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15 votes
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How did Easter Islanders lift statues' thirteen-ton hats? Researchers may have the answer.
7 votes -
Do you think school uniforms should be in all American/Canadian schools?
I think that a student should be allowed to dress freely. I don't see a problem unless they dress like a freak. Your thoughts?
11 votes -
Change my mind: The world will be better without religion
Most religions base their beliefs on the Bible. If so, where was the bible based on? Clearly, the bible was written by a bunch of men. Men. Humans. Humans are prone to corruption. We cannot tell...
Most religions base their beliefs on the Bible. If so, where was the bible based on? Clearly, the bible was written by a bunch of men. Men. Humans. Humans are prone to corruption. We cannot tell whether these authors corrupted or even invented stories? So, why should we base our virtues on a thick book when we don't really know if it's accurate or not?
Science has already proven that Adam and Eve didn't exist. Evolution does exist. And Science have evidences. The bible said the Earth was FLAT and have 4 corners and sides. Science said the Earth was spherical, and it proved what it said. Science seeks evidence. Science seeks the TRUTH. The bible? It was just created by men many years ago to answer questions they cannot answer.
There are tons of wars and crusades that were religion driven, whether we had holy wars or wars because of terrorists following inhumane beliefs, many people ultimately died. Just like wars almost eradicated humanity, that is what should happen to be Religion. Become eradicated. Adding on to that we see many deaths every day just because of religious differences.
The bottom line is, The holy book is repulsive and its repulsiveness creates a huge barrier to development. The world would be a better place without religions. Religions claim themselves right. And because of that, people around the globe were divided by awful beliefs. It's really sad to think that people do good things because they FEARED the awful HELL and because they wanted to go to the fictional HEAVEN. Religious people were driven by a 'holy' book which cannot speak and collect evidences for what it says. We should wake up. Be united by an accurate tool that seeks truth. Science. We should base our virtues on our intelligence and common sense.
Greek mythology was once a religion, and it flopped and became a myth. Religion in the US is now declining according to surveys. With our eyes, watch and see how will religion disintegrate through the years while the development, peace and stability of the world integrates. To add to my initial statement, I can provide sources for every argument against religion and the "holy book"
4 votes -
The technology fetish
What excites humans the most today is technological progress. Faster computers, better autonomous driving, colourful displays - a preoccuppation with 'means'. There seems to be much lesser...
What excites humans the most today is technological progress. Faster computers, better autonomous driving, colourful displays - a preoccuppation with 'means'. There seems to be much lesser excitement and study among popular consiousness with what is done with all these tech. Your smartphone is a technological marvel - but what are you doing with it?
This seems to be in similar veins as the idea of human progress from stone age to bronze to iron. "Stone age people used primitive technology, bronze age better, iron age the best. There are still peoples in the world who are still stuck in the stone age".
But this is a biased perception of human endevours. What matters is what humans did, not what they did it with. The incas, mayas and aztecs were 'stuck' in stone technology. But they built marvelous civilizations, buildings and cultures rivalling the greatest achievements in the rest of the world in their time.
Advancing technology is a fetish. One in pursuit of which we forget what matters is what we do with it. But there seems to be little of that going on. Most of the doing is for improving technology. And most of it in a fetishistic attempt to get out of the ditch we dug ourselves in from past technological 'progress'.
Today, humans are like a bunch of sculptures spending most of their days dicussing chisel technology rather than sculpting.
18 votes -
Eli "Paperboy" Reed - Your Sins Will Find You Out
4 votes -
If you are going to travel in the near future I recommend you check out Attaché, a web-series that gives a comprehensive overview of various cities and regions.
They are not overly long and often give some nice information on local transport, currency, scams, food and cultural etiquette. These are two of their videos. One focusing on the Kyushu island in...
They are not overly long and often give some nice information on local transport, currency, scams, food and cultural etiquette. These are two of their videos. One focusing on the Kyushu island in Japan and the other on Copenhagen in Denmark.
