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?

As I write this, I’m using a $10 foot massager from Temu that my wife bought. I thought it was totally stupid but it gets nightly use. We lie on the couch and just let it run.

Edit2: it looks like the LINGTENG one on Amazon - probably white labeled from same factory, nothing special about it but we like the simplicity.

What has anyone else found surprisingly useful?

Edit -

Here are some things that came in mind as I was walking around:

• Different type of mason jar lids from masontops for sprouting, cold press coffee, pouring spout for watering plants, etc.
• ifixit kit - originally used for phone fixing now used for prying random stuff - the Ifixit jimmy is really useful, and it’s great to have all tools in one place
• Shoegoo - originally used for shoe fixing now used for fixing bike parts - time to invest in a glue gun
• YouTube premium - I originally got a family plan so that my mom wouldn’t watch so many ads, but now it’s an integral part of my passive learning system - languages, guitar, sports, etc.
• hydrogen peroxide - I got it for wound disinfecting but it has only ever been used as a stain remover.
• cheap Muji mini umbrella - way more used than my fancy Davek

Just curious since the recent DeepSeek panic.

What do you like? Companies/ETFs?

What do you do? Buy and hold/Trade/Options (Calls/puts, LEAPs, spreads)?

What areas do you think will see massive change (gain/loss)?

Pretty sure this is my first or second topic post, so apologies if the opener is too short.

I just finished reading I hate the new internet post, in which the OP stated:

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of.

Why couldn't we create a bot database, which I imagine would work similarly to uBlock for ads? There would be a number of signals to attempt to classify users of social media sites (likely human, likely bot, etc.) in addition to user-provided feedback ("I think this person is a bot" or "this account is me -- definitely not a bot").

An extension could then be attached to the database to provide visual changes to social media platforms ("WARNING! LIKELY BOT!") or simply hide bot posts/comments.

Off the top of my head, some bot signals:

• Posting known duplicate posts with political motivation (e.g. on Reddit you see the same exact post about how the tariffs will create a stronger America by different posters) [strong indicator]
• Usernames that follow the lazy bot format, e.g., Pretentious_Rabbit_2355 [weak indicator]
• Usage of AI-generated or ripped off profile pictures, post images, etc. [strong indicator]
• etc.

On the crowdsourced side, there would have to be some rules in place to prevent profile bombing, etc.

All in all, I could see something like this adding a bit of human value back to the various social media platforms AND I would think it would lead to higher advertisement click rates (bots will become less valuable over time on a given platform and decide to invest their resources elsewhere, while "human" user engagement increases at the same time).

If this concept already exists, I apologize. I only did a very quick google.

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?

Kid has just started getting into Star Wars, which is great because I could buy a set of light sabres for Christmas and no what do you mean that was for the kid it absolutely wasn't a present for myself as well. Anyway, countless hours of duelling later...

We have watched the "first" two films (ep 4 and 5) and plan to watch the remaining movies at some points. A few grabbing-my-arm scary moments but it's OK because "the good guys always win, right Daddy?"

We're playing Lego Star Wars together on the Playstation, which is brilliant fun. Their face when they blew up the Death Star all by themselves was fantastic. Everyone was excited for the rest of the day.

We are hitting the phonics books, of which there is plenty. Kid loves books and stories but isn't such a fan of reading for themselves as yet - but will ask me to let them read to me if there are Star Wars books on the pile, which is great.

However, that's where my Star Wars knowledge ends. I know there's a whole boatload of EU stuff out there, but I have no idea what it is, or what of it is suitable (or not) for a six year old. Any suggestions? We have a rotating selection of streaming services live at any given time, but I'm ok with the occasional venture into choppier waters if needed.

Did you watch the royal rumble? How did you like it? I thought the winner was quite unexpected, especially winning directly against John Cena. Overall the performance of both the men's and women's rumble was really good.

