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11 votes
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China is treating Islam like a mental illness
12 votes -
The Ripper: The disturbing Visceral Games project that never was
6 votes -
A study on the online "filter bubble" found that liberals and conservatives were actually recommended similar stories on Google News, representing a fairly homogeneous set of mainstream news sources
8 votes -
A Black woman shot and killed her abusive husband in a “stand your ground” state. Now she faces murder charges
29 votes -
Would anybody be interested in a Tildes Minecraft server?
unofficial of course but like, a server for the tildes community with whatever addons people like. I just thought it would be interesting with how civilized our community is (most of the time).
37 votes -
WSUS isn't worth it
I just got off an hour of remote trouble shooting only to discover WSUS decided 10 at night was the best time to reboot every server for updates.
5 votes -
What happens when your bomb-defusing robot becomes a weapon
12 votes -
'Mass shooting' at Madden video game tournament in Jacksonville
48 votes -
Scientists warn the UN of capitalism's imminent demise
16 votes -
Fun, relaxing, singleplayer games
Hello, I am fairly new to the gaming world and I am looking for just some fun and relaxing games to play by myself. I play almost exclusively FPS and action games and I want to branch out....
Hello, I am fairly new to the gaming world and I am looking for just some fun and relaxing games to play by myself. I play almost exclusively FPS and action games and I want to branch out. Although, I found Civ V which is super addicting and I love it.
Anyways, thank you!
26 votes -
Haute pot: How high-end California chefs are cashing in on marijuana
5 votes -
Russia says biggest war games since Cold War are 'justified'
4 votes -
US and Mexico reach a trade deal, paving the way to replace NAFTA
11 votes -
These Cultural Treasures Are Made of Plastic. Now They’re Falling Apart.
8 votes -
Magic Leap is a tragic heap - Palmer Luckey's review of the Magic Leap ML1
9 votes -
The myth of John McCain
20 votes -
Script for anime of Satoshi Kon's Opus manga being written
6 votes -
A growing share of Americans say it’s not necessary to believe in God to be moral
37 votes -
What makes a human brain unique? A newly discovered neuron may be a clue
6 votes -
Suspected asylum seekers found in Daintree in far north Queensland, authorities say
2 votes -
Legend of the Bright Knight: History of the Adam West Batman TV Show
6 votes -
AD - What a Blessing (2018)
4 votes -
The details behind publishing on steam. Earnings, discounts, wishlists.
15 votes -
Chibi Maruko-chan Manga Creator Momoko Sakura Passes Away at 53
9 votes -
The tech industry is lobbying for federal data & privacy regulation that is friendly to the tech industry, but hostile to users' interests
11 votes -
Movie Monday Free Talk
So since I'm a terrible person and all that I totally forgot to make this post last week so I've decided to wait a week and actually post on a Monday. For those of you that don't know what Movie...
So since I'm a terrible person and all that I totally forgot to make this post last week so I've decided to wait a week and actually post on a Monday. For those of you that don't know what Movie Monday is, here is the post I made about it.
Basically I'd like to make a weekly post where myself and other users post comments on what movies they've watched recently and whether or not they recommend it etc. There's no specific format set out for the reviews, so feel free to write one any way you like, whether it's just a few sentences or a whole essay, we'll figure out what works best as we go along.
So far, the only rules are:
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All top level comments should be reviews. (if you have any questions or suggestions on how to do things differently, either send me a private message or post in the discussion thread I linked up above)
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No spoilers in top level comments. Ideally any spoilers should be in children comments (with sufficient warning) if you wish to write a review with spoilers, make another comment below your top level comment and write the spoilers there. Anyone who doesn't want to know any spoilers should un-expand the comments at the top before they start reading comments. Hopefully this should allow discussion of both the film and the review without forcing people to see spoilers.
I know the second rule is a tiny bit confusing, but like I said this is a learning process and we'll see what happens. Anyway have fun and happy film watching!
16 votes -
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Instagram is testing virtual communities for college students
13 votes -
"No Love" x Death Grips
5 votes -
What computer/programming/etc. project are you working on this weekend?
This is a thread to discuss the projects you have planned for the weekend. Previous threads: 2018-07-27 2018-06-16
38 votes -
Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems
34 votes -
Github Joins the fight against the Mandatory Webfilters on the EU Copyright Reform
7 votes -
How a surrogate twin pregnancy turned into a custody battle over unrelated babies
6 votes -
Venmo's public API exposes millions of transactions, startling users
10 votes -
Lots of reduced activity it seems. Just the weekend?
Seems as though that "initial" wave of users is dying off when a lot of invites went out. Or is it just the weekend and everyone is busy?
