About 6 hours ago, I posted a thread with the suggestion that "guy" should be turned into a nongendered term. I did this after reading @Deimos' thread about how much of ~talk is "what's your favorite" type posts. So I took something I had noticed a bunch around here -- how the term "guy" gets tossed around a bunch, often to be corrected with "I'm not a guy," and I figured I'd make a post about how there really isn't an adequate word ("person" just sounds too formal to be a replacement for the gendered "guy").

Instead of saying "Hey, what word can we use in this instance," I framed it as a "Let's just use 'guy' for everyone, change my mind" and listed the ways the word "guy" already fit the bill. I did this in an effort to make the thread engage more than just the language nerds. This is where I feel I crossed the line into trolling, and regret having done so in this manner.

I did try to point out the problems with generalizing a male-gendered word, but a few commenters have pointed out that it read euphemistically. It was meant to be upfront about the issues inherent to what I was suggesting, but reading it again now it reads at best like a wink to the people who are already on the side of the argument I was hoping for and at worst it reads like a disingenuous ass-cover.

The thread blew up.

There is some good discussion in there. In fact, most of it seems to be, like most of the discussion on tilde, constructive and respectful. And all of it was genuine, or at least appears to have been so.

I won't try to walk it back and say it was satire, or a social experiment, or even a mistake. Mainly, it was something I felt clever for thinking of (and something I was to curious to see unfold). Sure, the thread got a lot of comments, but it also rustled some jimmies. And I think there was at least some subconscious part of my that recognized that as I was typing it.

I'll edit the OP with the clarity of 6 hours' hindsight, but I wanted to make a separate post apologizing for presenting an argument in an inflammatory manner. I've been a member of this community for a couple of days now and am very fond of it, and do not want to contribute to its degradation.

As things get going and we start getting more specific branches coming off of the main groups, posts are supposed to bubble up the branches as they get enough votes. So that a post in ~games.boardgames wouldn't initially be visible to someone who is only subscribed to ~games, but would become visible if it gets popular enough.

There is a danger of branches becoming so popular that they overwhelm the main group.

I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to "weight" the branches inversely to the number of subscribers it has. Meaning that a post in branch with 10,000 subscribers would require more votes to bubble up than a post in a branch with 1000 subscribers.

Thoughts?

Many occupations are set to be automated in the near future: truck(lorry) driving, cashiers, and various other service sector jobs. See the full paper here[PDF].

Will such a reallocation of labour be a net positive or net negative?

Will societies around the world adapt by offering ways to retrain those that lost their jobs, or by providing temporary assistance in some manner?

Or, perhaps, will those people who lose when the next automation wave comes just be ignored, as they would negatively affect the capitalists bottom line.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is stepping down, and there are rumors he intends to run for office and possibly the presidency. A frequent Trump critic, he would presumably be running as a Democrat if he entered the 2020 race. He seems to be staking out a position in the center of the party, criticizing the idea of a government jobs program or single-payer healthcare.

Would you vote for him in a primary or general election? Does America need another businessman (albeit a successful one) president? How economically progressive should the Democrat's candidate be? Discuss.

I've somewhat recently become vegan and am looking for more recipes to cook. I love pretty much all kinds of food, especially kinds I haven't tried before. If anybody has any great recipes that are vegan, I would love to share.

Movies, TV shows, and newspapers are just a few examples of the traditional media designations that dominated the 20th century. However, the digital revolution (and the internet in particular) has rendered them mostly meaningless now because the analog boundaries that separated them are no longer relevant.

Given the present-day proliferation of platform-agnostic content, what new designations or delineations do you think the world will (or should) adopt in the next century once traditional media is dead?

I've found that it's difficult to keep track of threads I found interesting but are no longer highly active, especially without a search function. My suggested solution is the ability to subscribe to updates on a topic/thread (whatever you want to call it) and enable easy access to checking up on the thread for updates without having to receive a direct reply to my comment on the topic. If this already exists and I'm just blind, let me know!

