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!
I have a specific ask at the end, but any and all musings on this topic are invited.
Lately it's become apparent that the endless fire hose of content and subsequent extinction of boredom is one of the most insidious shifts of modern life. While social media and the internet have accelerated this, upon further reflection I realize this battle to hijack our time and attention is something basically all of us were born into (and an even steeper climb for those of us blessed with ADHD).
These reflections have been borne out of a desire to protect my toddler's curiosity and passion for life outside a black mirror for as long as I can reasonably manage.
The issue as I see it is not the existence of content beyond what one could ever consume (books have been that way for centuries). It's the evaporation of friction. One click and you're on an infinite loop, optimized and engineered to keep you there.
I used to think this was a symptom of the smartphone & tik-tok era. However, looking back at my own childhood TV habits, cable TV was the precursor: dozens of channels that never went dark and 24/7 news cycles that bred fear and never stopped churning.
The ask: How have you set up an environment for your kids (or yourself!) to delay the hedonic content treadmill as long as is reasonably possible?
The goal is to avoid a smartphone until we can't. I'm not anti-screen. There are loads of great educational TV and movies, I just want to introduce them slowly and with intention. But unfortunately now every TV front-end is ad-stuffed and every streaming app is basically a recommendation engine in disguise.
How do you share content with your kids without letting the algorithm worm its way inside their brain? How do you give them access to the collective wisdom of mankind in the internet without turning it into a slot machine?
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.
For reference, I have next to zero knowledge of building electronics. I've replaced the joysticks on two Nintendo joycons (which I actually found pretty fun), and that's it. I also have no experience with 3D printing or designing specific products.
I am also sick of touch screen keyboards on phones, do not like any of of the phones that do have keys or the Clicks phone case (why is it on the BOTTOM—), and currently have a lot of free time.
So my question to you: how would I go about designing my own slide out case with its own keyboard?
Because that is my ideal solution at this point. And in fact, it turns out someone DID make a 3D printed "slider terminal" this year. Except it's for the Note 10 (I have a Galaxy S9), and seems to be used as a full-fledged replacement for a desktop experience with a trackpad. That's neat and will probably appeal to a lot of people here, but personally, I just need physical keys.
Along with the keyboard used for that terminal, I also found this other tiny keyboard which doesn't have the trackpad and is about the same dimensions as my Galaxy S9. Actually I found that first and was trying to figure out if there were any cases that could store and pop that out. The biggest issue is that it would cover my camera except maybe when it's slid out, but screw it, I want a damn physical keyboard.
I do have access to 3D printers (yay public libraries!) and I'm willing to learn Blender in order to make this thing. I just need advice on where to begin and how to tackle this. In particular, I have no clue how to go about the slide out part. I feel like I should be able to figure out how to make a case that fits the dimensions of my phone and the keyboard fairly easily, but no idea where to begin with researching the sliding component.
Besides that, I also know that I'm not alone here in my frustrations with phone keyboards, so I'm hoping we can pool together ideas on how to do this. As far as I can tell there's not really a "one size fits all" solution that would work for all phones (well, except perhaps a foldable case instead of slide-out), but maybe we can at least share decent starting points for people to design their own. For instance, the slider terminal uses a keyboard that came with a remote, and it would never have occurred to me that could be used for this sort of project. And there are a lot of potential workarounds for the camera placements, so Person A may have an idea that doesn't work well for them, but does work better for Person B than their own original idea.
So yeah. Advice, ideas and general brainstorming are welcome!
Started a new job today and got a mac as a dev machine. I won't do technical onboarding until later in the week, so I haven't seen what the dev tools are like, but today I was driving myself crazy just trying to do basic things like copy, paste, screenshot, change windows.
At the last job, we had ubuntu machines, so I was able to use gnome extensions to mostly replicate the same general layout, menus, and shortcut keys as Windows. Primarily, this allowed me to keep the same "muscle memory". Since the ubuntu gnome desktop is nothing special from a UX point of view, there didn't seem to be a downside. But I understand that the Mac experience is very curated, so I'm thinking I should lean into learning it.
So my questions are: what are your mac pro tips and things that speed up your work? And for others who have made this transition, what did you learn to do the "mac way" and what did you tweak?
I have a computer that is not quite powerful enough to run my flight simulators, but which is still quite capable. I tried to sell it for close to what I bought it for, after using it maybe 50 hours, but the stink of "used" was on it, so I only got low ball offers for the system as a whole. Selling the individual components would be better but take substantially more effort. Instead, after finding an absurdly good 64 GB RAM deal ($150 for DDR4, in early December, crazy), I decided to use it to educate myself on some work-adjacent science simulation capabilities, putting it at home to avoid the feeling like I'm doing work (and also so I can install nonsense on it if I want).
