What's an RPG? (video game)
like how is it different from other games ? what makes a game an RPG game? I never really understood
like how is it different from other games ? what makes a game an RPG game? I never really understood
For example, I'm handy with a lot of stuff. I could change an outlet in the wall no problem. But if asked by an electrician what gauge Romex is safe for what amperage, or what color direct bury Romex is, I'd have no idea (from the knowledge I walk around with day to day).
I'm curious what other random facts people may know from their line of work that quality them as more knowledgeable than your average goose joe. Or to paraphrase, walking around knowledge people wouldn't know unless they googled it, or worked/were very knowledgeable in your field. And how many of them I (or others) might know.
To start from my job:
Q: Under what circumstances would one want to withhold the administration of vasopressors (Epinephrine) in a cardiac arrest?
A:
This is the place for casual discussion about our pets. Photos are welcome, show us your pet(s) and tell us about them!
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.
Hey y’all,
YouTube recently decided to put a feature into the app which zooms in to fill the screen more and reduce the dark space. There’s apparently settings for the android app, but I can’t seem to find any way to disable if for iOS. Does anyone have any suggestions? It’s incredibly annoying and distracting when watching videos.
What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction or poetry, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk about it a bit.
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!
This is the place for casual discussion about our pets. Photos are welcome, show us your pet(s) and tell us about them!
I seem to remember there used to be a way to do those things. Maybe I don't have enough caffeine in myself yet, but I am not seeing any links. Thank You.
Edit: I've made some progress if you want to read the edits at the end.
Last year I started slowly planning out a home server setup with help from Tildes. I've gotten a few things up and running, but have been bouncing off a variety of walls trying to get to the next step.
The first goal was-
"Ok i've got Cosmos up and running for local access using self signed certs. I'd like to get it up and running using lets encrypt and a domain so I can eventually start giving a few family and friends proper logins and external access". Of note, ideally,
This led to a second goal of-
"Gosh it sure would be nice if I didn't have to be sitting at the physical server to do testing and could instead be at another computer in my house. I should probably configure ssh locally (working) and get it to forward windows so I can work in other rooms (not working...)"
Server - MS01 running LTS Ubuntu with Cosmos Cloud installed (well it was, but is currently not)
Router - Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro (of note i've done some minimal guided config of this to try and harden it at a basic level so my cameras and IoT devices are better isolated. Not fully default, but the server is, for now, in the same network/vlan as the rest of my main computers so don't think this should matter.)
Clients - All local windows 10/11 machines for now, although in the off off chance it matters, i'm running nushell in the terminal
Domain Provider - Cloudflare
I have a friend who's set SSH up for themselves with their home server, however they haven't had time to come over and troubleshoot. My rough understanding is "setup VcXsrv, change some configs, then it just works.". Windows these days has ssh built in, and I can SSH to the machine just fine with my key.
ssh -X...less so. I've read some docs, followed some guides, tried copilot, and it all leads to "yeah should work" and it just doesn't. I have configured a ssh config on both machines to allow X11 forwarding, i've started the XLaunch making sure I disable access control, made sure my unbuntu login isn't on wayland and so on. So far, no dice.
If someone has an end to end guide they trust to link, i'll gladly read and start from scratch. I've been cobbling together so many sources at this point i'm very lost. Lots of things jump quickly to "well just use WSL", which yeah ok i probably should test that next, but I was hoping I wouldn't need to (and am unclear if that'll even help).
So..cosmos cloud.
I like the theory behind this software in that it helps enforce best practices so you don't blow your own head off when you screw something up. Maybe it's not the absolute best starting place, but getting it running without a domain was trivial, and more importantly, shockingly well documented. Not perfect, but for what I understand is mostly a one man show it's better than a lot of professional grade stuff i've dealt with.
And so I figured it'd be easy to just do the setup from scratch but choose https and point to my domain. There's been two attempts here, no DNS challenge and DNS challenge
Per their docs it seemed easy enough. I'd never touched a DNS screen before but I configured an A record pointing at my WAN IP (eventually...) and disabled the cloudflare proxy.