This was inspired by a recent post from Your Local Epidemiologist, where she lays out a set of guiding principles for the blog going forward:

• be a steady guide, trying to avoid whiplash
• providing important context - a broader perspective
• staying grounded in evidence
• being clear about what we know and what we don't know
• approaching issues with empathy

She also references the hazard + outrage framework for risk communication. I come from a safety / risk assessment background, so we usually think of risk = severity x likelihood. But as a communication framework, hazard + outrage seems pretty useful, as talking about risk to lay people is always difficult.

Thinking about one's guiding principles, writing them down, testing them in use, seems really useful to me as a way to be more proactive and less reactive in the way that I deal with the world. So then, the questions on my mind for the Tildes community are:

• what are your guiding principles?
• how did you come by them?
• how have they evolved over the years?

Since this is a text post, I'll put mine in another post below so the responses can thread under it. And since I can never resist a quote, I'll close with:

If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values, they're hobbies.
~ Jon Stewart

As is the case with a lot of my questions, "intended for multiplayer" is as open as you want it to be.

It could be that it's a game primarily known for its multiplayer that also happens to have a campaign (e.g. one of the Call of Duty games) or it could be you playing Mario Party against yourself by trading off between your own controllers (we've all done something like this, right?).

Entirely up to you how you interpret the question.

Let us know what the game was, why you played it solo, and, most importantly, how that went for you. Did you like it? Did it give you a novel gaming experience? Were you able to work around any of its limitations? Would you recommend other people try it?

Recently my wife was complaining how her phone has been getting overzealous when flagging incoming phone spam, and as a result she's missed some important calls. It made me think about how easy it is for me to avoid spam calls, despite using a 3rd party dialer on my phone without any kind of spam ID features.

It's because around 15 years ago when Google started letting you pick your own phone number through Google Voice, I (for various reasons) needed to change my phone number. I ended up choosing one with what I thought was a really cool area code, and I've ported that number to every new provider I've swapped to so it's stuck with me since then. It turns out that all the spam callers, bless their hearts, like to spoof incoming phone numbers with the same area code as the number they're dialing. It means whenever I see a call coming from the same area code as my number it's ~100% guaranteed to be spam, and if I see a call coming from the same area code that I actually live in it's ~100% guaranteed to be something actually important (doctor, pharmacy, kids' school, something like that). It wasn't my intent when picking the number (I just wanted the cool area code), but it turned out to also be the perfect spam call ID system. (At least so long as I never move to the place that matches my area code.)

So I'm curious if anyone else has similar stories, where you did something for one reason but it turned out to actually be awesome for an entirely different, unexpected reason?

I’m in between books now, and would like to ask for some suggestions for new books to look at. I use a Kindle and the Kindle app for books usually, so it shouldn’t be difficult to find most books on Amazon.

I’m very close to finishing the Stormilight Archives by Brandon Sanderson and well into The Harrowing by James Aitcheson where i really enjoy both a lot. So if you’ve either read The Harrowing or any of the Sanderson books I’d love some recommendations on books who are in the same vein as these.

Thank you in advance!

This is the tenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Our next book will be Born a Crime by Trevor Noah at the end of February.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

This topic is a part conversation starter, part request for help in finding.

For those that are attempting to keep up with the many weird and sometimes interesting products both announced and teased recently in the field of AR/XR glasses- what are your thoughts?

Examples, off the top of my head, include a number of devices revealed at CES 2024. The Asus AirVision M1- a pair of full-HD display-in-glasses form, similar in many ways to the Xreal lineup. The new Xreal Air 2 Ultra and Xreal One line. Snapdragon's new XR2+ Gen 2 chip for high efficiency portable computing and a successor to the chip used in the Meta Quest 3 headset. The Halliday glasses, which forego any form of waveguide or combining optic and opt to project directly into the eye using a monocular microled projector. And older devices, such as the "open source" Brilliant Labs glasses which have been previous discussed on Tildes.

Personally, I'm disappointed in most (if not all) of these options, but that might largely be because the industry and I have very different ideas of what smart glasses should be. The industry is focusing heavily on social media features- cameras, filters, translation- and even more heavily on AI. Why anybody would want an LLM strapped to their face I do not know. I feel that the goal of full augmented reality (rendering tips and visuals over the real-world) is a noble one, but also not one I am particularly interested in. My ideal device would be purely a heads-up display with a long battery life. The ability to cast notifications and information to a reasonably pretty display, but the freedom to decide what. No cameras, no data collection, no overcomplications- does anyone know of any options that fulfill these criteria?

