What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
An event, a moment, an experience, etc.
Can be big or small; significant or insignificant; serious or funny.
It doesn't have to be a bad thing. You could be glad you missed out on something!
What did you miss out on?
How do you feel about it?
I'm in my mid 20s and have had a pretty lonely life. I had a very lonely childhood, a less lonely but still fairly lonely adolescence, and again a very lonely time in college (in that case, because of a mix of mental hangups, the pandemic, personal circumstance that was a major drain on my time, and not managing all those things as optimally as I could have). At this point in my life, I essentially only have one friend, who I met a couple years ago and has since moved across the country.
I have more time on my hands now, am probably more socially adept than I used to be, but I find myself having lost or losing the drive to make friends. I guess I've gone so long without friends that I've lost sense at an emotional level of what the point even is. It's also friggin hard to meet people in the adult world and it seems like you have to put twice the energy to meet people that you vibe with half as much as when you were younger. I want to want to make friends, but it feels like I'd be setting myself up for more pain and disappointment by putting myself in that headspace. It also doesn't help that I'm pretty socially picky (not in a judgmental way, but I'd prefer a small circle of people I'm really close with over a large group that I'm not) and that I have a strong need to feel like the friends I make aren't "arbitrary", that they are the ones I am "meant" to be around. Has anyone experienced something similar or have any advice?
I had this idea that is mostly a pun. I want to train a Love Language Model (LLM) on a large corpus of love letters and/or poems. Tricky bit is to find a large collection that is available. Any advice on sources of transcribed love letters?
Edit: so far I've scraped a few website and downloaded a dataset from kaggle. I think it's enough for a just for fun project :)
Etiquette:
It is fine to make multiple top-level posts throughout the week.
It is also fine to respond to your own posts.
If you are playing Backlog Bingo, you can share your table either by markdown or through screenshots.
Gameplay guidelines:
Goals for this event (if any) are entirely individual and self-determined.
Playing Bingo is optional and not required.
You do NOT need to finish games unless you want to. The point is to try out games and have fun, not force ourselves to play things we're not interested in.
Your "backlog" is all those games you've been meaning to play or get around to, but never have yet. This event is an attempt to get us to collectively dig into that treasure trove of experiences, scratch some long-standing itches, and knock a few titles off our to-play lists.
It runs every May and November. New discussion topics will go up once a week during those months.
You do not need to sign up in advance -- the topics are open to all. If you would like to be included in the notification list, comment in this topic to be added.
That's it!
Optionally: you can play Backlog Bingo which is a fun way of cutting down the choices you have to make and playing games you might not have normally selected on your own.
Nope! Not at all.
There aren't really any requirements for the event so much as this is an incentive to get us to play games we've been avoiding starting up, for whatever reason. Play as much or as little as you like of a given game.
Try out dozens for ten minutes each or dive into one for 40 hours. There's no wrong way to participate!
Yes! Each discussion thread stays live for a full week, so feel free to make multiple comments in the topic as you play different games. This isn't considered noise -- it's considered valuable participation in the event!
Important: All data for your Backlog Bingo card is stored on your device, not the server. Clearing your browser data will delete your card. You can use the export feature to make backups or move your card between devices.
If you've already created a card and wish to start over, click the Settings button in the header to access your card settings. Then click the Reset button, and confirm the prompt. This will irrevocably delete your present card, allowing you to start fresh.
All data is stored by your browser in local storage. There are no accounts, and nothing is sent to the server, so it's privacy-friendly by design. This does mean that you are responsible for not deleting any browser data on wescook.ca, either manually or through automatic cleanups performed on browser close.
Backlog Bingo is open-source, and licensed permissively under MIT.
In Standard Mode, each square on the bingo card corresponds with one single game. Duplicate games cannot be entered into different squares. A winning card would have a row of five different games that each filled in one square.