Well going to that domain took me to my router login. Hmm. After screwing around with port forwarding and router DNS records I never got it to work and felt like I was playing with fire, so undid everything I'd done and decided I'd try the DNS challenge. Of note I could still access the cosmos cloud page from http directly to the IP, where it confirmed it failed to get the TLS cert, but https to the domain wasn't having it.
This seemed like I was close, and then nothing. I have no idea if i need to do internal routing on the router for this, it just sorta says "Do the DNS challenge, here's a form, you don't need to fill out all of it" which uh...ok.
I filled out what I think I needed to after setting up a token(not an API key) in cloudflare. I'm pretty certain I got that correct as I saw text files with keys created on cloudflare's DNS page and had I screwed that I'm guessing it couldn't have.
However from what I can tell, that's as far as it got. The files nuked themselves 2 minutes later when the TTL expired, and going to the domain locally gave me the cloudflare "our shit's fine, the server is timing out" page. From what I could tell diving into logs, cosmos had the same error, and I couldn't hit cosmos at all, even using the IP and http.
I do however wonder if maybe it did work BUT since I undid the router DNS record before trying this maybe that killed it? dunno.
That's basically my situation. Figured i'd throw it here and see if anyone has some guidance or troubleshooting they'd recommend. Aforementioned friend who's done some of this before should be free one of these weekends and can probably help, and I haven't tried again since the second attempt. I've thrown some of the questions i've had on the discord and gotten minimal response(although I'm kinda using the thread as a rubber ducking spot as well). Next attempt is probably just DNS challenge again after more research on it and seeing if that works if I put back on the router DNS record, but i feel like logically that shouldn't work.
Oh also if anyone has some general recommended reading so that I can really understand what the hell it is I'm doing I'd love that. There's a ton of networking books/articles/etc, and in general I'd like to learn more about the subject, but I'm curious if there's a go to for people who are techy and trying to dip their toe in all of it the same way I am and setting up a proper home network and server.
Edit:
So after lots of testing, doc reading, and help from the cosmos discord I:
Now once that was all working and I could hit the site i was getting "likely a false cert" errors, but since i've got all the pieces I'm probably going to try another clean install later and see what we get. Hurrah for troubleshooting, good docs, rubber ducking, and helpful humans.
Edit 2:
Eventually required:
One I’d done those things started working. Killed it after that as now I need to think about architecture
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.
There was some discussion here when the earlier singles for this album came out, so I figured it was worth posting the full album now that's out (as of today, September 5).
https://ladispute.bandcamp.com/album/no-one-was-driving-the-car
Have you listened yet? What do you think? Standout songs? What did you think of the rollout for this album? (If you're unaware, the band released nearly the full album, except for the final two songs, over the past several months. They essentially released each "chapter" in the story of the album as individual EPs or singles.)
For me, this is miles better than PANORAMA was, and I'm glad that I held off on listening to anything after Environmental Catastrophe Film was released until this full album drop. I sort of hated the rollout for that, but I also think I understand why they did it.
I don't think it tops Rooms of the House, but it's absolutely among the band's top three (with Wildlife being the third in that mix). It really does feel like a mashup of the urgency/aggression of Wildlife and the artistry of Rooms of the House, and brings in some of the band's spoken word releases as well.
Environmental Catastrophe Film is the best song on the record, but that was going to be hard to beat because it may be the band's best song in general -- certainly their best song in a decade. Steve has also caught my attention each time it's come up in my play throughs.
This is the seventeenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Our next book will be Stories of Your Life and Others at the end of September.
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.
I joined their waitlist last month and still didn't get an invite, now they even have mobile apps but still invite-only... so any chance I can get an invite code from someone here 👉👈. I just want to try and see what it's like
Edit: I didn't expect so many comments, I hope everyone gets an invite! but I just want to say, it seems it doesn't work the same way as tildes and from what I can tell, you need to be a "Groundbreaker" to create invites and only 2 invites can be created? (would appreciate if someone can clarify that in the comments) and I'm personally not able to create invites from my account unfortunately, otherwise I would've sent an invite to everyone who commented. :(
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!
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?