I settled on Pop! OS, after finding out it has the best NVIDIA GPU support of the .deb Linux family, and installed 22.04 on it last month. After a standard "oops I messed something up on a new-to-me Linux distro, might as well wipe it," I reset the bios to see if it fixed things, then loaded 24.04 on a live USB and ran the update at POST.
24.04 made some very big changes to Pop! OS, which I won't list, other than one that puzzles me. After installing, I ran Geekbench 6 to benchmark it, and I found out my system CPU performance was about 33% down from the prior benchmark. I rationalized this as being due to no XMP being on, and tried to enter BIOS on boot...but Pop24 refused to enter BIOS, and my motherboard didn't even POST? But it would load into Pop24 without issue? So I was stuck without a way to tune my system. I eventually removed the SSD, hard wiped it on a separate device, and reinstalled Pop22, whereafter I was able to enter BIOS and enable XMP. Performance was restored, and even better than ever.
My question...why is Pop24 different? I tried to disable fastboot. I tried to have it use systemctl to reboot into settings. I tried everything I could find online. The best guess I have is something to do with UEFI? But I have no clue. I'm not really a computer guy, I just futz around, and I don't know what I'm doing.
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?
Happy New Year everyone! For January, Tildes Book Club will be reading Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bissen. It's short at 167 pages. I'm looking forward to discussing with everyone who participates. Lurkers, you are absolutely welcome to read along and follow the discussion at the end of the month.
We have books lined up monthly through September. I haven't read most of the books and I'm excited to see how the discussion goes.
I'm being brief because I'm not trying to stir up trouble.
Is it common for threads here to be locked without a reason given? In cases where it's not obvious, can we ask or is that grounds for being moderated?
For full transparency, I'm not asking about a topic I was part of, but was following and surprised to see locked.
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
Thought I'd post the thread this year as I haven't seen it pop up yet.
It's been an eventful 2025, and we certainly live in some interesting times. If you made predictions for this year, how did they turn out? What are your predictions for the next year?
I’ll try to keep this post as brief as possible.
I spend a lot of time on the internet. Twitter and TikTok mainly. And I’ve been extremely online since I gained unlimited access to it in the early 2010s. I would say that the biggest shifts in attitudes and styles on the internet occurred throughout the 2010s, with 2016 marking a clear-cut turning point.
We transitioned from the hipster aestheticisms and YOLO branding of 2010-2012 to the more “baddie” Instagram aesthetic popularized by celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Selena Gomez, and Ariana Grande.
Now, some people have confused that early 2010s aesthetic for what we actually saw during 2016. Which was a cleaner, less quirky idea of what “style” was. Music also showed this as we went from Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO being a chart topper to One Dance by Drake and Sorry by Justin Bieber being the club-friendly radio hits. Things were less ironic; in order to be cool, you had to be calm (if you listen to the 2016 songs, they don’t feel as aggressive as LMFAO’s songs).
I was 16 during most of 2016. Old enough to remember everything and young enough to still be “hip” with the culture (although I’ve always been kind of an old man mentally). Most of my internet use around this time was on Reddit. Specifically, the meme subreddits such as dank_memes and me_irl. The tone back then was super depressing. Saying you were gonna kill yourself was a common punchline. Everyone circle jerked about how sad they were. These are common on the internet now, but were relatively new for the mainstream back then. The running joke was that 2016 was the worst year in history. Many high-profile celebrities died during this year (Prince, David Bowie, George Michael, Carrie Fisher), which led to people saying “DAMN YOU 2016!” every single time. That saying “damn you [year]” became normal for every subsequent year.
Reflecting on this period, I will say, I do not recall much nostalgia for say 2006 back then on the internet. I saw more nostalgia for the 00s from Zillennials and older Zoomers throughout these past four years than I ever did back then.
So what is it? Why have we been seeing so many people longing for the days of 2016? I’ve seen videos like this for the past two years, and they’ve only accelerated now that we’re exactly 10 years removed. Videos, such as this, are making the rounds, glorifying the aesthetics of the time.
My first instinct has always been: these are people around my age who miss being a teenager. This is still the likeliest explanation. A time before you worried about bills or felt like you were behind in life. I also miss that time period for that reason, and I also wish I could wake up exactly that year and do everything over and better this time.
But, this general analysis of the human condition doesn’t explain why this specifically. Why 2016, why not 2010, why didn’t this happen ten years ago for 2006? In which case, I don’t really know.
