You always see a lot of threads around the best books of the year or of their favourite ever books, but how about the opposite - let’s have a thread of books you hated. There are so many books in the world to read, it can be handy to know which ones to avoid!

I’ll start in the comments! I’m not sure how to do spoiler tags (if that’s possible here?) so I suggest putting the title of the book in the first line so anyone who hasn’t read it can minimise the comment without seeing spoilers :)

I've been a computer scientist in the field of AI for almost 15 years. Much of my time has been devoted to classical AI; things like planning, reasoning, clustering, induction, logic, etc. This has included (but had rarely been my focus) machine learning tasks (lots of Case-Based Reasoning). For whatever reason though, the deep learning trend never really interested me until recently. It really just felt like they were claiming huge AI advancements when all they really found was an impressive way to store learned data (I know this is an understatement).

Over time my opinion on that has changed slightly, and I have been blown away with the boom that is happening with transformers (GPTs specifically) and large language models. Open source projects are creating models comparable to OpenAIs behemoths with far less training and parameters which is making me take another look into GPTs.

What I find surprising though is that they seem to have only experimented with language. As far as I understand the inputs/outputs, the language is tokenized into bytes before prediction anyway. Why does it seem like (or rather the community act like) the technology can only be used for LLMs?

For example, what about a planning domain? You can specify actions in a domain in such a manner that tokenization would be trivial, and have far fewer tokens then raw text. Similarly you could generate a near infinite amount of training data if you wanted via other planning algorithms or simulations. Is there some obvious flaw I'm not seeing? Other examples might include behavior and/or state prediction.

I'm not saying that out of the box a standard GPT architecture is a guaranteed success for plan learning/planning... But it seems like it should be viable and no one is trying?

So, I’m sitting at an airport lounge right now and the thing that is on the bar TV is golf. The (only) folks watching it are the most typical business folk you can imagine. Is golf just the modern version of polo (the ones with the horsies)? As someone who prefers to watch hockey and finds basketball and baseball to be less entertaining. Golf goes the extra distance of not just being uninteresting, but irritating by how snobbish it feels.

I’ll confess that I had a couple of drinks already so I’m a bit extra, but I’m genuinely curious if my take is wrong and I’m missing something.

Edit: another thought, will Millennials and Zoomers don’t embrace golf at all and golf resorts become a rarity in the future?

Hey everyone,

It’s my first post here so my apologies if I mess something up.

Recently I’ve been refreshing my YouTube homepage constantly because I feel like it’s either:
A.) Suggesting me things I’ve already seen before
B.) Suggesting me things I have no interest in

So I’m going to go straight to the source and find some good YouTuber Channels I may have not heard of.

I primarily enjoy gaming critiques, history topics & natural disaster docs (kind of random I know), videos detailing scammers (SBF, Elizabeth Holmes, etc) but I don’t limit myself to these, I’m pretty much open to anything as long as it’s entertaining and/or informative… preferably both.

YouTubers I currently watch:

• NeverKnowsBest
• LiamTriforce
• Knowing Better
• Internet Historian
• Ordinary Things
• RennsReviews
• Scott The Woz
• SAWS
• ADoseOfBuckley
• DAngelo Wallace

Any recommendations are seriously appreciated. I don’t limit myself to a specific genre, but longer form content is definitely preferable.

Are you comfortable following most bread baking recipes? Looking to start making your own recipes, and understand what ingredients do at what levels? If yes, this is what I'm going to try and explain the basics of, and point you in the right direction. If no, still feel free to read and ask me to explain anything I did a poor/insufficient job of.

Baker's Percentages

A baker's percentage is calculated by dividing the weight of the ingredient by the total weight of flour, times 100. You might hear it referred to as baker's math, or as a symbol with b%.

For example, if I had 100 grams of flour and 60 grams of water, that would be:

60/100*100 = 60% water, or in bread recipes that's referred to as the hydration. You might have seen on YouTube things like "90% high hydration sourdough!!".

It's important to note that if I had 90 grams of bread flour and 10 grams of whole wheat, that would be 100 total.

