I think the simplest thing Arc Raiders nailed about gameplay is the pacing. The enemies move at such a pace that you never get instantly vapourised; you always have a second or two to try something crazy even when you're utterly doomed. The times that 'something crazy' works you have a unique memorable moment. Let me tell you about one of mine.

A Rocketeer is a common headache in Arc Raiders. It's a quadcopter drone the size of a tank that shoots rockets. It usually takes a big and expensive weapon to take one down, but players started to take notice of an item called a 'Hornet Driver', basically a stun grenade. What happens when you stun an aerial drone? That's right, it drops right out of the sky, to its doom if the fall is far enough.

With this in mind, I emerged from some tunnels to find another player pinned down by a Rocketeer. I throw a Hornet Driver, it hits just the right spot and the Rocketeer drops to the ground but is unharmed... and then in trying to angrily get back in the air it flips itself over on its back, completely immobilised. The two of us strangers hesitate for a split second before we sprint over and beat the thing to death with hammers.

There are flaws in this game but in terms of creating organic events it's been a great time.

I was musing about this recently with the recent models becoming more capable. The core of gen AI is the model, which is trained on a massive dataset. To date, gen AI has improved because the models have become larger, more efficient, the data they are trained on has become better and the software/harnesses around them has improved to help query them.

As I see it, surely the bottleneck will soon become the data they are trained on? If we imagine a scenario where a models could consume an infinite amount of training data, and there is no limit to the training time or quality. The sum of human skill/knowledge is the limiting factor. Gen AI should (in theory) never be able to out preform or push the boundary of the sum of humanity at time of training.

Or, counterpoint, is there enough randomness and speed to iterate that gen AI can actually step change and improve if training times/cost were less prohibitive? Most companies/models today will save good output and feed it back into the next iteration, but right now that's taking months. What if that took minutes?

What do you think?

Is gen AI going to take us to general intelligence?
Will gen AI get to a place where it's "intelligence" and reasoning is actually better than the sum of Humanity?

Submit your response here!

• Direct link: https://survey.tildes.community/-/how-often-do-you-visit-tildes-10/
• This survey closes on June 28, 2026 at 10:00 UTC
• The results will be published on June 28 shortly after the survey has closed. I'll edit this topic and post a comment about it!

The current plans for questions that will be asked in the coming weeks are as follows:

This will be the last survey until August! Gonna take a little break from the surveys and develop the backend tools a bit more, as well as go on a vacation during the end of July, to the Tildes homeland actually! But in August I'll be back and we'll vote for the next set of surveys and get right back to it. :D

Please submit your ideas for questions here! Even if they've been submitted already by someone else. All input is valuable! You can view all submitted questions on this dashboard.

Thank you all for participating!

I've been seeing this claim repeated across social media, blogs, and various online communities these days. However, I haven't yet found a discussion that digs into the evidence behind it or provides reliable sources.

Where can I learn more about this topic?

I'm increasingly skeptical of mainstream media coverage and a lot of what I encounter online, so I'm looking for sources that are as rigorous and unbiased as possible. I'd especially appreciate:

• Academic papers and research studies
• Industry reports with transparent methodologies
• Independent analyses that critically examine the claim
• Any insights from people who work in web infrastructure, cybersecurity, search, analytics, or related fields

If you know of high-quality resources, I'd love to read about them.

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.

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:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

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.

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.

Custom games/game modes/rulesets give gamers the ability to enjoy some games nearly infinitely. Gary's Mod, Rust, Minecraft, Robolox, Fortnite, and many others keep people coming back as people create new ways to play.
When I was younger I played a ton of Warcraft 3 custom games. I remember there being a solid ~2 years when that was almost entirely what I would play whenever I was able to use the computer and then another 3-4 years after where I would play at least a couple of times a week.

I remember loving custom games like:

• Defense of the Ancients (DotA)
• Island Troll Tribes (also Jungle Troll Tribes to a lesser extent)
• Risk (and it's many versions)
• Wintermaul and Wintermaul wars (along with all the other tower defense and tower defense wars)
• Vamperism
• Pest Control
• Many others as this list would drag on

I remember chatting with a lot of interesting people, though I didn't have any friendships I made move past Warcraft 3 in to other games.

I know there are many other games with custom games or customer game modes that the community developed, with DotA 2 coming full circle from being the sequel to a custom game to having custom games of its own.

