Reading about tilde.club and cmccabe's excellent post about public access unix servers has made me want one for tildes.net. I realize that there are several alternatives, like tildes.team and sdf.org, but I think it would be really cool to have one specifically for the people here, and once the API is done, it could even integrate with the site.

Rogue like elements are used by lots of games. I'm interested to know which ones you think work, which ones you think don't work, and why.

Feel free to interpret rogue-like however you want. In my mind I have procedural generation, perma-death option, and some kind of turn-based strategy.

I took a break from Tildes for a week and came back to look at things again with a fresh perspective.

One of the things I immediately noticed was how the earliest comments are the ones that get the upvotes to the top of the comment list, and tend to stay there, even when better comments and chains flow below.

I started thinking about why this is so pervasive. Not just on tildes, but everywhere. Reddit and tumblr both suffer this issue to a degree. At the end of the day, going through any comments requires a certain amount of time, and a certain approach to the existing library of commentary. If we lock in the amount of time an average person will examine comments (which...is not much), we’re left with the only thing to address: the approach to going through the existing library.

Plenty of proposals (mostly already done) come to mind. Perhaps you go by most active or most recent comments. Controversial perhaps, or sorting by newest, rather than most popular. Maybe some secret mix of it all (the reddit “hot” formula). What about complete and utter randomness? ...yeah remember that Certain Amount of Time we discussed earlier? It’ll only be a couple posts before the user will switch back to another sort method.

So what should we try? What HASN’T been tried?

What about multiple panes? User-selectable, arrangable, 1-4. Vertical columns of different views, updated dynamically synchronously or asynchronously for the most controversial, new, and active. You could see all the views at once, side by side, so that your time switching between views and waiting for page loads evaporates and 100% of that limited attention span is spent on the comments in each of the sorts.

Having the more rapidly-changing columns (newest, active) update synchronously (every # seconds, configurable) would allow a user to engage those comments in time for the next refresh. The less-rapidly changing columns could be set to be asynchronous- updating as the orders change (top, controversial). This can also be tweaked as the site gets either more or less active as a whole. So what might need to be asynchronous now while things are quiet, can be made synchronous later.

Again, all of this is just a possibility, or perhaps starting point for a way to address the overall issue of the first comments being the most voted on.

I'm going to be a little bit more broad on my response. It wasn't a matter of just a one-time thing or action, but a philosophy. I have a personal rule of mine to change something major about myself at least once a year, and that could range from a job or to taking up a new hobby.

Since taking up on this idea, this thought, I've felt better as I can see changes happening, and looking back from exactly a year ago to the date there's a lot to be impressed by. By following this new tradition I feel better as I can see constant improvement, and self-motivation to adapt, and evolve as a person.

What was the best change you ever made in your life?

Hi folks, sorry for the late post. @Whom is sick and wasn't able to post this today so she asked me to do it.

Hello all you good people, here we are in week number 7! It's time for another classic record discussion: Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited!

Here's the place to discuss your thoughts on the record, your history with it or the artist, and basically talk about whatever you want to that goes along with Highway 61 Revisited. Remember that this is intended to be a slow moving thing, feel free to take your time and comment at any point in the week!

If you'd like to stream or buy the album, it can be found on most platforms here.

Don't forget to nominate and vote for next week's obscure record in response to this comment!

Just finished The Wise Man's Fear, and I'm blown away by the massive amounts of world building interspersed by hella awkward sex scenes. Anyone else eagerly awaiting the next Kingkiller Chronicle addition?

Following on the spirit of the book recommendation topic we can just log here what we are reading recently. I'm guilty of reading many books in parallel and oftentimes not finishing them nevertheless, here is my current list:

• Andy Weir: Artemis
• Sapiens
• Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose
• David Graeber: Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years
• Michael Booth: The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
• Cullen Roche: Pragmatic Capitalism

It's been about a month since my last post kicking off some freelancing discussion, I figured it would be a good time to do another if anyone is interested. Chosen topic today: productivity tools.

Let's just start by saying that there are a whole lot of them. Project management tools, accounting tools, time tracking, communication, storage and organization, all sorts of categories. I am pretty sure part of the reason so many of these web-based tools have popped up is simply because web developers are a pretty large contingent of the freelancing world these days, so they end up building tools for themselves and then spin up a product and start-up company out of it.

The first part of the questions I pose is simply: do you think we all spend too much time worrying about and investing ourselves in to productivity tools? Certainly there are some tools that require very minimal onboarding and are helpful at increasing your productive time, but it is also certain that is not the case for all of them. And determining which tools will be beneficial can be a time sink of its own; parsing through the long lists of options, reviewing features and walkthroughs, signing up for free trials (and then unsubscribing from all the marketing email lists), all of that is time spent not focused on your actual work.

I'll drop in a few of my own toolset to give you an idea where I'm coming from: Google Apps, Trello, Freshbooks, Slack. I honestly try to keep it pretty simple, though perhaps I overly rely on spreadsheets and text documents as a result. To be honest, I probably spend more time looking at API documentation for all of these kinds of tools than I look at it from a user perspective, because I end up with tons of clients who want integrations with all of these tools.

So what tools are the most important to you in getting things done and getting yourself back to the work at hand? Do you have any complaints on a particular product, or the overall ecosystem of productivity tools as a whole? Do you think we are too focused on such tools? Or not invested enough in them?