I'm attempting to be more active on Tildes (after my last attempt), and I noticed that there hadn't been a new fortnightly thread, so here's my contribution!

https://tildes.net/~health.mental/1oax/victories_and_challenges_an_a_u_dhd_community_and_support_fortnightly_thread

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

The year is 2025. The C programming language is something like 50 years old now - a dinosaur within the fast-moving environment of software development. Dozens of new languages have cropped up through the years, with languages like Rust and Go as prime contenders for systems-level programming. Bootstrapping a project in C these days will often raise eyebrows or encourage people to dismiss you out of hand. Personally, I've barely touched the language since I graduated.

Now, with all that said: I still consider learning and understanding C to be key for having an integrated, in-depth understanding of how computers and programming really works. When I am getting a project up and running, I frequently end up running commands like "sudo apt install libopenssl-dev" without really giving it much thought about what's going on there. I know that it pulls some libraries onto my computer so that another program can use them, but without the requisite experience of building and compiliing a library then it's kind of difficult to understand what it's all about. I know that other languages will introduce this concept, but realistically everything is built to bind to C libraries.

System libraries are only one instance of my argument though. To take a more general view, I would say that learning C helps you better understand computers and programming. It might be a pain to consider stuff like memory allocation and pointers on a regular basis, but I also think that not understanding these subjects can open up avenues for a poorly formed understanding about how computers work. Adding new layers of abstraction does not make the foundation less relevant, and I think that learning C is the best avenue toward an in-depth understanding of how computers actually work. This sort of baseline understanding, even if the language isn't used on a regular basis, goes a long way to improving one's skills as a developer. It also gives people the skills to apply their skills in a wide variety of contexts.

I'm no expert, though: most of the programming I do is very high-level and abstracted from the machine (Python, Haskell, BASH). I'm sure there are plenty of folks here who are better qualified to chime in, so what do you think?

Dutch Grand Prix
Circuit Zandvoort
August 29-31, 2025

Next race:

Italian Grand Prix
Autodromo Nazionale Monza
September 5-7, 2025

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I need you to do me a favor: please keep an open mind and reserve judgement until after you've thoroughly digested the ideas I'm presenting here. These are not my ideas, and I have no connection to this project. I hope to do them justice in representing them accurately and as clearly as I understand it all.

Please don't be dismissive. Please don't jump to conclusions. I would not be posting about this if I did not believe it has tremendous potential to reshape the digital economy, and therefore everything that governs how civilization progresses in the next century. Dramatic, much? Yes, but I hope I have your attention.

I'm not posting this as a plain link, because the website looks incredibly sus. Just trust me for a few minutes. Links are at the end.

(No generative AI was used to write this post.)

What is PrizeForge?

PrizeForge is a financial service that can be best thought of as "Representative Crowdfunding" (my term, not theirs). Like direct crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter), it lets people pool their money to support expensive projects that would otherwise be impossible to fund. Similar to Patreon, it can also be an effective tip jar for much smaller things that would otherwise go unrewarded.

The innovation is two-fold: first, contributors never move alone. As a contributor, you set a ceiling on your weekly payment. This is the "enrollment" amount. However, the actual amount of money disbursed each weekly cycle is the amount that is successfully "matched" with other contributors. In the simplest example, if I wanted to enroll for Tildes at $20/week, and one other user enrolled at $5/week, the disbursement would be the sum of the matched funds: $5 + $5. In this way, nobody ever pays an unfair proportion of the total, and small donations become an integral part of funding allocation. Additionally, like how philanthrophists often match charitable donations to meet a fundraising objective, matching provides a powerful incentive for individuals to contribute by making individual contributions feel more significant, since any money you part with can be doubled by another contributor. The more you put in, the more others will too. (PrizeForge calls this algorithm "Elastic Fund Matching". The full algorithm gets considerably more complex, but they have a neat visualization on their site and videos.)

Second, unlike existing crowdfunding and patronage systems, creators and companies do not receive fund disbursements directly. Rather, representatives ("Delegates") send the money to the people and organizations that should receive funds to deliver value to the stream's contributors.

"Won't delegates just siphon funds to themselves?" you ask. Well, yes, that will 100% happen at some point. Corruption is a human problem that can't be solved with technology alone. PrizeForge aims to provide mechanisms to allow the community to be very dynamic, so contributors can easily switch to a new representative—for any reason. Additionally, tools for transparency in how the money moves would go a long way in keeping delegates accountable.

In the context of open-source software, delegates should be experienced power users who are well equipped to evaluate features and bugfixes, and then can award the prizes to developers according to their best judgement.

The use of a representative has many advantages over direct crowdfunding. Someone highly invested in a software product has valuable experience and would be more effective at setting priorities for features and bugfixes. An experienced and trusted delegate would save developers time having to parse the requests (...demands?) of individual users who may not be able to articulate what they really want. Also, if a developer or company stops doing what people want (providing value to the people who care), then funds can flow to competing alternatives in a very granular and dynamic way, as the delegates shift funding and/or new delegates arise.

If we could pick a delegate here for Tildes, would anybody really object to @cfabbro?

These trusted delegates already exist, everywhere! We just haven't been able to cooperate in the right ways to delegate our individual power, so they can truly move the needle on funding the projects we care about. PrizeForge is, I believe, the first truly sustainable funding model for community-owned and directed open-source.

