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.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

What is a "Screenless Day"?

Tildes "Screenless Day" is a simple event aimed at encouraging people to take a temporary step away from toxic or consuming aspects of technology and spend their time and energies elsewhere.

When is it?

It takes place over the weekend starting on the first Friday of each month. Participants will choose that Friday, Saturday, or Sunday to take as their screenless day -- whichever works best for their schedule.

Some people might not be able to participate in that window, and that's fine too. They can choose to shift their day earlier or later as needed. It is also completely fine (and encouraged!) to take personal screenless days separate from the event if you like. This thread will be posted the first weekend of each month, but it is open for comments the entire month.

Does it have to be truly "screenless"?

"Screenless" is an ideal, not a mandate. The spirit of the day is to deliberately step away from toxic or consuming aspects of technology, and what that means is different for each person. Thus, it is up to each participant to determine what "screenless" means to them. Some might only choose to not use social media for a day; some might choose to eliminate all "screens" but still use their ereader; some may maintain some screen use but only for necessity (e.g. work; classes; GPS; etc.). Some might get rid of screens entirely, or go fully "unplugged" for the day.

How do I participate?

You do not have to do anything formal at all to participate -- simply take your screenless day in whatever way is best for you!

If you’d like to, use this thread to share plans for your upcoming screenless day or summaries/reflections about it once it’s over.

Can I chat in this thread if I'm not participating?

Yes! The more, the merrier! Discussion from anyone, participant or non-participant alike, is welcome. Though, do understand that it might take a bit longer than normal for some people to respond. :)

Okay, I’ve been bombarding all of you with article after article of what other award shows have been nominating and awarding.

Here are the nominations for what I had in November. It’s interesting to see how much has changed, sadly it seems like The Last Duel is going to end up with zero awards.

Anyways, if you have an Oscar pool going what I’m about to give you would probably put you at the top if your friends don’t follow awards. I did place 30 out of 2200 on Goldderby for my BAFTA nomination predictions so there’s that.

Here’s what I have, in order of what is most likely to win as of right now:

Best Picture

1. The Power of the Dog
2. Belfast
3. Licorice Pizza
4. Dune
5. Don’t Look Up
6. West Side Story
7. King Richard
8. CODA
9. tick, tick... BOOM!
10. Being the Ricardos

Alternative choice: House of Gucci

Best Director

1. Jane Campion - The Power of the Dog
2. Paul Thomas Anderson - Licorice Pizza
3. Denis Villeneuve - Dune
4. Kenneth Branagh - Belfast
5. Steven Spielberg - West Side Story

Alternative choice: Adam McKay - Don’t Look Up

Best Lead Actor

1. Will Smith - King Richard
2. Benedict Cumberbatch - The Power of the Dog
3. Andrew Garfield - tick, tick... BOOM!
4. Denzel Washington - The Tragedy of Macbeth
5. Leonardo DiCaprio - Don’t Look Up

Alternative choice: Javier Bardem - Being the Ricardos

Best Lead Actress

1. Lady Gaga - House of Gucci
2. Alana Haim - Licorice Pizza
3. Nicole Kidman - Being the Ricardos
4. Jessica Chastain - The Eyes of Tammy Faye
5. Olivia Colman - The Lost Daughter

Alternative choice: Rachel Zegler - West Side Story

Best Supporting Actor

1. Kodi Smit-Mcphee - The Power of the Dog
2. Ciaran Hinds - Belfast
3. Troy Kotsure - CODA
4. Bradley Cooper - Licorice Pizza
5. Jared Leto - House of Gucci

Alternative choice: Jamie Dornan - Belfast

Best Supporting Actress

1. Ariana DeBose - West Side Story
2. Aunjuane Ellis - King Richard
3. Caitriona Balfe - Belfast
4. Kirsten Dunst - The Power of the Dog
5. Cate Blanchett - Don’t Look Up

Note: I’m actually taking a big risk in predicting Blanchett, Ruth Negga - Passing seems to be the most obvious fifth choice.

Best Original Screenplay

1. Licorice Pizza
2. Belfast
3. Don’t Look Up
4. King Richard
5. Being the Ricardos

Best Adapted Screenplay

1. The Power of the Dog
2. CODA
3. Dune
4. The Lost Daughter
5. West Side Story

Alternative choice: tick, tick... BOOM!