In Golf Mode, duplicates are not only allowed -- they are encouraged! The purpose of Golf mode is to try to find a single game that will fill multiple categories at the same time. For example: Stardew Valley might fulfill You got it on sale, A solo-dev project, and Has romanceable characters all at the same time. A winning card would have all twenty five squares filled, but possibly only six or seven different games.
That is the "wildcard" or "free space."
In Standard Mode, there are no requirements to fill it. You can choose any game you want! Anything goes!
In Golf Mode, it does not need to be filled. Because Golf is all about stacking up categories on a single game, any game used in Golf would fill it automatically, meaning it has no real function. As such, the square will be pre-filled for you if you play in Golf mode.
The new Free list defaults to having this space turned off. Because you already have full freedom in how you fill the squares, having a free space is redundant (though if you miss it or just like the aesthetics, you can certainly turn it back on!).
Absolutely! The Backlog Bingo app reads in simple JSON files which define the available categories. We've created a couple prebuilt lists for this event, but you're free to tweak our categories, or create completely new ones. You could even use them for books, anime, movies, recipes -- anything!
If you are interested in learning more, you can find documentation on the wiki, and use an example JSON category file. You can also ask for help in the topic!
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
So we had baseball-sized hail suddenly come through my city a few days ago, and everyone at my work got to watch our cars get destroyed from the front windows. I opened a claim immediately after the hail stopped and could go take pictures, but still haven't heard anything other than that an agent was assigned.
City-wide, body shops are already talking about having a year-long backlog and having to triage repairs that don't affect immediate drivability. I've heard people talk about them being totaled already. Rental cars are hard to come by, because they not only have huge demand but had damage as well. The county is petitioning FEMA, because houses were damaged as well.
I'm just in a depressive waiting state, where I don't know how things will start to play out yet, with my undrivable car sitting at the office with trash bags taped over it while I work from home. And my old backup car (almost 20 years old), which was slated for one of the stepdaughters to receive once she gets her license, also had extensive damage making it unsafe to drive. My fiancée's car survived, being on the other side of town at the time, but she has a very busy schedule to the next few weeks.
I had the realization that every car I've ever bought myself was just destroyed, and I get fairly attached.
The Civic Sport Touring (2017), I still owe about $4000 on and expected to pay off this year. It's thoroughly dented across the whole body, with a completely shattered (to the point it's opaque) windshield, broken mirror assemblies, 2/3 cameras are probably broken, a tail light is broken down to the LED board, and the moonroof assembly appears to be bent and sagging slightly, probably from the roof and side parts being bashed so heavily. Not sure how much water got in during the ensuing torrential downpour.
Realistically, it being to totaled seems likely, given the cost of many of the parts. Which means I'm going to be stuck buying new, because used ones are a relative rarity (I jumped to buy mine when it showed up in stock) and there's barely a price difference these days.
I'm curious if anyone else here has had experiences with that sort of thing or knows what to expect.
Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!
Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”
Rules:
If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.
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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.
Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like creative commons, opting in out and david attenborough. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was curious.
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!
Inspired by a youtube video thumbnail I saw saying "Which Link would function the best in society?" I didn't watch the video, but that did get me thinking to how weird player characters can behave. You know, with all the walking into strangers' houses, constantly crouching and jumping while moving, breaking any containers we see in hopes of loot, using special powers for silly things... Destroying stuff just for the heck of it...
So! Here's my extended question: how long would a society comprised mainly of video game protagonists last? And I mean protagonists who behave the way players make them behave, not just how they're written by the story. And that includes still having all potential powers.
Can be based on specific past playthroughs, could just be generalizations of how they're typically played. How many protagonist characters could actually hold down proper jobs without getting fired? Who would be able to avoid causing heavy destruction in daily life? Or get arrested fastest?
How long would they be able to put up with other protagonists' weirdness before snapping and starting a city-wide battle?
