2020)

Originally scheduled for release in 2018 by Amazon, as part of their now rescinded deal with Woody Allen, the film was shelved for close to two years before becoming widely available during the pandemic.

The last Hollywood film Allen ever made stars Timothee Chalamet, Selena Gomez, Elle Fanning, Jude Law, Liev Schreiber, and Diego Luna.

Once again, in a post-Metoo landscape, the film received a 47% on RottenTomatoes. One imagines that if this released prior to 2017 it would receive similar positive notices to Allen’s first Amazon film Cafe Society.

The film plays sweet and comforting, like much of Allen’s work. Chalamet makes an excellent Woody replacement (makes you wonder how many films they would have done together under different circumstances). And the chemistry between Chalamet and Gomez is wonderful, it is also probably the best performance Gomez will ever give.

3. The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022)

On the topic of vengeful film critics, Peter Farrelly’s follow up to his Best Picture winner Green Book received a 43% on RottenTomatoes. Critics were not-so-subtlety punishing Farrelly for beating the critical darling Roma for the industry’s top prize.

It’s a beautifully shot Vietnam war drama with an incredibly layered and empathetic performance from Zac Efron. It blends comedy and drama much like its predecessor Jojo Rabbit. It’s never boring and gets criticized for “insensitivity” for whatever reason.

4. Cry Macho (2021)

Likely to be Clint Eastwood’s final lead performance, Cry Macho received a 57% on RottenTomatoes.

The film sees Eastwood do what he does best. Deconstruct masculinity through the lens of Americana, with the added element of the impending death that comes with old age.

The type of crowd-pleaser Eastwood specialized in and which was broadly better received thirty years ago.

5. The Strangers: Chapter Two (2025)

A bizarre follow up to the near shot for shot remake that was The Stranger: Chapter One. The film throws you off completely from any expectations you might have had for a horror sequel.

The lowest rated of these films at 15% on RT, it’s an energetic chase film that doesn’t let down and somehow tries to also be The Revenant. Gonzo choices are made here that somehow work as pure entertainment. And it’s anchored by a genuinely good performance by Madeline Petsch. It will be a cult classic with horror fans in a few years.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like alex pretti, anti ice and youtubers. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was bemused.

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!