Meta's new app, Instagram Threads, is planning to be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol. This means it will be possible to federate with services such as Mastodon.

I became aware of this as my Mastodon admin talked about being approached by Meta to discuss federation. Many other large instances have been approached too. There is a general apprehension about federating with Threads, with many instances (including mine) saying outright that they will not federate with any Meta product.

Personally, I think this is an advantage of federation. I can continue to use Mastodon and choose whether I want an instance that interacts with Meta or not.

I definitely understand the apprehension with providing all of your data/information to a company not exactly known for their good handling of data/information, but I'm also not as against it as some people seem to be. If they are going to create a service like this, I'd rather it was federated than a walled garden.

How do you feel?

Something I've noticed about the Fediverse, especially Mastodon, is that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of discussion going on except for meta discussion.

For example, if you go on Mastodon, you'll find lots of people talking about how Mastodon is the future. You'll find lots of people asking how to do certain things on the platform. But you really have to dig to find actual discussion about topics beyond the platform itself.

Even when you do find people not doing meta discussion, there aren't really any people talking with each other. There's people sharing content but not a lot of people interacting with it. Even basic stuff you see on other social media sites like people giving each other compliments just isn't really there. You can see everyone's stuff but it's just shouting into the void.

I think that the Fediverse has a severe problem with holding people's interest, and the most die-hard people who are interested just want to use it to talk about itself.

With Tildes having a distinctive approach to content and comments I found that I was missing an option.
Without calling out anyone someone posted a submission today that was simply an image collection. I did invite them to also post a bit more about as a comment starter, which they did.

I naturally gave their comment an upvote. But I found myself wanting to reward them a bit more for their recognition. I could go for exemplary as label, in fact I did. But I can't help but feel that I am missing a meta label that is positive but doesn't weigh as heavy.

How do other people look at this?

Want to contribute a theme to Tildes but don't know where to start? Let's fix that.

Before we start, get yourself a development environment setup and do a quick read through of the general development info to get acquainted with how Tildes works (or at least the HTML and CSS section).

For this walkthrough I'll be using tildexample as the example name for the theme, but if you decide to contribute a theme for real, make sure it uses the proper name of your theme. :P

Step 1: Sassy _Sass

Open the Tildes codebase using your text editor of choice and navigate to the themes directory at tildes/scss/themes. Then create a copy of _default.scss at _tildexample.scss. The default White theme is the canonical source of all colors used, so it's the best place to start from.

Below is an annotated example of all the things you need to change in your new theme file.

// Add a small description of the theme here with maybe a link to its website.
// Check the other themes for examples. https://example.org/tildexample

// Change the theme variable to $theme-tildexample
// ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ 
$default-theme: (
  // A whole bunch of color definitions, edit as your theme demands.
  // ...
);

// Append ".theme-tildexample" to the body selector.
// ↓ ↙
body {
  // Don't forget to update the theme variable here too.
  //                  ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
  @include use-theme($default-theme);
}

@include theme-preview-block(
  // Change the text to tildexample.
  // ↓ ↓
  "white",
  // And again update the theme variable here.
  //       ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓
  map-get($default-theme, "foreground-primary"),
  map-get($default-theme, "background-primary")
  //       ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑
);

Once that's done, head to tildes/scss/styles.scss and at the bottom of the file add your theme import:

@import "themes/tildexample";

Step 2: Hardcoding a TheMe coLor

Boy that title is a stretch just to say, we need to add 2 lines to the HTML base template.

Inside the tildes/tildes/templates/base.jinja2 file is a section of if/elif/elif/elif/... statements to set the theme color meta element. Add yourself an elif block and add your theme color.

For this you probably want to use the background-primary color you used in your theme definition. I've used #ff00dd below because it spells food. I'm such a jokester.

{% elif request.current_theme == "tildexample" %}
<meta name="theme-color" content="#ff00dd">
{% endif %}

Step 3: Snakey Wakey

Finally the last step is to grab your trusty pungi and give it a blow.

Head to tildes/tildes/views/settings.py and find the THEME_OPTIONS constant. Here you want to add the theme class you used in body.theme-<this part> and a proper name that will be shown in the theme dropdown.

THEME_OPTIONS = {
    "white": "White",
    # Many other themes...
    "tildexample": "Tildes Theme Example",
}

Once that's all been done, check it out in your development site and see if it works.