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Kyushu in Japan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpFSqZikbHQ -
Copenhagen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMGrL8NazOw
If any of you know of other good online travel resources, I'd love to hear about it!
5 votes -
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Stormland | E3 announce trailer (Oculus Rift exclusive)
4 votes -
Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse | Official trailer
13 votes -
I for one...
A long time ago I had noticed a trend developing on reddit where people were starting to preface their comments with: "I for one". It's pretty insignificant, which is why I never made a post about...
A long time ago I had noticed a trend developing on reddit where people were starting to preface their comments with: "I for one". It's pretty insignificant, which is why I never made a post about it at the time. Since then, its use seems to have spread significantly on the site and I've seen it a bit here as well.
It makes sense to use the phrase when talking about or quoting another person to help separate their opinions from your own. The weird thing is many people now seem to use it when its not ambiguous that the comment is their own opinion. I was under the assumption that the default position should be that the comment is the opinion of the person that posted it.
For example:
"I for one, prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate."
Is the same as:
"I prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate."
There's nothing wrong with using the phrase, it just reads like someone trying to pad out an essay for school.
Have you noticed people using the phrase on other sites? Is it a phenomenon more specific to reddit?
Do you use the phrase yourself? If you do, what is your thought process when typing it out?14 votes -
HITMAN™ 2 | Announcement trailer
4 votes -
Tildes effect
For the past few months I felt less and less inclined to engage in conversation on Reddit and other discussions platforms. The risk of any expression being met with a (severely) negative response...
For the past few months I felt less and less inclined to engage in conversation on Reddit and other discussions platforms. The risk of any expression being met with a (severely) negative response is just too great. I don't know if it was always like this and that I just don't find it worth it any more or if there is an actual trend of people being more of an asshole more of the time to each other online.
I've only joined Tildes a couple of days ago, and enjoy most of my time here. I've also noticed that I'm now more active again on other platforms. It's made me want to express myself again. I put more effort in my contributions. I'm not necessarily getting more pleasant responses, but there are fewer negative ones, I think.
Does this sound familiar to any of you?
50 votes -
MIT creates "World's first psychopath AI" named Norman by exposing machine learning algorithm to the darkest corners of Reddit
11 votes -
Disagree button
Having surfed reddit for several years, I've always had the impression that its voting system cannot handle controversial topics well. Although it's an official rule that comments shouldn't be...
Having surfed reddit for several years, I've always had the impression that its voting system cannot handle controversial topics well. Although it's an official rule that comments shouldn't be downvoted in disagreement, downvotes are very often used that way. This sometimes leads to less "valuable" content being on top of threads, for example jokes.
I think that it's beneficial for discussions to have good controversial opinions in higher positions as they are now on reddit. But I understand that people want to state their disagreement and don't always want to comment to do so. Also, I think many disliked that the public upvote/downvote counters were removed.
Something that could help with all of that would be a disagree button for each comment together with a counter that shows how many people clicked that button. The button wouldn't have any effect on sort sequence.
What do you all think of this?
Edit: Added clarification that there wouldn't be an effect on sort sequence.
11 votes -
Murder with Impunity: Where killings go unsolved
11 votes -
Idea: Expanding media on the main page
I think having a button to expand media on the main page. I've seen it on Reddit, and think it could be useful instead of clicking on the link to view the entire post. It gives you a way to skim...
I think having a button to expand media on the main page. I've seen it on Reddit, and think it could be useful instead of clicking on the link to view the entire post. It gives you a way to skim things. The only downside I can think of is it might limit engagement since you won't see the comments.
2 votes -
Arizona police officers on leave after video showed them punching unarmed man
3 votes -
Dota 2 – Anyone here watching Liquid vs Secret?
If so, how about we get a bit of a match thread going here?
6 votes -
Let's discuss politics
Broad subject matter, I know. I'm just curious on what the political views in this small community are. So, to get things started, what political ideology (if any) do you believe in?
31 votes -
Discussing anonymity on ~
So one of the things I really liked about the project is point 1 of the privacy section of the Mechanics (Future). Proactive not reactive; preventative not remedial: When creating new features,...