A lot of people are familiar with body fat percentage, BMI, etc. Personally, my BMI has been 'better' when I've been less healthy, and generally worse as I've been more healthy. Body fat percentage is difficult to actually measure. So every few months, I look for metrics that fit my biases. For example:
If possible, explain why it's your "favorite." Can be everything from accuracy, to ease of application, or you just being really good at it.
For me:
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.
Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like sideloading, messaging and friendship. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was eagle-eyed.
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!
Hey there Tildes, hopefully someone could help me with this. I'm having problems importing all my emails I exported from ProtonMail into macOS Mail app/iCloud.
Recently decided to move my custom domain email addresses to iCloud so I could just use the built-in Mail app on my Mac and iPhone. I backed up all of my emails with ProtonMail's own export tool. It exported every email (or maybe email thread?) as a .eml file and .json file (metadata I believe). After exporting, I switch the domain names over to iCloud. It was pretty easy. I guess I assumed all of my emails would somehow come with me? Seems silly thinking about it now. But I have a backup of all my emails!
All seemed fine until I tried to import them into macOS Mail. Mail wants a mailbox format (.mbox I believe), but I only have .eml files. It let me select all of the .eml files and import them anyway but it's taking about 10 seconds or more per email and I have like ~17,000 emails. ChatGPT says thats 47 hours 13 minutes 20 seconds. It's also freezing the mail app during this insane import process. It would be great if I didn't have to wait that long and that's assuming something doesn't go wrong/the app crashes.
No, I don't need all of those emails (I actually deleted about 10,000 over the past month) but now I'm kind of screwed. I guess for security reasons, when you delete the domain from ProtonMail, it deletes all the emails (as far as I can tell, at least). I'm mentioning this because I was thinking I could have tried to find a way to export it in .mbox format or even delete more emails but it's too late for that.
The way the emails were exported, the filenames are jumbles of letters and numbers so I cant even use Finder to search for specific emails when I need them. I can open each individual email in Mail, so it's not like the files are encrypted, I don't think.
One thing I thought of -- I once used Mail with ProtonBridge that would allow you to use ProtonMail with the Mail app, but still use Proton servers and it synced all my emails with my computer. I disabled that account some time ago (didn't delete it or remove it completely from the list of accounts, just unchecked it). Do you think that directory of emails is still on my computer somewhere? And would it be useable in my situation?
I do realize this is completely of my own doing and should have been more thoughtful but I'm here now and would love any help y'all could give. Thanks everyone!
Edit_1: Oh no... I found the directory for Mail in Application Support and it looks like the Mail importer is making a mailbox for every single email. I tried importing these emails earlier today and it looks like it might have imported everything? Here's a screenshot. 🪦
I wonder if I could try and import them into another app and then export in a better format? Thunderbird? Ugh, I really do need a lot of these emails…
Edit_2: So the export tool mentioned above has a restore feature so currently trying that. It will just import these emails back into ProtonMail and I’ll have to figure out the export part again. Hopefully this works!
My understanding is that Android emulators primarily exist for mobile development and app testing and such-like, and maybe secondarily, to play mobile games.
I want to explore the possibility of using them as a, basically, full-time replacement for installing apps on my phone. More and more apps and services have no "desktop/laptop" version, and no website version. Installing the app on your phone is starting to become a non-negotiable requirement ... one that I'd like to find a work-around to.
So, yeah ... I guess that's the question. Is this a 'thing'? Has anyone experimented with--or flat-out used--an emulator on a desktop/laptop to run their banking app and the like? Is this even possible? Can you connect an emulator to an app-store and just start downloading/installing stuff?
Thanks.
Mastery in any field or craft is welcome - construction, sculpture, martial arts, music, cooking, motorsports, you name it - but heavy preference for videos with camerawork and/or explanation that allows the viewer to appreciate the level of technique, precision, efficiency, and focus on display.
Also, I'm really referring to the practical demonstrations rather than analytical breakdowns after the fact, but if you have one of the latter and feel strongly about it, feel free to share. Long watches welcome.
Examples:
Jacques Pépin deboning a chicken from 5:00 onwards
A showcase of the incomparable Zinédine Zidane's ball control
Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith plays 'blind' covers of Thirty Seconds to Mars and Bring Me The Horizon
I was reading this Reddit post and was curious about whether the passengers of this theoretical spaceship could experience 1g of acceleration forever assuming the ship has an infinite fuel source.