Best Cinematography

1. Dune
2. The Tragedy of Macbeth
3. The Power of the Dog
4. West Side Story
5. Belfast

Alternative choice: Nightmare Alley

Best Film Editing

1. Dune
2. Belfast
3. Licorice Pizza
4. The Power of the Dog
5. West Side Story

Alternative choice: Don’t Look Up

Best Costume Design

1. Cruella
2. Dune
3. West Side Story
4. House of Gucci
5. Nightmare Alley

Alt: Cyrano

Best Hair and Makeup

1. House of Gucci
2. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
3. Dune
4. Cruella
5. Coming 2 America

Alt: Cyrano

Best Production Design

1. Dune
2. West Side Story
3. The Tragedy of Macbeth
4. Nightmare Alley
5. The French Dispatch

Alt: Licorice Pizza

Best Original Score

1. Dune
2. The Power of the Dog
3. Don’t Look Up
4. The French Dispatch
5. Encanto

Alt: Being the Ricardos

Best Original Song

1. No Time To Die from No Time To Die
2. Dos Oruguitas from Encanto
3. Just Look Up from Don’t Look Up
4. Be Alive from King Richard
5. Down to Joy from Belfast

Alt: Guns Go Bang from The Harder They Fall

Best Sound

1. Dune
2. West Side Story
3. No Time To Die
4. The Power of the Dog
5. Spider-Man: No Way Home

Alt: A Quiet Place Part II

Best Visual Effects

1. Dune
2. Spider-Man: No Way Home
3. No Time To Die
4. Godzilla vs Kong
5. The Matrix: Resurrections

Alt: Shang-Chi and the legend of the Ten Rings.

Best Animated Feature

1. Encanto
2. Flee
3. Luca
4. The Mitchell’s vs the Machines
5. Raya and the Last Dragon

Alt: Belle

Best Documentary Feature

1. Summer of Soul
2. Flee
3. The Rescue
4. Procession
5. Ascension

Best International Feature

1. Drive My Car
2. The Hand of God
3. Flee
4. A Hero
5. The Worst Person in the World

And those are all the categories. Oscar nominations will be announced on the 8th and of course I will be posting them.

I'm talking about games like the Fallouts, The Outer Worlds, some Telltale games, and many RPGs in which your decisions impact the outcomes of the NPCs and the world as a whole.

Do you make decisions based on what you think would be coherent with the character? Do you try to optimize your mechanical advantages? Are you consistent with your real world ethics, or do you like to pretend to be bad and put the world on fire? When available, do you focus on sex and/or romance? Or are you mostly concerned on what you think will make for a better story?

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

I'm curious what experiences people who game on linux have had, what your favorite distros are, and why. Mind sharing them in this thread? I'm in the market.

My old GTX770 just bit the dust. I picked up a Radeon 6600 to replace it, only to discover after installing it that while the 6600XT has Windows 7 drivers, the 6600 itself does not. The desktop works, but that's it. A little strange, but not entirely unexpected.

My ancient frankenstein Win 7 Enterprise has got to go (into a VM, already on its way) and there is simply no way in hell I will ever use any version of the spyware/bloatware mess that Windows has become today. They lost me forever the second they put a marketplace and ads into my start menu. Ain't nobody got time for that, or at least, I don't.

That means it's finally Linux time, for real - no going back. I'm rather excited. :D

Side note: My original install date for Windows 7 Enterprise was 11-12-2011, it's lasted nearly eleven years without a BSOD or the need to reinstall. They really did fix windows decay syndrome in v7. That's the longest I've ever had a desktop OS last. Can any desktop linux distro manage to go that long, I wonder?

The last time I ran a linux daily driver was Ubuntu for two years around '08, until I got sick of the pulseaudio issues. I'm not worried about that anymore, linux is ready for primetime now. That begs the question of which distro to use. I've toyed with or supported just about all of them at work (mint, redhat, suse, ubuntu, arch, deb, slack just to name a few). I'm a sysadmin by trade so I'm not phased by the learning curve, I know linux cold already.

It's more a question of which distro is going to bother me the least acting as my daily driver. I like to tinker at work, but if I have to do it all the time at home I get cranky. I prefer the 'it just works' experience. The primary requirement is linux gaming, as this is my main gaming rig. That means lots of Skyrim Special Edition, Stellaris, Rimworld, emulators, etc.

There's so many choices out there I'm not sure how to tell which one is the best and I don't particularly feel like putting a dozen of them through their paces over a month to find out - so I'm asking Tildes. ;) I don't mind trying a couple. Steam is required. Good support for WINE is a bonus. Ditto virtual desktop support - is Compiz still a thing or is there something better?

Here are the system specs. I'm sure it's all fully linux compatible.

1. Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z
2. Intel i7 2600K (3.2GHz, OC'ed to 4.2GHz with a Noctua air cooler, never breaks 60'C)
3. Sapphire RX6600 GPU w 8GB of DDR6
4. 16GB of G.Skill DDR3 2400MHz memory
5. 500GB Samsung SSD, 4x4TB WD Red NAS drives

Yeah, it's long in the tooth, and I'm glad I went for the Z/K combo so the new GPU isn't entirely gimped plugged into a much older PCIe 2.0 mainboard. I'll pick up a Ryzen sometime to replace it, but not until after the chip shortage shakes out. It was hard enough getting that 6600 in this market without getting scalped.

