The title says it all, really.

Today there was a story about the Flordia Department of Education rejecting a record number of books for containing Critical Race Theory. But when I read the article it said that it was rejecting these books for other things - for Common Core and for a thing called Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL.

SEL is not a term I'm familiar with, so I looked it up. There's an organization that advocates for it called CASEL who has a more in-depth writeup, but to put things as simply as possible, it's the idea that lesson plans should include material to improve a person's social and emotional growth and is largely concerned with students' mental health. I couldn't understand why anyone would have a problem with this kind of thing; kids today are put through a lot of stressful situations and it looks like mental health for children has been an issue that has exploded over the past few years. So I found and read an article about why it's controversial and I'm practically in tears over here.

Right now we are living in a world where children are tortured so much that they attempt to kill themselves and there are grown adults - legitimate parents of their own children - who are fighting against the people who are trying to help them. And all of the answers to why they are doing this are just absolutely insane to me. Some of them don't want their children to realize they were racist. Some of them don't want to ever discover the concept of sexuality or gender identity for fear that their child might not be straight cis baby factories. But overall, it seems like they oppose it because it threatens their control over their children, as if they were puppets to command.

I already knew how fucked up they were when they were trying to pass that Don't Say Gay bill, but this is just absolutely next level insanity. I'm sure they don't realize that the concept of SEL exists largely because there are so many children in the world who have had to deal with parents who think and act like these people do.

Utah Parents Unite, an activist group that says it’s fighting indoctrination and mask mandates in schools, urged its members to lobby against a bill to expand suicide prevention programs to elementary schools, where, the group said, “suicides are not happening.” (National data obtained by NBC News show that the number of children ages 6-12 who visited children’s hospitals for suicidal thoughts or self-harm has more than doubled since 2016.)

ARGH!

Two nights ago I decided on a whim to watch Jojo Rabbit on Disney+, since I love Taiki Waititi, and I remember hearing good things about it when it was first released a few years ago. But, weirdly, I didn't actually know much about it other than him having directed it.

So imagine my shock, horror, and surprise when I finally started watching it and learned it was a comedy-drama about a Hitler youth!!! I thought it was just about boy scouts or something, similar to Moonrise Kingdom. And I was even more surprised when I almost immediately got over my shock and started enjoying it despite how dark and touchy the subject matter was. It had just the right amount of irreverence for the subject to get me past my initial hesitance, and had enough deeply human, incredibly touching, and painfully poignant moments to get me completely engrossed in it. And by the end I was crying like a baby when he noticed the shoes, and again in the final scenes. (keeping it vague in case others haven't seen it yet)

Several days later and I'm still thinking about it. That's how deeply it affected me. So, needless to say, I highly highly highly recommend watching it, if you haven't seen it yet... especially in light of recent events in Russia and Ukraine, which a lot of the things shown in the movie sadly remind me of.

Has anyone else here seen it? If so, what did you think about it?

p.s. Taika Waititi as Hitler was insanely, darkly hilarious, and the final scene with him was incredibly satisfying. "Fuck off, Hitler!"

I'll start this post off by summarizing my hair loss experience.

When I was 18, a few months shy of 19, I went to the barber and there was a miscommunication and the barber ended up buzzing my hair off. This is the first time that I was able to see my hairline in a while and I saw that it was higher than I remembered. I was scared at first, I couldn't believe that my hairline was receding. But then I read a few things figures maybe it was just maturing, and then I eventually forgot. Actually a few months later I was back thinking to whether I was losing my hair or not. I talked to a cousin of mine and he said something about a pill that he was taking but that it had a possible side effect of erectile dysfunction. I wasn't going to take a chance on that when I wasn't even sure if I was actually balding.

The next year and a half, I stop thinking about hair loss. It's like I had my memory wiped of that moment, probably due to stress from school. The only thing that happened is that I thought to myself was "man my hair is kind of weird right now." And also I had developed a scalp issue, which I later found out was psoriasis also due to stress.

So, right before the pandemic hits in February 2020, me and my dad go have lunch at this restaurant. I take a shower and go out. My hair is still wet by the time we go to the restaurant. My dad looks up at my hair and asks "are you losing your hair?" And that's when I realized that I was indeed going bald. For the next three months, I was going through all the stages of grief. I was wildly depressed and anxious. I did some research into possible treatments. It took me a while to learn (or re-learn) about the pill known as finasteride. I then find out about a website where you can buy prescription meds without a prescription shipped over from India so I buy finasteride from there and I started treatment on May 1st 2020. I was 20 years old. I then go to the dermatologist two months later and they prescribe me Dutasteride which I have been on ever since.

