What started out as a little facetious in my own head leads me now to a serious question. Is there some meaningful reason why Google has to use a subsection of images for reCAPTCHA? I really dislike having to do this and at the very least would appreciate some variation.

• Traffic Lights
• Buses
• Bicycles
• Cars
• Crosswalks

Is there something special about these things in this context? Is the visual noise they're usually associated with what makes them good candidates? Are Google just really into urban planning? Who knows...I'm hoping some Tilder smarter than I can help me out.

Prologue: Feeling cranky, trying to be civil.

I posted a link to an article, in the ~news, about two of the top US dairy producers declaring bankruptcy ... and Someone moved it to ~food.

Harumpf.

~food is "check out this new latte recipe" or "how to survive the vegetarian keto diet" (yes, that's a thing; I'm on it. May be why I'm cranky).

My post was ~news, about the US economy, shifting societal norms, potentially about climate change.

But forget about this specific categorization issue. This is the first time I've bumped into Tildes' moderation methodology.

I don't subscribe to ~food, so for me, my post just vanished, w/o notification or explanation. Took me a few minutes to find it. I don't see any way to ID who moved it (may well have been @Deimos, for all I know), nor any way to challenge the move.

Have I overlooked some 'moderation dispute' button, or some such? Or is moderation here beyond dispute?

ETA: For anyone visiting this post down the line, here's the official/original statement on this ...

https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/53r/users_can_now_be_manually_granted_permissions_to_re_tag_topics_move_them_between_groups_and_edit

I (probably) have aphantasia, so I only dream when I'm actually trying to make my brain dream something, so I usually only dream to indulge in NSFW fantasies to jack off and despite this barely anything makes it into my mind. (I swear someone has said something like this before, I think they said they 'did it to embrace their kinks to improve mental health', which is quite unique and pretty cool.)

I have ordered a phone with an eSim this week and I have been reading a bit into it.
As far as I know so far, you just have to download an app and you can just book some extra data as needed - it seems especially cool because you can just book a local plan when you're abroad instead of getting a local sim card. Which can be more or less a hassle - 2019 I went to South Africa where it was pretty easy to get a sim card at the airport, 2018 I went to India, where it was a hassle.
I guess for people in the US this is not a problem? Some of my friends have global contracts, and I had that too when I was there via googles project fi. We don't really have an equivalent in Germany

I found the following pages in case anyone also wants to look into it
https://esimdb.com/ - this is an overview page about different esims
https://www.airalo.com/ - this is one specific offer that seems to be the cheapest for Germany, which is where I would try it, since I live here haha

I have a large VirtualBox VM on an external HDD. The HDD fails the S.M.A.R.T. test. The VM still works fine, but any regular attempt to copy the VM files over to a healthy drive fails ... there is clearly already something corrupt in the VM's virtual HDD, although it is not (apparently? yet?) affecting the functionality of the actual VM.

Any suggestions on how to save the VM? Linux Mint Guest OS, Pop_OS (Ubuntu) Host. The VM is nearly 800 GB. Both regular copy and rsync fail.

Thanks,
Eric

PS: (and perhaps I should have led with this, but...) is it okay to ask these kinds of specific, technical, "help me with my tech-stuff" questions here on Tildes?

Update to the update ... moved update info into a comment ... will keep my progress updated in that primary comment.

Danke, y gracias to all

Hello everyone, it's 00:16 my time and I'm finally fucking done making all the data pretty for you after about 4 hours of coding to parse all those juicy CSV files cause guess what, the excel files that JotForms gave me WHERE FUCKING GḀ͒ͬ̓ͦͅRͤ͊̔́B̴̼̫̟͍̅̆A̩̽ͮ̂̏͡G̸̭̜̑͑̃Ȇ͈͙͈̠̖̋́̌ͭ͂ͧ^{help me}

Anyway :) Let's give y'all a brief rundown of the current Tilde demographics, and some highlights, CAUSE NOW I HAVE ALL YOUR DATA AND THUS INFINITE POWER TO MAKE JOKES^{did I mention I've been doing for half the day and I'm really hungry? AND TIRED?} Honestly you owe me this moment of insanity considering I'M RUNNING ON GREEN LEAF JUICE AND HOW MUCH DATA I WADED THROUGH AHHHH-.

Also, most of these will be pictures because honestly I can't be asked to not pretty paste these figures into markdown tables or I'll legitimate go insane. Anyway, this post has plenty of sass, don't take this shit too seriously please, gracias.

The 2019 Census

Anyway.

This year we got 249 responses in total, which really annoys me cause 250 is way prettier to look at at. However, one was completely empty and the other two are... Fishy. More on that later.