So one of the things I really liked about the project is point 1 of the privacy section of the Mechanics (Future).
Proactive not reactive; preventative not remedial: When creating new features, think about what data will need to be stored, and consider how harmful it might be if that data was to be leaked in the future. Is it possible to reduce the amount of data being stored to lower the potential harm? Can the data eventually be aggregated or anonymized so that we're only storing recent data instead of a full history?
I think a good first step would be to not have a public comment/submission history. Users should evaluate other users contributions based on the conversation the are having/reading, not past submissions.
This doesn't make you anonymous, but at least it can prevent nosy people from knowing too much. (I get there are valid reasons to want to find other posts by the same user, but I think individual privacy is more important). At least, if not enforced for everyone, this should be an option, making your profile not display your history to others.
Now, one of my biggest problems with reddit is that it doesn't make it easy for you to stay anonymous and also keep your content on the site.
Let me explain. I don't like people being able to see my submission/comment history, because I don't want to give the chance for people to identify me if I don't choose to do so personally. It's not about reddit knowing what I like or do (I mean, I use Google, they know everything I do), it's about individuals, about other users knowing things I'm not happy sharing with them for whatever reason.
There are only two options on reddit: deleting my content (using a script or whatever or going one by one) or deleting my account. This results in me deleting all my comments and submissions on reddit every few weeks.
Now, I would love to be able to leave most of what I post on reddit online, because sometimes I have really interesting conversations and I try to be detailed and clear and other people might find (some of) my posts useful. But I don't want anyone who knows my username or anyone who sees a comment of mine going through my history. There's too many crazy people. Also, I haven't suffered doxxing, but that's just not nice.
There are many reasons why someone could prefer to not be identifiable. Just to give some examples that come to mind: people might have an ideology that other users don't like/respect, people might post pictures of themselves (think fitness groups, for example), people might post in local groups revealing their location, people might look for counsel and talk about their personal problems, etc. Putting all of that together might make it easy to identify someone.
So, what I would like to propose is a way to leave my content online if I wish to and giving other people the option to read it in the future, without it being publicly tied to my username.
How could this be done? Well, I think users should be able to anonymize their participation in a thread individually and throughout the site. There could be an button (on every thread for thread only anonymization and on your profile for full site anonymization) that you tap and your username is replaced all through each thread with a randomly generated username (it'd be great if the username is consistent within the thread, so people reading would know its the same person).
These usernames should be words, ideally, not difficult to parse by humans. Of course this would generate a great number of usernames, but there are some solutions.
One could be using something like Google Docs uses when several anonymous viewers are watching a document. Each gets a name (RedFox, whatever) which is consistently used throughout the thread. The same username (RedFox) can then be reused in another thread for any other anonymous user. (So RedFox wouldn't be referring to the same person in different threads, but to two random, anonymized persons).
I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to generate these (similarly to how reddit gives you suggestions to new usernames when you open an account).
Also, in order to avoid the admins having to reserve many usernames in advance, these usernames could have a special mark (like *RedFox or °RedFox, or ~RedFox~, for example). This way, a new user can register any available name without interfering with these anonymous usernames. A thread could have some non-anonymized user called RedFox and an anonymized user called °RedFox (or whatever mark is used).
In any case, the user should be able to access all of their submissions and comments on their profile even after anonymizing, being able to edit or delete them if they wish to.
Ok, I think that's it, I hope I was clear. I'm also not gonna be able to log in again until tomorrow. So please, go ahead and discuss and tell me what you think and I'll come back when I can.
EDIT: User karma should not be public either. I can make an argument for it tomorrow if needed or we can discus it on another thread.
42 votes -
The Rust Way of OS Development
9 votes -
GitHub is Microsoft's $7.5 billion undo button
16 votes -
You can now set different default topic sorting order/period for individual groups as well
As promised yesterday, it's now possible to set different default "views" (order of topics, and time period) for each individual group. Similar to how setting it for the home page works, just go...
