Just got my first MacBook Pro, and I've been setting things up. Wondering what people's "must have" software on MacOS is and what programming tools you might recommend. I've heard that I should definitely install homebrew so that I can have a real package manager like I've got on Linux.

It's no secret that social media is used by a large amount of people. The Pew Research Center has a social media fact sheet if you'd like to see the numbers.

• They claim that 72% of the American population uses some form of social media.
• In 2018 twitter reported 326 million active monthly users.
• Facebook posted record number profits last year.
• Reddit had 330 million users in 2018
• One of the most amazing parts of social media's rise is how quickly that it happened. As stated in the Pew Research article:
  when Pew Research Center began tracking social media adoption in 2005, just 5% of American adults used at least one of these platforms. By 2011 that share had risen to half of all Americans

With no signs of slowing down, social media is certainly going to be part of our lives for the foreseeable future. What sort of impact do you think it has had upon our society? Has it connected the people of the world, or disconnected them? Do the positive aspects outweigh the negative? If you believe social media's impact has been negative, do you think it can be fixed? How do you see social media evolving?

The home brew community is one of those groups I just love. Everyone's enthusiastic, helpful, and excited. So... what are you working on? Got something in the fermentor? Something planned for the weekend?

If you're like me, you have tons of various projects/companies/organizations that you like to keep up with. I have a few different methods I use to keep track of everything, but they all seem fragmented. Here are the methods I use:

• An RSS reader with the blogs of projects I follow
• Following the project on social media
  • Mastodon
  • Twitter
  • Reddit

The RSS feeds work, but I almost always miss the social media posts. Is there a better way to do this? What do you Tildians do?

I've been thinking for a while about making my own little personal website/blog, and I was wondering what other people here on Tildes might have set up. I feel like having one could be a cool little way to get myself to write more often and hopefully improve my writing, especially when it comes to technical subjects.

After being skeptic of password managers for a long time, I've decided to take the plunge and get one installed. The burden of remembering dozens of passwords is simply getting a bit too much. So, I was wondering if anyone here has any recommendations of password managers? Maybe one you or a trusted friend use? Or maybe you think password managers are rubbish, and want to share you opinion?

Any suggestions are welcome, in the interest of fostering discussion/having the thread be useful to other people too. But in my specific use case, I want to be able to sync between devices. I'd prefer something open source, but it's not a requirement.

Shortly after my son was born I started calling him "Buddy." I love it and he answers to it like a name now. My daughter is two and she calls him Buddy, which I think is the most adorable thing ever.

I'd like to do this with my daughter, but I'm not really a fan of things like "honey" or "sweetheart," though I do wind up calling her sweetheart pretty frequently.

Buddy is like friend, which is what I'm going for, but that's taken already. What else could I use?

it's that time of the month again, now hopefully aided by the changes in sort which will give this thread a bit of a longer half-life. here you can share/provide updates on some of the projects that you're working on. they can be of any kind--digital, physical, work related, passion project, whatever. pretty straightforward, i think.

november thread • february thread • march thread • april thread • may thread • june thread

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.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

This is kind of a question for Tildes as well as a discussion topic on Social Media more generally. For context, "The Right to be Forgotten" is an idea being kicked around in international law and human rights circles. It's kind of a corollary to the "right to privacy" and focuses on putting some guardrails around the downsides of having all information about you being archived, searchable, and publicly available forever and ever. It's usually phrased as a sense that people shouldn't be tied down indefinitely by stigmatizing actions they've done in "the past" (which is usually interpreted as long enough ago that you're not the same person anymore).

This manifests in some examples large and small. Felony convictions or drug offenses are a pretty big one. Another public issue was James Gunn getting raked over the coals for homophobic quotes from a long time ago. Even on a smaller scale, I think plenty of young people have some generalized anxiety about embarrassing videos, photos, Facebook statuses, forum posts, etc. that they made when they were young following them around the rest of their lives. For example, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had people try to shame her for dancing to a Phoenix song in an amateur music video. An even darker version of this happens with people who might be the victims of targeted harassment. Often doxxing happens by people digging through peoples' histories and piecing together clues to figure out who they are or at least narrow down where they're from, where they work, etc.