Personal details

Age

When it comes to age, Tildes is heavily skewed towards people in their 20s to 30s, 45% of the responses came from people between 20 and 30. Overall, late 20s to and early 30s dominate the demographics. (before anyone screams at me about the proper use of graphs, don't worry I also took Statistics at uni, but the histogram in Excel refused to work and honestly go make your own census) There is also some statistical noise, which I'm not sure how it happened. Most likely someone typed too quickly.

Our youngest user is 11! And either very intelligent, cause they also speak 9 languages, or a fraud. If you're not a fraud, I apologize and wish you luck on your future path in life, which will surely be extremely successful, if you really speak that many languages at such an age.^{Hint, this was one of the fishy responses}

Our oldest user is 70! I really don't know what to say, cause that's a pretty high number for an internet user. How was uhh... The cold war?^{Holy fuck I should stop I need to eat}

Geographical... Stuff

Overall, the Tildes demographic hasn't changed much. US and Canada still lead by quite a lot, but we have acquired quite the little diverse userbase.

All I can do is salute my fellow other Austrian user. Can you say Oachkatzalschwoaf though? THAT'S THE SIGN OF A REAL AUSTRIAN.^{NONE OF THIS STARTING WORLD WARS SHIT}

Language

Predictably, a large number of people does not speak a second language besides English, however, due to geographical diversity, a large number of languages is represented, most of them from Europe, which is Tildes' second largest userbase.

Gender & Sexuality

Tildes is heavily male-dominated, probably due to its IT-focused population and the fact that most of us came from Reddit.

Of the 248 responses, 17 people hit marked that they were trans, pretty much all of them MTF (which is apparently the majority of trans people, Wikipedia tells me.) 3 preferred not to say and everyone else is cis.

Now, let's get to the sexy stuff. And by that I mean the point where the numbers rub together in fantastic ways.

The majority of Tildes is really fucking straight, though we have some fun sexualities represented, my personal favourite Still figuring that out. You do you mate, you'll get there eventually. Also, whoever wrote down O-Sexual also wrote X-Treme Wiccan as their religion, and at this point in I'm too afraid to google what any of that is. Clearly, we need more straight people, after all, we're in the 20s.^{Before anyone yells at me, THIS WAS A FUCKING JOKE} For now I've defined that person as Fish numero dos.

Religion

So, here's a doozy. To that one person (probably part of the 9% of <20 year olds), WHO DECIDED TO WRITE THE WONDERFUL ANSWER atheism and angosticism are not religions, can you PLEASE read the question properly next time. FUCK.^{Honestly that is such a 14 y/o thing to write, by the Ǵ͙͔͔̻͖̜́ͅO̶̱̘͡D͓̞͉̲͓̥S̢̲͙̙̟̯̙͓̱͟}

Anyway, religion is probably the thing with the most diverse answers, honestly. There are words in there I have never read in my life before. Like what is Apatheist.1? Is there some sort of ranking? Does it work with natural numbers only? Is there a Apatheist.3,51? It can't be a typo, people take religions way too seriously for that.

Politics

I averaged out the scores of everyone who answered the political questions and got the following answers (remember, these are based on the 8values quiz):

Economy - 7,02
Diplomacy - 6,9
State - 3,8
Society - 7,48

Only economy is really surprising here, though I'd also have expected diplomacy to be a little lower as well. Maybe the leftist skew ia bit of an illusion?

Work, education and really everything else these sections were a terrible idea

When it comes to education, Tildes is pretty university focused. Almost half people replying have a bachelor's, a good bunch are working or have aquired their master's. Also one (maybe soon-to-be) MD and a few PhDs. The Craftsmen and tradeship people barely balance us out, we need some more COMMON FOLK IN HERE.

IT people, rejoice! WE STILL REIGN SUPREME^{Everyone else will remember that} All jokes aside, shoutout to the stay-at-home dad, proud of ya'. And to the disabled person, I hope life goes as well as it can for you. That goes for the longterm-unemployed person as well. Someday, you'll manage mate, someday.

And to the person who said their job is a waste of time in exchange of money... Mate, you need someone to talk? I'm here. We're all here.

Surprise section about technical shit and Tildes

OS usage is as expected, due to Tildes' heavy skew into IT and the fact that Apple doesn't nearly dominate as much in other countries as in the US, it's to be expected.

Due to said IT dominance Linux has almost caught up with the leader, Windows. Though my personal favourite is Anything cool that comes into existence, like can we make a Linux fork that is called literally that? You'd be the perfect match.