To get the conversation going:

• What games had your favorite custom games?
• What custom games were your favorite?
• Did you make or contribute to any custom games?
• Any favorite memories?

We used this question as an icebreaker in my church group, and it was interesting seeing what people thought they used compared to what they actually used.

Did you guess correctly?
Anything surprise you about which apps you used the most/how much time you spent on them?

I guessed Chrome, YouTube, and my ereader app, and got them right. But I also tend to see those same three apps each week through the weekly health report and figured it would be those.

The survey has been closed and the results are in!

Thank you to all the 244 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the full results!

• ZIP download of the data

Thank you all again for participating! Hope to see you in the next survey! :)

By sandwich, I am excluding "the Shaggy", where you just pile every good thing you can think of on.

I mean what is your favorite traditional sandwich, such that you could say the name to a stranger and have a reasonable chance of them knowing what fillings you are thinking of.

You may include candidates which are not not universally be considered a sandwich, such as hot dogs, quesadillas, burgers, etc. So long as you genuinely beleive it to be superior to all other sandwich forms.

My current shortlist of candidates, as examples:

1. Grilled Cheese - Simple, easy, accessible to the masses

2. Bahn Mi - A Vietnamese sandwich of a split baguette with kewpie mayo spread, stuffed with marinated grilled pork, cucumber, carrot, and sliced green pepper.

3. Italian Combo - An informal sub combination typically consisting of salami, capicolla, and some form of cheese, mozzarella being used as a default .

You can choose your own metric for what makes for a superior sandwich and may consider any standard toppings for the sandwich like mustard/mayo to be included.

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.

A few days ago, I posted this and quickly realized that the world of data backups is far richer than just sudo rsync -av --delete --exclude=Videos /home /home_bkup.

So now I'm window shopping the top Linux-supported backup solutions: borg, duplicacy, kopia, restic and--oh look--a core borg dev just dropped his own new-and-improved solution, vykar.

Restic was the first tool I started to research, and I thought I really liked it, got as far as installing, initializing a test repo, creating a couple of snapshots. But restic seems to be, hmm, fussy about the source and destination paths, absolute vs relative paths, etc.

The fact that merely renaming a parent directory (or grandparent, or great-grandparent, etc) causes restic to treat every unchanged byte below that as brand new ... that's a recipe for giant, bloated repos, and it's unacceptable to me ... and hey, lookit that, borg does not do that. So now, restic is out and borg is in.

But what other pros v cons are there, that I haven't even realized need to be considered? What advantages/disadvantages do other apps offer? Which ones can I easily automate with nightly/hourly cron jobs? Which ones have their own even-better automated solutions?

Do I even want encryption? All of my drives/volumes are LUKS encrypted, and anything I would store remotely would also get encrypted before it ever left my LAN ... plus, I'm just a bit nervous about having the backups encrypted, requiring working, functional software to restore/recover data from them....

That may not seem like such a big concern, perhaps, but I am currently working my way thru decrypting a bunch of 10-15 year old TrueCrypt-ed volumes, which requires using an old, outdated version of VeraCrypt and a somewhat "cross-my-fingers" effort to find KeePass repos old enough (also outdated, KeePass 1.0 repos) to still contain the various passwords I used to encrypt those ancient volumes ... but also still use new enough master passwords that I can still get the KeePass repos unlocked.

With rsync, I can literally just go into any backup, find the specific version of the specific file(s) I want to recover, and manually copy it back to my workspace. Is anything like that option available in any of these deduplicated/encrypted solutions, even if they're not encrypted? If (eg) a borg repo is created w/o encryption, the data is still all just borg-specific blobs, right? Or can I navigate into the repo and just manually grab files?

Oh yeah ... for reference, the past 10-ish years, my backup routine has been to create a new, dated, destination folder, starting with a full backup of my /home folder (excluding things like Videos, Music, VMs, other bulky stuff that gets backed up separately/differently), and then running nightly diff backups into the same folder, while also maintaining a "one-day-older" second backup of the whole thing on a 2nd HDD ... then, every 3-6 months, zipping up the current backup folder and starting a new one.

At any rate, there you go; that's the kind of stuff I'm thinking about now, as I overhaul my 20-year-old, 20TB (but could be 2TB) backup system.

Any and all feedback, recommendations, tips are welcome. Danke.