31 votes -
Live Nation's grip on music festivals 'stifling competition'
4 votes -
Finding a solution to Canada's Indigenous water crisis
4 votes -
Daily Tildes discussion - our first ban
After reaching a nice milestone yesterday of over 1000 users registered, we've followed it up with a slightly less nice one—I've now banned someone for the first time. This almost certainly won't...
After reaching a nice milestone yesterday of over 1000 users registered, we've followed it up with a slightly less nice one—I've now banned someone for the first time. This almost certainly won't happen with every ban, but I'm going to be quite transparent with this one since it was the first one, and it gives a good starting point for a discussion today.
Trying to be transparent about this one is actually a bit funny, because the user I banned was named "Redacted" (really, I promise!). I had removed his comments from the thread, but I've un-removed them for now so that you can see exactly what I banned for: https://tildes.net/user/Redacted
There were two reasons that I decided to ban him:
- Those last 3 comments, all in the ~talk thread. That thread has been a bit heated in places, but overall it's been civil and going pretty well. He came into it without being involved in the discussion at all and went straight to personal attacks.
- He went through and tagged almost all of Mumberthrax's comments as some combination of "troll", "flame", and "noise"—sometimes even all 3 tags on a single comment. That's just blatant misuse of the tags, with no possible reasonable excuse. (Note that I've already removed all his tags, so you won't be able to see them any more)
So that's a pretty clear case of being an asshole, in my opinion. Let me know what you think—I'm not sure that there's any particular focus for the discussion today, so we can just talk about this specific case as well as banning/removing in general since this is the first time I've had to do anything (and I was just saying how nice it had been).
161 votes -
What I think the anti-bullying books get wrong
8 votes -
Subverting the narrative | Holocaust denial and the lost cause
3 votes -
Cards Agains Humanity for Infosec Dorks - Malicious Content
6 votes -
Even before electricity, robots freaked people out
5 votes -
Open Data Endgame: Countering the Digital Consensus
5 votes -
What do Democrats fight about when they’re just fighting among themselves? The same thing the country fights about: Race.
7 votes -
Noticing sources from Information Theory in Le Guin's "soft" fantasy
Ursula K. Le Guin was my favourite SciFi & Fantasy writer. Her passing earlier in the year was a great loss. I'm reading her scifi-fantasy book Always Coming Home (1985), a compilation of...
Ursula K. Le Guin was my favourite SciFi & Fantasy writer. Her passing earlier in the year was a great loss.
I'm reading her scifi-fantasy book Always Coming Home (1985), a compilation of "in-universe" codices and oral traditions as seen by an anthropologist. Her works were usually put in the "soft scifi" bin, as opposed to the "harder" genre. What caught my attention was a passage from the book, as appeared in an oral narrative (p. 161):
There are records of the red brick people in the Memory of the Exchange, of course, but I don't think many people have ever looked at them. They would be hard to make sense of. The City mind [a vast autonomous network of computers] thinks that sense has been made if a writing is read, if a message is transmitted, but we don't think that way.
Here we're called to notice the information vs. meaning distinction, for which a lot has been said and will be said. It was striking to me how the definition of "sense" according to the "City mind" closely paralleled the concept of information in Claude E. Shannon's seminal paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (PDF link). There, "information" simply meant what was transmitted between a sender and a receiver. It gave rise to a consistent definition of the amount of information based on the Shannon entropy.
However, we implicitly feel that this concept of information isn't encompassing enough to include meaning -- a vague term, but one we feel to be important. It seems that meaning enters information only as we (or someone) interpret it. In the words of computer scientist Melanie A. Mitchell, "meaning" seems to have an evolutionary value (Complexity: a Guided Tour, 2009). I feel that we could as well say, meaning may be bonded to the bodily and messy reality where flesh and blood living is at stake.
Returning to the passage in the novel, for me it was read as a rare spark of "hard" science in Le Guin's scifi works. Was it possible that she actually read into the information theory for inspiration? I don't know. But it appears to have captured the tension in the "ever-thorny issue" of meaning vs. information. For the computers, "sense" follows the information-theory concept of information; but for the human people in the story, it "would be hard to make sense of" the information in that way.
Do you have similar "aha" moments, where you find a insightful moment of grasping an important "hard-science" idea while immersed in a "soft" scifi/fantasy work?
Or, we can talk about anything vaguely connected to this post :) Let me know.
10 votes -
"Romeo and Juliet" x Hobo Johnson (2017)
3 votes -
What is a group of Tildes users called?
God I hope it’s Tilders
25 votes -
Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound
25 votes -
Trump tweets about white farmers while indigenous peoples face annihilation
9 votes -
Three's a crowd: Millennials are shifting Australia's family values
12 votes