This is the second Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twentysecond overall. We are discussing The Truth by Terry Pratchett. At the end of March we will discuss The Metamorphosis by Kafka.

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

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.

And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I've made the decision to purchase a new M5 Macbook Air because of the memorypocalypse. My current M1 model is already upgraded to the amount of memory and storage as the current base model and I'm wondering if it's worth spending the extra 2-4 hundred dollars on memory upgrades today.

My current computer is more than good enough for today but I figure I should probably future proof just in case. I was thinking the 16GB would be enough, but I also know that I'm kind of falling behind by not embracing AI coding agents. According to my research the maximum 32GB is recommended for most coding-relevant models - almost as a minimum.

I work in education so coding is not actually much of a need, and obviously there are cloud providers I could use if I end up needing them in the future. I also have less than a teacher's salary because I work part time, which is the greatest reason why I'm sticking with the 16GB base for the moment, but other than that I also don't do many memory-intensive programs. But I thought I would get some recommendations before they start shipping.

I'd also be interested on people's opinions on trading in my old one, since it'll only get me ~$275 back. I'm considering reneging on that part and keeping it around to act as a web server or give it to my husband who has a computer that still runs Windows 7 and barely uses it.

I'm very excited to be taking a trip to Thailand with my wife for our honeymoon.

I'm going to do some clothes shopping this week and keen to take advice from those who live in or have travelled to SEA or specifically Thailand before.

I'm going for a minimal approach, so I'll be taking as few clothes as possible and having them laundered whilst I'm there.

For underwear, I'm settled on stocking up on Uniqlo's airism boxers as they're already the most comfortable I've ever owned and I'm certain they'll hold up well to the tropics.

In that vein, I'm not sure if I should also go for the airism t-shirts, or if there's an obviously better choice. I hear lots of mixed opinions on cotton vs merino vs synthetics. I sweat too much for cotton, and have never got on that well with merino (outside of jumpers/sweaters). Given I'll only be there for a couple of weaks, I'm feeling that synthetics are the way to go. But I'm happy to be convinced otherwise.

For footwear I'm going to wear my Altra Escalantes. I'm currently training for a marathon and will have to do at least a few runs while I'm out there, so these will serve as my running shoes and for anywhere I might appreciate plain black shoes (or something more supportive than sandals). Otherwise, I'll be living in my Birkenstock arizonas.

I'll be packing two linen shirts, one linen trousers and then a couple of very lightweight shorts. Again, I'm avoiding cotton with the shorts. I have some ABC WovenAir pull-on shorts from Lululemon that I think will be very comfortable, but I'd be keen for recommendation for another pair or two. I've been told the pacebreakers from Lululemon are great, but not sure if an order from there will arrive on time.

I'm based in the UK, so any recommendations would ideally before for shops we have here, or international brands like Decathlon, Uniqlo, H&M etc.

I understand this is all very personal, but I like hearing different preferences.

TLDR; I'm looking for a free way to improve bookmark management without increasing cognitive load.

I find that with the constant stream of information online, paired with my ADHD, I tend to know nothing in detail. So I bookmark so that I can return to the same articles regularly instead so that I can 1) stay informed with more depth rather than breadth and 2) contribute to online discourse when I see a gap.

I'm using bookmark folders (by topic) for articles I want to refer back to regularly, and the built in "reading list" for things I do want to come back to but don't plan to keep a record of.

But my bookmarks are overflowing because of all the other stuff I have folders for (admin logins, shopping, local services, social sites, online office stuff, literature and languages, fun stuff, etc).

I also bookmark folders for these:

• Politics (local/national)
• Environment
• Human rights issue #1
• Human rights issue (n) ...

These basically have 1) compelling facts in support of the issue or 2) important memorable counter statements to common misinformation.

But I get easily lost among clutter, and I contend with brain fog. I've seen stuff about "second brain" online, but to be honest they're way too complicated for me (raindrop.io synced with this and that...). Is the folder system I'm using as good as it gets for people like me who need to avoid complexity?

I'm currently on macOS & iOS but plan to return to linux when I next upgrade in a few years.

Update: thanks so much for the recommendations. I've started using Wallabag to get essential articles organised and categorised with tags. This helps me remember their contents better and retrieve them more quickly.

I'm also experimenting with Obsidian in parallel to see if it makes it easier or more challenging to do the same thing. It's the ideas within the articles I want to remember rather than just the headline, and some articles have a lot of different but useful information (for example, today I learned that if you earn more than roughly $33,000 per year, you are in the top 1% on the planet - one third of people on the planet live on $10 per day.). That was in an article about sustainable production and consumption, so the headline itself wouldn't necessarily help me remember that this is the article where that factoid lives.

I have start.me bookmarked too and plan to keep my top 30 articles there.

At some point I'll probably reduce the options from 3 down to 2 or 1. But whichever choice I go with, it's already much, much better than what I was doing before. Thanks again!

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.

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.

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?

Do you have any obscure books that you really enjoyed that you haven't had a place to recommend or feel like more people should read/know about?
Feel free to share them here, hopefully with a brief description of the book and why you enjoyed it.

I'm not putting a limit on number of reviews or that these have to be "hidden gems", but ideally lesser known works that have stuck with you, or you felt were great and feel like others might enjoy them as well.

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!