As promised yesterday, it's now possible to set different default "views" (order of topics, and time period) for each individual group. Similar to how setting it for the home page works, just go into the group, change the view order/period to the ones you want, and then click the "Set as default" button next to the time period dropdown.
So now when you go into a group, it will choose your default sort by the first one of these that exists:
- Your default for that group
- Your default for the home page
- The site's overall default (currently "activity, last 24 hours")
On that note, any opinions yet about the default switch yesterday to "activity, last 24 hours" instead of "activity, all time"? Or does this question not even matter much since people are setting their own preferred sorts now anyway?
26 votes -
The EU's copyright proposal is extremely bad news for everyone, even (especially!) Wikipedia
8 votes -
Avalance Sweden Announces "Generation Zero" a game set in 1980's Sweden were Robots have Invaded.
5 votes -
The problem with action scenes in DC movies [video]
3 votes -
How to gauge the degree of someone's self-awareness?
It's common in my job - and likely many jobs - to require learning and correction. I've noticed that people who have stronger self awareness are more likely to improve and learn from...
It's common in my job - and likely many jobs - to require learning and correction. I've noticed that people who have stronger self awareness are more likely to improve and learn from projects/mistakes/correction etc. I can say a lot more about the value of introspection, but I'll get to the point: I'd like to gauge someone's ability to do this by having a conversation with them.
If you were interviewing a candidate to work for you, what would you ask them to find out how self-aware they are? I figure if you asked: "how self aware are you?", each candidate would respond "in addition to my strong organizational skills and quick learning, I am also incredibly self aware." So I'll need to sneak up on the idea a bit.
12 votes -
My seventy-two hours Secure-Scuttlebutt experience
Warning, this is a rant. Feel free to criticize me. As ESL speaker, there's a "butt" in the name. SSB is the protocol, you have to download client called "patchwork" which is not an attractive...
Warning, this is a rant. Feel free to criticize me.
- As ESL speaker, there's a "butt" in the name.
- SSB is the protocol, you have to download client called "patchwork" which is not an attractive name either
- After setup patchwork, idk what to do next except staring at a blank "timeline" something
- So I grabbed documentations (you need manuals to use a god damn social network software), obviously you have to join pubs to dive in.
- After joined pubs, you start to stare list of "pubs followed you/someone else joined the pub" message explode.
- After a awkward self-post on "#new-people", I learned that you have to follow others to get content. So am I supposed to follow thousands of strangers on the Internet for a good degree of influx content?
- After several rounds following, I still dont get how to make new friends. I mean by what? I cant judge if I should follow someone because of random recent posts.
- So I started to search for stuff. The search is mostly broken, the results are not in chronological order, only English alphabet works, I dont know if reply someone's 2 year old post is polite or not. Engaging a conversation but expect no response feels wrong.
- The only way to tell if a "channel" is popular or not is through the search box. The "all channels" page does not show numbers at all.
- Channel names are a mess. The plural form and alternative spellings are killing me. I always feels worried that I might miss good content by not thinking of what creative "channel" names people invent. When making posts it gets worse, you have to paste dozens of bullshit channel names just in case.
- There's no way to tell if the software is functioning or not. Sometimes it took up to ten minutes busy downloading stuff, the rest times it's totally static. F5 does not work, Cmd+R reloads the whole electron app frame.
- When downloading stuff, I totally do not want old posts. There's not way to filter that.
- There's an "Active Channels" on the left side of the software, it jumps indefinitely for no reason. When I click one of the channels, I see old posts without any "activity". Again, you have to follow people in that channel to get fresh content.
- There's search for name tag function. Maybe there are people social with each other just by lookup Internet IDs. Since names can be the same on Secure-Scuttlebutt, you have to use public keys to identify people accurately.
- It's written in Nodejs/Javascript. I lost my motive to contribute.
TL;DR barrier of harvest is wayyy too high.
Anyone else using/tried secure-scuttlebutt? What are your thoughts?