They shouldn’t be able to pass the speed of light relative to an outside observer, but is there some phenomenon where the passengers can feel like they are accelerating forever?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
Do you change them out often? Or do you set up a rotating gallery? Right now, I've gone back to this photograph of assorted food cubes that I came across in my uni days.
There was a lot of interest in a Retro Video Game Club. I'm thinking it would be cool to get it off the ground!
Use this topic as brainstorming/planning for how we think it should run.
Hey Tildes car folks, so Rust Protection like this one in Canada -- is it beneficial and or necessary for cars during in Canadian winter? I know we have a lot of salt on the roads, and just in the sea air as well. Talked to a tow truck driver and he always does his work and personal cars every year.
So I took mine in too. But i wish I'd known that they don't wash the car beforehand. Like an idiot I just drove to the appointment and I got my car back and it's still covered in a layer of regular road dirt. Did I just waste $180?
Bonus question: the other older car has a 5 x 10 mm rust spot on the side - would this kind of coating do anything about it or what do I do to fix it or not let it get worse?
A long, complicated story, summarized: (apart from Tildes, on which I lurk) I swore off all social media years ago. Then my job required that I have an account on LinkedIn. I reconsidered, and attempted to make the least disclosive account possible in an effort to protect my privacy. Things aren't going well. Despite logging in with the correct credentials, on the same device, using the same browser; and with access to my signup email, and access to the phone I used to enroll, LinkedIn has flagged my account the second time I tried using it and now requires me to upload images of myself and my government ID to regain access to their cesspool. Are you familiar with their protocols and can share insights, so that if I start again I don't face the same problem?
I have read what LinkedIn says and I have read discussions on Reddit on the topic. LinkedIn says you can opt to "use your work email" or mail them an affidavit. These options were not given to me. Everyone else I have seen reporting facing this seems to have triggered the system by losing their login credentials or moving countries; what brought this upon me and can I avoid it?
Please be gentle with your advice as I am kind of panicking.
I have a 4 year old and I'm looking for some video suggestions (ideally a series) that showcases cultures around the world. I have lots of options handy for seeing all sorts of animals from any corner of the globe that are all very kid-friendly if not kid-oriented, but not a lot comes to mind when I want to introduce her to human life around the world. Particularly in urban places. Her exposure to these other cultures is usually just as porters helping some white guys walk around a jungle looking for animals. I can also find lots of travel series, which go to different places, but they are all oriented to adults-- either talking about how to travel to these places as a tourist, or have more adult jokes or are too focused on the presenter.
Are there any well made series about life in other places? I'd like her to see life in Tokyo, Cairo, Mexico City, favelas of Brazil, Amsterdam, Mumbai, etc.
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!
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.
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.
The year is 2025. The C programming language is something like 50 years old now - a dinosaur within the fast-moving environment of software development. Dozens of new languages have cropped up through the years, with languages like Rust and Go as prime contenders for systems-level programming. Bootstrapping a project in C these days will often raise eyebrows or encourage people to dismiss you out of hand. Personally, I've barely touched the language since I graduated.
Now, with all that said: I still consider learning and understanding C to be key for having an integrated, in-depth understanding of how computers and programming really works. When I am getting a project up and running, I frequently end up running commands like "sudo apt install libopenssl-dev" without really giving it much thought about what's going on there. I know that it pulls some libraries onto my computer so that another program can use them, but without the requisite experience of building and compiliing a library then it's kind of difficult to understand what it's all about. I know that other languages will introduce this concept, but realistically everything is built to bind to C libraries.
System libraries are only one instance of my argument though. To take a more general view, I would say that learning C helps you better understand computers and programming. It might be a pain to consider stuff like memory allocation and pointers on a regular basis, but I also think that not understanding these subjects can open up avenues for a poorly formed understanding about how computers work. Adding new layers of abstraction does not make the foundation less relevant, and I think that learning C is the best avenue toward an in-depth understanding of how computers actually work. This sort of baseline understanding, even if the language isn't used on a regular basis, goes a long way to improving one's skills as a developer. It also gives people the skills to apply their skills in a wide variety of contexts.