Discuss.

Hi everyone!

With my favorite F1 commentator joining the indycar crew and MBS acting crazy in F1, I want to dive into indycar a little bit this season.

I’m located in Belgium, when I checked the indycar live website it seemed like I won’t be able to stream indy500 here? (I don’t even know what indy500 is as opposed to the other Indy series? Which series should I follow? Who is awesome? Who is the stroll of indycar?)

I think it’s clear I’m a total noob here looking for some guidance. Any help is welcome, thank you!

I was talking to the other guitarist in one of my bands about the hedonic treadmill the other day. And he said to me that despite owning his swanky Range Rover for over 4 years, every time he gets in it he feels like a kid and is excited by it.

I think continued delight in the things that we already have is a really important attitude to take in life, and so I wondered what things my fellow Tilderen (yes, I'm refusing to budge on the nomenclature until I see at least one other person use it) have which they still feel the magic of owning, even after a long time.

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?

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!

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts who watched through the basho.

I don't have all my thoughts together yet but wanted to post this after watching the last day of the basho to get the ball rolling on any discussion.

I'm one of the moderators of a small / medium community. I've been doing it for around a year, with no prior experience at moderating or helping to foster an online community.

We have a section for jokes and humour, and somebody posted one of those "train dilemma" memes. It gave the choice of letting the train hit one of several groups of people. It was general enough to not name anyone specific. The options were similar to:

Let the train hit:
a) Nintendo developers
b) Sony developers
c) Microsoft developers

Fine. A bit crass, but hardly shocking.

A commenter then replied by stating they don't mind which, so long as x well known developer is shot.

Now that really threw me.

The moderation team have been divided over it, although not strongly so. We are all generally in favour of removing it. But we are concerned about over-stepping and of course the topic of free-speech has arisen.

As it came up with us, I'll also mention that there are no specific rules of the website, or this specific sub-community, to state such humour is disallowed.

Where is the line drawn with free-speech? We would certainly remove anything pro-fascism, racist, homophobic or grossly offensive, but we do have rules that cover those.

I'd be really keen to hear any views on how you would approach this and how you would justify your decision.

Ever since my diagnosis two years ago, I have had this as an ongoing conversation with my family. I always felt like there was very little accurate representation of ADHD in media. The few examples I could always think of were either very loosely coded as ADHD, or extreme stereotypes. I want to crowdsource some examples of ADHD representation in media, both good and bad.

Doug from Up: This is a common one that comes up a lot. I think it’s a really poor example. The only ADHD symptom is the squirrel joke they use a handful of times. It’s also (for my presentation at least) extremely inaccurate. Random things I see will indeed distract me, but Doug can come back from the conversation without a missed step. I think this one is extra harmful because it gives a false sense of how the ADHD brain works.

Dory from Finding Nemo: This is another common one people bring up. Dory’s intrusive and impulsive thoughts are much more accurate to my presentation, so it’s an improvement from Doug. I don’t like that she is often portrayed as stupid or careless. I’m not against a character with those traits, but with so few examples of ADHD in media, I think people may think it comes from the ADHD.

Evelyn Wang from Everything Everywhere All At Once: This example showed up recently on my Internet searches. I want to rewatch it again with the context of ADHD. I feel like it is probably a decent representation, but I can’t say for sure without a rewatch.

Percy Jackson: This is the only one on my list that is explicitly diagnosed with ADHD (and dyslexia and other issues). I will give them kudos for the explicit diagnosis, but I don’t think it’s a good representation. ADHD seems to just mean that he is bad at school. It seems that it has no impact on Percy outside of that. For my particular case, I was quite good in school, so it is inaccurate for me. I would be interested to hear if other people resonate more with it. Dyslexia seems to come up more in the books, so it may be a better representation for that.

