The other day I realised I should have used a disclaimer on a comment.

It is a comment that is supposed to be light hearted and fun so I started to amuse myself in a way that I haven't done in quite some time.

I've "always" enjoyed breaking down words (preferably in the "wrong" place), finding synonyms or sound-a-likes or second meanings and their synonyms or sound-a-likes or second meanings, etc, etc...

So I would like to invite you to build on my example below, bring your own examples or tell us about ways that you play with words.

Example:

Its 2am and I should be asleep so I'm sorry if this is maybe just a weird midnight rant.

Today I saw a news article on the other site about aggressive monkeys with covid and herpes escaping a crashed semi truck.

My first reaction was "is this headline a joke" and I couldn't tell. Then I looked at the source (action news 5 or channel 5 action news, or... something) and even opened the page to have a look for clues of it being fake and without digging deeper I just couldn't tell if it was a legitimate news site or not. So I read the (short) article and looked for clues and it sounded probably legitimate. There was a photo of the scene with a monkey at the rear of a trailer but af this point I can't instantly spot AI images and who knows if it isn't just an old photo. Then I go to the reddit comment and they're parroting additional "facts" but nothing that felt substantial.

I felt very struck by the feeling that I don't know if I can trust any information online unless it's REALLY from a trusted source, and I'm not really sure what sources I can trust anymore.

Is this just me? Have you felt a significant change in the last few months? AI is playing a big part in my distrust, but Im also seeing echo chambers somehow get even worse.

Also, it found out later that the monkeys weren't knfected with a bunch of viruses, it was some sort of miss-communication.

Turns out Google has been ruining Drive's speed by ramming Gemini down our throats (again). To get stuff loading quickly again, follow these steps:

From the Google Drive page, go to settings (top right, gear icon). Drop into "Manage Apps."

Find Gemini and uncheck "Use as Default." Of course it's automatically turned on despite my organization and my personal accounts having already opted out of Gemini. Once it's off things run much, much faster.

Presumably they're doing some dumb shit and having Gemini scan the contents of your entire drive, constantly.

A wizard has cursed you with billions of dollars! Why is that a curse? Because unless you spend it immediately* on something ridiculous** you'll become like the worst, asshole-iest billionaire you can think of. (Fill in your own blank).

Saving the world is out, philanthropy is out (unless it's utterly ridiculous), clever tricks to make the world better by finding a loophole and trying to outwit the wizard's curse are out.

If you try something that could be started with an "um actually" 🤓☝️you end up naming all your children and companies with the same letter before the end of the day, got it? Spirit of the rules!
I'm watching you. ತ⁠_⁠ʖ⁠ತ

*A project might take time but you're going all in on it, cash up front
** The point is that it's pointless. It might be accidentally useful but it's pointless.

ETA: I have been unjustly rate limited and will be replying when I can. Please take this opportunity to reconsider your charitable works and other attempts at public good and get back to airships and Animorphs movies. Ty

use postman quite a bit at work as a backend developer and the recent updates have added alot more bloatware to the program.

All I want is a simple program that does HTTP requests and not get account promo and collections and their cloud stuff shoved down my throat.

And my work computer is maintained by a central system so I can't freeze my Postman application at a past level, it auto-updates.

So I am wondering if there is a good alternative that just does HTTP requests and nothing else?

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.

A prototypical example of what I am looking for would be fruit juice. Where I am at the only options for something that isn't orange or apple are overpriced lemonades with about thirty to fifty percent fruit content and truly expensive 100% ones.

Usually I simply buy the expensive ones and add 1-2 parts water ending up with better tasting juice at same or less cost.

Another step would be squeezing fresh fruit yourself but that adds time, space, complexity and money costs.

What things can be done in a typical kitchen without buying additional single purpose appliances? Sufficiently multipurpose ones or small tools are fine. Basically I want to reduce the number of steps in which the food is industrially processed.

As some of y'all know, I moved recently to NYC (Brooklyn specifically) and now that I've settled in a bit more, I was wondering about volunteering my time to help out the less fortunate, especially with the holidays and everything going on with the government shutdown.