I'm no expert, though: most of the programming I do is very high-level and abstracted from the machine (Python, Haskell, BASH). I'm sure there are plenty of folks here who are better qualified to chime in, so what do you think?
Dutch Grand Prix
Circuit Zandvoort
August 29-31, 2025
| POS. | NO. | DRIVER | TEAM | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 | LAPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 81 | Oscar Piastri | McLaren | 1:09.338 | 1:08.964 | 1:08.662 | 18 |
| 2 | 4 | Lando Norris | McLaren | 1:09.469 | 1:08.874 | 1:08.674 | 18 |
| 3 | 1 | Max Verstappen | Red Bull Racing | 1:09.696 | 1:09.122 | 1:08.925 | 18 |
| 4 | 6 | Isack Hadjar | Racing Bulls | 1:09.966 | 1:09.439 | 1:09.208 | 18 |
| 5 | 63 | George Russell | Mercedes | 1:09.676 | 1:09.313 | 1:09.255 | 18 |
| 6 | 16 | Charles Leclerc | Ferrari | 1:09.906 | 1:09.304 | 1:09.340 | 22 |
| 7 | 44 | Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 1:09.900 | 1:09.261 | 1:09.390 | 21 |
| 8 | 30 | Liam Lawson | Racing Bulls | 1:09.779 | 1:09.383 | 1:09.500 | 18 |
| 9 | 55 | Carlos Sainz | Williams | 1:09.980 | 1:09.472 | 1:09.505 | 18 |
| 10 | 14 | Fernando Alonso | Aston Martin | 1:09.950 | 1:09.366 | 1:09.630 | 17 |
| 11 | 12 | Kimi Antonelli | Mercedes | 1:09.845 | 1:09.493 | 12 | |
| 12 | 22 | Yuki Tsunoda | Red Bull Racing | 1:09.954 | 1:09.622 | 15 | |
| 13 | 5 | Gabriel Bortoleto | Kick Sauber | 1:10.037 | 1:09.622 | 12 | |
| 14 | 10 | Pierre Gasly | Alpine | 1:09.894 | 1:09.637 | 15 | |
| 15 | 23 | Alexander Albon | Williams | 1:09.792 | 1:09.652 | 12 | |
| 16 | 43 | Franco Colapinto | Alpine | 1:10.104 | 9 | ||
| 17 | 27 | Nico Hulkenberg | Kick Sauber | 1:10.195 | 9 | ||
| 18 | 31 | Esteban Ocon | Haas | 1:10.197 | 9 | ||
| 19 | 87 | Oliver Bearman | Haas | 1:10.262 | 9 | ||
| RT | 18 | Lance Stroll | Aston Martin | 2 |
Source: F1.com
| POS. | NO. | DRIVER | TEAM | LAPS | TIME / RETIRED | PTS. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 81 | Oscar Piastri | McLaren | 72 | 1:38:29.849 | 25 |
| 2 | 1 | Max Verstappen | Red Bull Racing | 72 | +1.271s | 18 |
| 3 | 6 | Isack Hadjar | Racing Bulls | 72 | +3.233s | 15 |
| 4 | 63 | George Russell | Mercedes | 72 | +5.654s | 12 |
| 5 | 23 | Alexander Albon | Williams | 72 | +6.327s | 10 |
| 6 | 87 | Oliver Bearman | Haas | 72 | +9.044s | 8 |
| 7 | 18 | Lance Stroll | Aston Martin | 72 | +9.497s | 6 |
| 8 | 14 | Fernando Alonso | Aston Martin | 72 | +11.709s | 4 |
| 9 | 22 | Yuki Tsunoda | Red Bull Racing | 72 | +13.597s | 2 |
| 10 | 31 | Esteban Ocon | Haas | 72 | +14.063s | 1 |
| 11 | 43 | Franco Colapinto | Alpine | 72 | +14.511s | 0 |
| 12 | 30 | Liam Lawson | Racing Bulls | 72 | +17.063s | 0 |
| 13 | 55 | Carlos Sainz | Williams | 72 | +17.376s | 0 |
| 14 | 27 | Nico Hulkenberg | Kick Sauber | 72 | +19.725s | 0 |
| 15 | 5 | Gabriel Bortoleto | Kick Sauber | 72 | +21.565s | 0 |
| 16 | 12 | Kimi Antonelli | Mercedes | 72 | +22.029s | 0 |
| 17 | 10 | Pierre Gasly | Alpine | 72 | +23.629s | 0 |
| 18 | 4 | Lando Norris | McLaren | 64 | DNF | 0 |
| NC | 16 | Charles Leclerc | Ferrari | 52 | DNF | 0 |
| NC | 44 | Lewis Hamilton | Ferrari | 22 | DNF | 0 |
Fastest Lap: Oscar Piastri // 1:12.271 (Lap 60)
DOTD: Isack Hadjar
Source: F1.com
Next race:
Italian Grand Prix
Autodromo Nazionale Monza
September 5-7, 2025
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!
