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    1. What’s something that you wish more people would inform themselves about?

      In today’s age, we have a wealth of knowledge available on the fly, and a wealth of misinformation too. Every day I see someone on the internet either mis-informed or ill-informed, even with...

      In today’s age, we have a wealth of knowledge available on the fly, and a wealth of misinformation too. Every day I see someone on the internet either mis-informed or ill-informed, even with google and research at their fingertips. What is something you wish the general public would actually take the time to learn about beyond a very surface level interpretation?
      Many issues can’t be solved based on just surface level knowlege.

      My biggest answer is politics in general, because it controls our world yet it feels like 70%+ of people don’t know what they are talking about beyond layman knowlege, and we’ve seen what happens when tons of people set themselves on a belief and even argue for it when they don’t know what they don’t know.

      I don’t know anything about politics but even I can see that people are talking out of straight emotion most of the time.

      So, i ask you nice tildes’ers Tilderds Tilderotatoes, what’s something you wish to inform us about that most people don’t read into very much? Can be political or otherwise.

      It’s a broad question I know, but that leaves room for a lot of discussion.
      Thanks for reading

      43 votes
    2. Future of personal security and privacy, upcoming trends.

      A few years ago I got into improving my knowledgebase of personal security - theory and tools - but it didn't go much farther than reinforcing everything with 2FA and setting up a password...

      A few years ago I got into improving my knowledgebase of personal security - theory and tools - but it didn't go much farther than reinforcing everything with 2FA and setting up a password manager, plus setting up a VPN and full disk encryption.

      It seems like we're amidst a rising tide of data breaches due to, IMHO, laziness and cheapness on the part of many companies storing personal data.

      So, recently I've embarked on my second journey to improve my own security via habits and software and teaching myself. Privacytools has been a super helpful resource. My main lesson this time is to take ownership/responsibility for my own data. To that end, I have switched to KeyPass with yubikey 2FA (still trying to figure out how to get 2FA with yubi on my android without NFC), moved over to Joplin for my note taking (away from Google and Evernote) and also switched to NextCloud for all of my data storage and synchronization. I'm also de-Googling myself, current due-date is end of March when Inbox is shut down.

      So my question / discussion topic here, is, what are everyone's thoughts on the future of practical personal security and privacy? More decentralization and self-hosting? That's what it looks like to me. Blockchain tech would be cool for public objects like news articles, images etc. but from what I understand that has zero implication for anything personal. The other newish tech is PGP signatures, which I'm still having trouble implementing/finding use for, but surely that will change.

      There is this topic but that ended up just being about encryption which I think is a no-brainer at this point. I'm more so looking for the leading edge trends.

      17 votes
    3. Missed Character Potential - Russell Crowe- The Mummy (2017)

      I really enjoyed his character in the movie and found his story arc to be way more interesting than the actual movie itself. I think they should remake League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with his...

      I really enjoyed his character in the movie and found his story arc to be way more interesting than the actual movie itself. I think they should remake League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with his Hyde/Jekyll.

      Even a follow up film about his character and maybe he tracks down “the mummy” again.

      4 votes
    4. I'm downsizing my digital life. Do you listen to a lot of music? How do you archive it?

      I'm downsizing my digital life. I deleted my account on reddit, on another phpbb forum and i don't have instagram/facebook apps anymore. This subject got me thinking about my music. I grab/buy...

      I'm downsizing my digital life. I deleted my account on reddit, on another phpbb forum and i don't have instagram/facebook apps anymore.

      This subject got me thinking about my music.

      I grab/buy albums in mp3 and i have so many that it's impossible to listen to everything. I don't pay for any service like spotify because i don't like. I prefer to download and/or buy in places like bandcamp where i can download the album.

      I started reading about other codecs like flac and opus. The availability of albums in flac are way less than mp3 and it's a lossless format. If i focus on it i will be forced to downsize my music library.

      The problem is disk space in my smartphone. I'm not an audiophile so i'm not able to hear the difference between flac and 320kpbs mp3. This is where opus enters. This codec gives half the size with better quality than mp3. Soundcloud uses it. A 96kbps opus is the same quality as 320kbps mp3.

      Now that Android can play opus i don't see a reason to keep using mp3. The downside is converting flac files every time i want to put on my phone.

      I could just convert flac to opus and just live with opus everywhere, freeing a lot of space. But i think keeping flac files is better for archiving because it's lossless. If opus for some reason disappears, i'll have a lossy format and would have convert to another one losing more quality.

      How do you deal with music?