My initial side effect on the drug was watery semen, which cleared up a few weeks after starting the drug. My hair has re-grown a lot. It's back to it's original thickness, and my hairline has made a rather substantial comeback. It's not all back, but enough to the point where the average person wouldn't know I'm balding anymore.

Let me know if you have any questions. I would love to post pictures, but I rather not if that's okay with everyone.

Hello everyone,

This will be a long post because I want to give my post the proper context. I apologize in advance for taking your time.

About five months ago, with the help of relatively high ceiling of Windows 11's system requirements, I finally pushed myself to use Linux exclusively on my desktop. It was a decision between using Windows LTSC or Linux and I went with the better long term option.

I am not a programmer but I'm also not unfamiliar with the Linux world. I believe I've used one distro or another on a spare computer for shorts period of time since at least 2008. But those use cases have always been to satisfy the curious side of my brain as I am always interested in technology. So after installing distros ranging from Ubuntu to Arch, my curiosity waned enough to never look deeper into how these systems work. They were, after all, a hobby project on a spare computer that was often gathering dust.

When I decided to switch exclusively to Linux, the next decision I had to make was to pick a distro. Naturally, I looked for the established players first. Ubuntu was the obvious choice because it has long been the distro for newbies and there are a lot of guides on the internet if I ever needed help, which was inevitable. But then I read about snaps and thought that was a deal breaker. I was moving to Linux specifically because I don't want things shoved down my throat. I had no intention to relive that¹.

So Ubuntu was a no go, but I was certain I wanted a Debian based distro as their support and software availability was unmatched, maybe save for Arch². At this point, why not Debian right? It's known for being rock solid and it's Debian itself, not some derivation. Well, because I had various issues with Debian before. These issues were always fundamental and not very specific too, so I didn't want to risk wasting a lot of time fixing things I didn't understand, only for them to break again after a couple of days. Then I came across Pop!_OS, which seemed like a perfect fit. It was Ubuntu without its worst parts, came with Nvidia drivers and it had a company behind it that seemed to be committed to Linux. I installed it and everything just worked. I had zero issues.

But then I started getting that FOMO itch again. GNOME 42 was out and it looked great, but Pop!_OS was two versions behind. I also found out that they're working on their own DE, which might end up being great (it looked nice) but I didn't want to leave an established player like GNOME behind, including all the benefits you get from its wonderful extensions. I started looking for other distos again and Fedora caught my eye. I was obviously aware of Fedora, I even used it once back when YUM was still a thing, but it didn't leave a lasting impression on me. The fact that it wasn't a Debian based distro was also a disadvantage because that meant something different and at this stage of dipping my toes into Linux, I didn't think different might be the best way to go for me. Still, despite my best judgment, I installed Fedora on a USB and used it live. When my gut feeling was confirmed by my research about how Fedora leaves things as stock as possible and is ahead of the curve in terms of upcoming technology (btrfs, PulseAudio, Wayland et al.³) without sacrificing on stability, I was hooked.

After renewing my Timeshift backup, I formatted my Pop!_OS system and installed Fedora. The installation process could use a facelift, but it handled everything perfectly. I didn't even have some of the issues I had with Pop!_OS right after installation. It was literally problem free. I'm now on day #3 of using Fedora and the experience remains the same. The only issue I had to deal with was trying to get Timeshift to work (apparently it doesn't play nice with btrfs on Fedora), but instead of wasting my time with that, I just installed Déjà Dup and I'm good to go again. Barring any drastic issues, I don't plan on changing my distro again.

Now, onto my plea for guidance.

I'm looking for comprehensive resources that will teach me how Linux works under the hood. Considering my non-programming background, I'd appreciate it if the language is approachable. The reason why I want this, for one thing, is to learn more about the system I'm planning to use probably for the rest of my life (in tandem with macOS) but also, I want to do some cool stuff Linux allows users to do.

Just to give a quick example. Yesterday, I installed Rofi, which is, besides many other things, an app launcher. I got it to work just fine, I even got a configuration of my own with a theme of my choosing, but when it comes to using some scripts, I just couldn't do it. Every video I watched on YouTube told me how easy it is to use scripts with it as if it's a self-explanatory thing, but I was simply clueless. There was a lot of lingo thrown around like environment variables, setting up $PATH, making the scripts executable with chmod etc. I have very little knowledge of these things. I want to learn what they are, why they exist, and how they all tie together. I want to learn how /etc/ is different than /usr/ and the difference between X11 and some DE (or if they're even in the same category of things). Now, at the risk of sounding impatient and maybe even worse, I also don't want to go way too deep into these things. I am not, after all, trying to become a kernel developer. I just want to be better informed.

There are a lot of information on the internet but most of this information is scattered and out of context. If I try to learn more about one thing, I'm bombarded about other things that I don't know, so in the end I learn nothing. In short, I'm looking for a comprehensive, entry level video series or a book about Linux written in an easy to understand language that assumes no prior knowledge.