I suppose 2016 felt less cringe. The aforementioned millennialisms of the early 2010s weren’t as prevalent, so the time period doesn’t feel as dated. Speaking of things feeling “dated,” many of the interfaces we use now are not so far off from what we were using in 2016. I remember watching the 2014 film Whiplash and being shocked at how old the cell phones looked there, but if you put on Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016) the technology doesn’t really stand out that much. Many of the social media apps we use are the same as they were in 2016. You could realistically have had the same Instagram and Twitter accounts for nearly 20 years now. With the exception of TikTok, the way in which we use the internet today is about the same as we used it then.
Which is why 2016 is this comforting year. Where everything is the same, except you’re younger. It was right before politics got really weird. It was before we lived through a global pandemic. Clubbing still felt like a thing that people did. Youth had a defined image that we currently lack. It felt like a party compared to the way we experience life now.
Without going into details, my partner's parent is sick with an unknown prognosis (1-5 years; 1 year has passed). I admire how they've come to support their parent and have tried to both be supportive and keep myself busy so my partner could focus. Still, it's created a lot of distance for me. Where I see the future as exciting and exploratory for us, for my partner, they imagine their family in shambles and their favorite person gone. With the uncertain prognosis and the aftermath, it's hard to imagine that really changing for the foreseeable future.
I am looking for insight from people who have been in similar situations. Perhaps it's the sort of ridiculousness of how selfish this is or sounds, but I don't know if I've ever heard much about how this affects romantic relationships.
Good deals count too as long as it's a knockout deal.
See title. I think there's an entire topic on Tildes that needs to be reported, not just individual posts therein.
Hello all! My lease is up mid-March of this year. For personal mental health reasons I would like to secure a move-in date of around mid-February and perhaps even earlier than that, because I'd like to have things finalized before my ex starts her own moving out process. This is the first time I'll be apartment hunting on my own, and while I have definitely talked to many friends and mentors regarding my options, I figured I wouldn't mind getting thoughts from folks here.
I have a few hard requirements for personal reasons: I would ideally not be too far from groceries (I have a car), be able to go for walks/runs without having to drive to a specific place, not too far away from the main airport here as I have to fly for work very very occasionally or when visiting family, and central HVAC. I have, generally, two options to choose from:
The expensive option, 1500 base rent and estimated 300-400 for utilities/parking/etc. At this time I do not believe it possible or even worth looking for anything slightly cheaper than this - whether it's a studio or a 1bed, the cost is more or less the same in this area. And even if the location were less of a factor and I looked farther away from the main city / big hubs, at best we're looking at $100 cheaper and I don't think that is big enough savings given how inconvenient location is.
The budget option, estimated 700-800 with utilities included, 3 housemates. A friend is currently sharing a house that his family owns with two other housemates. I've never met said housemates but they are personal friends of his. All housemates are male, I am female. I would be getting a single master bedroom, attached bathroom. At this time I do not consider the... eyebrow-raising-ness? of being the sole woman to be a problematic factor.
Some of the factors I'm considering, that probably isn't comprehensive because I'm new to all this:
Living with housemates. I haven't had to share a house with so many people since my first year of college, which was 14 years ago. My ex did keep me honest over the last year of living together, and from a brief call with the friend who would be renting out the room, his housemates do keep to themselves, don't really use the kitchen, plenty of fridge space, etc.
Living alone. I actually haven't "lived alone" since the last semester before I dropped out of college. My roommate at the time was taking a leave of absence and I had the studio to myself for three months. I feel neutral about this.
Laundry? House has in unit laundry. No apartment I've looked at has in-unit laundry unless I add at least $200 on top of the base price.
WFH and personal space. I do work remotely and for my entire WFH life, I have always had my personal PC setup, bed, and work setup in the same room. This has been difficult for me in the last two months while recovering from the breakup, and moving into a 1bed apartment would allow me to have a dedicated work setup away from bed since I personally value that higher than a nice living room space (no television, no problem). Or I could even fit that work setup into a small but still cozy living room space, who knows. However...
MONEY. I've broken down all my fixed monthly costs, including any recurring annual subscriptions. I am estimating very, very high for absolutely everything, such as monthly grocery costs (400/mo, which is the highest that my ex and I split over the last 10 months. We're both very light eaters and "groceries" would include the occasional toiletries restock and such). Right now I am looking at taking home around $1300/mo living in my own apartment, vs. $2300/mo sharing the house.
Mental health? Monthly therapy costs are factored into my numbers. So is a $150/mo cost of classes at a local muay thai gym (picked up recently for sake of both physical and mental health, joining a community, a regular activity to take me out of the apartment).