Addendum

Watch this video first! Before you get scared away by the terrible scammy-looking website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO46oEdlkY8

The FAQ: https://prizeforge.com/faq

The company's github page: https://github.com/positron-solutions

Looks like just two people, with Psionikus doing all the promotion and running accounts. The company is incorporated in South Korea. They've got a bunch of emacs tooling, and I believe the PrizeForge concept originated out of a desire to improve the funding/development process of emacs, then the lem editor. They also apparently have a bit of beef with the FSF due to emacs politcs. Check out the last FAQ for a fun easter egg.

The sub-reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/PrizeForge/

The Hacker News comment that took me down the rabbithole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45036360

Bonus thoughts:

• What's really crazy is that this is not a crypto or blockchain project. You can do a simplified version of the elastic fund matching with just money, pen & paper.
• This financing scheme is basically an idealized utopian voluntary tax system. I can imagine a granular delegate system being extremely effective at making politics incredibly boring. Imagine electing a local representative only to have potholes fixed in your area, using only the funds earmarked for fixing potholes. It would be so much simpler to keep them accountable. Either the roads are crap or they aren't! Where's the money, bub?! Why've you got a fancy new lawnmower?! I want my $2 back!
• If this reaches critical mass, it ends surveillance capitalism and digital feudalism. I don't want to live in Black Mirror, and this seems like the way out of that future.
• I would really love it if we can establish a funding stream for Tildes. I know I can donate to Tildes directly, but it would be a great test run to help PrizeForge get operational and build credibility. I only need one other crazy person. Isn't the internet great? (My credit card has not been stolen btw)
• The password login is still in development, so you have to login via Google SSO. I absolutely hate using Google SSO but I get it from a developer perspective. Proper auth is hard and companies like Tailscale took the same path and still don't support password login. (My google hasn't been hacked either fwiw)

This is the seventeenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Our next book will be Stories of Your Life and Others at the end of September.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.

And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

I'm finishing a full rewatch of the films from the Coen Brothers tonight and have decided to go with PTA next. PTA really has no stinkers in his filmography. Fincher is pretty close, but I haven't seen Alien 3 and I'm willing to forgive the first film or two.

Who else can share this level of consistency?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like sideloading, messaging and friendship. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was eagle-eyed.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Recently there has been a discussion thread about how many people (myself included) are recently finding it difficult to find meaningful, lasting friendships. Let's change that. I don't know if we've ever had a thread like this, but if we did then it must have been a while ago (or my search juju failed me).

Normally, the "finding friends 101" involves finding a small community that revolves around one of your interests, then make friends within that community. Finding those kinds of small communities on the internet has become nigh-on impossible, at least for me. Discord is no substitute; most Discord servers revolving around a certain interest are massive in size, with text channels flying by faster than a popular streamer's Twitch chat.

So we're breaking the code. Instead of finding a specialized community for your interests, just type up a list of your interests, quirks, or whatever other things you'd like to lure new potential friends with as a response to this thread. Go into as much detail as you'd like. If anyone has mentioned an interest you share, send them a DM and start a conversation! (That goes for the lurkers too – if you are one, don't be shy; you play an essential part in making this thread work.)

Note: it may be helpful to add other details too, like your age (if you want friends in a similar age group) and what kind of friends you're looking for in your post. Some people may be looking for people to hang in voice chat and play games with; others may just look for people to discuss topics via Discord DM; and others still may not even necessarily be looking to take their new friendship outside of Tildes. All of these are completely valid.

There was a lot of interest in a Retro Video Game Club. I'm thinking it would be cool to get it off the ground!

Use this topic as brainstorming/planning for how we think it should run.

1. We need a facilitator/emcee.

• Is anyone interested in stepping up and running this?

2. We need to figure out logistics.

• Schedule
• Game selection process
• Parameters on what counts as "retro" (if necessary)
• Maybe a name for the club?

3. Anything else?

• Is there anything else we need to consider?

The Party

• Jeff, half-elf Druid 6 / Fighter 4 / Magus 4
• Lee, gray elf Fighter 4 / Magic-User 4 / Thief 5
• Oryn, high elf Magic-User 5 / Thief 6
• Rudy, halfling Druid 2 / Thief 3
• Takeshi, human Ranger 4
• Varda, human Cleric 6 / Magic-User 4
• Vordt, half-ogre Cleric 4 / Fighter 5

Ran the group through some werewolf hunting the other day. Thanks to the local army scouts, they knew where the hideout was; a chapel on a hill in the badlands, about ten miles from town. The party arrives, takes a look in one of the side windows, climbs the bell tower for a vantage point around the thing, including the graveyard and mausoleum, and then pushes their way into the building.

There's no light inside, but Takeshi has a broadsword with continual light on it, as well as a ring that increases the radius of light sources he commands, so the hall and sanctuary ahead are well lit through the 80' of luminescence in his hands. As they enter the sanctuary, three people materialize behind the altar, outlanders in appearance, claiming to be using this building as protection from the elements. Some players noted the lack of a "lived in" feeling here, no bedrolls or typical litter you'd expect of a temporary living space, and these people appeared well-fed and hale. Sensing that the party is about to lash out, the werewolves attack pre-emptively and gain surprise.