Additionally, I'd appreciate any website, YouTube channel and what have you to keep up with recent developments in Linux. I already found a couple as there are plenty of them, but I'd like to learn more about how people here keep up with this fast changing environment.

Thank you for reading and sorry for being so verbose! 😊

^{1: I know you can remove snaps, but I didn't want to deal with the hassle of any possible issues deleting a core system functionally might bring about.
2: Despite finding its approach fascinating, I had no intention to get into Arch because it's a rolling distro and I didn't want an advanced system that can break at any moment in the hands of a novice like myself.
3: To be clear, I don't know how most of these technologies are better than alternatives, but the Linux community at large seems to think they're drastically better than alternatives and are the future.}

I'm making a video game, which is sort of a mixture of a puzzle game and interactive fiction. I'm a little uncertain about some name and pronoun choices that I currently offer to the player and I thought that you guys might be able to help me.

The game is in English. At the beginning of the game, the player chooses the main character's name and pronoun. This is presented through two screens that offer the choices through textual narrative. It goes something like this, with [brackets] marking the options that the player can currently choose between.

This is the story of...
[...Alice Aster.]
[...Alan Aster.]
[...Al Aster.]

It is...
[...her story.]
[...his story.]
[...their story.]

Detached from the wider narrative context, this method may seem clunky, but I believe it works within the game itself. Mechanically, that is. I'm less sure about the options that I'm offering.

The player can choose any of the three options in the first screen and again any in the second, regardless of what they chose in the first. This affects the player character's name and pronouns used throughout the game.

Now, there clearly are also many other pronouns that people identify with in English, just like there are many other names. However, for technical and design reasons, it would be challenging for me to have the player freely type in their preferred name or pronouns, and neither can I really present a long list of options. At the same time, by condensing all non-binary choices into the most common (?) "their" and by assuming that "her" also equates to "she" and so on, I wonder if I end up coming across as someone who thinks they are on top of things, but clearly has only a very superficial understanding of the topic. Which, to be honest, might not be that far from the truth.

Similarly, of the three names offered, "Al" is intended as a more gender-neutral or non-binary option than the other two. Does that make sense? Would there be a better way to handle this? Are there names that better signal non-binary or gender-neutral identity?

Or am I simply approaching this wrong?

The game itself does not deal with gender identity. As you can see, I'm not the right person to write about the topic. The choice of gender in fact has relatively little effect on the story itself. The player also has no choice over other matters of identity, including their character's cultural background or family structure. The character is not intended to be the player, but someone whose story the player follows. But it still feels important for me and for the story to offer a choice about the name and the pronoun. And I wouldn't be comfortable with it being just a "traditional" choice between male and female, as it would quite explicitly imply and reinforce assumptions about the world that I think we should move away from as a society.

Not that my game is of course going to change the world in any meaningful way. But having worked on it for about six years now, it has been one long personal learning experience for me. And this feels like another opportunity to understand something better.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts and advice.

Choose one album
that you love
that you think deserves more love

Tell us what it is, and why.

Additional Details

I notice this primarily with the YouTube videos. I've started to notice that the videos I see posted in here I have already had recommended to me by YouTube. And I realize it must be because when I watch a video here, the YouTube algorithm decides I'm interested in that kind of thing. So, functionally, by posting and interacting with content in Tildes we are tuning the various algorithmic recommendation feeds that we interact with to view us all similarly.

It's just an interesting side effect I noticed and some food for thought about the effectiveness of a link aggregator or discussion forum at surfacing novel, interesting content we might not find otherwise. In part, this could just be an effect of Tildes being kind of small and having lots of self-selection biases for its user population. Perhaps if it was more diverse we'd be exposed to more things that break the mold and recommendation algorithms won't be able to pin it all down as easily. In fact, we may be able to use this effect as a way to test the breadth and diversity of content and types of people a site is attracting.

I bought a colour eInk screen last summer and had a bit of fun getting it to talk to my shared Google calendar that runs our house. Recently I finally got around to making a frame for it so it can sit somewhere prominent and tell us about upcoming events. It's basically just a raspberry pi zero hat, so it's debian underneath. There's some slightly hacky python to make it (a) talk to Google, (b) mung their API output into something useful, which turned out to be HTML which is then "screenshotted" to create a PNG which can be sent to the eInk display. Updating takes about 30 seconds in total, partly because the pi zero is slow and partly because the refresh rate of the screen is in double-digit seconds. Works in full sunlight though, which is nice, and it's a much nicer screen than it looks in photos.