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.
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
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 need you to do me a favor: please keep an open mind and reserve judgement until after you've thoroughly digested the ideas I'm presenting here. These are not my ideas, and I have no connection to this project. I hope to do them justice in representing them accurately and as clearly as I understand it all.
Please don't be dismissive. Please don't jump to conclusions. I would not be posting about this if I did not believe it has tremendous potential to reshape the digital economy, and therefore everything that governs how civilization progresses in the next century. Dramatic, much? Yes, but I hope I have your attention.
I'm not posting this as a plain link, because the website looks incredibly sus. Just trust me for a few minutes. Links are at the end.
(No generative AI was used to write this post.)
PrizeForge is a financial service that can be best thought of as "Representative Crowdfunding" (my term, not theirs). Like direct crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter), it lets people pool their money to support expensive projects that would otherwise be impossible to fund. Similar to Patreon, it can also be an effective tip jar for much smaller things that would otherwise go unrewarded.
The innovation is two-fold: first, contributors never move alone. As a contributor, you set a ceiling on your weekly payment. This is the "enrollment" amount. However, the actual amount of money disbursed each weekly cycle is the amount that is successfully "matched" with other contributors. In the simplest example, if I wanted to enroll for Tildes at $20/week, and one other user enrolled at $5/week, the disbursement would be the sum of the matched funds: $5 + $5. In this way, nobody ever pays an unfair proportion of the total, and small donations become an integral part of funding allocation. Additionally, like how philanthrophists often match charitable donations to meet a fundraising objective, matching provides a powerful incentive for individuals to contribute by making individual contributions feel more significant, since any money you part with can be doubled by another contributor. The more you put in, the more others will too. (PrizeForge calls this algorithm "Elastic Fund Matching". The full algorithm gets considerably more complex, but they have a neat visualization on their site and videos.)
Second, unlike existing crowdfunding and patronage systems, creators and companies do not receive fund disbursements directly. Rather, representatives ("Delegates") send the money to the people and organizations that should receive funds to deliver value to the stream's contributors.
"Won't delegates just siphon funds to themselves?" you ask. Well, yes, that will 100% happen at some point. Corruption is a human problem that can't be solved with technology alone. PrizeForge aims to provide mechanisms to allow the community to be very dynamic, so contributors can easily switch to a new representative—for any reason. Additionally, tools for transparency in how the money moves would go a long way in keeping delegates accountable.
In the context of open-source software, delegates should be experienced power users who are well equipped to evaluate features and bugfixes, and then can award the prizes to developers according to their best judgement.
The use of a representative has many advantages over direct crowdfunding. Someone highly invested in a software product has valuable experience and would be more effective at setting priorities for features and bugfixes. An experienced and trusted delegate would save developers time having to parse the requests (...demands?) of individual users who may not be able to articulate what they really want. Also, if a developer or company stops doing what people want (providing value to the people who care), then funds can flow to competing alternatives in a very granular and dynamic way, as the delegates shift funding and/or new delegates arise.
If we could pick a delegate here for Tildes, would anybody really object to @cfabbro?
