Hey tilderinos,

Self-described resident roboticist here, Not really sure if this is needed, but as people tend to quote/@ me on threads semi-regularly, you might notice @drannex has disappeared, but you can find me at @macleod now. Thanks @Deimos for the change!

Drannex is a really old username that I've never really enjoyed since I stopped being twelve a rather long time ago, much longer than joining here. So it's dead now.

I'm most known online as tumblr user @macleod anyway, and my website is macleod.ee to match. Homeowner has a meow in it? Glitter coffee? the dress meme? yeah, that was me (or partially). I'm sorry. Plus, it's my irl name anyway and I rather like it (muh-kloud).

Anyways, consider this a reintroduction or notice that my username has changed.

cheers, and remember, there can be only one ⚔️.

They aren't a startup anymore, but it seems the current CEO, Tony Stubblebine, got it right, according to his latest (long) blogpost.

Although Medium is in a healthy path now, they burnt goodwill so many times in the past that my trust on the business is absent. I wonder how other people perceive them…

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

Sorry if this isn't the best place to ask. IT and cybersecurity-focused communities over on Reddit aren't exactly the most welcoming places for such questions, and reading the r/ITCareerQuestions wiki has made me seriously question if I'm being sold false promises of working in a sector that actually has a low demand for workers. Then again, that wiki page seems more geared towards the US job market.

Two weeks ago, I responded to an Instagram ad advertising cybersecurity courses, because the job market is horrible here in the UK right now, and after some setbacks with my ACCA studies, I am seriously considering just giving up on trying to get into chartered accountancy because that path is closing many more doors for me. A course advisor rang me asking about the reasons I showed interest in the ad, then we had a long discussion about any questions I had, what the sector is apparently like, etc.

Some of the claims seem too good to be true, i.e. that it's an industry where you can afford to be picky, jobs outnumber people by almost 3 to 1, most jobs are remote, the provider boasts a 90%+ employment rate, I don't need programming experience, the most complex thing I'd be doing is running command prompt/powershell commands and scripts.

The firm itself seems legitimate. They offer CompTIA, Microsoft, Cisco, AWS and EC-Council certifications, have good review scores on Trustpilot, are a registered training provider and limited company in the UK, and are supposedly an assured service provider with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC.) The courses they mentioned to me in their syllabus supposedly come to £4k and would take about six months.

1. Am I right to be wary about what this training provider are offering?
2. Do you require extensive programming knowledge or a computer science background to work in cybersecurity in any capacity? A friend with an IT background has told me that Python is useful in his field.
3. Is the reality of IT and cybersecurity jobs in the UK (or in the West) far different from what has been painted to me?

I'm in the planning stages of a custom setting for a new campaign I'm aiming to start next year with my current table. We're doing PF2's Kingmaker and AD&D's Temple of Elemental Evil in the meantime.

The game is to be Viking themed, in that the starting locale and civilization will be structured in similar ways to the coastal Scandinavian settlements and there will be an on/off season. During the on season, they will board boats and sail many hundreds of miles across water to distant lands to find dungeons and ruins to loot, with a clock they have to keep an eye on; the expedition can only afford to be out for so long, and they need to ultimately make a profit. During the off season, they will be home and can spend time locally engaging in low-tier politics, explore the untamed parts of the continent, or both.

I'm intending for gods to play a more concrete and available part in this game and have been chewing on how best to represent that mechanically. I discovered that one of D&D 5e's supplements for a Magic: The Gathering setting, Mythic Odysseys of Theros, does something similar and has mechanics for tracking Piety with a given deity, which comes with boons at specific breakpoints. I liked the idea, though I'd be making my own boons for my pantheon rather than use these as-is, especially since I wouldn't be running this game in 5e, but rather in AD&D 1e.

I have a group chat with a few of my players that I can trust for this kind of thing to bounce ideas off of for various things, so I put this forth to them and got their thoughts. They universally thought the example boons from 5e were too personal and individual for the kind of stuff Norse gods would get up to, and there wasn't really a way to track a given deity's disdain of you in a similar manner. They also didn't like that you could track the Piety with a discrete score and could reliably measure when your next boon would be.

What we settled on doing is utilizing my custom tarot effects we're already doing in my regular AD&D campaign, but having it apply in certain regions or during certain stretches of adventure. This would allow for randomly coming across an avatar of a god and earning a minor boon or bane for assisting or denying them.

Piano keys are familiar and easy enough to draw if you're not trying to be exact, but if you want label the dimensions with their exact measurements (like in a CAD drawing), it turns into a math puzzle. The problem comes from the groups of two and three black keys.

This article explains it like this:

If you've ever looked closely at a piano keyboard you may have
noticed that the widths of the white keys are not all the same
at the back ends (where they pass between the black keys). Of
course, if you think about it for a minute, it's clear they
couldn't possibly all be the same width, assuming the black keys
are all identical (with non-zero width) and the white keys all
have equal widths at the front ends, because the only simultaneous
solution of 3W=3w+2b and 4W=4w+3b is with b=0.

To unpack that a bit: in that equation, 'W' is the width of each white key at the front (which should all be the same), 'w' is the width of a white key at the back, and 'b' is the width of a black key.) The first equation is for the group of two black keys (separating C, D, and E) and the second equation is for the three black keys separating F through B.