Screen is this one here. Pi Zero is a pi zero, the frame is flamed oak, the base is beech, the copper is copper. If there are no events in the next week, it shows a random picture instead (and boy, if I thought rendering html was slow on a zero that's nothing on 7-colour dithering a jpg!)

Like the title says, I'm curious if anyone has experience encountering digital resumes. Whether you're an employer or you've used a digital resume yourself how well did it work? Were you more likely to hire a candidate because they had a well-rounded website that showed off their skills or was it an immediate discard because it didn't conform to normal practices.

I'm graduating with my MS in organic chemistry this May, and I'm trying to work my way in the job market. A website/blog sounds appealing to me because I can show off data annotations and analyses from failed reactions that normally aren't discussed in papers, so I think it would be a good fit.

What I mean is, if two clients of a provider upload the same data, do the hosts identify the match and create only references to the identical data for the multiple clients, or do they simply have two copies of the same data on their server?

Caveat: I am merely geeky.

What prompted the thought was an article maybe on /. that Russia might run out of data storage, and this would impact entertainment providers. Seems a good way to save space if that's an issue.

I would guess not, as storage is pretty cheap these days (or was at least in the before times), and it would raise privacy and possibly copyright issues. But a semi-scrupulous and miserly provider might consider it I suppose. Anyone here have any insights or knowledges?

I thought I'd take the time to post about a series I've been looking forward to for over a year now.

Hidden is a fantastic crime drama set in Wales, and a third series was announced early last year. The Welsh version, Craith, aired late last year. This week, the bi-lingual version airs on BBC One Wales and BBC Four. In my opinion it's the perfect crime drama: set in the mountains of North Wales, with a great soundtrack and unconventional storyline. Some shows focus only on the investigation and the victim, who probably just admits to the crime at the end. Not so here.

Sian Reese-Willams, who plays DCI Cadi John, explained what the series is about back in 2018:

It’s not a classic detective drama in that it deals with the whodunit and the police catching the bad man. It’s much more of a personal drama. It takes time to delve into the lives of everybody that gets caught up in the crime - the detectives, the victims, the family of the victims and even the bad guy. You’re trying to understand him.

It really plays with the idea of nature versus nature and almost tries to twist you into sympathising against your better judgement; it’s exciting and thought provoking. The characters are really interesting and it covers a lot of human emotion.

Here's another interview ahead of the second series.

Series two picks up around nine months after series one ends. We find Cadi trying to deal with the grief of losing her father, while trying to keep her head in her work.

It’s a difficult time for her - just as one begins to come through the initial shock of losing someone and start to try and deal with it, that’s the time that everyone around you starts to forget and move on. She’s also faced with dealing with the estranged daughter of the victim of the case, and the parallels she sees between the two of them are difficult for her to navigate professionally.

The first two series are on iPlayer now, and if you speak Welsh (or like subtitles) the third series is already on S4C Clic under the title Craith. Hidden is on BBC One Wales this Wednesday at 9pm, and BBC Four this Saturday at the same time.

I've decided I'm going to start looking for a new job. I'm a software product manager in the US and will be looking for senior positions, hopefully remote. Has anyone used a service to help find jobs before? This is the first one I've come across and I'm considering it.
https://www.findmyprofession.com/career-finder/

Any thoughts or feedback welcome. Thanks.

The 2022 Backlog Burner Event has officially concluded!

Use this thread to update on your games from the last week of the month, give overall thoughts, and provide feedback about the event itself.

You can view all threads for the event here

People eat a lot of food. So much, in fact, that we tend to overlook exactly how good our food is. In celebration of this (and to get our minds off of the scary stuff), I thought this was a good time to reflect on the good things in life. So I give you this question: what average, everyday supermarket food is secretly fantastic? So fantastic that you could eat it everyday - and probably actually do.

My vote is bread. Bread is so delicious you can practically make a complete meal out of it. But it's also versatile and with just a few more ingredients can be transformed into something even more delicious. Buttered toast is absolutely divine. Everyone has their favorite sandwich, and any of those would also be perfect for this list as well, but you can't have any of them without bread.

I'm also not above ultraprocessed garbage food, so as a bonus suggestion is (bread-adjacent!) premade frozen pizzas. While some people will prefer fresh made pizzas, I've never seen anyone hate frozen pizza altogether, and everyone has a favorite brand. I personally like Totino's; it has a strangely appealing artificial quality to it, and most importantly it's a filling meal that takes zero effort (it can be cooked in the toaster oven without even needing to dirty a pan) and costs only about a dollar.

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?

I want to share with all of you a gift I've been preparing. I love finding good gifts and seeing people's reactions when they get something that truly blows them away. But this is the one I'm most proud of yet.

First, some backstory! Early February 2021, something amazing happened in Belgium. The winter cold wave hit hard and all over the country, lakes froze.

