Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like flock, internet and creative_suite. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was bemused.

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!

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.

G'day,

Like most people I suspect, when I'm working I love having music on in the background.

One of my go-tos is Tool (and A Perfect Circle) because it offers the perfect mix of "wall of sound", great clear vocals, sharp interesting drumming, and guitar work that slaps and moves around instead of playing the same sound over and over again (also I am not a musician so I have no idea what the proper technical terms are for these things).

I stick YouTube Music on a Tool Mix and it's a pretty bad selection with a heap of stuff I really don't enjoy (I dislike growly or screamy voices, sad muddy instruments, or where the "wall of sound" is basically just feedback that drones on and on, etc).

I've tried going with "prog metal" and "prog rock" and "alt metal" as genres but that seems to cover a LOT of variation. No matter how many thumbs down I give there's always the screamy dudes and high pitched guitar whining popping back up.

Are there any bands that are Tool-like I can seed my selection with? The big focus being if there's vocals you can actually hear and understand them, distinct instruments that are actually playing a tune, and drumming that does something more than just maintain a beat in the background.

Some other bands I enjoy that I feel are similar enough are My Sleeping Karma, Kadavar, Witchcraft, Smote, and Riverside.

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?

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.

The prices have increased, and even before people called it too expensive.

I am just wondering - do you have one? What do you use it for? I've been thinking of getting one (as a business expense, I guess the price is high, but then again - what other option do you have for compute? renting GPUs is quite expensive, any comparable amount of VRAM is very expensive - ok if you have space and mostly want to do inference, I guess you have better options (3090 or 5090)

For me, I have just been considering having some more compute available for robotics, finetuning, trying out selfhosted and fine tuned LLMs, among other things. My other setup (M1Pro 32GB and a 1070 Mini) could work for some stuff, but especially for the robotics part it's mostly about NVIDIA...

Curious about any experiences.

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?