What considerations am I missing from the above? What would you go for? I mentioned I have not lived on my own for a very long time, and to be honest I don't have concrete long-term financial goals. Obviously property ownership is like... the American Dream and whatever... but frankly I am so very far from being able to realize such a goal that it just is not a factor when it comes to me saving money. I just don't want to look back at myself in 2027 and regret my finances. My family is in another part of the state and I can't rely on them for money or housing... well, I actually can, for housing, and save even more money, but I vastly prefer the climate where I am at now and my mental health will suffer far more living with family than with 3 housemates.
I really appreciate any thoughts! I know I have time, there is no rush, but I am also aware that distracting myself with this has been pretty helpful with, you know, not being too depressed about circumstances.
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.
Just curious
In PST I’m a little late but here it is. What’s up? Any resolutions?
I've owned Baldur's Gate 3 pretty much since it came out. I prefer role-playing games with good stories and characters that feel real and interesting, so this game should be right up my alley. Turn-based, party combat is not my favorite but I find it enjoyable once I make the mental switch.
I've tried playing 3 times. The first time, I went in blind (as did everyone) because it had just come out. Having gotten into it somewhat, figured out the basics, I realized that I had managed to totally miss 2 of the main companions. I was also playing as a ranger and regularly getting my butt handed to me, because I had no warriors in my party. . So I restarted, but found the restart a slog And then an update broke my play-through so put it away for (quite) a bit.
After many months, I thought I'd try again, when Cyberpunk fatally crashed late in the game because of my modding addiction. This time there was LOTS of information on the web about BG3, which I read, hoping to make sure not to miss anything important (like, all the warrior companions...) I tried playing a mage. But this time I felt constantly stressed about getting the "right" outcome, picking the "right" dialogue, getting the "right build....It wasn't fun. I think it was my fault.
There are a bunch of people who consider this game the greatest ever, and I really think it could be up there for me, but I'm doing it wrong. So I am asking--how to you play this game to maximize your enjoyment? How much did you rely on wikis or our guides? Are there mods out that you recommend? What attitude so you bring when playing that makes the game enjoyable for you? Help me love this game, I really want to!
EDIT: Thank you everyone, I'm totally psyched to start again with a new attitude and some new strategies!
EDIT2: Sorry I didn't respond to the later posts... I took all the advice and tried again and have spent all my free time having a blast with BG3, so THANK YOU
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.
Just a passing thought, came up in conversation. I'm not talking about warehouses-full, nor even "retirement savings" quantities, but like, all the RAM you and your friends and family could possibly need for the next 3-4 years.
Pros, cons? Too late? Too volatile? Too ___?
I am really not sure if this topic belongs in ~tech or ~society or ~talk but I trust the moderators to re-assign accordingly.
So, this is the layout of the "development" team of my companies.
there are 4 "development" teams which reports to the development manager who also occasionally codes.
There is one team, that's the one I am on. 7 people, 6 males.
there is another team, 4 people, 3 males.
there is another team, 5 people, 4 males.
The last team, I don't really consider "development" team. its a team of 4 females. What they are best suited for is QA in the sense of manually testing the product to ensure the experience is sufficient for push to PROD, But because of budget restrictions, they are being forced to learn code and testing suites so they can be the people to develop our testing structure. They are great people and excellent Manual QAers but they really are not developers.
All our tech managers and team leads are men with the exception of the team lead for QA (obviously).
And just to be clear, the culture is friendly and respectful and no complaints. It's just the gender ratio is pathetic.
So our tech gender ratio is really 17 people and 3 women which is 17%.
If you want to consider the QA team a dev team to bump up the numbers, you get 21 with 7, that's still only 33%.
At a recent company meeting, they were talking about how diverse our workforce is and blah blah blah (I tune out most of that stuff as we are fully remote and I spend most of my time coding), but then they showed a slide that claimed our gender ratio for tech roles was like 50% or something.....
I message a colleague at work, being like "where on earth did they get that number??", he was like ":shrug: maybe they are counting the people who use the product we are making?"
To clarify that, the product we work on is rarely used by external customers. Instead we have employees who know how to use our product and correspond on our behalf with external customers. So all these employees are doing is using a webapp the real tech employees develop.
So long story short, my company pulled a number out of nowhere to claim we have gender equity in the tech roles and now I dont know how to trust any stats a company puts out about how equal the gender roles are in their "tech" departments.
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.
A new year is soon upon us, so, what was the past one like for you? Share anything about your own personal life in 2025 that you want to. Highlights; disappointments; milestones; celebrations; etc.