Why is this important? Whilst it's not an exact thing, for most breads you can tell a lot by seeing what the baker's percentage of the recipe is. It's also a great way to share those recipes, it's a ratio, so it's easy to scale up or down a batch. I share recipes like this, and it might look as simple as something like:

Flour - 100%
Hydration - 50%
Salt - 2.50%
Lard - 20%
(The flour tortilla recipe I use)

In my experience, I would say that most breads fall in:

50-70% hydration
1.5-3% salt
~3% oil/fats is the optimum for loaf volume without it being very enriched (added fats and sugars), although it's also common for rustic loaves to be lean (no added fats/sugars)

There's not much I can do in terms of the typical range for other ingredients, apart from recommending resources that help to explain what these ingredients do, and give examples using bakers percentages. Michael Suas' "Advanced bread and pastry" explains what all the commonly used ingredients for each section are used for, and gives lots of recipes for different items in both weights and baker's percentages.

Bakerpedia is a great resource for seeing the typical ranges used for various products, as well as offering example recipes in some cases. It's much more geared towards industrial/commercial baking, including the use of functional ingredients (additives), but I find that kind of stuff interesting too.

If you have a lot of money to spend, Modernist Bread by Francisco Migoya and Nathan Myhrvold is definitely interesting, informative, and the photography/graphics are as helpful as they are beautiful.

The main way I learnt is to convert recipes I liked/used into baker's percentages, and start to change them. You can find various ones online, but one thing that really helped me was creating a spreadsheet calculator.

I'm going to walk through how I first made my calculator, and hopefully that will show how all the maths actually works.

Recipe Template

This is the recipe for a lean dough, so I keep the name in the top left. The "weight per" is how much I want each loaf or roll to weigh. I can change the number of them, and it'll change the total weight in the recipe to match that. I input the bakers percentages under "percentage" and the formulae display the total percentage of the recipe, and the weights of each ingredient. I like to centre align calculated cells, and right align cells that I have to change.

Showing the Formulae

So how does this actually calculate the weights? You can see that the "Total" for percentages sum up all the percentages in the recipe, and for weight is multiplies the weight per by the number of. Why? Like I mentioned above, baker's percentages are like a ratio. If I know I want 100 grams of dough, and I want to figure out how much flour I need, I need to figure out how many grams each percentage is worth and multiply it by the percent of that ingredient.

100 / 168.40 = 0.5938 grams
0.5938 * 100 = 59.38 grams

You can see me doing this in one step for each weight, where I divide the total weight by the total percentage and multiply by the column to the left - the percentage for each ingredient.

You can make one of these for all of your recipes, and then you can change the weights or batch size very easily by just changing a number or two. As you start to experiment, you can keep a "main" template with lots of blank spaces to write what ingredients you want.

This is my own personal calculator, where I've added things like pre-ferment calculators, double hydration, offsets for water loss with evaporation, something that calculates the amount of vital wheat gluten depending on what protein I want, and checks/balances for seeing if all my flours add up to 100. I also have a vlookup table underneath that tells me the nutritional information for the ingredients I'm using. I also use cell colouring as a validation tool. You can see a screenshot of it here

I don't want to share this with the idea of you using mine, there are many things I'd change about it if I decided to start over, but hopefully it shows you the flexibility and customisability of making your own calculator.

One thing that this can't do is tell you how long to knead, how long to proof, how long to cook, what temps, et c. The only thing I can recommend for that is continuing to read and do other written recipes, until you get the intuition - although I still look up recipes similar to what I've written to double check things like cooking time!

In terms of how long to bulk/final proof, generally you'll get a feel for things like judging volume (if i'm not doing an open crumb bread, I like to proof in a large 2L jug to measure change in volume). For final proof I like to use the poke test, although you'd expect a poke test on baguette dough to spring back much more than you would on challah. You want more oven spring with baguette than challah, so understanding what the tests mean and reading through resources that explain those things are very useful.

I hope this has made sense, I'm not very experienced with long-form writing and trying to teach a topic like this, but I'm trying to lean into the tildes mindset.

We often talk about the environment in abstract terms, using phrases like "good for the environment", "bad for the environment", "environmental problems", and so on. Obviously there is a place for this, but I think it also serves to abstract what is a very immediate and concrete thing that we interact with each day — our local environment.

So I wanted to ask, how familiar are you all with your local environment?

• Do you recognize (or even identify) different plant and animal species in your area? Do you know which are native and which might be invasive?

• Do you notice changes in your environment throughout the year? Do you know why these changes happen?

• Thinking longer term, if you have lived in one location long enough, have you noticed changes over the years? If so, what?

• Do you know what the most pressing local environmental issues are?

I'm hoping this can be a thread for people to talk about their local environments, but also to share tips on how to be more tuned in to your local nature.

