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!

So I just upgraded to an M1 Mac Mini. I was a little iffy on it, part of me wanted to build a PC just to play games but I really like MacOS and I mostly play on PS5 and the Switch with the PC only being for indie titles and stuff that only works with a keyboard and mouse like RTS, 4x, or city builders. I just don't play PC games enough to prioritize gaming as a use case in buying a computer, but I also really like RTS and city builder games.

I figured WINE and Parallels would meet most of my gaming needs but my forays into WINE have been frustrating and buggy, and this reddit thread about what works on Parallels is, frankly, just kind of sad to look at. What's worse, apparently the new Age of Empires has some kind of pathfinding instruction set that ONLY works with x86 architecture. So it won't work under any kind of virtualization or emulation.

Enter Cloud gaming. It seems the big contenders right now are ShadowPC, GeForce Now, and Paperspace. Has anyone tried these? When I last costed these out Shadow was only around $15-$20 a month which was almost a no-brainer. But it seems to have gone up to $30 a month now, which gets costly enough to where it almost seems like I'd rather get a Steam Deck. Paperspace is like $10 per month plus another ~$1 per hour of play, which would probably end up cheapest for how little I play. But how it is in terms of configuration and latency I have no idea.

Timasomo Has Officially Begun!

Weekly Task

This is the thread where you commit to your goal. Post what you plan to achieve this month.

Posting in this thread is your official entry into Timasomo.

Next Steps

Get creating! Timasomo is LIVE!

Timasomo FAQ

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!

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?

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with friends about the singularity and transhumanism, and I thought it was very interesting to consider the philosophical value in preserving whatever we consider to be humanity. That got me to thinking about non-anthropocentric views of the subject. I think that the one weakness to transhumanist ideas is that they put too much value on the perceived value of their humanity, regardless of what they define that term to mean. Does the existence of "humanity" make the universe any better in any measurable way?

Fast forward to now and I have come across a random group of people talking about Nier Automata. The game has a lot of thoughts about humanity and the value of life, and the fact that all the characters are robots and AI really help to give you a different perspective of everything. And during this time I'm thinking about people like Yudkowski and Musk who are terrified of AI becoming sentient and deciding that humans all deserve to die. And I think to myself, "wait a moment, is it really that bad?"

While of course I would hate to see humankind exterminated, there's actually merit to being succeeded by an intelligence of our own creation. For one thing, the combination of intelligence and sentience might in itself be considered to be a definition of humanity. And inasmuch it fulfills the desires that motivate transhumanism; the AI would last much longer than humanity could, could live in places that humans cant, and can live in ways that are much more sustainable than human bodies. This AI is also our successor; It would be the living legacy for us as a species. It would even have a better chance of coming into contact with intelligences other than our own.

Well, these are just thoughts that I thought were worth sharing.

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

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 started tracking down commentary tracks for The Sopranos. Has anybody gone through them? If so, are they worth it? I try to do commentary tracks for everything I watch, but sometimes they're lame 'oh, I love this actor' 'this day was fun <no story or context>'

I'm mostly interested in backstory, technical details, etc.