In the context of Tildes, this would basically be a question of how do we feel about peoples' comment history lingering forever? Do we care about/agree with this "right" in principle and if we do, what should be done about putting it into practice?

The root of the issue is the existence of archives of data about yourself that is 1.) searchable, 2.) publicly viewable, 3.) under someone else's control, 4.) forever. Even if the ability to delete comments exists, it's infeasible for any individual to pore over the reams of data they create about themselves to find the stuff that might be problematic. The solutions would revolve around addressing any one of those numbered items. Unfortunately, hitting any of those has upsides and downsizes. Some examples:

Some people like being able to look back on old contributions and having them get deleted after a period of time (hitting problem #4) would be a bummer unless there is a system to selectively archive stuff you want to save from atrophy, which would be a function/feature that would take a ton of thought and development. What's more, there is no point in just saving your own comment if everyone else's stuff is gone because comments without context are indecipherable. It could work in a more selective way, so rather than a blanket atrophying of posts, but then you have the context issue again. Someone you were having a discussion with might choose to delete their entire comment history and there goes any sense of logic or coherence to your posts.

We could address the searchable bit by automatically or selectively having posts pseudonymed after a period of time. But in a lot of cases a pseudonym won't work. People tend to refer to each other by username at times, and some people have a distinctive enough style that you could probably figure it out if they're well known and long-tenured.

That's just some general food for thought. I'll yield the floor

I think having a hobby, something outside of your work that you enjoy doing and/or are simply just good at, is kinda important, and fulfilling. And so, I wanted to make a topic in general about what hobbies you might have and why that particular hobby appeals to you (along with some tips as to how a newcomer might be able to introduce themselves to the hobby).

For myself, I have recently gotten into the Rubix Cube and have had a lot of enjoyment learning some different methods and improving the time it takes me to solve it.

Started out with a non-descript cube from a supermarket and have recently purchased a GTS3M which I am enjoying a lot so far (plenty of online stores in a variety of countires that will deiver quickly and cheaply). I was able to find a plethora of tutorials on youtube (jperm and brodythecuber in particular) that I found very helpful. For any other cubers: favourite perms, methods, do you compete, tips?

Something, something first post, may not be perfect, but I want to be more engaged.

Hello! After spending many development hours in my past years running on Virtualbox/Vagrant-style setups, I've decided to take the plunge into learning Docker, and after getting a few containers working, I'm now looking to figure out how to deploy this to production. I'm not a DevOps or infrastructure guy, my bread and butter is software, and although I've become significantly better at deploying & provisioning Linux VPS's, I'm still not entirely confident in my ability to deploy & manage such systems at scale and in production. But, I am now close to running my own business, so these requirements are suddenly going from "nice to have" to "critical".

As I mentioned, in the past when I've previously developed applications that have been pushed onto the web, I've tended to develop on my local machine, often with no specific configuration environment. If I did use an environment, it'd often be a Vagrant VM instance. From here, I'd push to GitHub, then from my VPS, pull down the changes, run any deployment scripts (recompile, restart nginx, etc), and I'm done.

I guess what I'm after with Docker is something that's more consistent between dev, testing, & prod, and is also more hands off in the deployment process. Yet, what I'm currently developing still does have differing configuration needs between dev and prod. For example, I'd like to use a hosted DB solution such as DigitalOcean Managed Databases in production, yet I'm totally fine using a Docker container for MySQL for local development. Is something like this possible? Does anyone have any recommendations around how to accomplish this, any do's and dont's, or any catches that are worth mentioning?

How about automating deployment from GitHub to production? I've never touched any CI/CD tools in my life, yet I know it's a hugely important part of the process when dealing with software in production, especially software that has clients dependent on it to function. Does anything specifically work well with Docker? Or GitHub? Ideally I want to be avoiding manual processes where I have to ssh in, and pull down the latest changes, half-remembering the commands I need to write to recompile and run the application again.

Let's do a little show and tell for our new toys :)

(I was thinking about this as a non-recurring equivalent to the listening threads and such but I probably worded it a bit too...fluffily for ~tech so I moved it to ~talk)

I'll get the discussion started -- I'm somewhat into contemporary art, recently Can't Help Myself by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.