I myself would not say I am very familiar with the flora and fauna of where I live, but I have been trying to get better. I use the app Seek (which is similar to iNaturalist for those who might be familiar, but with better recognition capabilities in my experience) to identify plants around where I live, and I'm slowly trying to get better at recognizing them. The process of stopping to take a photo has really helped me slow down and pay attention to things around me — I notice a lot more garbage, roadkill near the big crossings, etc. In addition, seeing pictures of some of these plants online have made me realize just how water deprived a lot of the ones around me are, which is no doubt an effect of the drought my area has been experiencing. This has lead me to be more intentional with seeking out news regarding water laws and rights and trying to be more tuned in to these issues.

Edit

Some great additional questions from this comment of @skybrian's:

• Do you know where your water comes from?
• Do you know where sewage goes?
• Where is the landfill that your garbage goes to?
• How is recycling done?

I have a new niece and I'm making a list of songs which we can play for her naptime when we babysit. I have some Raffi songs and my childhood lullabies (Edelweiss from my mom and Moonshadow from my dad), as well as some calm songs from my Spotify playlist.

But it made me wonder, what songs did your parents sing when you were young? Children's songs? Disney? Pop? Metallica?

I'm also interested in whether you think it's best to keep a small list and rotate through, for comfort's sake, or if it's also okay to have a wider variety of songs as lullabies.

Hi Deimos

Its been a while since a lot of redditors started to move over to tildes, yours truly included, and I wondered how is it going for you?

I know you have a full time job and tildes was relatively quiet until the last few weeks but is it becoming too noisy?

I'm guessing that you have had a lot of positive feedback but I'm also guessing you have had a lot of 'why can't we make this more like Reddit?' comments as well.

I see you responding to comments left, right and center and while good this must mean you are reading everything as well as all comments in order to evaluate things, which takes time out of your day.

I know that you have a clear vision of where you want tildes to go, so I guess my question still stands, how is it going?

For context: I'm going from southern California to Salt Lake City, Utah, and I'm moving for work. I've never lived alone for an extended period of time before. I figure I've got a handle on it, but there's always something that I forget or don't know, so I'd like to ask you all for advice.

What are your thoughts on Naruto as a series? Anything specific you want to highlight (plots, characfers, themes, arcs...). Thoughts on manga, anime, movies, novel... all welcome.

I'm wondering how to read this book. I'm about 2 chapters in, and I've read all of these footnotes/references to other material at the bottom of the page. So far, they basically mean nothing to me, and I think it was implied during the introduction that some of the footnotes are real and some of them are fake? Do they reference other parts of the book? Am I supposed to be flipping somewhere else in the book every time a footnote refences something? Or should I be going outside of the book to hunt down the references to read those? Is it worth it to try that if some are fake and some are real? Is there a wrong way to read this book? Can those footnotes/references be ignored sometimes or most of the time? Am I overthinking this and I should just keep reading normally without thinking about the footnotes?

This month, I have been exploring reddit alternatives due to the ongoing events currently going on the site. It resulted in me requesting to be invited to this site, but I also played around with Lemmy, Kbin, Beehaw, and other sites within the lemmy/mastodon network. The conclusion I have come to is that these federated sites shows a lot of potential into becoming something interesting if proper care is put into it by the community and the mods and admins. But as it is now, it is fundamentally broken, ill-equipped to handle the userbase it has inherited from the reddit fallout, and potentially dangerous if steps aren't taken to protect users and their communities.

The signature feature, greatest strength and biggest weakness of these sites all lie within the "fediverse" (which I hate the term. gives me "metaverse" vibes.) From how I understand it, There are several different instances of lemmy that acts as its own site, hosts it's own content and users, and can have its own rules, features, and restrictions. All the content of these instances can be featured on other instances, basically allowing you to see all the communities, users, and content within the fediverse without having to leave the instance you are on. The admins are also able to restict the content of other instances from being shown on their site, though how this works I don't completely understand, and I'll go into detail later.

Anyway, I figured all this out through a lot of trial and error. When I first tried to search for and join Lemmy, I ended up joining the Canadian instance by mistake, and my feed was mostly Canadian related news and communities. I eventually figured out there were several differences I could join. I ended up joining lemmy.world and kbin because they were the most popular, but I basically had to create sepperate accounts on each.

I started out spending most of my time on Kbin. I was mostly following gaming communities, hobby communities, a few tech communities, and the lgbtq community. one thing I noticed in the comments in some of the lgbtq posts were a lot of transphobic comments. Granted they were heavily downvoted, and there was a lot of pushback from the community members, but they were featured near or at the top of the comments, as if I were sorting by controversial on reddit.