      26 votes
    5. What DE and distro do you use and why?

      I'm curious as to what the Tildes Linux/BSD community (and I suppose other answers like Windows or MacOS would be acceptable, though they may feel a bit more dry) use for their desktop. I imagine...

      I'm curious as to what the Tildes Linux/BSD community (and I suppose other answers like Windows or MacOS would be acceptable, though they may feel a bit more dry) use for their desktop. I imagine that Ubuntu and Gnome will dominate the answers as you would expect, but maybe you'll surprise me. Personally, I'm on Arch Linux with i3-gaps. I use Arch because I enjoy the DIY aspect of Linux as well as the aur and slim nature of Arch. I'd also be lying if I didn't say I use it partially just because I like the "pacman" pun.

      As for i3-gaps, I think that WMs are generally more customizable and good for 'ricing', plus they go with my workflow and are convenient in that they load faster and the likes, though I have to admit I have only ever used i3 (I've been considering trying out bspwm). So, what do you guys use? You can also of course share more information such as your shell or DM if you wanted, though I highly doubt anyone cares what display manager you us or anything.

      24 votes
    6. Suggestion: Color the names of new users differently.

      Many websites like hacker news, lobsters and stack exchange put an indicator next to usernames to show that the user is new. This lets regular users know that this user may need some help fitting...

      Many websites like hacker news, lobsters and stack exchange put an indicator next to usernames to show that the user is new. This lets regular users know that this user may need some help fitting in and following the rules.

      What does everyone think about such a feature on tildes?

      16 votes
    7. What are the most influential books to you?

      I'm young, I'm looking to understand more ways of looking at the world. What books do you recommend people to read that had profound impacts on your world outlook, character, or anything else like...

      I'm young, I'm looking to understand more ways of looking at the world. What books do you recommend people to read that had profound impacts on your world outlook, character, or anything else like that. Future me says thank you.

      Edit List (Books listed so far by Title):
      "Accelerando" by Charles Stross
      "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess
      "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn
      "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
      "Bardo Thödol" by Padmasambhava
      "Brave New World" by Huxley
      "Book of the Dead" by ?
      "Cain" by José Saramago
      "Capital vol.1" by Karl Marx
      "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold
      "Collected Fictions" by Jorge Luis Borges
      "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoyevsky
      "Die Grundlage der Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie" by Einstein
      "Divine Comedy" by Dante
      "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick
      "Don Quixote" by Cervantes
      "Daughters of the Dragons" by William Andrews
      "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card
      "Ethics" by Spinoza
      "Fables" by Aesop
      "Fahrenheit 451" by Bradbury
      "Faust" by Goethe
      "Flowers for Algernon" By Daniel Keyes
      "Fragile Things" by Neil Gaiman
      "God and the State" by Mikhail Bakunin
      "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter
      "Good Omens" by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
      "Great Books" by David Denby
      "Harry Potter" by J.K. Rowling
      "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
      "History of Violence" By Édouard Louis
      "Homo Deus" by Yuval Noah Harari
      "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie
      "Illiad" by Homer
      "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn
      "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami
      "Le contrat social" by Rousseau
      "Les fleurs du mal" by Baudelaire
      "Leviathan" by Hobbes
      "Maus" by Art Spiegelman
      "Naked Economics" by Charles Wheelan
      "Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss
      "Neuromancer" by William Gibson
      "Odyssey" Homer
      "On the Origin of Species" by Darwin
      "Paid Attention" by Faris Yakob
      "Personality-Shaping Through Positive Disintegration Processes" by Kazimierz Dąbrowski
      "Player Piano" by Vonnegut
      "Poetics" by Aristotle
      "Republic" by Plato
      "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
      "Shogun" by James Clavell
      "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
      "Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu
      "Tales of Power" by Carlos Castaneda
      "Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science" by Peter Godfrey-Smith
      "The Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins
      "The Bible" by :contentious_topic_here:
      "The End of Eddy" By Édouard Louis
      "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt
      "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood
      "The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo
      "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes
      "The Prince" by Machiavelli
      "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
      "The Singularity Is Near" by Ray Kurzweill
      "The Stranger" by Camus
      "The Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff
      "The Three-Body Problem Trilogy" by Cixin Liu
      "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" by Wittgenstein
      "Traité d'atheologie" by Onfray
      "Treatise of the Three Imposters" by ?
      "Where Mathematics Comes From" by Lakoff and Nunez
      "Where I'm Calling From" by Raymond Carver
      "1984" by George Orwell

      20 votes