(Round 1) Takeshi and Lee ended up targets between these three werewolves. Four more tried to ambush from behind, but Vordt was in the back filling up the hallway, blocking their way. Oryn casts amplify damage at one while Varda fires magic missile and Jeff fills the hallway with web as Takeshi and Lee retaliate in melee; Rudy provides missile support with their sling. (R2) Oryn and Varda wait for an an opportunity to capitalize on while Takeshi and Lee continue trading blows, with Rudy continuing to provide missile support and Jeff casting a magic missile; Vordt is 5' deep in the web begins to leverage his obscene Strength to break free of them. One werewolf lies dead. (R3) Varda continues waiting, confident in their allies' abilities as Oryn charges in, Rudy provides missile support, Jeff supplies another magic missile, Takeshi and Lee continue trading blows with the two remaining werewolves, and Vordt is working himself free of the webs. Three werewolves lie dead.

Over the next couple of minutes, Vordt breaks free from the web. Not wanting to try and jump through windows, the party opts to wait for the spell to expire, as the remaining four werewolves trapped in it yell muffled requests for mercy. Their progress was much slower than Vordt's, and they had to go through 8' of web rather than 5', but after about an hour they'd all suffocated. During the wait, both Takeshi and Lee ate some belladonna to stave off potential infection.

The party finds a trap door to a cellar and checks it out. There's a wight hiding in the shadows, but it doesn't surprise them. It still slaps Lee and eats about 5k XP off his thief levels, but it dies by the end of the first round. In exchange, they found an iron chest, within which was 21k gold, 13 gems, a scroll of protection from magic, dwarf-sized field plate +1, and a pouch of dust of dryness.

Then Takeshi and Lee both vomit up their lunch and pass out on the floor. Lee is no longer breathing. Ingesting belladonna does a few things: (1) small chance of curing lycanthropy if taken quickly after infection, (2) incapacitates you for 1d4 days, (3) has a 1% chance of killing you. Lee is the 1%.

They get both of their bodies and the treasure out and back to town, then broker a deal with the local lordling MU to get Lee poked with a rod of resurrection, which drops him from 20 to 19 Constitution, removing his natural regeneration. Takeshi remains incapacitated for a day and Lee for a week, due to resurrection sickness.

For example, I'm handy with a lot of stuff. I could change an outlet in the wall no problem. But if asked by an electrician what gauge Romex is safe for what amperage, or what color direct bury Romex is, I'd have no idea (from the knowledge I walk around with day to day).

I'm curious what other random facts people may know from their line of work that quality them as more knowledgeable than your average goose joe. Or to paraphrase, walking around knowledge people wouldn't know unless they googled it, or worked/were very knowledgeable in your field. And how many of them I (or others) might know.

To start from my job:

Q: Under what circumstances would one want to withhold the administration of vasopressors (Epinephrine) in a cardiac arrest?

A:

Here is the schedule for the upcoming year

Last week in August - Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut,

Last week in September - Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

Last week in October - The Poisoners Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine by Deborah Blum,

Last week in November - We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis Taylor,

December break for the holidays.

Last week in January - Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bissen,

Last week in February - The Truth by Terry Pratchett

Last week in March - The Metamorphosis by Kafka,

Last week in April - The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See,

Last week in May - Pnin by Nabokov,

Last week in June - How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Wexler,

Last week in July - A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers,

Last week in August - Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

Last week in September - Dr. No by Ian Fleming

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like delusions, experts and eyeo. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was taking notes.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

The other day at the bus stop I overheard a mom saying how amazing it was that her husband not only cooked dinner - pasta - but also then put the kids to bed. The woman she was talking to nodded sagely in agreement: clearly this was laudable.

Is the bar for being a good father and husband so low? What the hell?

This isn't really new to me, I suppose. I've worked mainly with women my whole life and too often I hear that the bare minimum seems to be "they provide money" and occasionally throw down a meal and play with the kids. Sometimes, even that is expecting too much.

Can I get some perspective on this?

I didn't know where to post this, sometimes I invite people on instagram to suggest ideas or things for me to draw and post; I found it's a nice way to interact on the internet in a different way and challenge myself and practice at the same time. If anyone's interested maybe we can do it here, this is not for commissions and it's totally free, I'm just trying to do something fun and collaborative with strangers.

Even if this doesn't take off feel free to contact me and see what we can do, I'd love to make something for somebody else, I can share some of my drawings so you know what to expect.

Maybe we could organize and turn it into a monthly topic with a different prompt for anyone who wants to draw and participate and share. Would love to read your opinions on this.

Apologies if this is the wrong space for it.

I just sold my first car, a hand-me-down Kia Optima I learned to drive in and had been driving since the 2010s, and I can't help but reminisce about it and everything I and my family had been through in it and had put it through.

What was your first car, and if you don't still have it, what happened to it?

I was looking through some old posts this afternoon and noticed several users posted but had since been banned. I was wondering if anyone knows the approximate number of users that have been banned and what the most common reasons were.