12 votes -
Entire Hawaii suburb vanishes as lava gushes in
14 votes -
Billions in US solar projects shelved after Donald Trump panel tariff
8 votes -
“No-logging” VPN led Homeland Security to Comcast user
12 votes -
Why Men Are Refusing To Help Women and Children
3 votes -
Best tablets for interactive training?
Hi all, In light of our recent conversations re quality, I'm sorry that this is more of a "nothing" post. But I trust you all and I think you could give me some good advice. I've tried Googling,...
Hi all,
In light of our recent conversations re quality, I'm sorry that this is more of a "nothing" post. But I trust you all and I think you could give me some good advice. I've tried Googling, but it's hard to find anything I feel is trustworthy.
I'm searching for a few tablets on which I can have employees view training videos and or SCORM training content. I believe all of this will be sourced from web-based companies with mobile platforms built-in. I know very little about tech stuff, so I don't know if a basic tablet would do, or if I need any certain specs.
I believe our wi-fi is good enough to support this. We'll be purchasing 2-8 of these for intermittent trainings.
Needs:
- Cheap-ish
- Durable (We will be buying industrial Otter-box type cases as well)
- Good volume/accessibility (Avg employee age is 52)
- Standard video playback (don't need super hi-def anything)
I posted in ~talk rather than ~tech or ~comp because I didn't think it would fit there. Thank you!
4 votes -
What did Futurama get wrong about the future?
For example: they depicted Amy using a very tiny cell phone because at the time phones were getting smaller and smaller.
16 votes -
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World | Official trailer
4 votes -
Post your shelfies!
Since I just moved into my apartment my shelf/book collection is sparse and I hardly have space for more. What I do have though keeps me busy. If anyone wants to know I ordered - history on the...
Since I just moved into my apartment my shelf/book collection is sparse and I hardly have space for more. What I do have though keeps me busy. If anyone wants to know I ordered - history on the left, theory and sociology in the middle, and philosophy on the right. Anyone reading the same books I am?
https://i.imgur.com/BW1BJ8z.jpg
Post yours and discuss.
12 votes -
Star Wars actress Kelly Marie Tran deletes Instagram posts after abuse
18 votes -
Bryan Colangelo and 76ers part ways
@wojespn: Philadelphia and Bryan Colangelo have agreed to part ways, league sources tell ESPN.
5 votes -
What kind of comic books are people reading?
Hopefully this is the correct section, there isn't a comic book group yet, hopefully soon though. What kind of comics do people read? Any good books out there?
6 votes -
Speeding up Zsh and Oh-My-Zsh
7 votes -
Court Allows “Battery by GIF” Claim to Proceed–Eichenwald v. Rivello
5 votes -
The problem with DC action scenes
18 votes -
US President Donald Trump has second highest “own party” approval rating of any president at the 500 day mark
11 votes -
Any subgenres of/punk fans here? What're you listening to?
For me: https://song.link/album/us/i/1210662780 and: https://song.link/album/us/i/1136408633
10 votes -
Corruption and Rebuilding Trust in Brazil's Government
For those not in the know, Brazil is going to be having a presidential election this year. The reason the title of this thread is what it is relates to the scandals that engulf all three of the...
For those not in the know, Brazil is going to be having a presidential election this year. The reason the title of this thread is what it is relates to the scandals that engulf all three of the current and past presidents: Current President Michel Temer, and past Presidents (in order of most recently in office) Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula was found guilty and began serving his 12-year jail sentence for accepting bribes in early April, maintaining his innocence and that his investigation and trial were politically motivated to prevent him from running in this year's election.
There are few countries as publicly wrestling with corruption allegations in explicit quid pro quo deals between politicians and companies as Brazil.
If you're interested in a pretty decent introduction into this wild ride, the wikipedia article on Operation Car Wash--and that is how this scandal gets referred to--is a good place to start.
So, using publicly available evidence (in Portuguese if you have to), what role does corruption play in the highest political offices in Brazil, and how can Brazil begin rebuilding what seems to be a clearly shattered reputation?