These trusted delegates already exist, everywhere! We just haven't been able to cooperate in the right ways to delegate our individual power, so they can truly move the needle on funding the projects we care about. PrizeForge is, I believe, the first truly sustainable funding model for community-owned and directed open-source.
Watch this video first! Before you get scared away by the terrible scammy-looking website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO46oEdlkY8
The FAQ: https://prizeforge.com/faq
The company's github page: https://github.com/positron-solutions
Looks like just two people, with Psionikus doing all the promotion and running accounts. The company is incorporated in South Korea. They've got a bunch of emacs tooling, and I believe the PrizeForge concept originated out of a desire to improve the funding/development process of emacs, then the lem editor. They also apparently have a bit of beef with the FSF due to emacs politcs. Check out the last FAQ for a fun easter egg.
The sub-reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/PrizeForge/
The Hacker News comment that took me down the rabbithole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45036360
Bonus thoughts:
I'm finishing a full rewatch of the films from the Coen Brothers tonight and have decided to go with PTA next. PTA really has no stinkers in his filmography. Fincher is pretty close, but I haven't seen Alien 3 and I'm willing to forgive the first film or two.
Who else can share this level of consistency?
so Google's AI Studio used to have an option to finetune gemini flash for free by simply uploading a csv file. but it seems they have removed that option, so I'm looking for something similar. I know models can be finetuned on colab but the problem with that is it's way too complicated for me, I want something simpler. I think I know enough python to be able to prepare a dataset so that shouldn't be a problem.
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.
When I made my post about Chex Quest, it got me thinking about the classic Doom games released from 1993-1997, and I thought it would be great hearing some fellows Tilders thoughts about these classic games that can run on just about anything.
I thought of some questions, but please share anything Doom related! I think it's awesome seeing how this game has had such a lasting impact over the last 30+ years and how people continue to push this game in new and surprising ways.
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!
Here I am, late-30s languishing on a grey Sunday afternoon. After finishing my first real week-long vacation in 4ish years without even side-hussling, a thought is growing: I don't really want to go back, what's next?
I've browsed topics discussing career changes/pivots when the OP has a desired endpoint, but I could use help brainstorming one step earlier: how to figure out what jobs/career move I might like, might be feasible/pragmatic for me, and even just exist?
Meandering background
if tl/dr, skip to questions below
My current job (ux/comms) is objectively decent for pay, coworkers, work/life balance. So, not in a rush to jump ship. [Edit: removed some details about myself]
Questions
Housekeeping: feel free to change group/tags if appropriate. This is also a lot more than I typically share online, I may remove some personal details later.
Recently there has been a discussion thread about how many people (myself included) are recently finding it difficult to find meaningful, lasting friendships. Let's change that. I don't know if we've ever had a thread like this, but if we did then it must have been a while ago (or my search juju failed me).
Normally, the "finding friends 101" involves finding a small community that revolves around one of your interests, then make friends within that community. Finding those kinds of small communities on the internet has become nigh-on impossible, at least for me. Discord is no substitute; most Discord servers revolving around a certain interest are massive in size, with text channels flying by faster than a popular streamer's Twitch chat.
So we're breaking the code. Instead of finding a specialized community for your interests, just type up a list of your interests, quirks, or whatever other things you'd like to lure new potential friends with as a response to this thread. Go into as much detail as you'd like. If anyone has mentioned an interest you share, send them a DM and start a conversation! (That goes for the lurkers too – if you are one, don't be shy; you play an essential part in making this thread work.)
Note: it may be helpful to add other details too, like your age (if you want friends in a similar age group) and what kind of friends you're looking for in your post. Some people may be looking for people to hang in voice chat and play games with; others may just look for people to discuss topics via Discord DM; and others still may not even necessarily be looking to take their new friendship outside of Tildes. All of these are completely valid.
I'm looking for some recommendations. I'm not a voracious reader, so just about anything you can recommend will be new to me.
I'm not sure how to describe the genre I'm after, which is really why I'm here. I just got done binging Petscop on YouTube; the surreal and Lynchian story telling coupled with the dark subject matter really sucked me in. I'm also somewhat enthralled by some of the higher quality Backrooms content.
I'm interested in short stories or novels.
Edit: sorry for not tagging. I completely forgot!