It’s before 5am CT, and I’ve been awake since… 2:30am. Most nights, I can feed my newborn and fall right back asleep. I believe that some work stress has kept me awake. It got me thinking about some questions to ask the group:

1. For those of us who would rather be productive than lie in bed awake for an extended period of time, how long before you decide to just get up and do something? I’m a little surprised I haven’t just gotten up yet. I think I will here in a few minutes.
2. What are some fun activities you like to get up to when it’s the middle of the night and everyone is asleep? I’m a software engineer by trade so I tend to work on a side project. Maybe a music project if it’s something quiet.
3. The age old question: how can I fall back asleep? I can usually count backwards from 100 and by the second time through I’ll be out. Does anyone have anything more interesting?

I’m sure variations of this topic have been posted before, so I apologize if this is less than novel. Retitle as necessary, I couldn’t think of a good one.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like websites.niche, consumerism and association of research libraries and public knowledge. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone loves this kinda thing.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

TL;DR: I’m interested in your thoughts about this the current problems in UK higher education, and how they can be fixed.

I recently read an opinion piece in the Guardian about the problems currently faced by UK universities and their students. These problems aren’t new, but they’re getting worse year by year, and Simon articulates them particularly well.

It seems to me that there are three main criticisms of our current university system: that it is too costly for students while failing to fund the universities adequately; that degrees do not provide enough value to students; and that there are too many students attending university, especially (so-called) “low value” degrees, but increasingly also “high value” areas such as STEM.

The main solutions being presented are replacing students loans with a “graduate tax”, shuttering low-quality institutions and degrees, and sending more students to apprenticeships or trade schools rather than universities.

My view on this, as someone who has recently graduated university, and will be returning next year to begin studying for a PhD, is conflicted. I can definitely see that these problems are real, but I’m not convinced by the solutions being offered.

Firstly, I don’t think most people discussing these issues and offering their solutions are addressing the most fundamental problem, which is that universities have forgotten how to, or simply stopped, actually teaching. Many degrees only teach you what you need to know to pass the exams and produce acceptable coursework, which is not the point of a university degree.

This is a very challenging issue, because obviously universities must assess their students. But the purpose of a degree, its value, lies not in the assessment, nor even in the certificate awarded upon its completion (despite what many people believe), but in how you can learn and grow to have a deeper and more rounded understanding of your degree area, and the world at large. A university degree should make you a more curious person and build your critical thinking, enabling you to think through and approach many problems intelligently. But instead universities are continuously lowering the bar necessary to pass, because failing students is too costly for them, and thus also lowering their teaching standards.

The problem, it seems to me, is that the purpose of university is to educate, yet many who graduate university do not display the level of education, understanding and intelligence we would expect them to have achieved after investing at least three years of their life and tens of thousands of pounds in their education. This is not a crisis of too many students, but of a lack of quality in teaching. It seems to me that this has been driven by the funding model, which incentivises universities to grow their cohort size in order to receive more funding. Of course, this makes it harder to teach them all, and thus promotes the lowering of assessment standards so that students of sub-par quality - whether it be their work ethic, prior education, or simply learning at university that lacks - can graduate successfully.

If this is our problem, then I don’t think any of the proposed solutions serve to ameliorate it. This problem is equally common to humanities as it is STEM subjects, so the issue is not in students studying in “low value” degree areas. Whilst an apprenticeship might provide better value to a student in terms of the skills they would acquire, it is addressing a different goal and need to a university education. And while a graduate tax might be fairer than our current loan system (which favour high earners who can pay the loan off faster), it would not solve the currently perverse financial incentives universities are subject to.

The solution to this is obvious, but a hard sell. It is necessary to remove the financial incentive for universities to grow their cohort sizes. It seems to me that we must either fix, or at least cap, the funding universities receive, such that it does not grow with larger student bodies. Perhaps it should instead be linked to some performance metric, or maybe the faculty size - the more lecturers and other teaching staff the university employs, the better its funding. Of course, a complete solution to this will require a lot of thought and nuance, but I think it’s clear that the basic issue is the funding model.

The value to be gained (as a society) from a well educated population is massive, but we are currently selling hopeful high school students up the river with underwhelming university degrees that don’t educate them properly. I believe it’s the wrong answer to say that these students should give up on their dreams of a university education. We need to fix the funding model so that universities are incentivised to provide as high quality teaching as possible, not to provide the lowest level acceptable to as many students as possible.

Kingmaker was last night. Some minor spoilers to follow.

Party, Level 3

• Marisiel, Elf Witch
• Nok-Nok, Goblin Rogue
• Linzi, Halfling Bard
• Amiri, Human Barbarian
• Titus, Human Fighter
• Valerie, Human Fighter
• Stik, Kobold Monk

Variants in Play: Ancestry Paragon, Free Archetype, Gradual Ability Boosts, Slow Leveling, Stamina. I also allow Hero Points to adjust the degree of success on a check by one step rather than re-roll; this primarily gets used to either mitigate a crit fail or turn a failure into a success.

Realizing they had just under a week before the Stag Lord's bandits tried to strong-arm Oleg's Trading Post for goods again, the party stopped their trip towards the tatzlwyrm lair and immediately turned around to return to Oleg's to stock up and then head towards the fort.

On the way back, they encountered yet more bandits and, on one evening, an owlbear and its mate. Once at Oleg's, they spent a day turning in their quests and buying some of the goods available at the trading post. When ready, they set out. About twelve miles from the fort, they were about to start cooking dinner when some of the Stag Lord's bandits showed up in a neutral manner, presuming the party to be aspiring recruits. Linzi takes the opportunity to try and get some information out of them by indulging their fantasy.