Mark Rothko is another favorite of mine, hopefully some day I can make it down to the Rothko Chapel.

I've been creating new languages for a few years now. I like to do it in my spare time, which becomes smaller and smaller each year, mostly from proto-languages that already exist. I'm currently working on a Slavic language in Belarus and Ukraine for fun. Anyone else into this stuff or wanna know more about conlanging in general?

I find it hard to find articles that I think more people should read.. I find most of them pretty much spam (cough medium cough). I created this thread so you can recommend some articles that you read and found interesting.

It doesn't matter about what it is, recommend away!

Hey everyone

If you're a fellow sailor, post your favorite boat, current boat and location here.

I'll start -
Fav boat : Hunter 42ss
Current boat : Broke college kid :(
Location : Great lakes

Also who was hyped for the Mackinac race last weekend ?

Anyone in here interesting in plants (growing, propagating, maintaining, etc). Figure we can get a forum started to exchange tips.

On a side note, some of the side categories seem overly broad. Hobbies for example is going to get pretty bonkers.

Hey everyone !
Post in here if you wanna squad up with people on here.
I'll start : Anyone wanna run some apex or titanfall 2 on Xbone comment in here. I play most evenings. Feel free to comment in here looking for people to play a different game with.

Hi all, I am currently on the hunt for some nice newsletters for my email. I ran into "Big" by Matt Stoller on here and I really enjoy it. I guess I am looking for something in a similiar enomonic, political, or macro vein, science works as well. Any and all recommendations are welcome.

Here in 2019 the overwhelming majority of all currency is virtual and commerce on any appreciable scale occurs electronically. But consider a sci-fi/space opera setting where reasonably fast FTL is commonplace, but FTL communications are not possible. Obviously one could still "communicate" at FTL with a courier, but you would still be limited to the speed of the courier ship. You certainly wouldn't have instantaneous communication between star systems, meaning there can be no interstellar electronic banking: transactions would take years to complete.

The Traveller tabletop RPG uses exactly this setup: FTL travel is common, FTL communication does not exist. In Traveller you have the Third Imperium minting currency that is accepted essentially everywhere, the currency is Imperial Credits and they're printed on polymer bills. The result is an effectively cash-only economy.

But what if your setting has no centralized government? Do people revert to using gold? Are there fleets of merchant ships schlepping precious metals around the cosmos, as if the American Old West has been transplanted into space? Would they come up with a cryptographic solution? Could something like a blockchain work without instantaneous communication cross the entire network that accepts the cryptocurrency?

What if quantum computing is widespread in your setting, rendering most forms of encryption obsolete? That would seem to eliminate the blockchain based option, FTL comms or not, and once again send us back to needing a fiat currency, or a gold standard.

20 years ago I saw a computer scientist on TV saying that operating systems should come up with a better way to organize and present files, something that took into consideration the files we used the most and the ones we were likely to use again. Not just a recent files menu, but some form of AI prediction that would prepare our desktops with little intervention. This, of course, didn't happen, but I think about it from time to time. I would love to have an AI that would understand my workflow and do a bunch of things for me.

This is obviously way too advanced as an answer to this thread, but I'm curious: what did you expect to already exist in the field of computer science, but simply didn't pan out?

Mine is: do others see the same colours that I do? As in, is my "green" the same as your "green"? Or would my "green" look "blue" to you? I like this one because it's completely possible, points out the plasticity of our minds and makes a distinction between sensation and perception. There are variations of this but I like it formulated as such. It's my favorite because it was also my first foray into the philosophy of consciousness and I'm often reminded of it when in an altered state of consciousness (e.g. by psychedelics).

Your favorite experiment can be whatever: either something that has affected you deeply / changed your life or just something fun and amusing to think about.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, especially in light of some recent threads, and because my own account here is nearing 1 year old. I don't think I've seen this come up yet, but it's possible I missed something. I'd really just like to see what the consensus is here, especially now that the site is fairly large.