Todd from Bojack Horsemen: I saved my personal favorite for last. I first watched Bojack Horsemen before my diagnosis, and ADHD wasn’t really on my mind. After my diagnosis, I realized how good of a portrayal Todd is. As a bonus, it is the only portrayal I have heard of that includes hyper focus (When Todd hyper focuses on writing the rock opera, and then the hyper focus switches to a video game). With the exception of the rock opera, I think I have had the same exact scenario play out in my own life. I had something I wanted to do, was able to focus on it, but was stolen away into a video game hyper focus.

Are there any other examples you have found?

Lately I've been taking an interest in American westward expansion and trying to get a better understanding of how the lines were drawn on maps in the past. Can anyone recommend a good video or interactive visualization that I can scroll back and forward through time to see the changes in detail?

Things I'm particularly interested in tracking:

• Indigenous lands (specifically how the boundaries of traditional/ancestral lands evolved into modern-day reservations)
• European claims like those of Britain, France, and Spain
• What was considered US/Canada/Mexico territory vs. no man's land or frontier at different points in time, from the governance standpoint of each of those nations
• Large and rapid settling movements like the Mormons into Utah, Oklahoma land rush, California gold rush, etc.
• Other factors like homesteading programs (I don't know much about this) and the transcontinental railroad, confederacy borders, trail of tears, etc.
• Notable battles/massacres marking bloody land disputes

I mean I guess that's a lot, this is basically "tell me about all of American history." 😂

I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp of the general political timeline and important events, I'm just realizing lately that I don't have a cohesive mental model of how it all fits on a map and changed over the years. I did find the Wikipedia page on Territorial Evolution of the United States to be interesting but it's a bit overwhelming and not very digestible. It contains this animated gif, which is awesome but I can't scroll through it at my own pace, and it's USA only.

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!

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like new years, life hacks and pebble. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was desperate to know.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Soldering/electronics repair enthusiasts: I am in need of a soldering iron/station for electronics repair and wiring, preferred budget is under $150, perfection can raise the budget to $250.

First line of this post is all that's really needed if you just want to provide advice on what to buy (which is just fine, people don't need to know how a car works for me to explain that they probably just need a minivan).
Below is what I have gathered thus far if perhaps there's more that you'd like to know about what I've seen and perhaps misunderstood so far.

At present I have a no-name, non-adjustable, extremely basic soldering iron that is more fire hazard than anything and a Weller soldering gun that is obviously not meant for electronics and small wires. The iron has been good enough for the occasional need to solder a couple of wires together to get something broken back up and working, but is not something I'd use on anything critical.

Inspired by a recent thread, and how reticent some folks seemed to be about creating topics or even new groups dedicated to making things, I figured it would be nice to have a topic where we can share these things. Whether it's an electronic widget, a piece of knitting or crochet, retrofitting a bike with a motor, or whatever else, let's share what we've been up to.

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.

Every time I get a haircut, my barber hands me a small hand mirror so that I can bounce an image off the wall mirror and see the back of my head. My hair is noticeably thinner in the back each time.

I recently was at a function and saw pictures of me standing around, some of which included the back of my head. The thinning is clearly starting to stand out in a bad way.

I feel like I’ve got two options:

1. Do something to try to save my hair (medication?).
2. Shave my head and try to rock a bald look.

I’m open to tips, tricks, and guidance on either of these (or options I’m not aware of).

I’m not very attached to my hair, so this isn’t a super emotional thing for me. I’m also not scared of going bald since, as a gay guy, I’m well aware of how compelling a bald + beard look can be on some men (my beard isn’t thinning at all, thankfully).

There’s still a question of whether it would look good for me specifically though. Also I don’t know if I’m ready to give up on my hair just yet?

One advantage I do have is summers off (I’m a teacher), so I’m going to be able to do a bald test run in a few months without too much risk. If it turns out that I’m a complete disaster without hair, I’ll just stay home and let it grow back out.

Anyway, I’m open to any and all thoughts on balding, hair loss, hair loss prevention, etc. Tell me your own experiences and what decisions you made. Let me know the tricks of the trade.