9 votes -
Daily Tildes discussion - quality concerns
Yesterday we had quite a few topics posted in ~tildes related to "fluff" content and some similar topics. Today I want to talk about a few related things, and some changes that I'm planning to...
Yesterday we had quite a few topics posted in ~tildes related to "fluff" content and some similar topics. Today I want to talk about a few related things, and some changes that I'm planning to make in the near future.
Not a reddit replacement
First, something I obviously haven't done a very good job of making clear (and needs to be added to the FAQ) is that Tildes really isn't intended to be a replacement for reddit. It's not my goal to have most people want to move here away from reddit. The goal is much closer to a complement—reddit is making a lot of choices to prioritize "quick entertainment" content, often at the expense of more in-depth content and discussions.
Reddit wants to prioritize that kind of content because it works better for the business goals they have. "Fluff" content attracts the most users, and supports showing far more ads. You can show a lot of (in-line) ads to someone skimming down through hundreds of cat pictures, but you can't really show any to someone that spends an hour having an in-depth discussion inside a single post. So naturally they're going to prioritize quick content—it brings them more users, and directly makes them a lot more money.
Tildes doesn't have the same incentives, so my goal is to be a better home for that in-depth content that's slowly getting pushed out. Reddit can keep the fluff. It's going to be better at it than Tildes ever will be anyway, due to displaying images and autoplaying gifs in-line, and many other design choices they're making to prioritize that type of content.
Concerns about current quality, and some changes
That being said, even though we're really not getting image posts or anything similar yet, we have been getting a lot of "what's your favorite?" type threads, which are especially prominent due to the default activity sort. For example, if I look at what a new user on Tildes would see right now, in the first 20 posts we have:
- Favorite desktop environment for Arch?
- Name the online accomplishment you are most proud of
- What upcoming video games are you looking forward to?
- What are some TV shows you find yourself constant rewatching?
- Here's an idea. Comment something really unique (in a good or a bad way) and relatively unknown about a place you're living in or lived in.
- Name a cool, mostly unknown feature of your OS of choice
- What are the most influential books to you?
- What's everyone's favorite movie?
- So, what have you been working on?
And a few more that are similar as well. None of these are bad topics at all (especially the ones in ~talk where that should be expected), but they're pretty much all just "casual discussion" and not really what I'd consider particularly high-quality content. I don't want to discourage these or start removing them or anything, but I do think we probably need some changes to make them less prominent (or at least easily avoidable if people don't want to see that type of topic right now).
So here's my plans for the short term (all three should happen today, I think):
- Implement filtering for topic tags - I have a basic version of this almost done now, which will allow people to set up a (global) list of tags, where any posts with any of those tags will be filtered out of their view. There's a "show unfiltered" toggle as well that allows you to easily see everything.
- I'll start editing tags on other people's posts and/or giving other users the ability to do this. Primarily, all "what's your favorite?" type topics should have a common tag so that they can all be filtered easily. I'm thinking "ask" or "survey" or something similar, suggestions are welcome.
- Allow users to set their default sorting method for the home page and individual groups, and then probably change the default away from "activity".
Let me know what you think of these plans, or if there's anything else you think we should consider doing.
89 votes -
Dance of the Honeybees: By pairing the sun’s direction with the flow of gravity, honeybees explain the distant locations of food by dancing, essentially using 2D representations of 6D shapes as guides
7 votes -
10 Things I Regret About Node.js
10 votes -
Anyone pick up Memories of Mars?
3 votes -
Markdown live preview for Tildes
Hacked together a simple markdown live preview, which works for both comments and also new posts submission. To use, just install the extension and start typing on Tildes, you will see live...
Hacked together a simple markdown live preview, which works for both comments and also new posts submission.
To use, just install the extension and start typing on Tildes, you will see live preview. No settings to configure.
The code is open source and released under MIT. I am not really a JS dev, so any feedback is welcome.
Chrome extension - link
Firefox addon - link
Source code - link
20 votes