Asked in ~comp thread, figured it should be its own post.

Thinking about whether I want to do some upgrades to my 10 year old PC or buy new. I could bump RAM to 16 without breaking the bank since its DDR4, and maybe splurge on a new processor, but I'm not sure if I'd just want to go with a new machine at that point, thoughts?

AMD Ryzen 3 1300
8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR4
MSI B350M PRO-VD PLUS
4GB ATI Radeon RX 480

Edit: To follow up some questions about what I'm using this computer for, not a whole lot at the moment. I was thinking of making it into a media server or a Steam OS console now that it's available to download, but it's more of a whim and a project itch to keep my mind off of personal and global events.

Businesspeople of Tildes, what do you do? I want to hear about people running and owning businesses, whether they have employees or are freelancers.

What do you do? Where are you based? How do you find your customers? Can you live 100% from your business? What do you like most about it? What would you do differently? What bothers you the most about it? How did you get the idea?

I live in an apartment on the third floor, and have a cat. She loves watching birds from our balcony, so we got her a bird-feeder to put in our balcony.

It has done a great job of bringing in more birds (primarily finches and sparrows) for her to watch, except the sunflower seeds we got for it result in an extreme mess all over the balcony and I worry our downstairs neighbors likely hate us as a result, so we’ve taken it down.

Wondering if anyone has recommendations for a bird feeder or bird seed that would be less messy? Or should this just turn into a “when we move to a first-floor apartment or a house” sorta dream.

Unfortunately, my wife is allergic to peanuts, so any bird seed that is made with peanuts (and from what we’ve seen, almost all are) is not an option.

Hi all,

I know this is probably going to be a bit of an incoherent mess of a post but my wife and I have not had a very good day and I'd just like to share my feelings, and make a simple request for anyone who might be reading this. This is also a sad story, so if you are not in a great headspace, I'd suggest skipping this. I swear I'm not trying to be a burden.

My wife and I have been fostering dogs with a local rescue for years now. We absolutely love it and it truly is one of the only things that make us feel like we are able to make the world a little bit of a better place. It can be tough sometimes but we always say "There will always be another dog to help" and that has helped keep us going.

Three or four years back we had a lovely old man foster dog named Elvis. Absolute sweetheart. If you thought of a soft gentle dopey old man dog, it was Elvis. He loved his toys, but in a funny way. He would just carry them around with him ENDLESSLY. But not all of his toys, it was either his little marshmallow stuffy or his little cookie stuffy. And I mean he took these things everywhere. To bed, on the couch, walking around the house and even outside to hold while using the bathroom. He would even try it on walks if we let him. He was the perfect old man dog and we loved him dearly.

Well, eventually he had an application for an adoption and he was picked up by an older individual and that was the last we saw or heard of Elvis. Life just kind of moved on.

Until this week.

The universe sometimes works in cruel ways. Earlier this week, my wife, while scrolling through social media happens upon a post from another local animal shelter we follow. The post was about a stray dog whom has been picked up and the owner could not be contacted. My wife showed me and said it looked like Elvis. And initially, I didn't think so. Maybe? I mean like sure, but a shell of his former self. He was so thin. He looked like a skeleton. He was so unkept and neglected that it really only kind of looked like him. There was no way it was him. He was so old and frail looking. I wasn't so sure.

Until I looked at a photo of him on my phone. We were convinced it was him. My wife immediately called our foster agency and they contacted the shelter. The microchip confirmed it. It was Elvis. The shelter nor the foster agency could get ahold of the adopter. And no one had any idea what had happened or how long he had been like this. It was so upsetting to hear. My wife and I both knew immediately we had to go and get our boy back, even if it meant we held onto him for the rest of his days. Didn't matter. It was devastating but we were glad to know he had been picked up and was safe at the shelter.

But it wasn't that simple. He had to be on stray hold for a few days to give his owner a chance to come and get him, and was on medical hold too. Initially they had thought he had been hit by a car because of his inability to stand and he was in really rough shape. My wife and I said that's fine, we can pick him up on Friday and we will make sure he gets the care he needs. We are fortunate that our foster agency has a lifetime promise to always take care of an animal should an owner surrender the dog or cat.

