I was watching this clip of The Daily Show where Desi Lydic highlights the change in how Dr. Oz has been portrayed over the years, and it got me thinking about the perception of public figures over time.

I remember watching CBS Sunday Morning segment in 1998 where Elon Musk was painted in a fairly good light as a sort of rebel taking on Microsoft. This was around the time that Microsoft was seen in a pretty bad light for the Internet Explorer anti-trust case.

Musk as he appears in the media I consume today is almost unrecognizable from the 1998 segment.

I also recall a time when Rudy Giuliani was seen in a good light (disclosure: I'm mostly going off of my memory of how he was perceived by the nation as Mayor of New York. I never lived in or near New York, so I can't really speak to how he was perceived locally).

I'm sure I could come up with other examples if I thought about it some more.

All of this has me pondering the nature of my own perception. I don't know any of these people personally, so I rely on what I see online and in the news to guide my image of who these people are. But when I see this stark contrast it makes me wonder what is real.

Did these figures change over time, perhaps corrupted by power and/or fame?

Have they always been this way, and I'm just seeing the media paint them differently over time?

Are they just in a Harvey Dent / Batman "live long enough to become the villain" situation?

Maybe all of the above?

I also think about this in context of aging. My views on the world have definitely changed over time. I think I've mostly grown in a positive way as a person. But I've also seen my own parents change their views and become disturbingly conservative. It worries me that I may also have a regression as I age. They are still mostly the same loving parents I grew up with. The only real obvious cause of their shift in views is the media they consume.

So I'm curious to hear other points of view on this phenomenon.

I’m embarrassed to admit that after the whole Reddit shutdown, I’m at a loss on how to get news. The past 10+ years my internet routine has been browse Something Awful for discussions, and use Reddit as a glorified RSS. I would open up Reddit, browse World News, Politics, Technology, Games, Apple, and Electric Vehicles for any interesting articles for the day. Then go to SA for more granular discussions, which I’m now using Tildes to supplement since I love the community here.

I have tried downloading Inoreader and adding some of their default feeds but it feels super cluttered, not like the quick concise headlines I’m used to casually browsing. I’ll admit I’m guilty of just glancing at headlines and not actually reading news, but it was nice to just have an inkling of what’s going on in the world

So the question I ask is how (mostly on the internet) do you get your news? RSS? Dedicated news app? Read a site?

What's the thing that was promised, not delivered, and just really upsets you?

For me, it's "The Doors of Stone" promised by Patrick Rothfuss. Every couple of months I think about how badly I'd love to read this book and it just really makes me angry. When I first read The Name of the Wind, I was awestruck. I just freaking loved this book. The Wise Man's Fear was a wait, but when delivered, it really satisfied me. Now, it's been 13 years!! Some days I think to myself, "I'm not even going to read his stupid book when it comes out." But, I'm kidding myself. Of course I'm going to read it...if he or I don't die first.

I have for the last few years been preoccupied with creating a kind of audio-based social media, a call-in radio-show if you will without any call-screening, and the occasional piece of music to rest the ears after too many words. By now this has resulted in a pretty solid community of dedicated listeners capable of discussing a wide range of topics and so far no heckling or trolling even though we never had a call-screener. Two listeners even met through the show and are now dating <3 <4

The relative success of this radio format has made me ponder how a community comparable to tildes would behave if it had an audio or podcast layer to it. Like a spoken forum/Reddit thread with moderators arranging audio messages from users/listeners into threads that make up rotating topical sections in an ongoing audio transmission. If you could listen to a curated spoken feed of tildes. A community-based audio forum live radio social media hybrid.

Drop some references if you know of any media experiments it might be worth for me to know about while I brainstorm with myself!

One example I know of is the US-based 100% listener-sponsored radio station WFMU. Full weekly schedule, absolutely unrelenting top programming by hosts who have full autonomy to explore their broad musical interests. There is never this modern smarmyness of some podcasts hosts. No ads. Fully listener sponsored. Your attention is taken for granted. Nobody's trying to get you hooked. Your attention is rewarded. They have a written chat-roll during most broadcasts the host will sometimes include into their speak, but not often. It's freeform radio with a digital layer as an add-on. It's fantastic for what it is. https://wfmu.org

Do you know of any experimental/hybrid social media where the users/listeners provide the spoken input in the style of call-in radio? Please drop some references, books, anything that connects to experiences gleaned from this type of experiment. Also interested in your ideas for how to make this work in real life.

It's not supposed to be the best and most streamlined brains-off entertainment ever. Just a stab at a technologically modern and democratic way of enabling discourse and the identification that seems a unique feature of audio-based media. When you can't see the person talking, it's a pseudonymous stranger ... you fill in the blanks with projections, guesses about the person. Always loved this kind of interaction. Which is why I'm here on tildes too!

