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    • Showing only topics with the tag "internet". Back to normal view

    13. What cool online services should I sign up for while I have a burner phone?

      ~tech Ask (recommendations)
      I have a burner phone for the next month. (Lately a number of services refuse to accept my google voice number, and I refuse to share my actual number.) Are there any cool services I should try...

      I have a burner phone for the next month.

      (Lately a number of services refuse to accept my google voice number, and I refuse to share my actual number.)

      Are there any cool services I should try out that maybe require a phone number to sign up?

      5 votes

    17. Where do you acquire books?

      ~books Ask (recommendations)
      Hello! I do a fair bit of my reading via Libby (I have memberships at the NYPL and Brooklyn Public Library) but I like to pick up some physical copies as well. I've spent some time in a couple of...

      Hello! I do a fair bit of my reading via Libby (I have memberships at the NYPL and Brooklyn Public Library) but I like to pick up some physical copies as well. I've spent some time in a couple of NYC bookstores but I'm curious about online portals folks here use to buy books. I've switched to bookshop.org for new books but what's the go to for used books?

      Thanks!

      20 votes

    27. The Internet as a superorganism AI ... thoughts?

      ~talk Text 267 words
      This thought just popped into my head, so it's still quite nebulous, but I want to float it out here, see what other's have to say about it, before I really dive into it. Superorganisms are things...

      This thought just popped into my head, so it's still quite nebulous, but I want to float it out here, see what other's have to say about it, before I really dive into it.

      Superorganisms are things like ant and termite colonies and beehives ... and, for the sci-fi minded, the Borg. The theory/idea is that the individual ants/termites/bees are not actually independent living beings (or at least, not exclusively), but closer to cells in a larger, distributed body, with a distributed intellect driving the colony to thrive and reproduce, which only happens when, eg, the beehive throws a swarm that eventually becomes a new beehive.

      The "Earth as Gaia" theory is comparable, suggesting that all of the life forms on Earth form an amorphous, distributed superintelligence that is trying to reproduce ... which would happen once humans colonize Mars, or meteor strikes on the Earth successfully transfer living organisms to another celestial body where life ultimately takes root.

      So ... you see where I'm going with this? Is it a feasible idea to consider the Internet itself as a nascent AI superorganism, made up of both the humans (and, increasingly, the bots) that use it, as well as the assorted hardware and software that comprises it?

      I'm confident I'm not the first person to entertain this idea, and I expect that, as soon as I start searching the 'Net for this topic, I'll find plenty on it. Just wanted to post the idea while it was still just my idea.

      And of course, if I never post here again ... assume the Internet took me out.

      9 votes

    31. Megathread: April Fools' Day 2022 on the internet

      ~talk Ask
      As is tradition, here's the (late) thread to collect this year's April Fools' events: Over the next day or so, the internet will be filled with jokes, pranks, fake "announcements" from companies,...

      As is tradition, here's the (late) thread to collect this year's April Fools' events:

      Over the next day or so, the internet will be filled with jokes, pranks, fake "announcements" from companies, fun interactive activities, games, and so on. A lot of these can be quite clever and interesting so I think posting about them in general is fine, but in the interest of preventing them from completely taking over Tildes, let's try to keep as many of them restricted to this thread as possible. Ideally, a separate top-level comment for each individual item would be good.

      If something particularly discussion-worthy comes up (like an ARG or activity that a lot of people want to talk about), a separate thread is reasonable, but please make sure it has the "april fools day" tag. That way, if anyone wants to avoid seeing the April Fools' Day threads, they can use the topic tag filters and filter that tag out.

      I'm going to use the "official" styling for this topic (that's usually only for ~tildes.official topics) to make it stand out more to try to encourage people to notice it. If you notice people making individual topics for April Fools' Day things that don't really warrant their own topic, please (nicely) encourage them to delete and post in here instead.

      34 votes

    32. Radio streams! I need more.

      ~music Ask (recommendations)
      I did a fresh install of Foobar2000 [1] for the first time since it came out. I'm rebuilding playlists and figured I'd do some digging for some new ones. My old list had a bunch from somafm,...

      I did a fresh install of Foobar2000 [1] for the first time since it came out. I'm rebuilding playlists and figured I'd do some digging for some new ones. My old list had a bunch from somafm, Luxuria, the BBC ones, and a few others. Here's a list of some ones I dug up tonight. If you have any other good ones that are indie, hip hop, jazz, exotica, or really well-curated EDM, list 'em up! Bonus points for direct links to the stream.

      [1] my foobar2000 setup with a custom W10 high contrast theme

      With the default interface, foobar2000 has some ugly white panels like this. I could patch uxtheme.dll, but its a pain if you forget to restore it before an update kicks in. To get around this, I made my own high contrast Dracula theme, which looks kind of like a UI you'd see on TV.

      This system only runs Kodi and Foobar2000. I would recommend this route for anyone who actually wants to use the system due to high contrast themes taking over the entire color scheme for everything.

      8 votes

    40. Looking for a good map of the internet

      ~comp Text 69 words
      I did some cursory Googling but found stuff that I'm not looking for (maps of the web and traceroutes hooked up to GeoIP lookups). Is there a resource that will show me the internet as a series of...

      I did some cursory Googling but found stuff that I'm not looking for (maps of the web and traceroutes hooked up to GeoIP lookups). Is there a resource that will show me the internet as a series of interconnected hops? Preferably with information on the connections between nodes that indicates the amount of traffic. I'm interested in the topography of the internet itself - not physically where hops are located.

      7 votes