Titus eventually gets bored and challenges one of the bandits to a duel. The bandit rightfully declines, but Titus begins pushing forward with intent to attack him anyways. Linzi threatened to force him to spend his night in a laughing fit to get him to back off, and he calmed down. Unfortunately, after dinner was taken care of, the bandits took their leave, not wanting to be shanked in the night by the crazy man.

The next morning they stop a few hundred feet from the fort and Marisiel sends her familiar, Youmu, forward to scout the hills since the bandits don't seem to be paying them much mind. Youmu returns shortly and informs Marisiel that something's off about the hill; he suspects undead. Armed with that information, the party decided to waltz up to the front door and just infiltrate by providing the password.

Once inside, introductions are made, stories are shared, and after the party learns that there's a late shipment of alcohol and the Stag Lord loves the stuff, Stik taps into their knowledge of alchemy (via dedication) to create a bottle of booze. The Stag Lord quickly comes out and snatches the bottle before returning to his chamber.

Stik is quickly inducted as the brewmeister, but instead of delivering alcohol to the other bandits, they deliver lightning. In a bottle. One Extreme encounter later (as they triggered the entire compound, including the Stag Lord, and the owlbear was let free at some point), the Stag Lord lies dead on the ground along with most of his lieutenants.

This is always weighing on my mind and is coming after this comment I wrote.

The tech sector, especially the hyper-online portion of it, is full of devs who were doing some random shit before and shifted to AI the past few years. Don't get me wrong, I'm one of those: In much the same way, very shortly after the release of ChatGPT, I completely changed my own business as well (and now lead an AI R&D lab). Sure I had plenty of ML/AI experience before, but the sector was completely different and that experience has practically no impact aside from some fundamentals today.

The thing is, LLMs are all in all very new, few people have an active interest into "how it all works", and most of the sector's interest is in the prompting and chaining layers. Imagine network engineering and website design being bagged into the same category of "Internet Worker". Not really useful.

Some reflexions on the state of the business world right now...

In most SMEs, complete ignorance of what is possible beyond a budding interest in AI. Of course, they use ChatGPT and they see their social media posts are easier to write, so they fire some marketing consultants. Some find some of the more involved tools that automate this-and-that, and it usually stops there.

In many large companies: Complete and utter panic. Leaders shoving AI left and right as if it's a binary yes-ai/no-ai to toggle in their product or internal tools, and hitting the yes-ai switch will ensure they survive. Most of these companies are fuuuuuucked. They survive on entropy, and the world has gotten a LOT faster. Survival is going to get much harder for them unless they have a crazy moat. (Bullish on hardware and deeply-embedded knowledge; Bearish on SaaS and blind-spend; Would short Palantir today if I could)

In labs just like mine: I see plenty of knowledgeable people with no idea of how far-reaching the impact of the work is. Super technical AI people get biased by their own knowledge of the flaws and limitations so as to be blind to what is possible.

And in tech entrepreneurship, I see a gap forming between techies who have no respect for "vibe coders" on the grounds that they're not real programmers, and who don't end up using AI and fall massively behind since execution (not code quality) is everything. And at the same time I see vibe coders with zero technical prowess get oversold on the packaging, and who end up building dead shells and are unable to move past the MVP stage of whatever they're building.

And the more capable the tool you're using is, the more the experience can be SO WILDLY DIFFERENT depending on usage and configuration. I've seen Claude Code causing productivity LOSSES as well as creating productivity gains of up to 1000x -- and no, this isn't hearsay, these numbers are coming from my own experience on both ends of the spectrum, with different projects and configurations.
With such massively different experiences possible, and incredibly broad labels, of course the discussion on "AI" is all over the place. Idiocy gets funded on FOMO, products built and shut down within weeks, regulators freaking out and rushing meaningless laws that have no positive impact, it's just an unending mess.

Because it's such a mess I see naysayers who can only see those negatives and who are convinced AI is a bubble just like that "internet fad of the 90s". Or worse, that it has zero positive impact on humanity. I know there's some of those on Tildes - if that's you, hello, you're provably already wrong and I'd be happy to have that discussion.

Oh and meanwhile, Siri still has the braindead cognition of a POTUS sedated with horse tranquilizer. This, not ChatGPT, is the most-immediately-accessible AI in a quarter of the western world's pocket. Apple will probably give up, buy Perplexity, and continue its slow decline. Wonder who'll replace them.

About 45 mins ago, I read that a live-action Hollywood adaptation of Akira has been in the works for more than 20 years, and it was apparently about to move forward.

About 30 mins ago, I read that the rights have lapsed so it's pretty much dead in the water. However, it looks like there was always skepticism for an American version, long before anyone thought to put Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell.