The recent discussion of Baldurs Gate 3 tempted me to play a video game after a long break. What games do you suggest for someone who likes getting emotionally involved and likes intriguing twists?
I've played the Mass Effect series and the first Bioshock. Apologies if this is information that is easily found.
I remember being young and going over to one of our neighbor's house to watch him play Phantasy Star Online (PSO) on his Dreamcast with other people over the Internet which blew my mind as a kid. I also remember getting my parents to rent a copy of PSO for Gamecube to play it some, but since we had to return it, I didn't get very far or get to experience much of it. Though the memory of it being awesome never went away.
When I was in high school, one of my best friends at the time loved the Gamecube version and played it a ton with his dad and brother growing up. He found a private server to play the PC version, Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst, which includes both episodes 1 and 2 along with the PC only episode 4. ["Where is episode 3?" you might ask, that was released as a card game that was also set after the events of episodes 1, 2, and 4] and asked me if I wanted to play with him and his brother. We ended up playing together, usually once or twice a week, depending on our schedules. Sometimes we would play all evening and just chat while grinding and leveling up our characters. I think I ended up getting to level 50 out of a maximum of 200. I could easily have seen myself continuing to play for years as a way to keep up with that friend if we had stayed in touch.
That game has sat in the back of my head for years, I'd occasionally think about it, and have the urge to play it, but never would since I usually have other stuff going on, and I couldn't remember what server my character was on or my login information. I recently saw some videos about it on YouTube, since it was the 25th anniversary that has got me looking in to it again. I think later in the year I may look in to setting it up to play on my Android phone.
PSO has an interesting place in video game history, and something I didn't know until watching a retrospective was that the Monster Hunter series took inspiration from PSO.
There were follow-up games made, like Phantasy Star Universe, and Phantasy Star Online 2, but I only played PSO2 for a brief period when it was Japanese only, and I kept having my translation patches breaking every few days due to updates and never went back to revisit it after it was released in the West.
It made me curious if any Tilders played it back in the day or still play it now?
Do you have any fond memories of the game, or stories you might want to share?
Did you play or enjoy any of the follow-up games to the original PSO?
This is one of those posts that make me wish we could tag multiple tildes. Because this would apply to ~tv, ~movies, ~comics, ~games, ~books, and ~anime, with possibly even more.
A long time ago I read an article about weird crossovers, and it made the point that thanks to unrelated crossovers and six degrees of separation, the Archie comics Sonic technically existed in the same universe as... Some popular live action shows, because that show had a crossover with some other show that crossed over with Sonic. Obviously not really, but it was a funny thought.
I failed to find the article I remember, but my brief search did bring up the Tommy Westphall Shared Universe, which comprises 400+ shows thanks to various crossovers, cameos and in-universe references. There is a whole fandom wiki dedicated to it. There's also this site that lets you search for connections between TV shows. The site's description from DuckDuckGo is "Easily search and find the relationship between shows in the Tommy Westphall Universe and beyond." It's silly, but fun!
Thing is, most of my cursory searching into it has people focus on live-action TV and movies. And... Well, like I said at the start: the article I remember reading made a connection between Archie comics Sonic and some live-action show thanks to some crossover.
Since that first article, I've wondered off and on about the weirdest crossovers out there, and just how weird of a shared universe could exist. I don't want to limit it to one or two mediums, I want to find crossovers that can transcend mediums! Comics, TV, games and more!
So: what are the weirdest crossovers, cameos and in-universe connections you know of? What are the wildest connections we can make? And, for bonus fun, what are the ramifications of shoving all these wildly different series into one ridiculous universe?? how many different apocalypses can we shove into it
Looking to get a tablet for my birthday but I'm so disconnected I don't know what specs to look for, where to get one or a decent price range to expect. I do need something on the cheaper side, but am ok with something good if refurbished. Only ever had a tablet once and it was a "free*" one from Verizon over a decade ago. I'm also open to other device suggestions.
Wants:
I am wanting to be able to disconnect from my phone and all the work apps and social media and such while still playing farmrpg on a lazy night watching a panel show on TV.
Or watch something on the tablet while knitting or something.
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!
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!
Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like bragging.humble, social media and proselytism. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was able to keep up.
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!
Welcome to the 2025 NFL Season Weekly Discussion Thread! Share your thoughts on Week 17 — wins, losses, fantasy fumbles, predictions, or anything else football-related.
For example, games like Superliminal (solving puzzles), The Stanley Parable (exploration) and the upcoming Subliminal.
The backroom games I've looked at tend to be just about walking and walking and it gets really boring. I played the game called "Pools" and though I liked the aesthetic, I just got so bored because there wasn't anything to do at all other than just looking around and walking. any suggestions?
