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5 votes
-
Gamedev from scratch 0: Groundwork
5 votes -
Reversal of Presidential pardon analyzed
8 votes -
Endnote 2: White Fascism
3 votes -
In pursuit of intentionality
7 votes -
Legendary science fiction author Ben Bova has passed at the age of 88, due to Covid
10 votes -
What are you following this week? Weekly sports round-up thread
Anything interesting from the day after?
5 votes -
No game days. No bars. The pandemic is forcing some men to realize they need deeper friendships.
30 votes -
What Facebook fed the baby boomers. Many Americans’ feeds are nightmares. I know because I spent weeks living inside two of them.
18 votes -
Asteroid impact: What are our chances?
4 votes -
‘It will change everything’: DeepMind’s AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures
22 votes -
'Sistine Chapel of the ancients' rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
11 votes -
Keleketla! - Keleketla! (2020)
4 votes -
disroot.org (providers of hosted open source services) is getting his emails blocked by Microsoft and wants your help
13 votes -
Rubber ducks have become a symbol of Thailand’s pro-democracy protests in Bangkok after demonstrators used them as shields against police water cannon and teargas
12 votes -
Protein folding, 2020
7 votes -
Because cheerleading is not governed by the NCAA, its participants can sign lucrative endorsement deals that would lead to punishment for most college athletes
5 votes -
How Qanon invaded moms' Facebook groups
11 votes -
AlphaFold: A solution to a fifty-year-old grand challenge in biology
7 votes -
What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
12 votes -
Radicle -- A peer-to-peer stack for building software together
16 votes -
The podcast The Butterfly Effect and Last Day of Autumn are free to listen to, do it
5 votes -
What did you do this weekend?
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 weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at...
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 weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
10 votes -
Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of November 30
This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the...
This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!
11 votes -
How machine-readable content benefits everyone who publishes content online
4 votes -
The impact of toxic influencers on communities
11 votes -
The time is right to re-evaluate open worlds. We can do better
16 votes -
Google Desktop (2004) - demo and retrospective
6 votes -
Capitalists are bad at business
10 votes -
When was the last or most important time you tried proving someone wrong?
At what lengths did you go to prove this person wrong? Did proving this person wrong cause a major transition in your life? Side bar: The question comes from watching Dancer Boy.
7 votes -
Why Nova Scotia sends Boston a tree every year
@Canadian Forces in 🇺🇸: This tree from Nova Scotia is now in Boston Common.The Nova Scotians send one every year.Why? pic.twitter.com/T0iCbPoEh5
14 votes -
BOTI Science: Best of interval compilations, suggestions? Supporting trends identification
Discussions of progress or collapse often get mired in the question of significant discoveries and inventions. After wrestling with several organisational cencepts for various catalogues, and...
Discussions of progress or collapse often get mired in the question of significant discoveries and inventions. After wrestling with several organisational cencepts for various catalogues, and running into the Ever Growing List dilemma, I hit on what I call BOTI, or Best of the Interval (day, week, month, year, decade, century, etc.). It's similar to the tickler file 43 folder perpetual filing system of GTD. For technical types, a round-robin database or circular buffer.
(As with my bullet journal experiments, the effort is uneven but recoverable, which is its core strength.)
By setting up a cascade of buffers --- day of month, (optionally week or weekdays), month of year, year of decade, decade of century, century of millennium, millennium of 10kyr, a progressively larger scale record (roughly order-of-magnitude based), with a resolution of day but a maximum retention of (here) 10,000 years but only 83 record bins. How much you choose to put in each bin is up to you, but the idea is that only to most significant information is carried forward. Yes, some information is lost but total data storage requirements are known once the bin size and count are established.
Another problem BOTI addresses is finite attention. If you limit yourself to a finite set of items per year, say ten to one hundred (about what a moderately motivated individual could be aware of), BOTI is a form of noise-filtering. Items which seemed urgent or captivating in the moment often fade in significance with time, and often overlooked element rise in significance with time and context. 'Let it settle with time" is a good cure to FOMO.
There's the question of revisiting context. I'd argue that significance might be substantially revised years, decades, possibly centuries after a discovery or inventiion. So an end-of-period purge of all but the top items isn't what we're looking for. Gut a gradual forgetting / pruning seems the general idea.
Back to science and technology: It's hard to assess significance in the moment, and day-to-day reports of science and technology advances are noisy. I've been looking for possible sources to use and am finding little that's satisfactory. I'd like suggestions.
- Many newspapers and magazines run annual "best of" features. These typically include books, but not science (or at least not regularly). Some of the books are science- or technonolgy-related, though.
- There are the Nobel prizes, notably in physics, chemistry, and medicine, with lists at Wikipedia (linked). The Fields Medal in maths. Other fields have their awards, of which lists might prove useful...