About 15 mins ago, I learned that Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest is about to be released this weekend. It's apparently a "reinterpretation" of Kurosawa's High and Low, which I've been meaning to watch but never looked up the trailer to until 10 mins ago. That made me think about how inherent Japanese-ness might be to Kurosawa's work - the pacing, the emotional tension bubbling under the surface, the unspoken contexts - and how much of that is translatable or indeed replaceable. (Also it made me compare the track records of the Akira Kurosawa+Tohiro Mifune combo to Spike Lee+Denzel Washington)

All of that made me arrive at this question - how many worthwhile remakes have there ever really been, whether or not they crossed cultures? I suspect the ratio of bad/mediocre to good/great is weighted heavily to the former. I know of a few famous examples (The Magnificent Seven, A Fistful of Dollars) but I'm counting on you film buffs to broaden my horizons here.

For the purpose of this thread, I want to exclude movies that are second-attempt adaptations of a previously existing IP (e.g. Dune 2021 vs. Dune 1984), unless you feel it specifically aimed to be a remake of the first movie.

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

First of all, I want to say very big THANK YOU for all who contribute to various libre, open source etc. projects. I'm so happy that people love sharing knowledge, skills and fruits of their work.

But to the topic - how do you find time for it?
Whenever I update my Debian or Axpos or any other libre software I see soooo many updates/changes made by (probably soooo many) people. And I always ask myself a question - when did they do that? Where have they found time for contributing? For me full time work makes me so tired that it's the last thing I think about after work hours. Especially in the office job, after x hours of sitting before my monitor I truly hate every next minute after work. I would love to contribute some code, I would realllly love to. Sometimes I find some bugs and try to report them and that's all I am able to do. What frustrates me the most is that I have abilities to code because it's my daily job, but I don't have energy to do that.

So, could you tell me how do you find time and energy to contribute to libre projects?

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like artificial intelligence, bubbles.ai and den store havfrue. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was deep diving.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

First, I am emphatically not talking about LLMs.

Just a shower thought kinda question. For most people, the primary issue is anthropomorphizing too much. But I think programmers see it differently.

Let's say someone comes up with something that seems to walk and talk like a self-aware, sentient, AGI duck. It has a "memories" db, it learns and adapts, it seems to understand cause and effect, actions and consequences, truth v falsehood, it passes Turing tests like they're tic-tac-toe, it recognizes itself in the mirror, yada.

But as a developer, you can "look behind the curtain" and see exactly how it works. (For argument's sake, let's say it's a FOSS duck, so you can actually look at the source code.)

Does it ever "feel" like a real, sentient being? Does it ever pass your litmus test?

For me, I think the answer is, "yes, eventually" ... but only looong after other people are having relationships with them, getting married, voting for them, etc.

My understanding of how large language models work is rooted in my knowledge of statistics. However a significant number of people have never been to college and statistics is a required course only for some degree programs.

How should chatgpt etc be explained to the public at large to avoid the worst problems that are emerging from widespread use?

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I think things are going to get a lot worse until they get better (if they do). I’m not talking about US politics (I dont live there), I’m thinking more about climate change: food and water might not be as readily available anymore, never mind other things we take for granted like medicine, transportation, communications, a retirement pension.

It’s hard to articulate but I feel like our future is bleaker than the previous generation’s for the first time in modern history because of factors beyond our control (i.e. neither geopolitical nor economic). Not sure how to prepare for it so I’m wondering how other Tilderinas and Tilderinos deal with it, especially if you have or are planning on having children?

PF2, Kingmaker tonight. Minor spoilers re: names of potential companions and side-quest details.

Party, Level 3

• Marisiel, Elf Witch
• Nok-Nok, Goblin Rogue
• Linzi, Halfling Bard
• Amiri, Human Barbarian
• Titus, Human Fighter
• Valerie, Human Fighter
• Stik, Kobold Monk

Variants in Play: Ancestry Paragon, Free Archetype, Gradual Ability Boosts, Slow Leveling, Stamina. I also allow Hero Points to adjust the degree of success on a check by one step rather than re-roll; this primarily gets used to either mitigate a crit fail or turn a failure into a success.

The group had set out at the end of last session with the intention of picking some radishes and hunting two local monsters of some renown, a boar called Tuskgutter and some tatzlwyrms. Amiri was especially excited about going after Tuskgutter.

They arrive at the radish patch to find four kobolds suffering from The Itis™ that quickly scramble to protect their patch, but the monk eases tensions and ends up receiving an entire basket of the spicy radishes.

They spend a few days following the edge of the forest, crossing a rickety old bridge, disturbing some hunting spiders but dispatching them quickly. One evening, just after a meal, several of the Stag Lord's bandits had managed to sneak up on them, which turned out to be the last thing any of them did. Another afternoon saw Stik, Amiri, and Valerie attacked by thylacines while out foraging for ingredients, but by now they're used to that kind of thing.

They get into the general area of where they expect Tuskgutter's lair to be and spend the day searching for it. They eventually find it and have themselves their third proper Solo encounter since starting the game; I took the base profile for Tuskgutter and scaled it to be a Creature 7, so as to make the anticipation set up by the bounty poster and Amiri's vibrating in place worth it. With some good use of debuffing actions/spells and Hero Points, they take it down within a couple of rounds, albeit Titus did fall to an attack routine. One lesser healing potion and a soothe later, along with a short breather, and he's fine.

Trophy in hand, they make camp. As they're breaking camp in the morning, a hunter approaches the group to warn them of the dangers of Tuskgutter, only to be offered bacon.

Next stop, the tatzlwyrm lair.

In light of the stated desire of group members to also read books reflecting minority or disadvantaged perspectives, here is a second book nominations thread.