I also noticed there were a lot of pro-Russian articles featured in the news, with the majority of the comments pushing Z-propaganda. Apparently a lot of these came from an instant called lemmygrad, which is a pro-China, pro-Russia instance of lemmy. To the fediverse's credit this particular instance is blocked by most other instances, but it didn't stop me from seeing many of these posts featured, or users from that instance commenting in other subs.

At this point I was starting to get a little skived out. It gave me the same vibes Voat gave me during the reddit migration of 2014. I decided to try lemmy. world instead, since it seemed a little more down to earth. Had a few of the same problems there, though I began to sort some of them out as I began to learn the site better. It was around this time when the news that Beehaw, one of the instances that hosted many of the lgbtq and other communities I followed basically unfederated lemmy.world and a few other popular instances due to harrassment from the instances. At this point I was getting fed up, but thought, maybe I'll stick it out, and just follow Beehaw and Lemmy. world separately. After joining beehaw, I posted some of my grievances on the chat community there. In the end, I ended up getting an inbox flooded with notifications, which I couldn't turn off, many of which were replies from the post ranging from supportive to accusational, to some harrassing DMs. This happened on beehaw, which was supposed to be one of the "safer" instances, but many of the replies came from off the instance, and even from instances defederated by beehaw. What's worse is I even posted one of the means spirited replies as an example, and many people accused me of making it up because they couldn't find the reply itself, which I guess you can or cannot see depending on the instance your on and WHO THE FUCK KNOWS AT THIS POINT!

I ended up deleting all my accounts on the fed instances I had accounts on, except for beehaw, because the interface would often keep infinitely loading. The gripes mentioned above aside, I would frequently have issues with the site breaking, up and downvotes not showing the proper numbers, replies disappearing into the ether, accidentally double posting, seeing infinite amounts of the same comment posted over and over again, infinite loading, and so one, no matter what instance I was on.

At this point I have given up on the fediverse. Maybe if all the bugs are ironed out, and the site(s) are better managed, maybe I might return to it. But as it is now there are just way to many fundamental flaws that get in the way of me getting any enjoyment out of it. And none of the communities ever felt like a replacement for the subreddits I left behind.

That all being said, I have enjoyed my time on Tildes so far, and I think it is due to the fact that it is a smaller and better managed site than anything on the fediverse. The discussions here feel a lot more down to earth, the communities safer. And hell even the disagreements actually worth engaging in. Granted, there are a lot of niche topics missing here because subs aren't community created, but it's nice being able to view a site, and not have to self filter half the site because anything and everything is overloading my feed.

Anyway, forgive me if this was hard to follow. I wrote this at 4am with not a lot of clear direction. Just wanted to get my thoughts on lemmy and the fediverse out there, and why I decided not to stick with it.

Title
Anyone that has been playing multiplayer games for a while must have noticed the recent shift when it comes to multiplayer games matchmaking trends.
Multiplayer games were no joke, they were hardcore, with high entry barriers where the more experienced players would dominate the field, and newer players were nothing but fodder for them. If you were new to a game you could expect to lose most of your matches for a while, but if you were to put in the effort, improved, learned the game and persevered trough, then you'd be rewarded by becoming the one to dominate the field instead.
Nowadays it's different, anyone can pick up a game, no matter how experienced they are, and expect to win roughly half the games they play. From newcomers to pro players, everyone seems to be relegated to a strictly forced 50% winrate policy. But how is that possible?

The focus in game design seems to have shifted from rewarding individual oriented play, to rewarding more teamwork oriented skills instead. The focus on teamwork has been pushed so far to the point where, if your team isn't putting in the effort, no matter how good of a player you are, you won't be able to compensate for your team lack of skills and they'll be the reason why you lose the match. There wouldn't be anything inherently wrong with this, especially in a team game, if it weren't for the fact that it really feels as if the better you get at the game, the worse your teammates get.
This is how they're able to make everyone's winrates hover around 50%. Sure if you lose too much the algorithm will start giving you better teammates, but if you win too much then the quality of your matches will be abysmal, leading to a point where all the good players get effectively punished and can never fully see the fruits of the effort they put for actually learning the game.
Players have expressed for years their frustrations against this balancing method, as many felt cheated due to losing too many matches due to factors completely out of their control, but so far nothing has changed.