Sorry in advance if this is kind of a ramble. Thanks for any thoughts you may have.

This post asking about specific hardware made me realize that I have lost touch with major architectural changes in PC hardware. Back in college (over 20 years ago), I was constantly upgrading and rebuilding computers, talking about them, reading about them. But that's probably par for the course in a EE program. I'm sure there must have been other online resources, but Slashdot is the thing that sticks out in my memory of that time.

Then in grad school, my last set of desktops from college carried me through the first few years, and I had a series of laptops provided by school.

Since then, I've always just bought laptops because they've gotten good enough to do everything I want, and with kids, it's much more flexible to be able to work anywhere in and out of the house. My latest (now several years old) has a high end I7 cpu, an NVIDIA GPU, two solid state drives (1.5TB total). It weighs just a few pounds and does everything I want, including things like Solidworks, zbrush, and older PC games.

Since I can remember a time when I was excited about 90mhz processors and feeling like I was getting a screaming deal to pay $500 for a 500mb hd, sometimes it just feels surreal for this to be so normal.

So, am I out of the loop? Or is this reflective of a more general shift? What do you read / where do you post to discuss hardware, hardware compatibility, etc. Are you still building desktops? Laptops? Cyberdecks? What are your thoughts on cost/value trade off of dell, etc. vs rolling your own?

I'm thinking something I could use for news, with a feed that I curate myself. I'd open the app in the morning and see that I have a feed with five newstoks in it. I swipe to the first one, general updates from my local news, swipe for the weather, swipe for sports, etc. They'd all be short-form, and take the same amount of time it would take me to skim a newspaper. Once I get through each "card," my feed is done and I can put the app down and go about my day.

I could curate this feed to contain only the sources I want, and ideally content would not be user-generated, and instead more akin to traditional television with regularly scheduled programs. Then I can check at breakfast and see all the early news programs, check at lunch and see mid-day content, and ditto for the evening.

I'm not going to ruminate about social media, content, and news, but this would be a very refreshing change of pace instead of constantly being protective of my time, since everything is designed to suck away as much of it as possible.

A guy can dream, right?

I've been slowly fiddling around with setting up a little homelab and media server for the last few months. As a web developer, I've always wanted to learn a bit more of the infrastructure side of things, hence the homelab part. The deteriorating quality of major streaming services finally pushed me to set up a media server as well.

Right now, my setup is very basic. I've been using an old repurposed office laptop. It's a simple dell latitude 5540 I got ridiculously cheap due to it's barely usable crusty keyboard, but since I mainly SSH into it that's not really an issue. I formatted it, doubled the ram, and installed the latest stable Debian release. (Headless)

After that, I chose to install yams which was recommended here. Definitely saved a lot of time there! Finally, I added an old unisex raspberry pi I had lying around. The idea is that it's the only part of the setup that is on 24/7, since it has an almost negligible footprint. Whenever I want the main server running, I SSH into the raspberry and use wakeonLAN to start the main server. I'm probably gonna make a tiny web interface for that soon.

Now on to the part I need advice for. The laptop and attached HD are quickly running out of space. I know just slapping on extra hard drives has a limit, and am vaguely aware of things like unraid existing, but am a bit overwhelmed right now with all the information and options in this space.

Does anyone have some advice on something I can tackle for a reasonable amount of work/budget? Something basic, but with the possibility of expansion in the future?

Any other tips on where to go next in general are of course also appreciated. (On that note, I'm right now not opening up the server to ingress from outside. I only interact with it on the home network, as I primarily work from home)

So I recently got back from a very comforting trip to my motherland in Taiwan. I always joke that when I get back from Asia my Chinese gets better by a lot.

One thing I kinda wish I was better at was reading Traditional Chinese, since it's one of the barriers I have for fully communicating with my family and dimishes my confidence when navigating Taiwan.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fluent in speaking, I've had full on conversations with native Taiwanese and they're always surprised that I'm from America.

At the same time I feel like I should be keeping up with the news and general day to day life in Taiwan, since I plan on visiting more often because my grandparents are getting older and I really miss the country a lot.

I know we have a couple of people who are in East Asian countries/Taiwanese/Taiwanese-adjacent, I was wondering if y'all had any suggestions on things like news channels on YouTube or day in the life content that I can follow along with and match characters to practice my reading a bit. I can read at maybe a kindergarten level if that helps LOL.

Watching the drama around kagi unfold and it has me wondering how much you take into consideration a creator's view on things like homophobia, sexism, racism, etc. when deciding to use a product. I think most of us have a bar somewhere (I would imagine very few on this website would ever consider registering on an altright platform), so where is that bar for you? What about art? Have you boycotted JKR or dropped your opinion about Picasso because they're transphobic and misogynistic respectively? Is it about the general vibe of a product or piece of media, or are you more discerning? What goes into this decision and why?