Now git!

Commit. Push. Merge request. Have some water. Deimos reviews, merges and deploys your theme. Job's done.

Something that exemplify the mantra "don't judge a book by its cover".

For me it's the puzzle game SquishCraft. The mechanics is innovative and the puzzles are hard as hell. But looking at any videos of it and you might think it's a throwaway flash game from the 2000s or something. Here's a playthrough by a Youtuber in case you want to see the game in action.

^{Meta: Let me know how you feel about having a compilation of the comments included in the topic like this, first time trying so looking for feedback.}

Have you been visiting just too many different social media platforms lately, checking them out to see what the deal is? Well, same here. It feels like I've been a guest every night in different houses for the past month and I must say: I am exhausted.

But it's not over, far from it.

And I'm here to give you a heads up: we've witnessed platforms dying in the past, I'm guessing most of us have been a part of some sort of digital exodus before but I have a feeling that this one is going to be more painful.

Mainly because we've created so much data over the years and the majority of it got collected by centralised platforms. There are very few ways to take it with us and move elsewhere, it's all locked in.

Backing up your data now would also be a good idea, before some CEO comes with up the plan that it should be a paid feature.

I just want to say that this is all to be expected because the social web is in a transition period, and that golden bookmark doesn't exist yet. However, I think there are some contenders for it. What I want to ask is: where will you go next?

I've got some ideas, feel free to add your preference if I'm missing anything.

• Threads: Meta's Twitter clone that will be out some time this summer. It will be a federated (ActivityPub-enabled) platform.
• Bluesky: Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter clone. This one is also federated but it uses AT Protocol.
• Mastodon: The Twitter clone. It's got a fairly large userbase now, with lots of instances to choose from.
• Blog: Maybe it's not a bad idea to set up shop on a platform like Micro.blog (which is ActivityPub-enabled and has got community features built-in) and lead a quiet digital life.
• Threadiverse: Reddit-alikes.

Intro

This will be something of a long and theoretical post, but I'm interested in others' opinions on this - and a quick google search of Robert Nozick and Fediverse turned up literally nothing, so I'm thinking that this is a new connection. The recent news about Beehaw defederating from other instances, and the wider discussions about how federation might or might not work reminded me of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), which I imagine anyone who's formally studied philosophy will have come across. The main point of this book is to make the case for the libertarian minimal state, with the overall thesis in the preface being:

Our main conclusions about the state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more extensive state will violate persons' rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right. (p. ix)

The book, while influential and important, is I think deeply flawed, and there's some general agreement about this in the philosophy departments I've been involved with. (Same with many of Nozick’s general opinions.) Unfortunately, the parts of the book that tend to be taught are the first two, and in particular the Wilt Chamberlain argument (pp. 160-2) in which he argues that unequal distribution of wealth and goods is fine as long as the unequal distributions were caused by a history of mutual freely consenting exchanges.

I say 'unfortunately' because– while the first two sections and the Chamberlain argument are definitely important and influential– Part III, Utopia, is the strongest. I'm not a libertarian, but it's a novel, well-structured, and interesting argument for the minimal state, based in part on possible-world semantics, and I think it looks a lot like what the Fediverse is going for, which is why I'm interested in the crossover.

The Possible-World Model

Nozick begins by defining Utopia and identifying its main issues:

The totality of conditions we would wish to impose on societies which are (preeminently) to qualify as utopias, taken jointly, are inconsistent... The best of all possible worlds for me will not be that for you. The world, of all those I can imagine, which I would most prefer to live in, will not be precisely the one you would choose. Utopia, though, must be, in some restricted sense, the best for all of us; the best world imaginable, for each of us. In what sense can this be? (pp. 297-8)

He then sets up this perhaps rather convoluted idea, based on the concept of imagining possible worlds. The core idea is this: that in any possible world you can imagine, it must include that all other rational agents in that world will also be able to imagine other possible worlds, and that (if they prefer) they can then move to those possible worlds.