Not to stray from the story too much but my wife and I also have a cat. We've had since we were first together. He is our first real pet. We have had him for years now and he is our baby. Well, he's been battling cancer for the last year or so and these last few weeks have been tough. Long story short he had an emergency today and had to go to the vet.

Things did not go all that well. He had a lot of fluid in his chest and it made it so he was having a very difficult time breathing. He needed to have the fluid drained immediately and it was jaring to watch. While this is going on, someone from the shelter that was holding Elvis called. It turns out that he hadn't been hit by car. His heart was failing and he was likely to be put to sleep. Today. It was a complete shock on top of an already shitty day.

Once our cat was was stable and we were able to take him home, we wanted to go and be with Elvis for his final minutes. It only seemed fair. We didn't want him to be surrounded by strangers and scared.

But the shelter wouldn't let us.

They wouldn't let us see our boy one last time. I know he hasn't been our boy in years, and I know he was never really our boy, but I still remember him like it was yesterday! And I just wanted to apologize for what happened! I just wanted to hold him one more time but I couldn't.

Elvis, I'm sorry.

And I'm sorry for this lengthy and probably stupid post but my wife and I have been dealing with a rather emotional day and I wasn't sure how else to process it. We've talked and it's been hard,. We just held each other and cried. I've cried while writing this. Tomorrow is another day, and hopefully it will be better.

I have one simple ask for anyone who might consider adopting. Please, please, please, get the contact information of the fosters, if the agency allows it. Send them photos of the dogs, or cats. It's a hard thing to do and just getting those little reminders that's our foster dogs and cats are out there living a beautiful little life genuinely fills my wife and I with so much happiness it's impossible to describe. Anyone who has fostered would feel the same. Even if it's once a blue moon. Please. Do it. It's means more than I could ever really state.

I'm going to stay off the Internet for a bit to try and get in a better state of mind and spend sometime with my wife. If you made it this far and read this whole thing. Thank you. I appreciate you and I hope you have a good day.

Please give your pets a big squeeze and forehead kiss for me, and for Elvis.

Came to post and saw this thread popped up 5 hours prior (okay, near 7 hours as I'm still trying to look). So please help them first!

Sadly, while a lot of the requirements are the same, it doesn't offer what I'm looking for. Here are the demands (and here is why I cannot profit from it):

• USB A or C wired (no BT or detachable connection)
• Full 100% size

Similar demands are:

• Works with Linux
• Cherry MX (or comparable) switches - red or brown level
• Backlit with custom coloring

Honestly, Ducky seemed to be exactly what I was looking for, but I see no "buy" option, nor are there Linux options. Yeah, they're on mechanicalkeyboards.com but the third party is disconcerting and also the options I want are out of stock.

This is the seventh Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twenty-seventh overall. We are discussing a Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers.

ANNOUNCEMENT - My schedule has changed and I have joined an in person book group. I will no longer be coordinating these discussions for the foreseeable future. I want to thank everyone who has participated and contributed and read along while lurking. It has been a pleasure.

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

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.

And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Particularly interested if it has already impacted your life, or scrapped any plans or influenced where you decided to live.

Anybody else chose their current/ next home because of lower natural disasters risk or climate change resilience?

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.

In all the hype and debate and excitement and frustration around AI, I think sometimes the fact that we've achieved something really cool gets lost. I want to talk about that a bit, which I'll try to do in a simple way, without too much math or computer science.

There's a surprising amount of intelligence encoded in applied language. To me that's the most remarkable insight in LLM technology. Except it's not really surprising at all. The whole point of language is to encode intelligence. Communication, at its core, is about sharing intelligence. LLMs agents are a way of turning the intelligence encoded in language, particularly written language, into useful work.

You might imagine that language is just the starting point when building LLMs. That it gets converted into computer stuff and then it's not language anymore. But in a way it's language all the way down. Distill language into math and then run gradient descent on it and the intelligence (for lack of a better term) bubbles out.

Forgive that hyperbole, but there is something a little bit magical about it, and the technology is entirely unmagical. The magic is in the language.