Anyways, what I define as 'recruiting' is responsibly (preferably privately) messaging someone who hasn't posted on the /r/Tildes subreddit or reached out in some other way, and asking if they would be interested in joining the platform. My reasons for wanting to do this are two- fold:

For one, on the rare occasion that you come across someone who seems like a good fit for this site, and who is trying to contribute meaningfully to reddit but obviously getting frustrated, it just seems like the right thing to do. Wouldn't you want someone to reach out and let you know there is something better?

Secondly, it's a good way to grow representation of niche ideas, which could later evolve in subgroups. Have a favorite programming language you'd like to see represented here more? Maybe a favorite hobby? Whatever the case, I think most people are part of some kind of niche interest that they would like to see more of here.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

good morning, tildes--this is not a test. we are 482 days and dropping away from possibly the biggest election day in recent american history. no opinion pieces or longform this week; this week was pretty quiet, as was true of last week. a few polls also dropped, and they are included here.

the usual note: common sense should be able to generally dictate what does and does not get posted in this thread. if it's big news or feels like big news, probably make it its own post instead of lobbing it in here. like the other weekly threads, this one is going to try to focus on things that are still discussion worthy, but wouldn't necessarily make good/unique/non-repetitive discussion starters as their own posts.

Week 15

News

Polling

• from Emerson (B+ on 538): National poll

Biden: 30%
Sanders: 15%
Warren: 15%
Harris: 15%
Buttigieg: 5%
All others below 5%.

• from Morning Consult (B- on 538): National poll

Biden: 31%
Sanders: 19%
Harris: 14%
Warren: 13%
Buttigieg: 6%
All others below 5%

General Stuff

• from CBS News: 2020 Democratic presidential candidates reveal second quarter fundraising efforts. we begin this week with the fundraising news, as the second quarter ended at the end of last month. candidates are not obligated to report their numbers until july 15, but many candidates (particularly those with good numbers) like to report early. the current leaderboard, as of this morning:

Buttigieg: 24.8 million
Sanders: 24 million (18 million fundraised, 6 million transferred)
Biden: 21.5 million
Warren: 19.1 million
Harris: 12 million
Bennet: 3.5 million (2.8 million fundraised, 700k transferred)
Bullock: 2 million
Hickenlooper: 1 million
Swalwell (dropped out): 850k

• from the Atlantic: The Most Critical Argument Democrats Will Have in 2020. healthcare is again going to loom pretty heavily over this race, consistently being one of the top issues for americans. the healthcare debate is part of what led to the democratic wave in the 2018 elections and, if republicans don't get better messaging in short order, is probably going to be one of the many things which leads to trump losing re-election in 2020. of course, what the democratic plan for healthcare looks like to the eventual nominee isn't set in stone either; most of the frontrunners define their plan as some form of medicare for all and would get rid of private insurance, most of the perennial 1%ers want something less "socialisty". given that the party is to the left of where it used to be and that biden is the only person really standing on the status quo who has a chance at winning at this point, i'd bet on M4A winning out ultimately.
• from the Atlantic: The Long-Shot Candidacy Conundrum. one of the candidates in this piece has already dropped out (swalwell), but the weird slate of swalwell, seth moulton, and tim ryan as candidates in the presidential race is still interesting because they really have few if any compelling reasons to be running and most people have no idea why they're running at all. ryan perhaps has the best case: ohio, likely to lose a congressional district in 2020, will possibly redistrict him out and leave him having to run in a less friendly district; there are no such excuses for swalwell (now dropped out and committed to his house seat) or moulton (in a safe seat but almost certainly limited in his ability to climb the political rungs by his anti-pelosi posturing). nonetheless, running is almost certain to land them all more political capital or better positions than the ones they currently have, which makes the presidency pretty alluring even if they come nowhere near it.