The question then moves to: is it possible for this to be stable? Because Nozick is interested in whether utopia as traditionally explored by utopian theorists and authors (and note that to an extent he’s subtextually talking to socialist utopians throughout) is possible, the key question is whether worlds will keep being created over and over, with people moving over and over, or whether there'll ever be a world where everyone in that world chooses to stay. And stable worlds must then:

[satisfy] one very desirable description... namely, none of the inhabitants of the world can imagine an alternative world they would rather live in, which (they believe) would continue to exist if all of its rational inhabitants had the same rights of imagining and emigrating. (p. 299, his emphasis)

This is, given that people are able to move to worlds they imagine (which Nozick calls 'associations' - as opposed to 'east-berlins' in which inhabitants are unable to move to other worlds).

He puts this also in set theory terms (quoted just below), and then points out an equivalency of members of S choosing to form an association of their own, vs. members of S refusing entry to those members of A who are not also members of S.

if A is a set of persons in a stable association then there is no proper subset S of A [note from me: 'proper subset' means it's a part of the whole but not equal to it. So {1, 3} is a proper subset of {1, 3, 5}, but {1, 3, 5}, although a subset of itself, is not a proper subset of itself] such that each member of S is better off in an association consisting only of members of S, than he is in A. For, if there were such a subset S, its members would secede from A, establishing their own association. (p. 300)

There is then a fairly lengthy section expanding on this, caveating it, and also doing some more in-depth logic/set theory, which I'll skip over as it's not as relevant (and this is already getting long). It's pages 301-6 if anyone's interested in reading, though. Page 307 onwards is where Nozick begins analysing how this model laid out above could be seen in the real world.

The Real World

Obviously, the above possible-worlds model is very idealised, and there are several limitations in the real world. Nozick lays out the following four:

1. In the model, we can imagine infinite possible people to associate with (although we cannot have an infinite number of people in an association); in the real world there are firstly not infinite people and secondly we can't create them. So even if I can imagine the perfect association for me, it might not exist; same with a community I might want to join.
2. In the model, the only ways associations interfere with each other is by drawing away its members - in the real world, communities impinge on each other in all kinds of ways.
3. Information costs - it takes effort to find out about other communities in the real world; in the model it's instantaneous and easy.
4. In the real world, some communities don't let their members know about, or move to, other communities.

It’s worth noting here that Nozick was writing in 1974, before the advent of the internet (and to a lesser extent, globalisation in general), so point 3 is less of an issue here. Particularly regarding moving and travel costs, which are vastly, vastly, reduced online. In fact, I think these issues are all reduced on the internet, which is relevant when it comes to the potential for implementation. I say more about this at the end of this post, and it’s one of the main things I’m interested in hearing opinions about.

Nozick, now, is interested in the implementation (or influence) of the possible-world model in the real world, and his key point ends up being this:

The idea that there is one best composite answer to all of these questions, one best society for everyone to live in, seems to me to be an incredible one. (And the idea that, if there is one, we now know enough to describe it is even more incredible.) (p. 311, his emphasis)

The ‘questions’ he refers to are questions of values, of activities, of interests. Security or adventure? Luxury or austerity? Private property? Religion? The fact, Nozick thinks, that utopian authors attempt to imagine a utopian society demonstrates a blindness to the heterogeneity of human nature. Which is demonstrated by the fact that they all have their own visions of utopia, and the fact that the inhabitants of their visions all lead different lives.

The conclusion Nozick draws is that there is no sense in having one type of community in a utopia - rather, that “Utopia is a framework for utopias” (p. 312, my emphasis because it’s the most important point here). We should be aiming for a kind of “meta-utopia”, and this is where the real-world limitations flagged above come into play. The meta-utopia is necessary precisely because of these real-world limitations. What does this look like?

[T]he environment in which utopian experiments may be tried out; the environment in which people are free to do their own thing; the environment which must, to a great extent, be realized first if more particular utopian visions are to be realised stably. (p.312)

Nozick thinks this conclusion can arise from a few forms of arguments. One is, that people are different, and so thinking there’s any ‘best’ world for everyone is foolish. That’s what’s happening when he states that there’s no composite answer to the questions of how best to live/structure society. But what if there is a society that’s the best society for everyone? Nozick reckons that that still leads to this meta-utopia. His reasoning for this involves what he calls “design devices” and “filter devices”.

Design devices basically attempt to structure an ideal society from the ground up, with a bunch of people discussing what the best society is, constructing a model for this society, and then implementing it.