I have been overly obsessing about getting a new backpack for the past week without any reasonable way to move forward. I came across this bag because I was searching for something that holds my lunch box and laptop in a tinier volume. Here is what I found from Decathlon UK which not only fits my needs but looks stylish as well! Now, although I can work around with other backpacks for my use case, I really want to get my hands on this one.
Although the same backpack is available in other countries like Ireland, Italy and other EU countries, I have been unable to obtain this on the US site. Writing to the customer care has not been helpful as they asked me to get it from a third-party forwarded from elsewhere.
While I have acquaintances in EU, I wouldn't consider them close enough to have it shipped to the US as a gift (de minimis rule is going away by 29th August, so there will be extra tariffs!). I looked into it getting from a forwarding service and eat the cost, but it is stupid expensive and overall I am looking at about 80-100€. As a student, that is not viable either.
I kinda grew too attached to the idea of using this for my everyday carry for college since I only carry a laptop, a notebook and a lunch box. And I love small backpacks. At this point, I am giving up on getting it :(
Do you have any suggestions on how to get this backpack to the States?
I had an idea for a game some weeks ago, just as the title says. It would be something like Crusader Kings, it's all about dinasties and roleplay, but set in more modern eras, from the beginning of the industrial revolution until today, or maybe the future, we'll see. And instead of kingdoms, it's all about businesses. It's all about owning global company empires. Being a kind hearted local chain owner, or a sociopathic cutthroat in the 1% that owns the world. Up to you.
And this idea is still stuck with me, and I wanted to get back into game development, so I might as well just try it for fun and see what happens.
I picked Godot, 1) because it's open source, 2) it's going to be fun to see how much it developed in the last decade and 3) it's free, and especially 4) I don't want to use commercial engines and risk being affected by something similar to the runtime fee fiasco
I still have to finish some tutorials and make some simple games to get a grip on the engine and see how everything works, but as a data analyst I already have programming foundations and, I think, this project is monumental for someone like me, but I also think it's doable.
I have a very rough idea of how the code will work for the AI. It will incorporate "ticks" like CK, each tick being a day, and some events fire weekly or monthly, where based on the stats and traits, each individual character will calculate how likely they are to accept or reject that event. This event can be about buying shares, accepting proposal marriages, going on a trip, etc.
My main worry here is if GDScript is good enough to handle "intensive" algorithms. If not, I can always use C#, or C++ if I really have to, and adapt the problematic algorithms.
Another is what would be the best database manager for this, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.
As for the world, initially I was thinking about being about the real one, but I realized that I may not want to deal with... Well, accuracies. For example, I don't want these businesses to exist in a vacuum, I'm going to try to make a system that interacts both the world's political events and these businesses. I want to create events, like, a country invades another, which creates demands for weapons, and if you own a weapon factory, good news for you! If you own businesses in the invaded country, well, sucks to be you.
So, I want to do those kind of events, but without needing to worry about things like "Portugal would never invade Japan. What is your AI thinking!?" or "Why is Greece an industrial power house?". If a big studio like Paradox has trouble fine tuning their hundreds of nations in their games, me by my alonesome certainly will not be able to do it.
So I'm thinking just making a fictional world, populated by several countries and empires but not as many as the real world. This way I can fine tune it to my liking and without worrying about being accurate with the real world. This is another challenge by itself, with its own cliffs, but it's more doable.
And so far, that's it. After I'm done with the learning phase, I'm going to start a proper planning phase, lay down some key mechanics and develop a prototype.
I wrote this post as a way to put my thoughts down, double check with myself if the idea is good.
But also, to check with the tildes community if you have any inputs. It can be anything: ideas, suggestions, warnings, problems that you know that I'll face, etc. I'll appreciate anything that you can give me
We all have words we dislike for one reason or another. I am specifically talking about words that are non-problematic, so slurs and politically incorrect words are out of the scope of this post. I am talking about words that you find inane, dense, overly broad, vague, imprecise, pedantic, confusing, or inadequate for any reason. Maybe you just don't like how they sound.
As long as it is not a slur or politcally incorrect, for the purposes of this post, anything goes! Any language too!