@RoyalHenOil's comment in another thread got me thinking, and I feel like it might be helpful for me to hear what other Tilderinos have to share about this. I've wondered for years if I might have ADHD. Any time I've looked into it, it never seems like I check enough boxes for that to be an accurate label. But I've also gotten the impression that many psychological things like ADHD might be better understood as a spectrum (or even a region?), so lately I keep coming back to the possibility that I just have some other/related flavor of executive dysfunction. Or maybe I just haven't figured out how to "adult" properly yet for other reasons. I don't know, but it feels like being able to name the way my brain works would help things somehow.
I tried for hours to write up an explanation of my experiences, but I couldn't come up with anything that felt accurate and was a reasonable length, so the five-second version is this: The thing I keep coming across and identifying with is the "hyperfocus mode" that some people report. I enjoy this but also feel like it must have something to do with my struggles in some areas. I can prioritize tasks effectively plenty of the time, but I also can't at other times. If I used an Eisenhower matrix, things in the "important but not urgent" category would mostly be gathering dust (except for ones I happened to focus on). I don't really have any control over the "hyperfocus mode" and its target changes unpredictably.
There's an exhausting amount of nuance I could add to the above. I'd really love to hear from anyone who's had experience with any sort of divergent executive function that doesn't seem to fit into any of the currently available boxes we use to understand these things.
Addendum: I reread RoyalHenOil's comment just now and I think responding to it directly might be easier than writing out my own explanation from scratch, so I'll include that response here for anyone who feels like reading it.
I'm more the hyperfocusing sort than the easily-distracted sort (I don't really experience boredom or anything resembling internal "chatter" that a lot of people with ADHD describe),
I do identify with this. I think there's some degree of "chatter" for me, though.
but it ultimately amounts to similar behavior: I have a hard time prioritizing.
I guess? Sometimes?
It feels like it should be easy to switch activities, but I just can't. It's like trying to move a paralyzed body part; you're firing all the right neurons, but nothing happens.
I'm not sure if I would describe it this way. This is definitely how it feels when trying to get out of bed if I'm really drowsy, but switching activities mostly doesn't feel like this. It can sometimes though.
When I'm focused on Task A but know I need to switch to Task B, I can't stop thinking about Task A. They're basically intrusive thoughts that aren't under my conscious control. Even if I do successfully pull myself away from Task A, I can barely do Task B because I'm still thinking about Task A — and I'm feeling frazzled the whole time.
Yeah, this is more or less true for me. It is possible for the hyperfocus to switch over to Task B eventually, but I don't feel like I have any control over that.
But if I just give [in] to the hyperfocus and devote myself to Task A until it's complete, I feel great. I'm in the zone. It's better than meditation.
So much yes. It's like the flow state I can get from practicing music, except it's easier to enter and not taxing to maintain.
My hyperfocus can be a good thing. It means that whatever Task A is, I can fully immerse myself in it and do it exceptionally well. (. . .) But I'm useless at anything that resembles multitasking because I end up obsessing over just one of the tasks (even if it's not that complex) and neglecting all the others.
Agree. Some of the best work I've done and most fun I've had has been while hyperfocusing. But when multitasking, I feel almost useless.
I did very well in school and I do very well in the workplace (so long as my supervisors make good use of me)
Same.
but my private life is a completely different matter. I have a hard time maintaining routines and establishing habits. I'm always neglecting the majority of household tasks and my personal needs; if I'm on a vacuuming kick, for example, the floor will be spotless, but everything else will be in shambles because all I can see is the floor.
Yes and no. Some routines/habits stick and others don't. I'm generally fine with chores, though most of them don't happen on a routine, they just get done when they need to get done, I guess.
One of the worst aspects of my hyperfocus is that it feeds into itself. For example, being sleep-deprived makes me far more likely to hyperfocus, and hyperfocusing makes me far more likely to experience insomnia. If I do break out of my hyperfocus tendencies, I can usually only maintain it for a week or so until, inevitably, something throws off the delicate balance.
You know, I don't think this had occurred to me, but that totally seems plausible. At the very least, I do know I end up in feedback loops where hyperfocusing on one thing leads to a new thing to hyperfocus on, so the need for variety that eventually kicks in to break me out is already satisfied by the new thing.
