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?

I live in the EU. I recently applied for a credit card, and the banker asked me (about my job): "Is it a management role?"

I realized that it is a question I have been asked several times in the past by banks. I tried a cursory google & Reddit search, but I haven't found anyone being curious about this.

I'll try here then. Does anyone know why bankers ask this question? How does it matter? Are "individual contributors" seen as worse/riskier customers than managers?

I have my own informal, anecdotal opinion, but I'm hoping to hear some more informed answer.

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.

I'll be visiting Taipei for a little over a week in mid-January. I'm going to attend a conference, but have most evenings free and will be staying a few days after it ends too. Looking for good recommendations on activities in the city (museums, sights, etc.). I've heard Taipei has a very good nightlife, but unfortunately I don't know if I'll be able to experience much of that due to with whom I'm traveling.

I got my friend a midi beatpad a while ago and he's about to start using it to experiment with music. Does anyone have any tips I can pass on? Any help with software/equipment would be greatly appreciated.

I personally don't love most anime I've been recommended. Admittedly, shonen anime is pretty predictable and boring to watch to me, and I've only mostly been recommended anime in that genre since it's the most popular. There are some exceptions of course, but nothing has grabbed me too hard. I'm not super into the exaggerated reaction shots and repeating everything that's happening on screen like I can't already see it happening. Announcing your feelings and actions is so tiring.

Really looking for something that makes me laugh or feel something.

I've been getting bored of current TV offerings and I'm trying to boost my Japanese learning so I'm wondering if there's anything out there for me. I do try to watch at least a couple of episodes every time I get something suggested, nothing really clicked for me. Even the ones I do like, I feel like I had to force myself to sit through sometimes.

Some anime I do enjoy:

• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners - Even though I really dislike super over the top things, there's something about the relatively simple story and heart in this one. I really loved it and it's probably my favorite so far.
• most Studio Ghibli things - I mean, who doesn't, right?
• Your Name and Suzume - both kinda in the same vein of interesting stories and something different that is hard to pull off in conventional live-action, and beautifully drawn to boot
• Ju Jutsu Kaisen season 1 - I enjoyed it, will probably watch season 2, but waiting for it to finish
• Persona 5 The Animation - Honestly mostly because I liked the game, the anime was not as great tbh.

Things I've seen and are already on the list and will probably(?) continue -

• FMA:B (1 episode)
• Cowboy Bebop (1 episode)
• Undead Murder Farce
• Chainsaw Man season 1 (this one's a bit iffy imo, I really can't stand the main character's fascination with boobs, the action is good though and the story is actually kinda interesting)

Things I've seen and won't continue/didn't particularly enjoy -
(17 episodes of) Death Note, One Punch Man season 1, Demon Hunter season 1

Edit: Western shows/movies I enjoyed:
Background shows I'll put on:
Community
Brooklyn Nine Nine

Shows that made me feel things:
Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul
The Last of Us
Mr. Robot

Not shows but things I enjoy:
Spider-verse movies
Everything Everywhere All at Once (my favorite movie of all time)
The Planet of the Apes trilogy remakes
Lord of the Rings

Paradise is an exciting action sci fi with a really interesting premise. What if eternal youth, was available to anyone with money... yet it involved literally sucking the life force out of others less fortunate than yourself?



The movie focuses on Max, who after his wife is unexpectedly forced to give up 40 years of her life, he desperately searches for a way to get her youth back.

The movie is filled with the usual plot twists, cool sci fi graphics, true love and the like.



There are two truly interesting elements to this movie. The first is the cynical idea that if the rich could live forever, then they would be much more motivated to think about and solve for the long term health of the planet.

In this movie, only the rich can afford to extend their lives for as long as they choose, so we also see how that would severely impact wealth inequality. 



The second interesting element of this movie is a series of questions very similar to the trolley problem. If you could extend your life, at the cost of someone else's youth, would you, assuming they were somehow reimbursed financially?

What if your youth had been taken from you; or what if youth had been taken from someone you loved. Would you take it back? Would you take it back as ethically as possible, or ethics be damned?

Could you give up your youth to save a loved one from an extremely unkind yet uncertain end, or is it easier to risk your life to save theirs than it is to give up eternal youth once you have it?



At one point in the movie, we learn it is easier to take someones life passively through the forces of economics and medical science, than it is to actively kill someone with a gun to their head. Which is the essence of the trolley problem. But it is also the essence of wealth inequality.