This sort of matchmaking algorithm can also be used to impose certain "patterns" in the wins and losses that a player experiences while playing, in order to increase their engagement. A study from 2017 published for EA , goes to show how players are more likely to quit a game if they incur in specific win/loss patterns. For example, of the entire playerbase, 5% of them will quit the game if they were to incur in three losses in a row.
Here's an excerpt from the paper's abstract
"Current matchmaking systems depend on a single core strategy: create fair games at all times. These systems pair similarly skilled players on the assumption that a fair game is best player experience. We will demonstrate, however, that this intuitive assumption sometimes fails and that matchmaking based on fairness is not optimal for engagement"

This is just a window into what goes trough the developing process of a multiplayer videogame these days. The paper is from 2017 but troughout these years this approach to multiplayer games has been adopted and developed to the point where every single multiplayer experience, from PC to mobile to consoles, feels artificially crafted and finely tuned to keep you as hooked for as much time as possible to the screen.
This doesn't stop to win/loss patterns, another example would be gears of war, where the devs have admitted to make your bullets do more damage on your first match of the day, because their studies showed that people were more likely to play troughout the day if they were to win the first match they played. These same devs would later go to make Fortnite, which would go on to generate billions in revenue for years.

What are your thoughts? Do you prefer the modern take to make multiplayer games more accessible to everyone, or would you rather go back to the days where communities would develope more organically?

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I'm relocating soon and trying to find the right spot for me. I don't want this to be an individual recommendation thread though. Instead, just tell me about your favorite urban neighborhoods — what you love about them, what isn't so great, and what makes them stand out from the rest.

Hi everyone! I am new to Tildes and wanted to say hi to the ~Health community. I am on a 28 hour emergency general surgery call today and have a bit of downtime. I also noticed that the post on the moral crisis of America's doctors had some interest so I thought I would answer any questions about that or training to be a surgeon in the United States. I am finishing my 2nd year of a 7-year training program. Ask me (almost) anything!

I've been thinking of this for a while and wanted to see what people here think the greatest TV intro themes of all time are.

I'll start.
Here is my top 10:

1. Succession
2. Full Metal Alchemist (Golden Time Lover)
3. Game of Thrones
4. The Golden Girls
5. X-Files
6. The Boondocks
7. Law and Order
8. The Wire
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Doctor Who

I'm looking for some games I can play with my team at work as part of our next team building event. We're 7 people, so finding a game that can seat everyone is challenging (and we don't want to split tables in this case).

My favorite board game is 7 wonders, which obviously is perfect except for the fact that it's pretty rules heavy and my team is mostly not boardgamers, so will probably be overwhelmed.

Cards against Humanity was also mentioned but is probably not PG enough for a work event.

What would you play?

Been lurking for a week on tildes now and I am really glad this place exists. The crow here is exactly what I have been missing on Reddit for a while now.

Having said that, the whole Reddit situation has some-what motivated me to get the balls rolling on an idea that I have had for a while and I am looking for advice on the same.

I have often heard this phrase "Learn programming by building" but whenever I dive in to the resources, I fall flat due to the information overload and the general abstractness that the field has (I appreciate abstractness but here it demotivates me) and I have never found a proper resource that I could follow to actually build something instead of just blindly following tutorials and playing with them.

So, my question is how do I translate "learn by building a project" into a practical framework.

I know of 100 days of swift and I really like that approach however I don't think I want to start with swift or build an iOS app right now.

I really like tinkering with older PC's, trying to make them work for modern usecases which is mostly using web browser.

Anyone else do this here? Or interested in it?

I have old 10" netbook from 2007 or so, it has 1gb RAM and Intel Atom 32bit that barely can handle things. However, I switched it's old SATA hard drive to an SSD, and it is a bit faster at booting now! I also ordered 2gb RAM stick, so maybe that will help it a bit too. It's also running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed 32 bit, but i dont recommend this for linux newcomers since it's a bit different distro.

If you have an old laptop or PC lying around, try breathing life into it by installing a Linux distro like Debian 12. Change a spinning hard drive to an SSD. For even older retro hardware there are even SD card adapters and such, that can work in place of old hard drives.

My goal is to make this tiny netbook good for light web browsing and maybe even scripting on things and having a Matrix chat window open. It's perfect tablet size, but very underpowered, even during it's release, so it's a challenge. But that's what makes this kinda fun! Also it helps tone down e-waste if one can use an old device for modern things.