Title.

As I peruse new, and new to me, music I generally average about 4-5 songs a month being added to my playlists. More often than not a song will just click immediately and get added, but sometimes it'll be an older song on an album I have heard/owned prior and found a new enjoyment of it or, more rarely, I'll be introduced to a song and end up liking it more as I listen to it over some period of time.

Hello. I'm currently in the market for an Android tablet, not strictly for my personal usage, but for my family so there's one easily reachable touch screen computer around the house. The problems start with my requirements, which are... not exactly tablet market friendly:

• Available in France (and without overly high shipping costs)
• Long term manufacturer support so it isn't subject to suddenly become e-waste because they decided to stop providing updates after like 1 major Android release
• Ability to install an Android distribution that doesn't rely on Google apps such as LineageOS + microG
• Sufficient specs to use a web browser and play videos without issues.
• I'd like the model to be easy to repair in the same vein as the Fairphone but that's lower priority

The budget is best defined as "probably not enough" (I don't think I can afford to spend much more than ~400€). Given that I suspect from my initial search not yielding much that fitting all the requirements is impossible especially within that budget, do you have pointers on models that provide an acceptable compromise for what I'm looking for, or that somehow do match all the criteria?

Hilariously, the closest candidate so far within budget seems to be... The Google Pixel tablet, which despite being a Google product has a fairly straightforward way to get an unGoogled ROM on it.

The company I work for just announced they want to open a new office abroad, in Australia to be specific. We’re based in Denmark, and they’re hoping to have one person from here moving there, working full time.
We already have an office in the US, so it’s not an entirely new thing for us to open an office abroad.
However, I’m really thinking about letting the company know that I would like to go, and I think there is a pretty good chance that they would let me. My wife is open to the idea too. We have one child (she would be just over 3 when we would have to move), so it’s really good timing too…

Have any of you tried something like this? What was your experience like?

I am using Windows 10.

That is perhaps a silly question to ask, but I did not find an answer.

Suppose that I have a playlist with 100 videos on VLC or some other video player. I wish for it to play all the one hundred files in random order, with the exception that any video that was already played (or, possibly, played to completion) will be excluded, and will not be played again. A video not played to completion would resume from where it stopped.

This should be persistent, so the next time I fire up the playlist it starts from where I left it and also remembers the videos that were already played and should be skipped. Ideally, upon completion of the playlist, I should be able to learn that it was complete, so I could get new videos/episodes of whatever shows I am shuffling.

Thanks!

EDIT: I understand I can actually pre-shuffle the playlist to get something very similar to what I am asking. However, I would rather not know what is coming next. Like it used to be when I watched TV back in the day. Thanks! ;)

My wife and I are planning on reading the Odyssey this year and we have to pick an translation. I've always struggled to read in translation, mostly because I get paralyzed choosing — it feels like a big choice, and if I end up not liking the book I can never tell if it was inherent to the story or because of the translation.

Can anyone help me out here? I don't mind if it is prose vs poetry, but we are doing this for fun, so I would prioritize readability over faithfulness to the Greek. I don't want anything that sounds too modern, but I also don't want to have very modern language take me out of the epic setting. I am currently leaning the Wilson translation, based on some excerpts I have read, but I am open to being convinced otherwise. Thanks!

EDIT:

Thank you to all who recommended some translations. I am narrowed down to between Fagles and Wilson, and intend to do some side by side comparisons to choose a final one before diving in!

Ok, this is one of those thoughts I have in my brain and that I can't quite get rid of.
It breaks down into a couple of questions. For the purposes of this, I'm aware that what eyes see is the reflection of light bouncing off objects, but I'm curious the impact on the visibility of both objects and other lights.

A. If eyes emitted any light, could they still see anything at all?
B. If eyes emitted, for example, red light, could they see everything except red items? What about red lights? Does this change if the light is green or violet?
B.1. If they can't red things would they just be invisible?
B.2. If they can't see red lights, would it matter if the red light they're seeing is brighter or dimmer, and would it still be an invisible/blank space?
C. I'm not sure how infrared interacts here but I know animals that sense infrared do emit it, is there a reason that's different, if it's different.