Elizabeth Warren

• from the Guardian: 105 town halls and 35,000 selfies: how Warren has shaken up the 2020 race. warren's strategy which early on in the race seemed to be leading her down a road to inevitable failure has turned around quite significantly in the past few months, as this article by the guardian explores. in practice, this piece on warren's strategy is also a candidate profile, talking mostly about warren's policy focus and her eventual aims to save capitalism from itself.
• from POLITICO: Elizabeth Warren shuns conventional wisdom for a new kind of campaign. warren's campaign is also crafting a new path by eschewing the standard model of campaigns where you just hire a shit ton of consultants who advise you on everything. warren's campaign has no consultants, no in-house pollster, plans to do its ad-making in-house, and has an extensive payroll of staffers, all of which is funded by the idea that her fundraising will continue as it has this quarter (19.1 million). this model has no guarantees of working, since it is entirely underpinned by warren continuing to raise absurd amounts of money, but if it manages to stay afloat, it could be quite formidable and serve as a future model for campaigns.
• from CBS News: Elizabeth Warren proposes executive orders to address race and gender pay gap. warren has some policy that she intends to push through with executive orders on the race pay gap and the gender pay gap. per CBS: "...companies and contractors with historically poor records on diversity and equality [would be] den[ied] contracts with the federal government." also a part of this plan:

To address the underrepresentation of women of color in leadership in the federal workforce, Warren says she would issue an order to recruit from historically black colleges and other minority-serving institutions; establish paid fellowships for federal jobs for minority and low-income applicants, including formerly incarcerated people; and require federal agencies to incorporate diversity into their strategic plans and mentorship efforts.

• from Jacobin: Elizabeth Warren’s Next Step on Medicare for All. warren embraced medicare for all at the debates, which was not especially surprising; however, it remains to be seen how much warren makes talking about it a focus of her campaign. warren has been pretty silent on healthcare issues despite having polices on significantly more esoteric issues and her website still lacks a healthcare page as of now. jacobin makes the case here that warren would be smart, if she cares about medicare for all genuinely, to defend it at every opportunity and sell it to the american public, lest it be rendered unpassable in the future.

Kamala Harris

• from CBS News: Harris proposes 100 billion plan to increase minority homeownership. kamala harris has some new policy aimed at promoting minority house ownership. CBS reports that the plan "...calls for 100 billion Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant to provide homeowners or homebuyers who rent or live in historically red-lining communities, where minority home and business owners were largely blocked from accessing capital for investment, up to a $25,000 down payment in assistance and closing costs." there are some other fairly esoteric qualifications involved here, but i won't quote those because they're mildly confusing and don't necessarily contribute to an understanding of the policy.
• from VICE: Iowa Is Getting Serious About Kamala Harris. unsurprisingly, harris's meteoric rise following the first set of debates continues. harris and biden both swung through iowa over the fourth of july and harris was immediately greeted to significantly more reception than she presumably would have gotten prior to the the debates. biden remains the slight frontrunner, of course, but despite harris prioritizing the more diverse early states of south carolina and nevada in her electoral strategy, she increasingly looks competitive in iowa.

Everybody Else

• from Jacobin: Bernie Is the Best Candidate on Palestine. jacobin makes the case for sanders being the best candidate on palestinian issues. this is relatively straightforward; sanders is probably the only candidate in the race currently who has consistently pushed for palestinian issues and really his only contemporary with a comparable record is warren, who used to be staunchly pro-israel before gradually moderating on the issue. sanders still has many rough spots around the edges when it comes to palestinians, namely the fact that he's anti-BDS (but against banning of the movement), but there are no perfect candidates.
• from Jacobin: We Don’t Need Pete Buttigieg’s National Service Program. jacobin is also unsparing in its criticism of buttigieg's national service program which is, admittedly, pretty silly in its justification. in the article's words:

But more to the point, the basic diagnosis behind Buttigieg’s proposal (and others like it) is simply incorrect. True enough, few would probably challenge the suggestion that America is a deeply fragmented and polarized society. Revealingly, though, Buttigieg thinks the causes are spiritual and cultural rather than material and political: people have different identities, backgrounds, income levels, religious beliefs, and party affiliations, with these differences being hardened by epistemological bubbles online; ergo, a divided country that might become more unified if people were brought together in common cause.

It’s a tidy narrative, and one that conveniently sidesteps America’s maldistribution of wealth, its general dearth of quality public programs and services, and the numerous ways these injustices and others contribute to a coarsening of its social fabric.