When it comes to Tildes specifically, y'all need to chill out. Most people who answered the census visit Tildes multiple times a day, like the content here doesn't even move that quickly? WHAT ARE YOU ALL DOING? IS THERE SOME SECRET CULT I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?_{If it's a LSD cult I'm totes in lads.}

As expected, most people who answered the survey have an account, and most likely due to the heavy IT skew most people are visiting from their PC. But I have also seen some people requesting a mobile app in the free form questions, so maybe that would go up if a native app were to be created.

The freeform questions

Well, in all honesty, not much has changed. Most people like the dedicated community, site design, in-depth discussions (though that was sometimes a point on both sides), etc. and dislike the heavy domination of IT topics and US/Europe news & politics. Also, multiple people simply said @Deimos when asked what they like most about Tildes. Get a room, y'all. Though it's well deserved, I think we can all agree on that.

Complete list of positive feedback: https://pastebin.com/KYCYLWP1

Complete list of negative feedback: https://pastebin.com/Eng6jjay

Complete list of ideas for change: https://pastebin.com/eery3mCt

Why am I posting these? Cause in all honesty, freeform feedback like this is hard to analyze and summarize, so I'd rather just post it all so everyone can form their opinion. Also, I'm tired.

Special mentions

Someone was nice enough to add the mention in parantheses that I should add them to the bisexual list instead if no one else marked pansexual. Well lucky you, exactly one other person marked it! You two can go find yourselves a room with lots of sexy pans in it now and have some fun.^{This is how it works, right?} Or just, slide into each other's DMs or something and talk about your love for pans. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I also appreciate the one person who entered their religion in the languages section on accident. That's fact now, you speak Raised Catholic, now spiritual/atheist now, no shh, no talking back, that's your language now.

To that one person that said that Tildes is too serious, this one's for you.

And cheers to Deimos, without whom I couldn't be so silly on this overly serious but fantastic platform.

Anyway, Grzmot out, I need sleep. I'll come back in 8 hours or so to regret the shit I just wrote down at 2 AM. Please don't ban me.

So my friend has a computer she put together, and after replacing what feels like every single part on the rig, multiple trips to the repair shop, and calling a priest wrestling the demons out of it, it is randomly cutting power and we think the replacement power supply might be just as busted as the last one. Are there decent odds of that being an issue, or could it be something that we are overlooking?

EDIT: So, I had a car issue pop up and I won't be able to to take a look at at it tonight. Will download the tools you all mentioned to a jump drive and will keep you posted.

Was there, stayed up the whole time. Really thinking it might be a bad power switch that stuck, so it would turn off randomly. Thanks for all your help.

FINAL EDIT: So I narrowed it down to the Graphics Card and/or the Cooling System. Running the Heaven Benchmark on Extreme pretty reliably cleans it's clock, especially turning it off and then turning it on again. This happens on the latest Windows Updates, with latest Nvidia Drivers. (RTX 2080) Pulling the card and running the benchmark anyway causes the same issue, and this time it powered on and then back off in a loop. CPU-Z stress caused it to crash, so I'm assuming it's the cooler. Thanks again.

I've just finished The Sirens of Titan from 1959 (after seeing it recommended here, actually) and something struck me compared to more recent books. A lot of the more technical stuff is kind of hand-waved away. It's not a criticism, just something that stuck out as I was reading. Is this a trend? Do readers demand more details these days? I've read a bunch of sci fi from the 60s until the present day, but I've only really gotten back into it more recently with Sirens.

Perhaps I've read too much Neal Stephenson, who has likely never hand-waved anything away! The Martian also springs to mind, but that's very deliberately focused on the details and keeping it realistic, IIRC.

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?

I recently finished "Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki and was deeply moved. I've meditated sporadically over the years and dabbled in various Buddhist traditions yet never have I been so taken with an approach as I was after reading this. If there is anybody out there practicing Sōtō Zen would you be able to recommend anything to read next?

Her eyes are fixed on the cooker.

— Look.

Points at the egg.

— What?

— Can’t you see?

— Has it gone bad?

She takes a deep breath.

— I noticed the way you broke the shell, but I needed to confirm. Can you see how the yolk is soft yet whole, with a small cut in the lower portion slowly leaking a yellow thread at a regular pace?

— Yes...

— Don’t you get it?

— No.

— When the yolk leaks like that, it can only mean two things.

She hesitates.

— You’re either going to murder me...

— What you’re talking about?

— Or you’ll get a Ph.D. in Physics in 2035.

— You’re kidding, right?

— Nope.

— You saw all that? On a fucking egg?

— I knew you wouldn’t understand...

— You were right.

A second goes by. He cleans his throat, kinda embarrassed.

— Honey?

— Yeah, babe.

— I’m terrible at physics.

He holds a knife with a confused expression on his face.