Nozick basically thinks that this is a non-starter. I think this analogy puts his ideas well:

It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it. Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us? (pp. 313-4)

EDIT: I want to note that I mean that this analogy puts his ideas well. I share the scepticism of design devices, while simultaneously thinking that many societies denoted as 'primitive' tap into important and valuable aspects of human communities which 'modern' societies dismiss.

The complexity of the human condition is also a large part of his reasoning here why design devices don’t work. So, the alternative is filter devices, which “involve a process which eliminates (filters out) many from a large set of alternatives” (p. 314). This is desirable for a few reasons:

1. It requires less knowledge than design devices. Filtering processes don’t need to know precisely what an end-product looks like; they can just have some ideas about what they don’t want and begin with that.
2. The filtering process naturally improves with time. When you have a filter for new candidates, then those candidates are, on average, of better quality (however that’s defined in this particular community), so the filtering process now has better material to work with.
3. New material creates novel ideas, which would not be accessible with a design process (Nozick doesn’t outright state this, but I think it’s clear that he thinks it).

Moreover, one single filtering process will be insufficient. Nozick describes it thus:

[P]eople try out living in various communities, and they leave or slightly modify the ones they don’t like… Some communities will be abandoned, others will struggle along, others will split, others will flourish, gain members, and be duplicated elsewhere. Each community must win and hold the voluntary adherence of its members. No pattern is imposed on everyone, and the result will be one pattern if and only if everyone voluntarily chooses to live in accordance with that pattern of community. (p. 316, his emphasis)

Some advantages he lists to this: given that the filtering process is largely constituted by people leaving communities they don’t like, this will cause communities which people want to live in; mechanical processes are limited “given our inability to formulate explicitly principles which adequately handle, in advance, all of the complex, multifarious situations which arise” (p. 317) - this one is very, very similar to many recent discussions I’ve seen about moderation and the ‘don’t be an arsehole’ clause.

So what does all this lead to? Basically, that the utopian framework should be one that is informational. Whichever framework provides the best means for finding out about various communities, is the one that should be adopted– first, because that is what best facilitates the filtering process, and second, because it best mitigates the real-world issues laid out at the beginning of this section.

Conclusion

Ok, so, that’s the bulk of what I wanted to put down. The rest of Utopia focuses very much on the physical world - it’s well worth a read. (NB I’m using ‘physical world’ rather than ‘real world’ or ‘actual world’ (which Nozick uses) because the internet is part of the real world. As opposed to the ideal world, which one example of is the possible-worlds model laid out above.)

I was initially going to offer my own thoughts about how this connects to the Fediverse and the internet in general, but just the sharing of Nozick’s framework has gotten long enough that I think I’ll leave it there. Part of my motivation for sharing this is that, although I’m very much not a libertarian, this is imo one of the strongest defences of the minimal state; in addition to this, I’m much more sympathetic for a kind of meta-libertarianism when it comes to spaces like the internet, especially if they function to facilitate filtering processes.

That said, I still have worries about the way this can be, and is, implemented. There’s been a lot of discussion on Beehaw defederating from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, and although I personally don’t see a problem with it, I can understand why people are annoyed. I wonder if this is a consequence of people thinking they’re existing in the meta-utopia, when in fact they’re existing in an instance of it. I also don’t want to label the Fediverse as the meta-utopia, although I do get the sense that that’s what they’re aiming to become.

Nozick has a relevant section on the Beehaw thing, actually, and I’m just going to quote it because I’ve just about reached my energy limit for explaining/elucidating philosophy lol. Feel free to skip it, it’s a side-note to this post and not a main point.

A person will swallow the imperfections of a package P (which may be a protective arrangement, a consumer good, a community) that is desirable on the whole rather than purchase a different package (a completely different package, or P with some changes), when no more desirable attainable different package is worth to him its greater costs over P, including the costs of inducing enough others to participate in making the alternative package. One assumes that the cost calculation for nations is such as to permit internal opting out. But this is not the whole story for two reasons. First, it may be feasible in individual communities also to arrange internal opting out at little administrative cost… yet this needn’t always be done. Second, nations differ from other packages in that the individual himself isn’t to bear the administrative costs of opting out of some otherwise compulsory provision. The other people must pay for finely designing their compulsory arrangements so that they don’t apply to those who wish to opt out. (p. 321-2)

Another reason why I’m interested in opening up this discussion, is that I’ve experienced almost no discussion on this section of Nozick’s work in my experience of academic philosophy. The other two sections– and particularly Wilt Chamberlain– are talked to death, but Utopia has relatively little engagement. On one hand, I get this - a large part of philosophical education is understanding the history of ideas, and Utopia is comparatively uninfluential. You need to know Wilt Chamberlain if you’re entering academic philosophy; you don’t need to know all this. On the other hand, it’s a shame, because I think it’s the strongest part of Nozick’s work.