• from CBS News: Tulsi Gabbard says Kamala Harris hatched "political ploy" to "smear" Joe Biden on race. y'all remember tulsi? she's still around, and she's making headlines for the wrong reasons yet again. for some reason, she's decided to die on the hill of kamala harris smearing biden on race issues, saying harris was "leveling this accusation that Joe Biden is a racist — when he's clearly not — as a way to try to smear him." this is interesting: harris not only never said that biden was a racist, but in fact immediately prefaced her comments with "I do not believe you are a racist"; i suppose tulsi is trying to argue that harris was lying or something similar here. either way, it's a bizarre line of attack that doesn't really make a lot of sense, not least because gabbard has literally nothing to do with the whole situation.
• from CNN: 2020 Democrats Klobuchar and Inslee unveil education plans ahead of summit. jay inslee and amy klobuchar meanwhile unveiled some education plans. here are the highlights:

klobuchar:

• would end the Trump administration's push for a school choice tax credit
• proposes a federal-state partnership program under which states would tackle education funding equity and recommend how school services can better meet the needs of working parents

inslee:

• will end the diversion of federal funds to private charter schools
• would provide universal preschool, double funding for magnet schools and fully fund the federal Title I program for schools that serve low-income areas
• promises to help states fund pay increases for educators, providing student loan forgiveness for educators and protecting teacher pensions
• supports giving federal funds to districts that switch to zero-emission buses and investing in climate change education and STEM programs at K-12 schools and historically black colleges and universities

both:

• promise to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and to provide protections for the LGBTQ community
• want to ban the use of federal funds to arm teachers or for firearms training

• from NBC News: Swalwell ends presidential campaign less than two weeks after first debate. eric swalwell, one percenter extraordinaire and man whose name is impossible to spell correctly on the first try, is hanging up his presidential campaign after lackluster polling and fundraising. swalwell's most recognizable moment for people will probably be his tagline "pass the torch"; unfortunately, it does seem that he's passed the torch himself to candidates who can actually gain traction with the american public. swalwell remains a house representative, and will be seeking reelection in 2020.
• from Vox: “I call her a modern-day prophet”: Marianne Williamson’s followers want you to give her a chance. marianne williamson remains the media's token "wacky candidate", for which she receives occasional media attention including this article focused on the people who support her. broadly, her main demographic is wine moms, but williamson also has a number of younger supporters to her campaign and message. williamson supporters are, unsurprisingly, not "williamson or bust" types: just as other candidates's supporters, they're more than happy to get behind other people and the eventual nominee, whether that's marianne or not. williamson's supporters will probably remain behind her for the duration of her campaign, though.

anyways, feel free to as always contribute other interesting articles you stumble across, or comment on some of the ones up there. see also: Why America is Ignoring Kirsten Gillibrand, Warren Rising: Massachusetts Progressive Announces $19 Million Fundraising Haul, Any Democrat Who Wants to Be President Should Reject War with Iran, Not Hide Behind Process Criticisms

No genre restrictions, so a tell-all memoir is as valid a response as a high-fantasy tome. Maybe you want to dive in deep on an anthropological topic, or maybe you want to pen a full book of contemporary political commentary. Any and all options are on the table, with the only caveat being that you'd have to write enough to fill a book, so it would have to be an area of knowledge or passion for you--likely both.

Also, for those here that have already written books, feel free to talk about those if you like, or one you hope to write in the future.

For those that haven't, don't feel constrained by real-world concerns/inhibitions. Pretend you have the time and resources to adequately devote to the book to fully see your vision through.

Make sure you give us:

• A summary of what the book would be about
• An explanation of why you'd want to write that specific book
• And, most importantly, a good title!

A really long time ago I was introduced to the Evoluent Vertical Mouse. Even though I was only in my early twenties I already had wrist issues and I thought this thing was god send. It was clunky but totally worth it.

These days there are a ton of vertical mice available. Is anyone else into these? I am looking to get a new one now that I'm on the mouse/keyboard a lot again. Do you have a preferred model?

note: If you have wrist issues and are curious, I highly recommend trying one out. One caveat is that the cheap one I got off of amazon recently is a bit too small for a decent sized guy like myself. Filling out your palm seems really important for maximum relief.