Kind of a simple question but I can't find a good answer for myself. How do you keep track of all those little (and big) things that you want to remember? I've tried Notion, Google Keep, Evernote and I'm sure other things that I can't remember but nothing seems to stick. I end up reverting back to the "just keep a shitload of browser tabs open on all my devices" approach. Have you found a solution you like to keep track of (and find later!) your notes, links, lists & other digital tidbits?

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

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 TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with different desktop monitor setups, primarily for productivity-focused work as a systems engineer (coding, writing docs, Slack, email, terminals, etc.). Over the past few years, I’ve rotated through:
• 3× 24” 1080p monitors
• 2× 24” 1080p monitors + laptop display
• 1× 32” 4K monitor + laptop display
• 1× 32” 4K monitor
• Laptop display only (on a stand)

Surprisingly, I’ve found that I feel the most focused and productive when I use only my laptop display and rely on Alt-Tab to switch between apps.

With larger monitors or multiple displays I start to feel scattered. It almost turns into sensory overload, and my focus drops off.

Has anyone else experienced this? Do you find that larger or multiple monitors decrease your productivity? What setup works best for you?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

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.

I was never a wordle fanatic, but I am hooked on this Alphable game now https://geoffpevlin.com/games/alphable/. I also play https://cluesbysam.com/.

Do people know of other web-based (hopefully free) logic puzzles like these? I like the daily format, but wouldn't limit myself to that if there are others that are also interesting.

I've done all of the https://www.rustylake.com/ games too, which I quite enjoyed, but these types of puzzles require a little bit more time investment that I don't really have right now. (I also hated that some of the "logic" in those games did not seem to make sense to me, and I'd have to google the answer to continue with the game.)

I also like https://timeguessr.com/ but don't return to that one as frequently because I can't play it on my phone.

I really like in-person escape games but they are expensive and vary drastically in quality, so was very happy to find these types of games scratch that same itch.

The rules are as follows:

• If you can lift an object above your head unassisted, you can put it into your inventory.
• There is no limit in the total quantity, volume or weight of objects in your inventory.
• You can immediately store or produce a stored item to and from your inventory at will.
• Objects will remain in their original state when stored in an inventory. From their perspective, no time has passed.

Basically, where do you go online or on your phone when you just need a distraction and don't have the energy or mental bandwidth to read something in-depth? Games and apps are okay, too.

I appreciate the community and the quality of discussions that are had here on Tildes, but sometimes, I just want to veg. I basically want to scroll through a large supply of pictures, memes, short-form videos, but without the toxicity and manipulation that comes with the main social media platforms. I don't think I need to create a whole list, I think we all know what the main social media sites are to avoid.

And I also want to distinguish this topic from other "where do you get your news from" or "what are some interesting feeds you're subscribed to" topics. I'm looking for easily digestible and mostly positive/happy/funny things to consume. Where do you regularly turn to when you just want a distraction?

For me, the biggest is definitely Modern Baseball.

To set the scene, it's 2016, I was in high school, and a girl I was friends with told me about this band Modern Baseball. I liked them a lot, but I wasn't quite at my peak emo phase (that would come about a year later during my freshman year in college lol), so I didn't get super into them or anything. Anyways, a few months after that, MoBo came through our city on tour and that girl and one of our other friends literally offered to pay for my ticket to the concert if I DDed for them... and I said no.

Fast forward like 7 months and Modern Baseball goes on hiatus in early 2017, a hiatus that continues to this day, though they played a few one-off shows throughout 2017. Anyways, fall 2017 comes around and I listened to Modern Baseball more and realized I really liked them... but they're on hiatus and I missed my chance to see them!

Anyways, I mostly made this thread because the fact that I turned down going to that concert is something I still think about from time-to-time and I wish I went, but I'd love to hear if anyone else has similar stories or just stories of bands you wish you could have seen.

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.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

Steam Next Fest is currently underway, lasting until March 2nd. Coincidentally, I had just been thinking a little while ago that I kinda miss game demos. About a month ago I came across a little twin-stick shooter called Minishoot' Adventures and ended up paying it more attention than any other random game I see that looks kinda cool, because they had a demo available. I installed it, played it for a couple hours, and instantly bought the full game once I was done. It's quite a good game, but they got my money primarily because the demo was able to hook me into making an impulse purchase, totally defeating my usual standard of decision-making about buying games.

For Next Fest, Steam is recommending me a deluge of indie 2D platformers and metroidvanias, and I'm not sure if that's because those are the games in development that tend to have demos or if Steam thinks that's all I'm interested in (spoiler - I'm not). So, have you discovered any truly noteworthy upcoming games in this year's Next Fest? Also, what was the last demo to win you over?

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.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

There's a lot of stories of people getting off caffeine and documenting the changes and benefits they experienced. But I'm wondering if anyone has gotten on caffeine as an adult and could share what benefits, if any, they gained. For reference, I've never consumed much caffeine and have been debating doing so. In terms of actual work and school, I've never found the need. But, I'm generally a bit lethargic/slow paced by nature (have trouble getting up in the morning, inefficient with my time especially when I don't have much going on) and maybe a light jolt and ritual in the morning would be worthwhile.

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

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.

I have probably a 1/4 of a roll of filament that slid off a roll when I swapped it between a Bambu reusable spool holder. It's been on my floor for a couple months and I have not found any way of getting this back onto a spool, either by trial and error or by finding a good resource online.

All the videos I see are people with tangles on spools, and this would be nice if I was in this situation but I am not.

Any time I try to do this it's just so challenging to get any sort of rhythm or easy process with our ruining the entire thing.

Any advice?

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?