I'm drawing the boundaries of the category as broadly as I can and feel free to include a book (within the length limit of 600 pages) that you think fits within these parameters. Also, diverse or minority or disadvantaged can apply to either or both of author or main character. Of the books of this type we have read so far, Born a Crime and Kindred were the most popular.

Here are some examples of what we might choose. This is not meant to be a set of hard boundaries, just a descriptive exploration.

Books that qualify include but are not limited to: being from a poor or formerly colonized country, being an immigrant or refugee, being a political/ethnic minority such as basque, tibetan, romani or catalan or kurdish, being indigenous, being poor or ethnic minority in a dominant country, being a sexual/gender minority, being disabled etc.

I feel like writing another rant, why not.

I guess it visibly started about the time Windows 10 released and probably earlier with smartphones but it is really going into overdrive lately. Especially with all the AI(it is like exponential being used to mean a lot, really. Words have meanings, being minimally precise is not waste of time) being shoved into everything.

Statistical based autocomplete being added everywhere whether it makes sense or not or whether the user wants it or not. They will get it anyway. It makes sense somewhere, in some situations when the user deliberately invokes that.

Settings that really should be standard user accessible are just not and in very lucky cases there are not too painful workarounds. Just several examples. Search bar in address bar(I could write a rant on this alone, is having to decide before using one or the other really that inconvenient?). Forced internet search in Windows start menu search. Automagically starting downloads without any user involvement. Also defaults such as hiding extensions automatically on Windows explorer.

Constant ui reshuffles, generally for the worse(at least from the point of valuing utility and good sized monitor). Less information, straight up insulting language. Uh, oops something broke. This is prevalent even in Linux on some distros. What the hell, why? What broke? Would it be that much effort to link high level overview and logs locations? Or at least start treating the user like an adult again?

Search engines straight up ignoring the actual query entered. I can get any amount of low quality and irrelevant results(not even one or the other, they have to have it both ways) I want but a relevant result on the first page is a miracle regardless if it is actually useful or not. My guess is they simply throw the text into the nearest mainstream bucket with zero regard for nuance and specificity.

Algorithmic content recommendations. That is to say black box content reshuffling made by entity concerned with ads and engagement. Hiding crowd sourced signs of content helpfulness(dislikes).

Forced internet connection, forced online accounts, forced permanent or regular internet connectivity. Forced updates, forced telemetry.

Inability or strong discouragement to take control of the user owned devices. Smartphones, consoles, smart things generally.

Zero chance of being able to read and understand all of the TOS that are thrown everywhere but a strong pressure to accept them anyway. Sometimes after the end user paid already.

It is not hard to see the benefits for one side but I don't understand end users who embrace this. Do they really think it benefits them? It does not take all that much effort to be a generation or two behind the latest user hostile trends even if opting out completely is next to impossible.

I had a little interaction over at the local ~health.mental monthly meeting that sprouted the idea of trying to create a kind of poetry/illustrated book together.

Original comment, for reference

I moved back to my parent's place, and mentally that has been hard because of past trauma issues related to the place.

But I've come up with many coping mechanisms and meditate a lot. So that has been helping.

But I still cry sometimes.

I think the cadence is kind of sweet and an interesting base to tell small stories (either as part of a larger story or independent) from daily life.

As I wrote there I think having each spread of the book in the same format will drive the point across best: that no matter how life is, sometimes we cry and that's probably a good thing.

Well, let's see if we can come up with similar short stories, or just talk about the idea, or share a drawing that you'd like to show us that you think would fit.

Back in high school when I was writing essays, my teacher always demanded to use justified text, because simple left aligned or right aligned text looked ugly. Even back then as a totally rebellious teenager, I agreed with her. Print has used it for hundreds of years, why shouldn't we?

The web has always resisted this development because it was difficult. Yes, the css property text-align: justify exists, but browser were always missing the crucial functionality of hyphenating words. That led to very ugly justified texts and so called "rivers" of whitespace because the spaces got so large. Begrudingly, I got used to it.

I was surprised to learn that all major browsers support the new hyphens css property since late 2023. This one adds exactly that crucial functionality. I was stunned and immediately tried it out and oh look, the web is so much more beautiful now.

You can try out yourself here on Tildes! Just right click a comment, click "Inspect" and then when the dev console pops up, add

text-align: justify;
hyphens: auto:

to p, which stands for the paragraph html tag and in which all text posts are rendered on Tildes.

It looks so much better! But I do wonder why it hasn't spread around more in the web. Am I the only one? Am I nitpicky? I feel like the improvement is stark and very good for functionally no extra work. I even installed a browser extension which augments a website's css so I could automatically do it on most websites.

Party hit level 3 at the end of the last session. Started tonight's session with an encounter with three hunting spiders (Low threat). Barbarian got inflicted with the poison and managed to stay on stage 3 (2d6 poison, clumsy 2, off-guard) for the majority of the six-round duration, which ran its full course.

Still on the way back to the trading post, they encountered more thylacines (Moderate threat), but they push through that just fine. A wolf approached them as they were walking alongside the great forest and was beckoning them to follow. They did, and were led to a man bleeding out and trapped under a couple of boulders. In the distance they hear crashing and bellowing as something big approaches them. They get the guy out from under the boulder and put an elixir of life in his mouth, which wakes him up. His immediate suspicion of the party allayed, he quickly fills them in on the fact that a troll is approaching and tells them to use fire or acid. Also don't let it get its hands on you.