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Past weeks

Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8 · Week #9 · Week #10 · Week #11 · Week #12 · Week #13 · Week #14 · Week #15 · Week #16 · Week #17 · Week #18 · Week #19 · Week #20 · Week #21 · Week #22

Post any cover art (EPs, single art, etc. are also fine of course) that looks shockingly ahead of its time. There's so many odd examples of artists being strangely predictive of trends far in the future, let's collect some of them.

_{Note, I totally stole the idea from this thread over on rym, so if you want to see more then look there. Lots of good answers already :)}

I think a Sovereign Fund is where Yang should move his focus to. Its a long-term approach that requires a focus. In 30 years the Norway fund has become the largest fund in the world

The Norway Fund has been the receiver of all of Norway's Gas Taxes and Profits but has not paid out anything, so its only grown. But its intend purpose is to supply a form of a UBI (or subsidize Gov't tax revenues if the taxes were to ever fall short enough)

To Fund it, in the US, we need the Gas tax to be quadrupled. Double ($1/gal) it to properly pay for road maintenance and to pay for properly funded and expanded metro development, Greener metro lines, bike lanes, double it again ($2) to pay for Wealth Funding

This gas tax funding of $1/gal would contribute 175Billion in investments

After 40 years the wealth Fund would provide $7 Trillion Annually to pay for a UBI for as long as the US were to want it. Without any additional tax revenue

I think we can look at other jobs and industries where there is a boom and bust cycle, casinos, and where future income should be considered

Mississippi Gambling Revenue and therefore taxes has fallen 31% in 2018 (tax revenue $234 million) vs 2008's (345 million) best year numbers.

If Mississippi had contributed it's taxes to a Sovereign Wealth Fund instead of using it as a Substitute to Government taxes what would the effect have been.

A year after gambling was Legalized in Mississippi, skipping the first years taxes, the state of Mississippi has received Gaming Taxes, Starting in 1994, a total of $6.3 Billion in tax revenues

If those same taxes had been invested in a Wealth Fund its current value would be ~$29.6 Billion

Of course this would have required Mississippi to create 6 Billion in alternate tax Revenues, and this is the stump speech Yang needs to create.

Because in 5 years when Gaming Revenues have dropped another 50% its time for Mississippi to be ready, and in this case you're sitting on a $50 Billion Wealth Fund. That can pay out $4 billion a year to its 2.9million residents or fund the government services instead of deep cuts

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.

After our discussion about Tempest-like games, I looked at what else could at least scratch a similar fast-paced space-theme racing, with optional shooting itch on Switch.

To kick off the discussion, these are the games I already tried that I kinda like. I‘ll update this list, once people suggest other entries. I realise it’s a bit of a mish-mash, but it’s more about the feel than a specific genre.

Fast RMX is a very fast-paced pod-racer, with a similar feel to Wipeout, if you take away the weapons, and add a boost mechanic where you need to switch your booster’s code with the speed lane. I prefer playing it with motion/gyro controls, which admittedly makes it harder to play, but with that actually feels a lot more like you’re travelling at massive speed where every unintentional jerk of the steering wheel can cause you to wipe out.

Velocity 2X is a very successful mix of a vertical shooter where time matters with added platforming levels in between. Boosting for speed and warping/teleporting to solve puzzles is a huge part of the game.

The Next Penelope is a top-down 2D (pod?) racing game with weapons, where the acceleration happens automatically, but is influenced by boost, boost markers on the track and bumping into stuff. I haven’t played it for a long time yet, but once you learn the controls it seems to be a very good game.

VSR is a pure zero-gravity, zero-friction 3D space racer. Which makes mastering the controls very hard for anyone who is not used to it. To be honest, I haven’t mastered them yet either, but haven’t given up, as I really liked RPGs and shooters with such a mechanic. It just gives a specific type of zennish “in the zone” feeling, once you get into it.