In the middle of an intense and frustrating lockdown, after a 5 months lull during which all ice rinks were closed and travel was impossible, Belgian skaters all across the country put on their boots and went to skate outdoors on lakes.

On February 12th, that's exactly what I did with my (at the time) friend from the rink. I posted about it here before. We had a blast of a time; truly a day you don't forget, and it came at a time where both of us were seriously depressed.

Today, that friend and I have gotten very close and she has become my skating partner. Recently, she moved in to her new apartment close to the ice rink, and I needed a housewarming gift for her! I settled on a keyring. It's very on-brand for a housewarming gift, and I myself have skate boots keyring ornaments kinda like these which are pretty cool. But this is someone I really like, and I wanted to personalize it a bit.

I then thought about a skating figure ornament that could represent her. And what better than my absolute favourite photo of her from our day on the lakes?

So I got to work, and a friend helped me trace the initial silhouette as vector since my tracing skills suck. I did clean it up in Inkscape, and I now needed somebody who could turn this digital silhouette into a real physical artifact!

I found this shop on Etsy, but they did not respond in time when I asked them about cutting that figure for me. So I asked my ex girlfriend (who is doing a Ph.D in metallurgy, soldering and metal printing) for some advice. To my surprise and delight, she volunteered to do the laser cutting herself!

And so we got to work. I turned the SVG into a DXF (thanks Inkscape for being able to do that!), and she helped me clean up some of the edges. We calculated dimensions, stress spots, and added an attachment anchor. Here is the final contour for the cut, and here is the first trial sample!

So, after fixing a couple more minor issues, she gave me eight samples. We engraved her trouser's pink stripes into two of them; they're very representative of her skating attire.

One final issue to deal with was the burn marks. The back of the samples had very burnt edges due to the laser. Today, I found a jewelry workshop which was able to polish that away. I then added a small chain and a cute little snowflake ornament.

And so, here is the final result:

• Front: https://imgur.com/TqKLCzU
• Back (after polishing): https://imgur.com/7OdItjf

Full album: https://imgur.com/a/SW7Sqdm

She's currently sick and in quarantine. Once she recovers, we are having dinner at her house. I cannot wait to see her reaction :)

Update: By a friend’s suggestion: Added a print of the original photo with a cute note on the back. Looking nice!
https://photos.app.goo.gl/d5gvZEqx3eRZgN5dA

So, I just listened to a This American Life podcast called Ghost in the Machine. In one of the stories, a man decides to calculate, every week, the Average Family Location of his family. By that, he means: once you add everyone's coordinates for every coordinate in which they've been in that period, what city/location represents the average point between them all?

I decided to do the same for my family, which will be much easier because there are no touring musicians among us. The one complication is that a good chunk of the family is on other continents, and I wouldn't want us to "meet" in the middle of the ocean. So some approximation might be warranted.

I'd be happy if someone could provide me the math, I'm fairly confident I would be able to do it with a calculator or maybe put into some crude Python. I don't think I need to make a weekly report, since we're not that mobile. Maybe twice a year, or once every two months.

Thanks!

Edit: I don't know much math

Edit2: holy shit this is not simple at all! Now I feel kinda bad for throwing this problem at you guys. I really thought it would be quick and easy!

I was just thinking and wondering why people are so incredibly anti NFT. I recently posted about my art here and someone was compelled to post an angry comment about NFTs. I have come to expect this and just wonder why?

It is a strange thing to collect digital items, I get that. Personally I find it hard to understand most of what people do including collecting stuff. I'm try to get rid of stuff.

We know some crypto is bad for the environment. This is why I didn't buy bitcoin in the first place, it seemed like a huge waste of energy for nothing. Many companies support this now though. If you invest in Tesla, you invest in bitcoin. You may not even know or care that your 401k hedge fund is investing in crypto.

But some crypto like Tezos (which is what I use) is in line with energy use you would expect from credit cards and the like.

The other thing is that some people are making huge sums of money from crypto and maybe there is jealousy involved. I've felt it too! Then I remind myself what life is all about, that I am happy where I am, and that fame would not help me create better art, in fact it would likely work against it. Money is much so much easier to make then art, it's not even close.

Thoughts?

Thought I'd post a general conversation thread for folks who might not be spending time with family or friends on Christmas. What are you doing on your own for Christmas, or what are you missing out on?

When I last wrote about money, some people liked it but u/MimicSquad had issues with my simplified explanation. After thinking about it, I'm going to try again. I don't want to make my "casino world" analogy too complicated, but I will make some changes so that we can talk about payments. (Caveat: I'm not a financial expert, but this is how I think it works.)