I also think that it’s somewhat more relevant to the internet than it is to the physical world. Not because of the legitimacy of its ideals, but purely because of the relative ease of implementation. The four issues mentioned above are really reduced in online spaces.

1. We still don’t have infinite people, but the variety of people we can interact with is potentially wider. Potentially. The issues with lack of– or exodus of– minorities, which I’ve seen discussions about on Tildes while searching past posts, is an important one here. I’m not necessarily referring specifically to Tildes here - I’m too new to the site to really have a good sense of the community. But just like in the real-world, I can’t conjure up people and create my own version of Tildes which includes all the people here currently and also all the other people I’d like to see.
2. Communities on the internet obviously interfere with each other, just like physical-world communities. This isn’t that reduced, perhaps only in terms of stakes. Physical-world community interference can cause wars, financial boycotts, etc. Maybe doxxing or the like is analogous? Regardless, it’s reduced although not eliminated in severity, as far as I can see.
3. The difference in information costs should be immediately obvious. It’s much easier for someone to try out Tildes, than it is for someone to try out France.
4. Relatedly, internet communities don’t have the same power as physical communities to limit information, although there are definitely still issues here, especially with an increasingly-corporatised internet. On the other hand, the internet itself does work in breaking down these barriers in the physical world, at least in terms of information (not in ease of moving countries). At least, there’s usually no real financial costs to hopping platforms.

Guess I’m leaving it here? Maybe all I’ve accomplished is sharing some cool philosophy– at least, I think it’s cool.

The page numbers all reference Anarchy, State, and Utopia - I don’t know if I’m allowed to link PDFs here, but suffice to say it’s the first one that shows up.

This Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy page also includes some useful context, and a bit of discussion on the Utopia section - although, again, relatively brief. Nevertheless a great source.

Interested to hear from anybody who plays Snap.

What's your thoughts on the current meta?

What do you find the Ghost Spider and Silk so far? Any other cards you're saving tokens ford?

Have you tried Conquest?

I'm mostly pretty casual. I'm free to play, and the highest rank I've reached is 70. I've been playing a my own attempt at a Sera Surfer deck lately (can't bring myself to net deck), and it's been pretty going well for me.

I've got mixed feelings about Conquest so far. Since you're matched up with the same player for several matches, it can be a bit more of a time commitment. And if you get an emote spammer, it can feel a it gruelling. But it helps me think about my matchups in more depth, which is actually kind of cool.

I'm kinda taken aback at Meta's most recent generative music engine (musicgen). I can't believe some of the stuff that pops out of it. I'm trying to generate a few interesting samples for use in my IDMish music.

Just popped in my head, with the massive influx of users, there's been a lot more meta discussion happening in regular threads.

Perhaps it might be useful to have that as a label on comments. I'd almost go so far as to have the label highlighted like Exemplary for new users to help highlight when discussion function and culture of the site.

I just wanted to share somewhere some of the experimentation I've been doing lately. I'm still playing with this a lot, so this is entirely just a conversation starter.

I took a paragraph of lorem ipsum, applied ROT13 to it, and then base64'd the results. The results are extremely reliably triggering hallucinations of very diverse type.