Since it's mathematically impossible, a constraint needs to be relaxed. The article describes ways to make the white keys have slightly different widths at the back.

If we set c=e=(W-5B/8) and a=b=d=f=g=(W-3B/4) we have a maximum
discrepancy of only B/8, and quite a few actual pianos use this
pattern as well. However, the absolute optimum arrangement is to
set c=d=e=(W-2B/3) and f=g=a=b=(W-3B/4), which gives a maximum
discrepancy of just B/12. This pattern is used on many keyboards,
e.g. the Roland PC-100.

When actually building a musical instrument (instead of just drawing the keyboard), there is a further constraint, described in this article:

The black keys on a piano keyboard, instead of always being centered on the dividing line between the two white keys they lie between, are spaced so that the twelve keys which make up an octave are spaced equally as they enter the internal mechanism of the instrument.

But this means that the "key caps" for the white keys should be slightly off-center compared to whatever rod or lever they're attached to. The author speculates about how to divide this up using various units.

(They seem quite annoying to 3D print.)

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

The server will shut down on July 17th in the evening (US Pacific time)

We will then start up on the 25th for a special 3 day hardcore survival server. After that the server will be offline for a few months for everyone's Minecraft-o-meter to recharge.

Server host: tildes.nore.gg (Running Java 1.21.4)
Bluemap: https://tildes.nore.gg
Playtime Tracker: https://tildes.nore.gg/playtimes.html
Tildes website extension (shows online status & location): Firefox (Desktop and Android) - Chrome
Verification site: https://verify.tildes.nore.gg
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TildesMC

The server operates on a soft whitelist. Anyone can log in and walk around, but you need a Tildes account to gain build access.

Long ago, Cree leader Captain Swan visited the Athabasca area. In 1715, he described a scene to Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader James Knight: “... there is a Certain Gum or pitch that runs down the river in such abundance that [Indians] cannot land but at certain places.” This was the first written reference to bitumen in Canada. Bitumen forms when organic matter is buried and subjected to heat and pressure over geological timescales. That organic matter was primarily algae and plants, which had sequestered carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere by photosynthesis, thereby locking CO₂ in place, significantly reducing atmospheric CO₂ levels, and helping sustain all aerobic life.

In 1859, John Tyndall explained how atmospheric gases absorb heat from the sun as infrared radiation. His paper details an early understanding of the greenhouse effect. Scientists have long since linked CO₂ emissions—burning refined bitumen and coal—to changing Earth’s climate. A 1912 Popular Mechanics article states, “The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2 billion tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and raise its temperature.” A century on, we’re burning 500% more fossil fuels.

Wishful thoughts will not prevent Earth’s global average temperature from increasing as we combust fossil fuels back into atmospheric CO₂. And while our generation reaps the rewards of inexpensive energy, our grandchildren will face the consequences of repaying this debt. A debt undermining the ancient Haudenosaunee philosophy that today’s decisions should result in a sustainable world seven generations from now.

Building a better world for our children requires energy—yet doing so by burning fossil fuels to the point of climate destabilization twists irony into generational betrayal far removed from sustainability.

In a 2013 experiment, University of Berkeley researchers found that breathing in a CO₂ concentration of 1,000 parts per million (ppm) indoors causes a measurable decline in intellectual capacity; at 2,500 ppm, initiative and strategic thinking declined to a dysfunctional level, which has since been corroborated by other researchers, including a 2023 meta-analysis on the short-term exposure to indoor CO₂ levels versus cognitive task performance. These cognitive effects become particularly concerning when viewed against atmospheric trends. On June 2, 2025, atmospheric CO₂ surpassed 429 ppm, a significant increase from the 318 ppm measured at Mauna Loa on June 15, 1959.

https://i.ibb.co/yFcXJqCy/graph.png

The graph illustrates a troubling acceleration in CO₂ emissions. At the current growth rate of 3.8 ppm per year, atmospheric CO₂ could reach 1,000 ppm in six generations (150 years). A 2021 study published in Nature emphasized the urgent need for action, stating that global oil and gas production must decline by 3% annually until 2050. Moreover, to limit warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels (1850–1900), an additional 25% of oil reserves must remain untouched.

Against this backdrop, political leaders advocate for increased fossil fuel extraction. Danielle Smith wants to unlock Alberta’s “$14 trillion in oil wealth” to “benefit millions of Canadians for generations.”

Short-term economic benefits derived from resource exploitation have repeatedly led to gradual, often unheeded, environmental degradation. This pattern repeatedly culminated in ecological and economic crashes, devastating the very communities who initially profited. Notable cases include Mesopotamian salinization, the Classic Maya collapse, the Ancestral Puebloan collapse, Norse Greenland settlements, Easter Island’s deforestation, the Dust Bowl, the Aral Sea’s desiccation, and the Grand Banks cod collapse. While some nations have sustainably managed resource wealth, the immediate economic pressures and political incentives that drive extraction often overshadow long-term planning.

The question is not: “How many Canadian generations will benefit?”

The question is: “How many generations will suffer, globally?”

Will we learn from history? Will we set an example for the next seven generations?

Or will we build more oil and gas pipelines, condemning our descendants to an unsustainable future?

Hereby released into the public domain. Feel free to adapt, correct, and send to representatives.