So let's say there is a town with two casinos. In the Yellow Casino, gamblers use yellow plastic chips, and in the Purple Casino, they use purple plastic chips. Otherwise, they are much alike. Each casino has a teller window where gamblers exchange the national currency (which we might call green money) for its own chips.

So there are three currencies (yellow, purple, and green) and two exchanges (the teller windows). The casinos want their chips to be worth the same amount as green money, so their teller windows always trade them at par. (This makes yellow and purple chips worth the same amount too, even though nobody trades them directly yet.)

Suppose that a gambler who has yellow chips walks into the Purple Casino. "You can't use those chips here," they say, "but for your convenience, we will trade you a purple chip for each of your yellow chips." Which they do. Then they send an employee to the Yellow Casino and trade the yellow chips for green money.

This is a basic payment system. It's implemented as two trades, one visible and one hidden. The Purple Casino's teller visibly trades yellow chips for purple, and behind the scenes there is a settlement process, implemented using a trusted employee who carries chips and money to do another trade. The gambler doesn't need to know about trades between casinos, but they're essential for providing this service.

Notice that, although the gambler carried yellow chips from Yellow Casino to Purple Casino, the second trade (a withdrawal) causes the Yellow Casino to have less money. The money followed the chips and the chips came back home.

It doesn't need to happen quite that way, though. If Yellow and Purple agree, the Yellow casino could trade anything that's worth the same amount in return for getting its chips back. So, more abstractly, some financial asset must follow the chips from Yellow to Purple.

Furthermore, if the casinos trust each other, they can delay settling up. Perhaps at the end of the day, the Purple Casino will have some yellow chips and the Yellow Casino has some purple chips, so they can exchange yellow for purple and they can use green money (or any financial asset) to make up the difference.

Why settle at all? Partly because of risk. The casinos don't want to trust each other too much. If the Yellow Casino gets into financial trouble, the Purple Casino doesn't want to end up holding worthless yellow chips instead of the green money that they have more confidence in. (Also, they probably find green money more useful than yellow chips.)

These casinos are are my thinly-disguised model for banks. To make things a bit less abstract, I'll talk about the US. There around 4,000 banks (and 5,000 credit unions) in the US. Each bank has its own computers that implement money as bank deposits. They have payment systems that tie them all together and hundreds of thousands of ATM's that trade electronic currency for cash.

We could think of US banks as having 4,000 different currencies that all trade at par. While we normally think of the US dollar as a single currency, it could also be thought of as a federated system of many currencies, all tied together with payment systems that do lots of trades. (Nothing really changes; this is just a different way of thinking about it.) There are some currencies with special status, like paper money and coins and federal reserve accounts, but these are in addition to all the others. (You could even think of each kind of coin as its own currency, and making change as a form of currency trade.)

There is a historical basis in early US history for treating each bank as having its own currency. US banks back then issued their own paper money, and although they tried to make them trade at par, these banks sometimes failed and were sometimes frauds, and their paper money often traded at much less than par. These days banks are much better regulated and we normally don't have to worry about such things, but much as a multicellular organism has cell walls as a sort of remnant of earlier times when cells were more independent, the boundaries between banks still matter, despite all the regulated mechanisms that make their currencies practically the same to us.

Since each bank manages its own computer systems, there is a sense in which electronic money never actually moves outside its own bank. ​When we "move money" electronically, it's done by trading, and there has to be a payment system to bridge the gap. The timing of the trades varies, depending on the details of the settlement process.

What about creating money? In casino world, the Yellow Casino makes yellow chips and the Purple Casino makes purple chips, but they can only make their own chips. Similar, a bank could make money in its own computer system, but they are limited in what they can do in anyone else's computers. They influence other bank's computers via trades.

If a bad bank created a lot of their own money and then spent it (perhaps disguised as making a loan), they would still be on the hook during the settlement process, which essentially requires them to take their money back in return for a financial asset worth the same amount that wasn't created by them, such as money in their central bank account. Payments can be very complicated and there is often short-term debt involved in the settlement process, but ultimately a legitimate bank needs to honor its debts.

It's similar to how anyone with a checkbook could write bad checks, but this will catch up with you during settlement. The physical ability to write large numbers on checks isn't a superpower that lets you buy anything. What a criminal could do with it is somewhat limited and short-term.

Every bank has accounts with the central bank and one thing they are used for is implementing settlement. Having "reserves" with the central bank, even there isn't a legally required balance, is something every other bank needs to handle some kinds of payments. Just as you need money in your bank account to write a check and have it not bounce, banks need a high enough balance with the central bank to handle the payments their customers make. (Though I don't know the details of what sort of overdraft protections there are.)

The only bank that can buy anything it likes without consequences to itself is the central bank, which doesn't participate in settlement like everyone else. The central bank's power to create its own money might look superficially similar to other banks, but it's special because payment is complete after the first trade; there is no further settlement after receiving central bank money. (Though a bank could trade reserves for cash if it needs it for its ATM's.)