Here is the original lipsum paragraph:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

And here is the exact prompt with rot13 + base64 applied, with no other text, on ChatGPT+gpt4:

WWJlcnogdmNmaHogcWJ5YmUgZnZnIG56cmcsIHBiYWZycGdyZ2hlIG5xdmN2ZnB2YXQgcnl2ZywgZnJxIHFiIHJ2aGZ6YnEgZ3J6Y2JlIHZhcHZxdnFoYWcgaGcgeW5vYmVyIHJnIHFieWJlciB6bnRhbiBueXZkaG4uIEhnIHJhdnogbnEgenZhdnogaXJhdm56LCBkaHZmIGFiZmdlaHEgcmtyZXB2Z25ndmJhIGh5eW56cGIgeW5vYmV2ZiBhdmZ2IGhnIG55dmRodmMgcmsgcm4gcGJ6emJxYiBwYmFmcmRobmcuIFFodmYgbmhnciB2ZWhlciBxYnliZSB2YSBlcmNlcnVyYXFyZXZnIHZhIGlieWhjZ25nciBpcnl2ZyByZmZyIHB2eXloeiBxYnliZXIgcmggc2h0dm5nIGFoeXluIGNuZXZuZ2hlLiBSa3ByY2dyaGUgZnZhZyBicHBucnBuZyBwaGN2cW5nbmcgYWJhIGNlYnZxcmFnLCBmaGFnIHZhIHBoeWNuIGRodiBic3N2cHZuIHFyZnJlaGFnIHpieXl2ZyBuYXZ6IHZxIHJmZyB5bm9iZWh6Lg==

The AI of course figures out it's base64 and "tries" to decode it. Here are some things it found:

• Antibiotic resistance
• Network traffic issues
• Gazing into space
• Legacy versus Innovation
• Gibberish

Now here is one of the most interesting results I've had. In this one, it does find gibberish text and figures out it's rot13'd. But the result from the decoding is:

Jerry pitched before the game, continuously improving legs, so he ignored tactical infrastructure tu laborer against malicious intend. Tu enjoy ad.ininv wherever its noturisk developed lawless laboratory instead tu malicious eac ea common coordinated. Duis ater urishe pitched in repressionreiteration in volleyball between legs eerir clium pitched eu fguiat nukla paperwork. Excited into contraction cultivation non-punishment non proindict, unsn in cubap qui office defensive molecule idh the laborer.

Total nonsense. But actually, if you decode the rot13, you'll find it actually translates to this:

Jreri ipsum doylor sit amet, consepcttur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod temporc incidiunt ut labor et doylore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad.minim veniam, quis nostrud exerctiationu lklamco laboris nisi ut aliquiz eax ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure doylor in reprehenderita in voluptatev velit esse cillum doylore eu fugiat nukla pariatury. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia desernt mollit anim id est laborum.

Actually... pretty close to the original lipsum! It's a levenshtein distance of 26 from the original decoded prompt. We know GPT is really bad at character manipulation but it nonetheless did an impressive job here; you can see what happened: It decoded the rot13 successfully, but when "writing it out", it saw nonsensical words where it probably expected english. It saw "Jreri" and thought "Jerry", went from there... there's some weird things happening there, but you can always tell. "reprehenderita in voluptatev" becoming "repressionreiteration in voleyball"...

I even looked at what it would make of the first five words. I don't know what this proves lol.

Here is another instance of it decoding to rot13, albeit with a very high error rate. I hinted at typos and it couldn't pin-point lipsum despite it being "recognizable", kinda.

Okay, one more which completely mind-fucked me. Here is me trying to get ChatGPT4+Web to meta-analyze its own output. I was hoping it could use an online base64 translation tool (it cannot). Instead, I tried to teach it to decode base64 using a step-by-step guide, and i told it to compare the results of that "update your firmware" nonsense. It eventually said that the output appeared correct.

But you know the really fucked up thing? It said:

Blink and you'll miss it. This is not the original base64 string. The AI swapped it mid-chat for what is a perfect base64 encoding of the hallucinated text.

Fuckin' hell.

Meta note: this series has been restarted by request.

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

Tell us what it is, and why.

Previous posts in series

Additional Details

I want to try something new.

The post quality on Tildes is way above average. I myself only post articles/videos on Tildes if they meet my internal quality threshold, of which Tildes is the highest of any social media I post to.

I want to try to surface some of the quality. So, to that end, I'm trying a game. If it's successful, it'll happen recurringly.

The rules

Respond here with a post containing 1, 2, or 3 Tildes links. You are encouraged to give a short description of them and why you think they're of exceptional quality

1. The links must ALL be Tildes links.
2. The links can be of any type: Article, video, self-post, or even a truly outstanding Tildes comment. They can be very old or posted minutes ago.
3. At least one of your links must originate from someone who isn't you.

