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...

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

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.

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!

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

A good friend of mine recently released his latest game, Social Caterpillar.

I will choose 3 random people who commented on this post by February 25, 2026, 06:00 UTC (unless you say in your comment that you don't want to join the giveaway)

This is the first time I've done a giveaway like this, but from what I saw online, if you win, I'll have to add you as a friend on Steam and wait a few days until Steam lets me send you a gift (unless someone tells me there's a different way of doing this!). I have no issues - and even expect - that you'll unfriend me once this is done. No hard feelings.

I will either edit this post or make a comment with the winners when they're selected. Will send a private message with my steam username for the friend thing.

Why I'm doing this giveaway?

I just really liked this game (and I enjoy his games overall). It hooked me for way more hours than I thought it would, and I loved the puzzles.

I told him I'd do a giveaway on Tildes, but I didn't know back then that I'd need an invite to join (I was - still mostly am - a lurker). So now that I have an account here, it's time to do it!

This game has a lot more to it than it seems at first glance. If you're still unsure whether the game is for you, but you like what you see on the store page and you like puzzles, click below for a tiny bit more about it. I hid it for those who don't want to read anything more than what's in the store page.

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.