Welcome all to our fortnightly (ish) gardening group discussion!
Feel free to discuss anything related to gardening, beginner or advanced, challenge or success.
Ive moved it to a fortnightly thread, as sometimes gardening can be a bit slooooowwww motion
The last couple of weeks I've been fooling around with different ideas for how to build a chess bot that's fun for beginners to play against. I don't have much real experience with chess, so I've mostly just been testing it against myself.
After looking into the different techniques that are used to force engines to play at a certain level, I put together my own (somewhat silly) approach and have had some fun playing against it. The problem is, as I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to the actual game, I can't be a particularly good judge of how others will feel playing with it.
Regardless of your own skill level, I'd be super appreciative if anyone would give it a try and let me know what they think.
I'm working on a full write up of how it works, but here's the short version:
The inspiration came from this paper which describes a "Tutoring Search" wherein the engine attempts to find the worst move available that it predicts the opponent will not recognize as an error.
My implementation doesn't follow this exactly, but it does have the same aim. Two engines are used: one (Stockfish) as an oracle treated as a true measure of any state's quality, another (Maia) as a substitute for the opponent model. On each move the bot consults both of these to identify a move which:
The idea is that, if a human would be likely to play the move, they also would be unlikely to identify it as an error. The ultimate goal is a bot which gives the player plenty of opportunities to win, but only if the mistakes are likely to go unnoticed.
There are a few other supplements to the implementation like adapting to opponent choices and some tweaks to early and end-game play, but the above is the core idea.
Radicalization has, of course, varied meanings to pretty much any person you ask to define it and it is both contextual and a spectrum. I will provide no definition of such here as this isn't a pissing contest and a person's definition is likely to be highly personal based on their own lived experiences up to and post said "radicalization".
Today is my yearly reminder of what I consider to be the impetus of what "radicalized" me.
So thought I'd ask all of you for yours.
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 need to overhaul my home network.
I have a house on a lot that is ~60 meters by ~15 meters. my house is on one side and my garage is on the other, I have a little "studio" building in the middle.
I had relayed the signal around with 4 google/nest wifi mesh things for a decade or so. but I always felt locked out without even a web interface, just the home app. and then two of them died at the same time last month.
I ran some cable last weekend. Now I have 3 roughly equidistant wired switches wired together :House-Studio-Garage.
My current plan is just 3 wireless APs at each. I have a wired only brume 2 that i can use as the router.
I want to be able to have one SSID and roam between them. how well can that work without a mesh type network? just 3 good APs? My phone would stick to one before the mesh network. but that was a long time ago. Im hoping modern protocols might be better?
We have teenage kids, lots of phones and laptops plus wireless home automation devices, shelly switches, wyze cams, smart bulbs, etc.
I'm looking for something open source and as configurable as possible. I'm going in a linuxy direction lately and looking to have more direct access and control of my hardware. That's why I thought to ask here.
Claude and co have recommended:
Zyxel NWA50AXPRO
Cudy AP3000
Omada EAP670
After I pick an AP I also need to pick a switch. I used the old 3 switches I already had on hand: TRENDnet TEG-S82g, Netgear GS105, Netgear FS108. All 3 are unmanaged and one is 10/100. so I want to replace at least the slow one. I'm thinking of getting a managed switch with POE for the switch that connects to the router. I want to try running POE cameras at some point. I want to be able to make a plex server, NAS, etc. Again, I want something flexible and I don't mind fiddling with it or paying a little more for decent hardware. I'm considering the Zyxel GS1900-8HP.
Both the Zyxels apear to be openWRT compatable. which is something I may want to try.
I generally don't keep up with this stuff. I've never went very deep into networking before. I wanted to check with some real people. Has anyone used any of these, or any other good wireless APs? Is there another strategy that would work better for my setup?
Thanks for reading!
Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!
Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”
Rules:
If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.
All previous Save Point topics
If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.
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.
This is the place for casual discussion about our pets. Photos are welcome, show us your pet(s) and tell us about them!
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!
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?