We could easily flip the switch, to improve the quality of life and length of life for many people, at the cost of one rich persons riches, but those with power passively choose to not do so. The movie doesn't philosophize anywhere near as much as I am doing right now, instead focusing on fast action, true love and cool sci fi. But I think perhaps this movie is a very subtle warning to the rich. At a certain point of wealth inequality, some portion of the population will want their fair share of the wealth, ethics be damed.

https://www.netflix.com/title/81288179

Yes, yes, I know, the classic blunder 😅

I just have to say though, the difference is insane, I mean what the actual fuaæosiuhrfjk!?

I have been on 60 hz screens my entire life, only upgrading to 1080p in 2015 or so, and I bought my current screen from a friend a year or two ago -- I guess that's why I never realized it was 144 hz, not 60 hz!? But playing WoW with another friend yesterday, we started talking about specs and refresh rates came up, so she even offered that I could borrow her second screen because she felt so sorry about my only having 60 hz. So for fun and just to be sure, I went to check my settings and yup, it said 144 hz in there! "Surely not", I thought... so I clicked it and absolutely surely fucking yes, it instantly looked a million times better??? I laughed so hard because it is both amazing and I am an idiot because I have seen this exact meme dozens of times and I cannot believe that I am a victim too 😂

The colors are so much richer, the movement of everything was so much smoother. I mean seriously, my mind is still completely blown now a day later. This is a great christmas present for myself, and it was free!

I don't think any other computer upgrade has ever had this big an impact. Blew my mind!

I'm doing a bit of Typescript programming and started using zod for input validation. It has a fair number of convenience methods, one of which is brand(). This creates a unique type, much like the newtype operator in some languages. This is despite TypeScript not having unique types by default; TypeScript implements structural typing.

The technique used to implement unique types has been known for a long time, but it's new to me. You can declare a type with an extra field that doesn't really exist.

There seem to be several variations on how to do this. They seem to be mostly equivalent, but the ergonomics might differ. (Some might have better compiler errors that others?) The basic requirement is that the imaginary field doesn't get in the way in normal use, but it's incompatible with other types, causing a compiler error if they're mixed.

One way goes like this:

declare const brand: unique symbol;

type Brand<T, TBrand extends string> = T & {
  [brand]: TBrand;
}

It can be used to declare branded types like this:

type TopicId = Brand<bigint, "TopicId">;

const myTopicId = 123n as TopicId;

This trick relies on the fact that TypeScript's type checking is unsound. We can lie to the type checker. Intersecting T (in this case, bigint) creates a subtype of bigint with an imaginary field. The field's type is declared so the field requires a specific string, so it's going to be incompatible with just about any other type, unless you use Brand to give it the same name on purpose. (The field doesn't actually exist and no string is actually stored there.)

To create a TopicId value, you use "as" to explicitly downcast bigints to TopicId's. Then you can use them just like a bigint, except that there will be compile errors if you use them wrong.

A less strict approach is to make the imaginary field optional, described here as "flavoring" but I don't think that's in common use? Then you could assign bignums without doing a cast, but the type is still incompatible with other branded type. This reminds me of how types work in Go.

I am and have been on a bit of a quest to make my computing devices suck less.

Over the last few years I have migrated all of my laptops and desktops over to various Linux flavors. My experience with this process is that each flavor has their own quirks that need to be ironed out, but after getting things running there is little in the way of maintenance. Things kind of just work nowadays.

I have been looking into getting something like (but not necessarily) LineageOS on my phone. As I am looking into this and reading forums on the subject, it seems like a perpetual arms race between application developers and application users. One puts in a way to check for root, then there are root hiders, then there are root hider checkers, then there are root hiders that you build with custom names, etc.

I want my device to not suck.

I don’t want to be going in and fighting with my banking applications every time there is an update. I am totally willing to fight a painful setup once.

Is a custom phone OS something that is essentially only viable to use if you are driven by spite? Am I reading too much into the struggles that are posted in various forums? I am looking for any input for anyone that has used a custom OS short or long term.

My whole life I have lived with the regret of not becoming proficient in a musical instrument. I grew up with a piano and acoustic guitar in my childhood home, and I actually took lessons for both but never committed to practicing or improving. As a result I grew up tinkering with both hit never learned how to read music or actually develop any fundamental techniques to play either.

I am an autodidact and have always felt that with the right resources, and a little discipline, I could at least learn enough to play a few songs on either instrument, and possibly with time become a sight reader.

To that end, I am curious, musicians of ~Tildes, what resources are the best to self-learn piano and guitar? Books, videos, apps, anything that you’ve used or know people have used and actually went from complete novice to reasonably proficient?

Thanks and happy new year!