Finally embarking on a side-project that I will be doing with Django.
One thing that I am having to consider is how to do encryption.
Looking at the explanations of different levels of encryption here, I think data at rest is really all I need to do (although, I will probably use cloudflare tunnels which will also ensure data in transit but I just won't be implementing it myself is all).
Now, doing data at rest, doing some research, django-cryptography comes up a lot but that hasn't been updated in forever, to point where an open issue on its repo points to a new library (django-cryptograph-5) that was made specifically cause the devs of django-cryptography seem to have abandoned it, but that same thing could happen to the new off-shoot.
I can't tell if this means that I am looking on the wrong webpages for knowledge of how to do about this or when working in the python open-source ecosystem, there's no list of trustworthy reliable publishers of a library for data at rest encryption? like how Django REST Framework is so established, they even have sponsors now.
Food highlights for the year?
Favorite meals?
New baking breakthroughs?
Hilarious cooking disasters?
New restaurants in your area?
Delicious snacking?
Let us know how all about your food for 2025 and what eating/cooking/baking/snacking was like for you.
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.
As we finish out 2025, it's been a minute since we had a question like this and with apologies to @kfwyre for stealing their MO.
What's something you're proud of? Maybe from this year, maybe not, but especially something you don't get to talk about a lot, for whatever reason.
Animals, robots, AIs, aliens, sentient rocks, etc. Anything counts as long as it's not human! And "stories" can count for novels, short stories, comics, etc.
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?
Hello,
I seem to be in a write it down phase and have gotten to the physical health part.
I'm looking for fun, absurd, dumb, exaggerated, vanity goals related to fitness.
What I have now is:
The idea is to have these feats as goals so that I have something to strive for... I have well over 40years to reach them.
Think of something that you would cringe at when shown or talked about, but secretly you think it's kind of cool.
Like that uncle that always has to show off...
My list is mostly gymnastics, but I sure welcome pure strength, endurance or other things too.
I don't know if you know Destin Sandlin. He has a youtube channel named "SmarterEveryDay." I believe he would self-describe his channel as "a red-neck doing sciencey stuff."
The guy has everything, from the southern accent to videos about seemingly-dumb red-neck things that involve a significant amount of engineering and the opportunity to teach about science. If you don't know him, some (not all) of what I consider his best videos are:
The large part of his content is like this. Maybe not of this quality, but the theme is often some, what he calls, "redneck" thing turned into an engineering challenge. And overall, the quality of his videos is quite high.
Sometimes he will just tag along with some expert explaining their fields. These are also entertaining and IMHO educational pieces of content. If you want examples, there are:
And more rarely, he will post weird, life advice or motivational content. Usually this is wholesome or harmless, but it feels disconnected from the rest. Examples are:
I've always like Destin. This is not a university class, and in the past he has taken some shortcuts with safety. But overall, I think he is an honest content creator, and he is entertaining and educational. He also has increase the safety of his experiments, and been educational about (see the video linked above about bullets hitting bullets) I feel that he has kept the clickbait as low as he could get away with Youtube's algorithm, and that's rare in this day and age, therefore I respect him for that. Overall his content is, IMHO, humble and wholesome.
I think this contrasts with Veritasium which has become way too clickbaity, and Mark Rober who reminds you every 5 minutes that he quit his job at NASA to do Youtube. By the way, did you know Mark Rober used to work at NASA?
Of course, Destin is not perfect. He has taken, what I consider to be, bad sponsorship in the past, such as NordVPN which is just a shady VPN (just use Mullvad or Mozilla VPN if you want to circumvent geoblocking), HelloFresh which is overpriced food delivered by a Roach Motel company, or Casper Mattress which AFAIK is a dropshipping company selling products with some health concerns. But many other Youtubers took these sponsorship, so I won't criticise him too much for that. Also his quest to make something 100% in the USA is very laudable, at least to me.
There are some weird stuff though. I'm trying to not be too much parasocial, but most of his content that is not science related feels... weird. It's often about family, helping the poor, being a good member of the community, which I think are good values to have, but it has this weird religious semi-conservative undertone that I can't really pinpoint, it's more like an uncomfortable feeling.
Most of his videos used to finishes with a reference to a bible verse in gray over a black screen. This has disappeared most likely as the Youtube algorithm started asking him to link to his other videos at the end of his videos. I also always find weird the videos with his kids because they address him as "sir". I don't know if it's cultural, but in France (where I'm from and where I live) this is usually associated with radical Catholics (aka "traditionalists")
I've pro-actively tried to avoid judging him on the last part, because I believe people can live their life as they wish as long as they don't hurt anybody.