- I'm having trouble finding something like a yearbook of science or technology, though some titles match, e.g., McGraw-Hill yearbook of science and technology. On closer look, this might answer my question, at least for yearbooks.
- Wikipedia has some promising but either inconsistent or untidily organised pages or collections, including the List of years in science, Timeline of historic inventions, Timeline of scientific discoveries, Timeline of scientific thought, among numerous other timelines. Compilations are useful but aren't themselves rankings. See also "never ending list" above.
There is a goal here: trends over time. I've a few senses of directions of research and progress, possibly also of biases in awards. Looking at, for example, Nobels in physics, chemistry, and medicine from, say, 1901--1960 vs. 1961--2020, there seems to be a marked shift, though categorising that might be difficult. The breakpoint isn't necessarily 1960 either --- 1950 or 1940 might be argued for.
There is the question of how to measure significance of scientific discoveries or technological inventions. I'm not going to get into that though several standard measures (e.g., counting patents issued) strike me as highly problematic, despite being common in research. Discussion might be interesting.
Mostly, though, I'm looking for data sources.
5 votes -
Doctor Who: Revolution of the Daleks | Official teaser
8 votes -
Vimeo is not very good
(This is kind of a rant about Vimeo's website. It might be better in ~tech, or ~comp. Feel free to move it.) I've always preferred using Vimeo to YouTube for finding interesting videos because...
(This is kind of a rant about Vimeo's website. It might be better in ~tech, or ~comp. Feel free to move it.)
I've always preferred using Vimeo to YouTube for finding interesting videos because it's more oriented towards artists than people just uploading random stuff. As mentioned in the recent What Creative Projects Have You Been Working On? thread, I had some nature videos I shot of hummingbirds and wanted to upload them somewhere. My spouse had uploaded videos to Vimeo before, so I thought I'd put them there rather than YouTube because I don't like dealing with Google.
The site is a hot mess. I've hit the following problems after lightly using it for 2 days. I uploaded a single video and set it to be public:
- No way to enter keywords or tags. Searching will only find your video if you mention the search terms in your title (and maybe your description).
- Some of their own pages are broken or missing. If I go to "categories" and click on "documentary" it shows me an error message saying the page doesn't exist. If I click on "arts" or "music" I go to that category and see videos available.
- No information on how to add your video to a given category. Is it done automatically? Is it done by someone on the staff noticing and adding it? I have no idea!
- My video has gotten a few views from people here, so it is uploaded and available for anyone to see. But if I search for "hummingbird" and limit the search to videos uploaded in the last 7 days, my video is not displayed. Why not? Who knows?
- I ran the iOS app without logging in and it showed my account but said I had no videos, even though others were able to see them. Logging in shows the videos and confirms that they are set to allow anyone to view them. WTF?
- I attempted to send them a message telling them about the broken links. When you go to the help section and click on "Contact Us," you get a fake chat window that's just a bot that will pick keywords out of your question and reply with articles that don't answer your question. In fact, they even ask below each one, "Does this answer your question?" with a button for yes and nothing else. There's no way to say, "No, this was unhelpful." If you scroll to the bottom of the list of articles they recommend, there's a button to send a message to their tech support.
- I'm on the free tier, so I wasn't expecting any sort of answer to my help question, but still wanted to let them know so they could fix it. But that didn't work either. They have enough sense to copy your question from the chat bot into the tech support form (nice!) but it strips out any URLs. (Thanks! Very useful since I was trying to report a broken URL!) But it doesn't matter anyway because after you choose a category (none of which are correct) and attempt to submit your form, nothing happens. You press "Next" and the button turns into a spinner for a few seconds, and then stops and turns back into the "Next" button. Nothing appears to have been submitted, but no error is presented.
- The site is full of dark patterns. I get that they want upgrade revenue coming in, and I have no problem with that. But they do things like have a blinking icon in your video's settings for "interaction tools." These are things you can do to monetize your video, or whatever. Stuff I will never need. All the options in this section require a paid upgrade and there's no way to turn off the blinking beacon (except, I assume, by upgrading).
I was considering upgrading to their bottom-tier paid account, but after seeing how much is broken, I have to wonder if they're circling the drain? I get using chat bots and forms to make it easier for their support people, and making sure users know about ways to upgrade, but this is ridiculous. Anyone else run into this?
26 votes -
The code that controls your money
8 votes -
Microsoft's 'Project Latte' aims to bring Android apps to Windows 10
7 votes -
US Rep. Ocasio-Cortez raises $200K after battling NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh in hit video game Among Us
17 votes -
Timasomo 2020 Thread #5: Final Update Thread
IMPORTANT INFORMATION Deadlines The creative portion for Timasomo ends at 11:59:59 PM on November 30, 2020, relative to wherever you are. The showcase will be next Sunday, December 6th (probably...
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
Deadlines
The creative portion for Timasomo ends at 11:59:59 PM on November 30, 2020, relative to wherever you are.