Fast RMX
price: 20 € 14 € until 2019-07-25
reviews: 81 % on MetaCritic
length: 3½ h main game (57 h completionist) on HowLongToBeart

Velocity 2X
price: 20 € 8 € until 2019-07-18
reviews: 87 % on MetaCritic
length: 5 h main game (26 h completionist) on HowLongToBeat

The Next Penelope: Race to Odysseus
price: 13 € 2 € until 2019-07-11
reviews: 79 % on MetaCritic
length: 2½ h main game (5½ h completionist) on HowLongToBeat

VSR: Void Space Racing
price: 5 €
reviews: 66 % on MetaCritic
length: (no HowLongToBeat entry yet)

I'm not sure if this is the case for everyone but the new reddit can't load any data, at least for me. However, old.reddit.com works, and all mobile apps seem to work which obviously use the reddit API. I am curious, does reddit have a different version of their API for the redesign, and that's what's been down for hours?

edit: I know that reddit must allow their own product to do things that other products don't.. Like it seems the chat api is not open to 3rd parties.. but I assumed that they would have just blocked certain api endpoints from public exposure. But based on my blind troubleshooting of this case, it seems that they must be using a totally different interface all together for the redesign?

Hmm, so I've heard reddit is super-cached... is this possibly a caching fault then?

reddit uses redis, correct? And it must be sharded, right? So maybe some redis cluster nodes are down?

I'm trying to learn here, and I am likely asking the wrong questions.. The goal of my post was to understand this type of failure, as I realize that it must be partial as in if all of reddit resign was down, it would be news. If anyone could correct any of my statements or assumptions I would really appreciate it.

I'm in no rush to buy but I am considering getting a Switch. From my brief bit of duckduckgo-ing, it appears that a new Switch is on the horizon, either a newer version (Switch 2) or a mini-Switch and the current release may drop in price.

Any thoughts? What would you do at this point? Most of the shops around here that sell them are out of stock anyway so unless I was to buy online, it's not necessarily an option.

Thanks all!

Update: I bought a Switch. With Mario Kart and Zelda. It's brilliant!

Everyone loves the idea of “Yes, let’s teach girls and young women about technology careers!” However, too often I see people put their attention on “What do I want to say?” rather than “What does it actually help them to hear?"

Let's say you are planning to hold a school event to encourage more girls to get into STEM careers. What, explicitly, would you include on the agenda? How would the agenda differ based on age or grade level? What metrics would you use to judge whether the event was a success?

I’d like to hear from people who have personally been involved in such events, as organizers, sponsors, and attendees. If you attended: What should have been included, that you later wished someone told you?

I’m writing a feature article in which I aim to provide a checklist of “what to include” for those who plan these sort of events. So please let me know how to refer to you in the article.

Disclaimer: I will not make any money off of this sale. I am just asking for my old boss with whom I built this company. Even though I don't work there and have no stake, I just want to solicit the best advice on her behalf. I can give more details via a PM as she doesn't want to spread the word yet.

The business is a vacation rental company located in a premier resort town in the USA. It has existed since before airbnb was even a thing. The business is very profitable and technologically self-reliant. She has spent a decent amount on technology so that there aren't multiple outsiders taking a slice of each rental. I can provide the rough numbers via PM. The SEO is already #1 in the market. The company owns its office building, and multiple vacation rentals which could be packaged in with the sale.

It is the largest vacation rental company in the local vicinity, so selling to a direct competitor doesn't seem likely. It would seem to be the ideal sale/purchase for someone who is wealthy and is looking to retire early, live in a tropical setting, make money, and still have something to do. However, maybe contacting the larger, more corporate vacation rental businesses on the mainland would be the best option?

Google searches for this are an SEO disaster which is why I am asking here. Are business brokers necessary for something like this? It is so niche that I really just don't know what to look for. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Edit: to add, it is completely turn-key. Everything could be left as it is, with all current employees. Aside from executive decisions the only thing that the owner did, since we scaled to dominate the local market, was write the ad copy because she is really good at that. She only physically spent a couple months of the year there in the last few years. The only reason she is considering selling is due to aging-out.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

What's a song lyric that has recently jumped out at you, caught your attention, resonated, or made you think?

This doesn't have to be a favorite/best of all time topic, though feel free to post those if they speak to you. I'm more interested in something you encountered recently that you really like, appreciate, or find interesting, for whatever reason.

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.