The internet is mostly not super helpful with this, since eyes don't emit light, just reflect it and look glowy, but yeah, anyway... thanks for entertaining my weird fixation.

I like to play games, but lately I've been avoiding certain types because I think they are not good for my health. At least, they don't make me feel well afterward. For me, this is a particular type of game that requires a very high level of skill, concentration, and dexterity.
I noticed this years ago when I would play online multiplayer. After the game, I would feel extremely aggressive and I could tell that my blood pressure must have been much higher than normal.

More recently, I notice this on very difficult games such as Elden Ring, specifically the boss fights. After playing for a while I have the same feeling that I would have if I had just walked away from a near fatal accident or something. Then sometimes that evening I would have trouble sleeping.

I'm sure my physiology is different than other people. I seem to retain adrenaline/cortisol levels longer than most others. And I know that some people find the adrenaline high to be one of the main points of gaming. Still, I wonder if in general it isn't good for people to stress themselves like this when they aren't burning it off with physical activity.

I read about this online a little bit. There seem to have been some studies about it that were mostly inconclusive. Most of the findings are more interested in games being a substitute for more physical activity, so gamers may be more sedentary or overweight than normal.

As a regular baker with whole grain wheat, I'm consistantly disappointed by the quality of flour I am buying, so I have finally got to the point where I have placed an order for some from an online source - in this case, Azure Standard. They make a big deal about their process, using a unifine mill - apparently something they had a hand in reviving when it had commercially failed. In trying to figure out why this was such a big deal I went into a bit of a black hole looking into wheat milling.

Part of that was learning about home mills. It seems almost insane to me, but people buy some very expensive mills in order to make the best quality breads. You can even buy impact mills, the same general concept that makes Azure's unifine mill such an attractive proposition, and it looks like a popular manufacturer in that niche has just introduced one that's less than $200, which I think makes it pretty attractive for less, uh, intense bakers.

I've been seeing a lot of weird kitchen appliances in recent years. Thermomix cookers have been a big thing for a few years. "Smart" or "AI" Ovens have been in the news a lot more recently, and it wasn't too long ago that sous vide specific cookers and electric pressure cookers were unusual. An odd one that I'm particularly interested in is a soymilk maker, which will grind, filter, and cook them.

Do you own a weird kitchen appliance? What do you think of them? Is it something you think other home cooks would like to have?

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows 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.

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.

SOLVED
Bit of a long shot here because this is one of those issues where I search for the problem and you get a sea of replies like "have you checked the settings?" or "have you tried changing HDMI cables".

I just got a brand new LG OLED TV and I'm happy, but I've been watching Arcane on it and I notice jarring changes in brightness through the episode.
I'm playing through a native app (Stremio) on WebOS and it's not the source file, I've tested the same file on two different monitors and it's fine.
I went through the settings and disabled every autocorrect and "boost" capability the TV has to try and diagnose it, and the first pass did seem to improve the rate of changes, but it still happens maybe once every 5 mins of watch time.
From what I can tell it seems to be picking up particular colour/brightness changes in the source (Arcane is full of then being so vivid) and when it does, it just changes the brightness of the whole display.
I'm no expert here, I'm also colour blind, so I won't categorically claim it is definitely brightness changing, it could be contract or colour, I'm not sure, but it looks like brightness because the whole picture gets darker or lighter.

I wondered if it was actually flip flopping between SDR and HDR which honestly, it might be. If it is I have no idea how to fix that, as the TV seems to have no option to enable or disable HDR on native apps.

Any advice, thoughts, things to try would be appreciated. I'm technically orientated but I don't really know much about changing picture settings to be honest, I tend to pick the most basic/neutral setting and leave it like that.

Edit: I've dug out the old 4k firestick as suggested and don't get the flickering at all through that. Also running through the guide below helped make the picture look even better! Thanks everyone!
I might yet grab the service remote though and see if I can make the native apps work, then I can retire the firestick for good.