The following is an observation that may be obvious to some, but which I didn't fully realize the extent of until recently.

Everything has a lifetime. If you grok this, you are able to reason about everything a lot more efficiently. At work, in life, everywhere. I initially started thinking about this in the realm of software engineering, but this is a universally-applicable observation.

In code, it's useful to think about operational lifetimes: How long will each operation take? How long should it take? When should it time out? We often call these "TTL" or "time to live". If you request some data from https://example.com/data.json, and it does not answer within the designated TTL (of your choice), you proceed to a failsafe.

Not employing TTLs is often the root cause of issues in fault-sensitive designs. Connections piling up, stuck UIs on spotty connections, etc.

Then there is the concept of "data lifetime". That is often controlled not by time but by size, for example how many items can be present in a bucket, or how large overall the bucket can be, or both. You may have seen this in your various trash folders on desktop, email clients etc: "Delete items after x days", "Limit bin size to 1 GiB".
Once again, not putting a lifetime in place is the root cause of many issues such as memory leaks, UIs becoming less and less responsive over time, unusable software that doesn't test for edge cases ("what do you mean you have 1200 tabs open in Chrome?"), and so on.

Setting the lifetime on something is a type of contract. By determining an "edge", you are now able to test "edge cases". By saying "You can have up to 1 million items in this folder", you're also saying you have (or at least should have) tested the edge cases of 1 million items, and what happens when you hit the limit.

You see this in the physical world as well, you may recognize the concept as a tolerance, or a limit. "This elevator has been certified for up to 10 people, or 1000kg". It doesn't mean it won't work beyond that, but there is a contract of undefined behaviour when you exceed the limits.

What happens when you don't have limits?
Well, this article from the other day is an excellent example. The autobahn famously doesn't have speed limits. What did they expect?

What happens when you don't have lifetimes? Well, remember how Google is shutting down free legacy GSuite? They promised "free for life" accounts and had to back down after realizing the accumulated maintenance burden incurred by not putting a real lifetime on that promise.
Or the slightly famous $250,000 Unlimited Flight Pass.

I'll give you the example that changed the way I see the world: My first company's CEO told me the (unverified) story of how, in 2015, when Verizon was doing due diligence on AOL before acquiring it, the value of AOL was significantly reduced because of its "free minutes trial CDs" with no expiry date on them. Because of the lack of an expiry date on them, all those trial CDs would have to be honored, and thus were "debt". You couldn't wait them out. The acquisition price was thus much lower.

I apply this principle religiously in life, and try to understand the lifetime of everything I deal with. Especially things I purchase. You do it as well, maybe not consciously, but when you buy a phone and think "I want a phone that will last me at least 3 years", "at least 5 years", etc. You are giving the phone a lifetime, which allows you to divide its cost by the number of years you will keep it and think "by having a phone, I have to support a recurring cost of x dollars per year".

The recently-discussed article "Everything must be paid for twice (HN discussion)" touches upon the subject, though not as elegantly as I'd like it to. Indeed, thinking about lifetimes should force you to think about the "end of life" scenario, which touches upon questions of recycling for example. Efficient systems will handle end-of-life scenarios by reusing/recycling as much as possible, which allows for cost reduction. The reason you don't have to constantly purchase new hard drives is because you're allowed to delete things you no longer need, reusing existing space. But the hard drive itself has a lifetime, which is determined both by its usage (it won't last forever) as well as how useful it is (as storage becomes cheaper, storage requirements increase, following Braess's paradox, which means that 1GB hard drive that was once "more than you could ever need" is now utterly useless.

I invite you to think about these concepts everywhere, and see how relevant they are. Are you upset your latest appliance already broke down? Thinking of purchasing extended warranty on the next one? Wondering what you should buy in bulk? Are subscriptions better or worse than versioned software licenses? How long do you want to keep those photos around? Why did the restaurant across the street change ownership three times in the last two years? Do you think the Simpsons have had too many seasons? When are you gonna take down that christmas tree?

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 a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I don't use Windows 10 all that much, but there's a Windows laptop in the house that I use from time to time.

I generally wait like a year before upgrading, but I heard Windows 11 has better support for running Linux GUI applications with the Windows Linux Subsystem 2. Command-line Emacs is fine but is not exactly the same and there is no clipboard integration. That is the sole reason I'm thinking of upgrading. I don't care about any details or aesthetic changes, since I'll just make everything look and feel more like Windows 7 anyway. I just wanna know if it's stable enough, and if it will get in my way.

Thanks!