At the core the tech is pretty simple. First you go and get all of the language. Just completely idiotic amounts of applied language. Because there's a threshold: if you don't use enough language you don't get a useful result. The more language you use, assuming it's good quality, the more useful the result.

After you have all of the language, you convert it into tokens, which are essentially pieces of words represented as numbers. You also compute a compressed version of the relationships between the tokens. The frontier labs don't say how much this costs publicly anymore but it's safe to say hundreds of millions in compute are required for this process. Each time you do it.

Once you've determined the token relationships, you've pre trained an LLM. You have the initial weights. At this point your LLM can output credible prose pretty reliably when you run inference on the weights. Meaning that you can take a given set of language tokens (a prompt) and determine which token should come next, over and over again, until you have a response. The fluency of the prose can be uncanny, and there are latent tendencies towards useful output, but you can't really do much with it yet.

The next step, fine tuning, modifies the weights in order to nudge the inference towards useful things like instruction following, tool use and reasoning. Or a simulacrum of reasoning. Fine tuning is a massive, multi step, iterative process that turns your LLM into a useful tool that can do more than output believable prose.

Something that's really fascinating to me about fine tuning is that what you're training is still the language relationship weights, and what comes out during inference is still language. But now it's language that is more likely to result in useful output and behaviors. Language is the substrate that LLMs reason through. A model that's more likely to infer the words "but what if I look at it another way" is more likely to consider multiple possibilities. A model that reliably infers language around tool use in appropriate situations is an agent. The behavior is encoded in the language.

After tens of millions in fine tuning costs, assuming you got it right, you have the core of a LLM that can function as an AI agent. You can put it in a harness and ask it to do things in the language of your choice and it will actually be able to do them a shockingly high percentage of the time. It can even do things that weren't explicitly part of the training. That's something which has never happened before outside of science fiction. Until recently it was one of those computer sciencey things that was probably going to happen someday, after we were all dead.

It sucks that this tech revolution is being driven by the capital class, and that it's happening as a mad dash for market domination and golden IPOs. In a more perfect world technology derived from collective human intelligence would be a public good rather than a profit driver.

But nevertheless, the ability to imprint some part of human intelligence into an autonomous agent is a remarkable achievement. One that we can't yet see the full size of. And it's possible not because we typed instructions into an interface, but because we've spent centuries encoding our intelligence into language.

I'm looking to replace my current mechanical keyboard which has a few problems. If anyone has recommendations I would appreciate it.

Here is what I'm looking for:

• Mechanical switches
• USB C and bluetooth.
• Smaller size (no keypad)
• Clicky but not too loud. I think I currently have "brown" switches which are good.
• Backlit (but not colorful unless I'm able to set it to something muted or single-colored)
• Works with mac, pc, linux, and maybe tablets

I don't care very much if there is a battery in the unit as long as it can switch to bluetooth while plugged into usb.

I went to mechanicalkeyboards.com and looked around and got a bit overwhelmed. Looks like the prices are mostly under $200 which would be ok.

What went wrong with my current keyboard:
It's an EPOMAKER TH80 pro. The size is good, the features are good, and the keyboard feel is good. But the battery went dead so it has to be plugged in all of the time, and several of the keys get double presses at random so I have to backspace a lot.

Thanks!

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

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I did a search and the last time this was posted about was nearly two years ago. I don't know if there have been any updates on the subject since then.

I see that there is a ublock filter suggested on the wiki, but that is not an option on some of the devices that I use to browse tildes.

Edit: Anyone who thinks it might be them, yes it is very specifically you. All of you. You know what you did. :)

Well, the time is about up for this month's CGA, so I hope everyone that gave Lufia II a shot enjoyed it and defeated the Sinstrals forever. JK, it's a prequel, we know they came back :)

Please feel free to talk freely about the game in the comments and let everyone know how far you got, what you liked, and what you didn't.

I was able to finish the game and I beat the ancient cave (my true goal) on my second attempt. Did anyone else give the ancient cave a try?

Our next host is u/Boojum with the amazing game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I'm super excited about this one, even though I've played it a dozen times, as it is my favorite Zelda game.

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.