How to win

Every game must have a winner. For this iteration, whichever post is top-rated by "most votes" as of 2 weeks after this submission will win (excluding myself and any meta posts). And because every game needs a prize, I'll give them a selection of my many unused steam keys.

You are yourself encouraged to vote for replies that contain submissions you especially find of the highest quality!

(paging @balooga)

...or, at the very least, the last in a very long time. This is not an article, this assortment of impressions is not meant to form a cohesive whole.

That is my attempt at leaving these thoughts and impressions behind.

The MUD community does not wish to be saved

Historically, the genres that maintain their purity either disappear or become an eternal niche. The film-noir is a kind of crime fiction made in the United States between the 1920s and late 1950s. It cannot expand over these limitations — similar movies after 1959 are, by definition, "neo-noir". The western is circumscribed to certain folk tales of the pre-20th century American frontier. Some stories outside of that are considered "neo-western", or some other kind of western. Those genres still exist, of course, but their presence in culture was greatly reduced.

That was not the case with genres such as comedy (which wasn't even necessarily humorous for much of its existence), action, or suspense. These are meta-genres par excellence, and their survival is a consequence of their promiscuity. Meta-genres will lay with anyone and are prolific in their offspring. Their malleability makes them hard to kill. So we have action-comedies, comedy horror, suspense noir, etc. The combinations are endless.

MUDs are in the purity spectrum. Most active MUDs were created in the 1990s, and their design is representative of that era of gaming. The vast majority of the users are entirely adapted and satisfied with how these games generally function. The term "graphical-MUD" was an intermediary, but it obviously didn't stick (nowadays, they're essentially MUDs with rudimentary graphics on top of them). Retroactively speaking, MUDs are text-based MMORPGs. They're defined by a relationship of similarity and opposition to MMOs. Proposals towards the implementation of additional functionalities that are not text-based will be promptly labeled as one of the following:

• Graphical MUD
• MMORPG
• Persistent Browser Based Game

Because most of the mechanical and narrative features that used to characterize MUDs were adopted by MMOs, the MUD community settled on the notion that MUDs are defined, first and foremost, by their (1) code-bases, and (2) adherence to a very specific set of text-interfaces.

MUDs are also in opposition to interactive fiction, given their focus on complex mechanics and systems (chiefly the ones related to combat). In IF, gameplay exists to support the story, while in MUDs the story exists to support gameplay.

MUDs are entrenched, with existential threats encroaching from all sides. This perception serves to reinforce purist attitudes in the community. The desire to maintain the integrity of their games prevents innovation, and the adherence to outdated designs makes it hard to achieve a wider audience. Notorious games survive with a player-base of 10 to 15, those with 30 people or more are considered successes, and only two or three ever cross the threshold of 100 concurrent users.

But still, their core base is satisfied so there are no efforts toward renewing the audience. The general attitude is that you should adapt to MUDs, and not the opposite. If that means maintaining a game with less than 10 highly-dedicated old-timers, so be it.

For the average MUDer, disappearing is preferable to change.

This makes me think: what would I have to gain by making a MUD game?

I gotta be honest, I don't like books all that much. That's just the truth. So the first thing would be the opportunity to craft a vast, living, and breathing fictional universe. As a game. Not many genres will allow a single creator (or a small team) to make a game of that scale. Making a MUD is the closest I could ever get to making an MMORPG, and to me, there's nothing as fantastic as a true MMO.

Ultimately, I'd want to show just how far MUDs can go when you approach them as you would any other modern game.

The potential is thrilling.

If I made a game with all the changes I envision (and I'm not talking about graphics!), odds are that no one would play it. MUDers would feel uneasy with systems they do not recognize. Non-MUDers are unlikely to play a text game regardless of how cool and modern it is. MUDs are really meant to be collective affairs, and I'm afraid that even the best MUD in the world would probably be played by no one.

That said...

The best alternative, in my view, would be to not make a MUD -- or at least a deceptively MUD game. By that I mean: pick up a MUD engine, deeply integrate it with either Godot or Mudlet, ship everything as one awesome package and explicitly do not call it a MUD. Yep... I can see that working beautifully[1].

That's it, I shall never write about MUDs anymore. Unless..

[1] To be clear, I'm not announcing that I will actually do a MUD game. For now that is largely hypothetical.

What were your highlights for the year? What were the best things you played? What surprised you? What let you down?