But now, I'm torn... He has recently made more and more references to the bible for historical and biological facts. The two videos, I have in mind are:
And this is starting to bother me. I don't mind the past "I have some belief I want you to know, but unrelated to that, I put it aside, here is some engineering/science video." However, I do mind the recent "I'm talking about science, and let me tell you how it matches my made up beliefs based on a book made up by people 1000s of years ago."
I know that Destin owes me nothing. And the counter point should be "hey... if you're not happy just stop watching him." But I just feel that I'm watching a guy who spend more than a decades building his brand and audience just tearing it appart, and it was a good brand and audience. I'm just sad about it, but maybe I'm overreacting.
What's your opinion?
(Stealing @kfwyre's format since I haven't seen anything similar posted here)
This is your place to share any and all thoughts on your anime watching for 2025.
What you talk about does NOT have to be limited to this year’s releases.
Feel free to share:
Let us know how your 2025 went.
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.
This is your place to share any and all thoughts on your reading for 2025.
Books you talk about do NOT have to be limited to this year’s releases.
Feel free to share:
Let us know how your reading for 2025 went.
I have stolen this idea from a Reddit thread and thought it would be a good discussion here. I am placing these in approximate order of favorite to least favorite.
Caves of Qud - Probably a top ten game of all time. Greatest environmental flavor I have ever experienced. Great soundtrack. This was the very first traditional rogue-like I played for more than a few hours
Wildermyth - I think the character creation/progression is my favorite of any game ever. Character age, befriend each other, fall in love, die, have children, and more. Also this is my favorite soundtrack of the decade, a very dreamlike and melancholic track that suits the game perfectly.
Jupiter Hell - The second traditional rogue-like i played for a few hours. Incredible tactical gameplay
Balder's Gate III - While not my favorite RPG (Wildermyth) probably the one I have played the most considering all the different ways you can play with story choices and character builds.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - The game has many flaws, particularly the poorly designed combat scenarios and a story that differs quite a bit in quality throughout. But the combat adds a bit more crunch then BG3 and the variety of choices and builds is multitudes larger than BG3.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020/2024 - Not much to say other than the flying mechanics are good and the entire Earth being mapped and populated is maybe my favorite technological feature in a video game ever.
Dorf Romantik - Cute puzzle game. Released in 2022 but was a game that I am 99% sure I played in early access during the pandemic and was warm and quiet in a terrible year
Spiderman Remastered/Spiderman Miles Morales
Total War: Warhammer III - On one hand a culmination of all the Total Warhammer games. On the other hand by the time I had played it I had played so many Total War games that the formula wore on me and I found myself auto-resolving battles more often then playing them.
Far Cry 6 - A step down from Far Cry 5 as far as I am concerned, but there is no FPS game with an open world that lets you approach things in any way you want. Guns blazing? Sure. Stealth? Four or five ways to approach a location? Yep. The only thing I did not like was the base design, which i felt was much more poor then in previous Far Cry games
Starfield - On the one hand, a game with a lot of flaws that make it a hard game to love. Tons of loading screens that break immersion. A lack of depth in systems. A story with little/no sense of morale choices. On the other hand, no one does open world like Bethesda and their formula is like crack for me. Good gun play. Best stories Bethesda has told in years. The ending and new game + hit really hard for me as well.
Here are other games that I play but are more of a 'annual series', so I am placing them separately
Pokemon - Arceus was my favorite Pokemon game, with Scarlet being my favorite 'traditional' Pokemon game
NBA 2K Series
Madden NFL Series
Out of the Park Baseball series
post contains spoilers for Dream Scenario:
I've become a big fan of the resurgence that Nic Cage is having, especially after watching Mandy, it was so wacky and surreal and just quite the mind trip.
Saw the trailer for Dream Scenario and picked up on that same vibe.
However, that movie really pissed me off. that story was pretty interesting and I really would have liked it but I kept thinking that they would find a way to wrap up the plot in a typical happy go lucky fashion that Hollywood typically demands. The closer and closer the movie got to the end, the more I was expecting the shoe to drop and for the writers to somehow find a way to end the movie on a happy note that makes everything OK.
It does not, the movie ends on quite a weird and sad note, which I would have loved, if I hadn't expected it to end in a typical Hollywood fashion. Makes me wish there was a way to get a warning when watching a movie to not expect it to end in a typical "safe" fashion. Cause if I had gotten that warning, I think I would've love it.
I was never one to subscribe to new year's resolutions, but I do believe in using the new year to set a mindset for defining the past year and a goal for the new year's theme. How do you want to describe your 2026 this time next year?