The end, for now. Sometimes I've been writing in a definitive way here, but keep in mind that I'm still not a financial expert and I welcome corrections from people who know better.

I recently made a post saying what movies I currently am predicting to get Oscar nominations and someone commented that they use awards as a way to watch more interesting movies. So I thought I would make a list for you guys of all the movies that currently have (or had) buzz. Maybe you’ll want to check some of these out, maybe you’ll be introduced to some movies you haven’t even heard of from the past year.

I will be giving two lists. The first is for movies that still do have buzz, and the second is for movies who’s buzz died off at some point in the year. In the first list I put parentheticals for films who have more specific buzz, and left solely the titles for films that have buzz for a lot of categories. I’ve also linked the trailer to each film.

Just a little fyi, this list is from movies that released March 2021 - December 2021. This past Oscar season had the deadline extend to February 2021.

Movies that still have buzz:
Being the Ricardos
Belfast
Belle (animated feature)
CODA (Picture, Adapted Screenplay)
Cruella (Costumes, Hair & Makeup, and Original Song)
Cyrano
C’mon C’mon (Picture, Original Screenplay, Lead Actor, Cinematography)
Don’t Look Up
Dune
Encanto (animated feature)
Flee (documentary, animated feature, international film)
House of Gucci
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Luca (animated feature)
Mass (supporting actress)
Nightmare Alley
No Time To Die (original song, sound, VFX, cinematography)
Parallel Mothers (Lead Actress, International Feature)
Passing (supporting actress)
Raya and the Last Dragon (animated feature)
Red Rocket (Lead Actor)
Respect (Lead Actress)
Spencer (Picture, Lead Actress, Original Score, Costumes)
The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Lead Actress, Hair & Makeup).
The French Dispatch (original score, cinematography, hair & makeup)
The Hand of God (international feature, Director, Original Screenplay)
The Harder They Fall (original song)
The Last Duel
The Lost Daughter (Picture, Lead Actress, Adapted Screenplay)
The Mitchell’s vs the Machines (animated feature)
The Power of the Dog
The Tragedy of Macbeth
Tick... Tick... Boom!
West Side Story

Movies that used to have buzz:

A Journal for Jordan
Blue Bayou
Bruised
Cry Macho
Dear Evan Hansen
Eternals
In The Heights
Last Night in Soho
Stillwater
Swan Song
The Card Counter
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
The Green Knight
The Humans
The Many Saints of Newark
The Tender Bar
Zola

For example, every material in a fluid shrinks in volume as is gets colder and solifldifies, with a few exceptions, one of them being water from 4 to freezing, and from freezing into ice. This is also why water freezes from the top instead of the bottom. This is relevant because it means lakes and oceans freeze from the top and the water below is kept from freezing by the ice, making things easier for the aquatic life below.

While this is the only example I thought of, something doesn't necessarily need to be important to be "noteworthy", it can also be amusing or unintuitive.

I know that there aren’t a lot of film buffs here, and that a lot of you don’t care about awards. I love awards. The oscars are actually a really important thing that got me watching more interesting movies. And I make it a point to watch all the Best Picture nominees every year.

I spend a lot of time on trying to predict what will get nominated and will win at the Oscars. I’m pretty okay at it. I average about a 76% correctly predicting what gets nominated and an 80% what wins. Things change as more award shows happen. And the closer we get to the Oscars.

But, I wanted to share with y’all what I thought would get nominated at the Oscars this coming year.

In no specific order:

Best Picture:

Don’t Look Up

King Richard

The Last Duel

Licorice Pizza

The Power of the Dog

Belfast

West Side Story

Dune

Being the Ricardos

House of Gucci

Best Director:

Adam McKay - Don’t Look Up

Paul Thomas Anderson - Licorice Pizza

Kenneth Branagh - Belfast

Ridley Scott - The Last Duel

Denis Villeneuve - Dune

Best Lead Actress:

Jodie Comer - The Last Duel

Jennifer Lawrence - Don’t Look Up

Penelope Cruz - Parallel Mothers

Nicole Kidman - Being the Ricardos

Lady Gaga - House of Gucci

Best Lead Actor:

Will Smith - King Richard

Benedict Cumberbatch - The Power of the Dog

Leonardo DiCaprio - Don’t Look Up

Javier Bardem - Being the Ricardos

Adam Driver - The Last Duel

Best Supporting Actress:

Kirsten Dunst - The Power of the Dog

Ariana DeBose - West Side Story

Meryl Streep - Don’t Look Up

Aunjaune Ellis - King Richard

Caitriona Balfe - Belfast

Best Supporting Actor:

Jamie Dornan - Belfast

Bradley Cooper - Licorice Pizza

Mark Rylance - Don’t Look Up

Jared Leto - House of Gucci

Jon Bernthal - King Richard

Best Adapted Screenplay:

The Power of the Dog

The Last Duel

House of Gucci

Dune

West Side Story

Best Original Screenplay:

Belfast

Don’t Look Up

King Richard

Licorice Pizza

Being the Ricardos

Best Cinematography:

Dune

West Side Story

Licorice Pizza

The Last Duel

The Power of the Dog

Best Costume Design:

House of Gucci

The Last Duel

West Side Story

Dune

Being the Ricardos

Hair and Makeup:

House of Gucci

Being the Ricardos

King Richard

Dune

West Side Story

Best Production Design:

Licorice Pizza

The Last Duel

Dune

West Side Story

Belfast

Best Sound:

Don’t Look Up

West Side Story

Dune

No Time To Die

The Last Duel

Best Original Score:

Dune

The Power of the Dog

The Last Duel

Don’t Look Up

King Richard

Best Original Song:

No Time To Die from No Time To Die

Be Alive from King Richard

Down to Joy from Belfast

Dos Oruguitas from Encanto

Just Look Up from Don’t Look Up

Best Film Editing:

Don’t Look Up

King Richard

The Last Duel

Dune

Belfast

Best Visual Effects:

Black Widow

Spider-Man: No Way Home

Dune

No Time To Die

Don’t Look Up

That’s what I have for now.

If this list is worth anything, it’s to let you guys know what films have a lot of buzz. The only films I think are certain of getting a Best Picture nomination are Belfast, King Richard, The Power of the Dog, and Don’t Look Up.

If you haven’t watch Belfast or King Richard as of yet, I highly recommend checking them out.

Why am I posting this thread?

Honestly, I'm really excited about this. Isn't that enough? :)

What is it?

The World Chess Championship (WCC) is the topmost competition of the sport, and basically determines the best player in the world. It is disputed between the winner of the Candidates Tournament and the current champion. Since his first title in 2013, Magnus Carlsen successfully defended the title on three different occasions and is the undisputed favorite. The challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi does have a positive score against Magnus, but most don't give that much importance, since most of his victories happened when they were much younger. Chess.com combed through the data and gave Magnus 72% winning odds. In terms of style, Magnus is considered a universal player. Nepomniachtchi is generally more aggressive but adopted a more conservative style in the Candidates Tournament.

Since 2014, the WCC happens once every 2 years, alternating with the Candidates Tournament. The current edition was supposed to take place in 2020, but was postponed due to covid. It will happen in Dubai.

The World Chess Championship starts this Friday, November 26, at 16:30 local time, 12:30 UTC.

Where to watch

• Chess.com
• Chess.com Youtube
• Chess.com Twitch
• Chess24
• Chess24 Youtube (I strongly recommend the stream with David Howell for non-advanced players)
• FIDE Youtube
• FIDE Twitch

In the United States, the NBC over-the-air television channel will broadcast daily 30 minutes highlights.

The players

Time controls

In chess, time controls determine the time each player has to make their movies. A time control of 10 minutes means that each player has 10 minutes to use throughout the game. There can also be increments, which are added to a player's overall time after each move. For example, with a time control of 10 | 5 each player starts with 10 minutes to make their moves, and automatically gains 5 seconds on the clock every time they make a move.

The time controls for the World Championship matches may seem a bit complex at first. This is just for reference, if you intend to follow the games online, I'm certain that the commentators will make sure to remind you of these details.

The table above means that, on stage 1, each player has 120 minutes to make their moves. On stage 2, they have 60 minutes. On stage 3, each player has 15 minutes, with an addition of 30 seconds after each move.

Format

• Draw by agreement is only allowed after the 40th move (it used to be the 30th).

• There will be 14 standard games (it used to be 12). The first to achieve 7½ points will be World Champion.

• If, after the 14 games, the score is equal, there will be tie-break games in that order, with the subsequent tie-break only being disputed if the previous one maintained the tie.

  1. 4 rapid games of (TC: 25min + 10s)
  2. Best out 5 blitz games (TC: 5min + 3s)
  3. 1 armageddon game.

Scoreboard

Magnus won on round 11. Rounds 12 to 14 will not be disputed.

Schedule

All games, as well as the closing ceremony, are scheduled to 07:30 AM EST / 12:30 UTC.

This will be updated with the results for each match, as well as the sum of the overall points. I will also try to sum up some experts commentaries for each selected games. Adding notes to every game would require more effort than I initially thought! I'll create a top comment with links and basic info on each game, but will not be adding personal notes to all of them. Feel free to add your impressions to the top comments. Thanks!.