The showcase will be next Sunday, December 6th (probably posted around 18:00:00 GMT).
Next Steps
Finish up your project in the next two days. You have the following week to prepare your showcase. This means you can edit, add polish, find hosting, etc. It's your week to get your project ready for however you're wishing to present it! And if you have to cram in a little creativity in that time too, well, I won't say anything. :)
Showcase Logistics
Changes
You can see last year's Timasomo showcase here. It will look fairly similar, but there are going to be a few changes this year based on feedback from last year:
- The Showcase will be hosted in ~talk, not ~creative, to expose the projects to the wider Tildes audience.
- Participants will post their own projects in the comments rather than me posting them within the topic (this is so people don't have to ping creators, and to give participants better control of their showcase entries)
Preparing Your Showcase
- Give your project a title, and use the
#
markdown to make it stand out in the showcase thread! - Link to your project in whatever way works best for your project.
- Give an "creator statement" that contextualizes what your project is.
Showcase FAQ
Do I have to share my whole project?
Nope! Only share what you're comfortable with! Snippets, excerpts, screenshots, or even just a summary from you are all fine. Tildes is a privacy-respecting site, and that extends to Timasomo! :)
What if I have more than one project to showcase?
Awesome! Make more than one entry in the showcase!
What if I didn't meet my goal?
It's up to you if you want to participate in the showcase. Even if you didn't meet your goal but still feel you want to share what you did accomplish, that's fine! If not, no worries!
What if I need hosting for files/images?
Please ask here! There are plenty of people here who can help with that.
What if I have a question not covered here?
Please ask here or by PM!
Timasomo FAQ
What is Timasomo?
Timasomo is "Tildes' Make Something Month": a creative community challenge that takes place in the month of November. It was inspired by NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. The first ever Timasomo took place last year. You can see the threads for the previous Timasomo using the timasomo tag, and you can see the final showcase thread of creations here.
What are the rules?
Timasomo is self-driven and its goals are self-selected. On November 1st, participants will commit to a creative project (or projects) that they plan to complete within the month of November. There is no restriction on the methods/products of creativity: writing, painting, code, food, photos, crafts, songs -- if it's creative expression for you, it works for Timasomo!Though most will be participating individually, collaborations are welcome too!
What is the schedule?
Timasomo begins November 1st and ends November 30th. All creative output towards your goal(s) should be confined to this time. This week prior to the start of November is for planning, and there will be a few days at the beginning of December given to "finishing touches" before we have our final thread, which will be a showcase of all the completed works. Below are the dates that I will be posting weekly threads:
Sunday, October 18, 2020: Announcement Thread
Sunday, October 25, 2020: Planning Thread
Sunday, November 1, 2020: Roll Call Thread
Sunday, November 8, 2020: Update Thread #1
Sunday, November 15, 2020: Update Thread #2
Sunday, November 22, 2020: Update Thread #3
Sunday, November 29, 2020: Final Update Thread
Sunday, December 6, 2020: Timasomo Showcase ThreadThis announcement will be posted in ~tildes. All Timasomo process threads will be hosted in ~creative. The final Timasomo Showcase thread will be posted in ~talk.
Can I participate?
Yes! Timasomo is open to anyone on Tildes! The greater Tildes community is also encouraged to participate in discussion threads even if you are not actively working towards a creative goal. This is meant to be an inclusive community event -- all are welcome! If you are interested in participating but do not have a Tildes login, please e-mail the invite request address here for an invite to the community.
Participants will formally announce their plans to enter into Timasomo on Sunday, November 1st, in the Roll Call thread. If you are planning to participate or just want to follow the event, please make sure you are subscribed to ~creative where all of the update threads will be posted.
What if I have ideas for how to run the event?
Please share them here! I am facilitating the event, but I am completely open to feedback and suggestions to make this the best event possible. I want this to be Tildes' event, not kfwyre's!
14 votes -
Extraordinary number of arrows dating from the Stone Age to the medieval period have melted out of a single ice patch in Norway in recent years
8 votes -
What happened in the US Treasury market in March 2020? Take 1 of 4.
6 votes -
Teddit: A privacy-friendly Reddit frontend similar to Invidious/Bibliogram/Nitter
18 votes -
How Iceland hammered COVID with science – the tiny island nation brought huge scientific heft to its attempts to contain and study the coronavirus
9 votes -
Dave Prowse: Darth Vader actor dies aged 85
17 votes -
SpaceX Falcon 9 "Sentinel-6" launch, from launch to landing with ground tracking, annotated with altitude and velocity
8 votes -
Popular pirate sites disappear from DuckDuckGo top results
25 votes -
The scammer who wanted to save his country
9 votes -
Guybrush Fact vs Fiction
11 votes -
How the self-esteem craze took over America
8 votes -
Who was Ross Perot, and what if he won in 1992?
11 votes -
One-handed boozy brunch | Stump Sohla
7 votes