I've been juggling the thought of doing a soup kitchen or something but just wondering if anyone else had any interesting/unique/critical need things that they do! I hardly do volunteering unfortunately, always was more of a donating my money kinda guy.

I did fairly well on my SAT's, (10 years ago so idk how much help I can be) but I was thinking of volunteering to teach kids or something but not too sure if a weekly commitment is too much for me or not.

Pretty much the title. I want to move away from OEM 1st party controllers due to quality and inevitable joystick drift. I have an 8bitdo Ultimate, but it's not working for me on CachyOS.

Anyone else have experience with good quality controllers on Linux? The Flydigi Vader Pro 5 caught my attention, and I am a pretty competitive person for certain games (mainly Halo 3 and Halo Infinite), and like tight controls for platformers and souls-like games as well.

Edit: I primarily used my controllers wireless, especially on the living room PC. I am more okay with wired on my personal computer.

Found a solution!!

Edit as of Tuesday, October 28th 2025: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1iceer5/8bitdo_controller_fixes_for_linux_my_impressions/

Fixes for 8BitDo controllers running under Linux.

sudo mkdir /etc/udev/rules.d

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/99-8bitdo-xinput.rules

ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2dc8", ATTRS{idProduct}=="3106", RUN+="/sbin/modprobe xpad", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo 2dc8 3106 > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/xpad/new_id'"

sudo udevadm control --reload

Change Product ID according to your controller:

Product ID 8BitDo Ultimate/Ultimate C 2,4Ghz: 3106

Product ID 8BitDo Ultimate 3-Mode 2,4Ghz: 200f / alternate Product ID: 201b

Product ID 8BitDo Ultimate 2C 2,4GhZ: 310a

I was reading this post about the Tildes hierarchical tag system and it got me thinking about possible tags with double meanings.

For example, the gooning tag could be interpreted in a sexual way, or interpreted as the act of being a goon/villain. To clear up the misunderstanding, you could make a gooning.baddies tag, but that also has a double meaning.

What are some tags that could be used for serious topics that can have a less serious interpretation?

I have held out for years from getting a loyalty/membership card from supermarkets as I hate the tracking that they do. But here in the UK so many prices are now locked behind it in most supermarkets, it feels like I’m just giving them so much extra money it’s getting ridiculous. I end up spending more money to shop where they don’t do this, but most of the major players are now adding these member only prices it’s hard to keep the status quo.
For other privacy minded people, how do you manage this?

In a landscape of so many quality things to watch, I wanted to take a minute to recommend Code 3, which came out earlier this year. It stars Rainn Wilson, Lil Rel Howery, and Aimee Carrero, among a few other known actors and actresses. It follows Wilson's character, a paramedic working for Los Angeles 911, through a period of a couple of days. The comedy is pretty funny, although I should mention it does have a couple of dark moments as well, in case anyone would rather shy away from that. But I recommend it specifically because, having lived that life, it's the most accurate depiction of life on a 911 truck I've seen from Hollywood. The ups, the downs, the laughs, the tears. I watch a fair amount of things that I feel like weren't worth my time in hindsight, but this is the first movie in a while where I enjoyed the entirety of it. Hopefully some of y'all do as well :)

Trailer (YouTube)

IMDB

TheMovieDB

Rotten Tomatoes

safety.air, food.processed, neurons.artificial, storage.data - there are many many more examples to be found of unnecessarily hierarchical tags. These are not tags that benefit from such a scheme. All we have now are syntactically reversed phrases, reducing readability. What person wants to look up "safety" and peruse rail vs. air vs. public? Or energy vs. data vs. thermal for "storage"?

Where we have the line drawn now is far too arbitrary. Why is republican party not party.republican? decomposition.runaway?? lights.head for "headlights"??? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

I propose that heirarchical tags should only be used for things that have a clear natural hierarchy that is generally used outside of Tildes for some purpose. Geographic hierarchy makes perfect sense to me. Being able to search by country, then by state/province, then by city is very sensible. For describing a section of the tree of life - yes please. Maybe we should even go so far as to use : instead of . for tags like source.youtube. When would I ever look up just source?

This is the nineteenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing The Poisoners Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine by Deborah Blum. We will be discussing We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis Taylor at the end of November.

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.