I want mine to be a year of sowing. I want to make roots in a new job which I love and extend myself out to new people to create relationships I'm proud to have.
Another big focus this year for me will be physical change. I'm the heaviest I've ever been and last time I was close to this weight, I dropped 70lbs in under 6 months. It's time for me to find a sustainable way to reach and maintain that target weight again.
The last couple of years have been a wild ride. The biggest parts of the conversation around AI for most of that time have been dominated by absurd levels of hype. To go along with the cringe levels of hype, a lot of people have felt the pain of dealing with the results of rushed and forced AI implementation.
As a result the pushback against AI is loud and passionate. A lot of people are pissed, for good reasons.
Because of that it would be understandable for people casually watching from a distance to get the impression that AI is mostly an investor fueled shitshow with very little real value.
The first part of the sentiment is true, it's definitely a shitshow. Big companies are FOMOing hard, everyone is shoehorning AI into everything they can in hopes of capturing some of that hype money. It feels like crypto, or Web 3.0. The result is a mess and we're nowhere near peak mess yet.
Meanwhile in software engineering the conversation is extremely polarized. There is a large, but shrinking, contingent of people who are absolutely sure that AI is something like a scam. It only looks like a valid tool and in reality it creates more problems than it solves. And until recently that was largely true. The reason that contingent is shrinking, though, is that the latest generation of SOTA models are an undeniable step change. Every day countless developers try using AI for something that it's actually good at and they have the, as yet nameless but novel, realization that "holy shit this changes everything". It's just like every other revolutionary tech tool, you have to know how to use it, and when not to use it.
The reason I bring up software engineering is that code is deterministic. You can objectively measure the results. The incredible language fluency of LLMs can't gloss over code issues. It either identified the bug or it didn't. It either wrote a thorough, valid test or it didn't. It's either good code or it isn't. And here's the thing: It is. Not automatically, or in all cases, and definitely not without careful management and scaffolding. But used well it is undeniably a game changing tool.
But it's not just game changing in software. As in software if it's used badly, or for the wrong things, it's more trouble than it's worth. But used well it's remarkable. I'll give you an example:
A friend was recently using AI to help create the necessary documents for a state government certification process for his business. If you've ever worked with government you've already imagined the mountain of forms, policies and other documentation that were required. I got involved because he ran into some issues getting the AI to deliver.
Going through his session the thing that blew my mind was how little prompting it took to get most of the way there. He essentially said "I need help with X application process for X certification" and then he pasted in a block of relevant requirements from the state. The LLM agent then immediately knew what to do, which documents would be required and which regulations were relevant. It then proceeded to run him through a short Q and A to get the necessary specifics for his business and then it just did it. The entire stack of required documentation was done in under an hour versus the days it would have taken him to do it himself. It didn't require detailed instructions or .md files or MCP servers or artifacts, it just did it.
And he's familiar with this process, he has the expertise to look at the resulting documents and say "yeah this is exactly what the state is looking for". It's not surprising that the model had a lot of government documentation in its training data, it shouldn't even really be mind blowing at this point how effective it was, but it blew my mind anyway. Probably because not having to deal with boring, repetitive paperwork is a miraculous thing from my perspective.
This kind of win is now available in a lot of areas of work and business. It's not hype, it's objectively verifiable utility.
This is not to say that it's not still a mess. I could write an overly long essay on the dangers of AI in software, business and to society at large. We thought social media was bad, that the digital revolution happened too fast for society to adapt... AI is a whole new category of problematic. One that's happening far faster than anything else has. There's no precedent.
But my public service message is this: Don't let the passionate hatred of AI give you the wrong idea: There is real value there. I don't mean this is a FOMO way, you don't have to "use AI or get left behind". The truth is that 6 months from now the combination of new generations of models and improved tooling, scaffolding and workflows will likely make the current iteration of AI look quaint by comparison. There's no rush to figure out a technology that's advancing and changing this quickly because most of what you learn right now will be about solving problems that will be solved by default in the near future.
That being said, AI is the biggest technological leap since the beginning of the public, consumer facing, internet. And I was there for that. Like the internet it will prove to be both good and bad, corporate consolidation will make the bad worse. And, like the internet, the people who are saying it's not revolutionary are going to look silly in the context of history.
I say this from the perspective of someone who has spent the past year casually (and in recent months intensively) learning how to use AI in practical ways, with quantifiable results, both in my own projects and to help other people solve problems in various domains. If I were to distill my career into one concept, it would be: solving problems. So I feel like I'm in a position to speak about problem solving technology with expertise. If you have a use for LLM powered AI, you'll be surprised how useful it is.