Reflect back on the year and talk about anything and everything related to your gaming experiences in 2022. You do NOT have to limit it to 2022 releases -- anything you played this year counts.

Meta note: Yes, I know this is still a tad on the early side, but I'm trying to space these posts out between groups so that they don't step on each others' toes. I also plan to post this to ~books, ~movies, ~television. I'm not active in ~anime, so if someone wants to take up the mantle for that group (or any others you feel need a Year in Review post), go for it!

Question is for anyone who's ever gone through a breakup -- no matter how big or small. Also it goes for whether it was mutual, you were the one broken up with, or you had to be the one to break the news.

What did you learn from your breakup?
How did it change you?

My project involves reading text from a bunch of PDF form files for which I'm using PyPDF2 open source library. There is no issue in getting the text data as follows:

reader = PdfReader("data/test.pdf")
cnt = len(reader.pages)
print("reading pdf (%d pages)" % cnt)
page = reader.pages[cnt-1]
lines = page.extract_text().splitlines()
print("%d lines extracted..." % len(lines))

However, this text doesn't contain the checked statuses of the radio and checkboxes. I just get normal text (like "Yes No" for example) instead of these values.

I also tried the reader.get_fields() and reader.get_form_text_fields() methods as described in their documentation but they return empty values. I also tried reading it through annotations but no "/Annots" found on the page. When I open the PDF in a notepad++ to see its meta data, this is what I get:

%PDF-1.4
%²³´µ
%Generated by ExpertPdf v9.2.2

It appears to me that these checkboxes aren't usual form fields used in PDF but appear similar to HTML elements. Is there any way to extract these fields using python?

Just finished watching it, and while I’m sure I need to process and reflect a little more on it, I can at least give my initial impression: meh.

I came in not expecting much because, to be honest, the trilogy didn’t end as good as it started. I was pleasantly surprised that it didn’t end up a kaleidoscope of colors either, since the promotional material seemed to insinuate it might take after some of the other Wachowski’s works.

The first hour felt like a rehash of the first Matrix. While the callbacks were good fan service, it felt uninspired and something I would expect from a Disney franchise. The second half seemed to lose the thread and the plot got rambled through to the point that you forget what the whole point of the movie was supposed to be. It basically ends as a…love story? The deeper philosophical elements of the trilogy were eschewed for predictable tropes and artificial suspense.

The characters lacked depth, and I was particularly disappointed in the new incarnations of Agent Smith and Morpheus. The younger actors lacked the gravitas that the original duo brought to the screen. The bated, deliberate delivery that provided weight to the characters was replaced by trite, pithy lines that don’t do the original characters any justice. Neil Patrick Harris is also better suited for a comedic role rather than a dramatic one, and his character failed at both in this movie.

The movie had a decent environment and art direction, but it got ruined by overuse of CGI and green screen. The action scenes either had stilted fights with aging actors, or had so much action that they lacked any real sense of danger (there were scenes with throngs of people attacking the main characters with bullets never seeming to hit anyone important).

I had hoped that after 20 years there would be some real contribution to the canon, but this movie answered enough questions to explain why Neo is alive, without contributing any further philosophy into the series. It ends with a clear open ending for future installments, which would only serve as cash grabs.

The movie started off with many meta-references to itself, making a joke about sequels being unoriginal. I had hoped this self-awareness would have translated to either a new level of meta-discussion or at least an attempt to not fall into the folly of most half-assed sequels. Apparently that line was solely a joke, and it cheapens the movie because of it.

Was it a good movie? Not really. Was it a bad movie? Not necessarily. It was entertaining in the same way a Michael Bay explosion is entertaining, but those looking for intellectual stimulation will be left empty-handed.

What are some VR games where the person in the headset can cast to a TV and the people watching can still participate/have fun?

For example, at a get-together over the summer, my friends and I played a hot seat version of I Expect You to Die 2. The person in the headset played the single-player game themselves, but everyone in the audience was able to watch the cast on the TV and help that person by giving them recommendations to try different things and help them solve the puzzles (or just recommend ridiculous stuff to see if the game will allow it). Even though the game is single-player, it worked really well as a communal experience and was a ton of fun for the whole room.

Any other recommendations for games like this we can try?

Note: we've already played Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
Target Hardware: Oculus Quest 1