The fight ended up being a bit of a slaughter due to dice rolls. I kept rolling low, they kept rolling high, so the troll went down at the very end of the second round despite being Creature 6. They nab the cold iron kukri and +1 light hammer from the troll's sack, and the man, a ranger, accompanies them back to the trading post.

They spend a week here doing various things; retraining, crafting, Earning Income. At the end of the week, they get their 70 gold reward from the quests they turned in, as well as the +1 striking bastard sword they'd ordered from a relatively distant city.

After spending some time going over their plans going forward, such as what quests to tackle, they head southwest to pick some radishes for the wife of the tradesman. We ended the session after wrapping up a bandit encounter during the camping portion of the day.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like silly, certifications and socializing. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was documenting this.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Hungarian Grand Prix
Hungaroring
August 1-3, 2025

Next race:

Dutch Grand Prix
Circuit Zandvoort
August 29-31, 2025

I have watched all of Dave Chapelle's specials and I occasionally watch Bill Maher whenever I can stomach his supposed "free speech" show.

Don't remember it verbatim but Dave Chappelle made fun of the trans community and took an empathetic approach to individuals such as J. Rowling who view the trans issue as a threat to womanhood (or something to that effect). He also however expressed support for a trans-woman being allowed to use a woman's bathroom so his opinions on this subject seem a bit mixed.

However, Bill Maher acts as if trans issue is the biggest issue of our time and that its the real reason that Kamala Harris lost the election. And is opposed to any sort of gender-affirming care as far as I can tell and thinks that cause L.A. has more people who identify as trans than Texas, that it's almost mostly a geographically based fad and what not. I will also never forget a clip of his show where him and Piers Morgan were telling Katie Porter about the threat that trans-women have to cis-women. It struck me as funny that 2 white dudes decided to take it upon themselves to tell a woman that trans-women pose a threat to her and she was just like ".....no I think I'm fine.".

But the release of Chappelle's specials were met with protests at the Netflix headquarters, whereas I don't remember people ever protesting in front of Bill Maher's studio even though I think he's far more in the camp of "trans movement has gone way too far" and says far more things that I would assume they find offensive or upsetting. what gives?

This is the sixteenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. Our next book will be Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut at the end of August.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.

And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

Just wanted to share an update on the stuff I overshared in this thread nearly a month ago.

It's been an incredibly long, frustrating, but successful month. Within a few days of writing that post, we took my son to the doctor and I just explained everything going on. The doctor seemed as unsure as we were whether my son was experiencing illness or anxiety, so she decided to tackle both. He got some medication for the stomach issues and we got the ball rolling on getting him into therapy.

The following few weeks were very hit-and-miss. I tried to get him to drive with me on little errands here and there throughout the week to get him out of the house, comfortable in the car, and to try to work through the fear he was experiencing. At first it would take quite a lot of convincing and sometimes I got frustrated and acted like an idiot. Eventually we got to a point where the convincing took less time and resulted in less tears (and frustration). But we are at a point where he's getting better at calming himself down and going in the car even if he's a little scared.

We still haven't made much progress with getting him in the car with his sister though. We've done a few trips to the nearby park all together, but my wife had to sit between them to calm him down. Likewise, he's still hesitant to sleep in the same room as her (they share a room for now). And again, it has nothing to do with her, aside from her overreacting to him being upset and him being upset by that. It's a vicious cycle. Honestly this is the most difficult part right now because it's making doing anything really complicated. We literally cannot do family trips anywhere without taking two vehicles. More on this later.

One of my biggest concerns in the other thread was that he was scheduled for eye surgery toward the end of the month and pre/post op appointments and the surgery itself would require a lot of driving. I'm happy to report that he handled every single car trip relating to it like a champ. And the surgery itself was a success, and recovery is going really well. Also apparently thanks to COVID, parents are no longer allowed to go back to the operating room until their child falls asleep, which we didn't realize until a few seconds before they took him back. Which was really difficult for us as parents and for him as well. He keep mentioning it and I try to talk him through and explain that we didn't know and that we're sorry, but wouldn't have let him go if we didn't know the doctor and nurses would be taking good care of him.

And he had his first therapy appointment this morning. It was just an intake appointment so the therapist could get a feel for what's going on and to get to know my son a little bit. But I feel a lot better about things than I did a month ago. I know we still have a lot of struggle and work ahead of us (he starts 1st grade next month...Getting him and his sister there is going to be interesting).

I think the next few weeks are going to be spent working on getting him and his sister together in the car more. We're already working on the bedtime issue. The last two nights we had them together in the same room to read a bedtime story together and then afterwards she slept elsewhere. Just trying to baby step our way toward solving that problem.

Lastly, I wanted to thank you all for your support and comments in the original thread. It was very helpful to be able to write everything out and get some validation, advice, etc.

What is something that's been eating at you that you haven't found the right place to share yet?

Long rants, short grumblings, and everything in between is welcome. Topics can be serious or silly.

Please specify if you do not want responses and prefer to use this as a venue to scream into the void.