At the moment the groups page shows a full list of groups with a button beside each: either Subscribe or Subscribed. It's not very clear, at a glance, which ones are subscribed as there is no colour difference and the terms differ only by the last letter. I personally think it would be better if it showed 'unsubscribe' for the ones you're already subscribed to, and even better if this were in green.

My personal theory is that this is similar to the phenomenon of "Don't Stop Believin'" having a surge in popularity in the late 2000's. I know that was commonly attributed to the song's use in the finale of The Sopranos, is there a similar usage of "Africa" that triggered its sudden prevalence in popular culture? What did I miss?

(Not a complaint, it's reminded me of how great 80's music is and I'm listening to an 80's station right now).

The one good thing, imo, that iOS does is its continuity and handoff with other devices. What are the best ways you've found to emulate this on your devices? Like if I'm actively working on a document or on web pages how can I seamlessly continue using them on my tablet/phone without having to re-open all the tabs or docs again?

Has anyone found a better way?

At the moment I get around this a couple ways:
-Google drive is my primary basic filesystem on all my main computer (desktop/documents/downloads/pictures/videos folders)
-Google Photos on all devices
-PulseSMS for the texting
-Google Chrome which offers a somewhat fix to webbrowsing

But the actual feature of my devices popping up and letting me "carry on" with what I was doing exactly where I was doing it with the click of the button isn't there. Also, the Google Chrome "continuity" is simply the ability to let me go see recent tabs open on my devices and click to reopen them. If anyone knows a way to sync tabs across all my devices (desktop/laptop/phone/tablet) and make them open/close altogether that would be great.

Some games were just magical to play and yet have never really had something come out which rivaled them or even recreated that experience to some extent. Which games would you say provide that for the following, if any?

• Black & White / Populous (Good God games are hard to find, and Godus was just disappointing)
• Xwing vs. Tie Fighter (Nothing so satisfying as capital ship destruction!)
• Master of Orion 2 (All around fun dynamics)
• Star Control 2 - (Tons of Humor, interesting back stories)

What do you wish had a modern day equivalent, and does it?

In three months I will probably start studying law. It's the second time starting university for me, since I left the university where I studied IT about 5 months ago because of depression and I guess I didn't really like programming that much.

My question is: Say I finished the uni and got a law degree. What are the jobs I could do and what do I really have to do there? I have a slight idea from the movies, but I don't really know any people in person to ask this from.

I got my hands on a copy of Rise of the Tomb Raider recently, and while playing I noticed that Lara would "helpfully" try to push me toward the correct solution to a puzzle, often while I was simply looking around to make sure I wasn't leaving any loot behind. Worse still, it could be literally every 10-20 seconds or so that she would repeat the same hint. It got infuriating after a while, and I was horrified (okay, I'm exaggerating, but whatever) to find that there wasn't a setting available to get her to shut the hell up.

I loved Tomb Raider games because you had to solve the puzzles yourself. Having the game hold your hand the entire way kind of defeats the point of that. It was really disappointing knowing that I couldn't play the game without either having a puzzle spoiled for me or having the obvious repeatedly pointed out to me. It was like having Navi from Ocarina of Time nagging me all over again, but worse, because at least I could ignore Navi and just deal with the occasional "Hey, listen!".

This sort of hand-holding seems to be getting increasingly more common, at least in my experience. The form often differs--e.g. in Skyrim you have quest markers that not only guide you all the way to a dungeon, but all the way through it--but it's there. I feel like the worst of it is that gamers don't get to actually play the game autonomously or at their own pace, and that this sort of thing violates a basic principle of "show, don't tell".

Am I just really unfortunate with the games I've been playing lately, or is this really as common as it seems? What examples of hand-holding have you run into that you found disappointing?

As some of you may know, Tildes is written in Pyramid. I've done some OSS work in Pyramid and Flask, but my paid web dev work the past few years has been mostly in Django. There are some newer frameworks out there like Sanic or Falcon, and some older ones like Zope, CherryPy and Turbogears, that I've played with but have no real experience in.

Personally, I like Django for its "batteries included" and its big ecosystem, Flask for its minimalism and Pyramid for its elegant design. There's no single framework that fits all needs and all have their share of annoyances - Django can be quite difficult to swap out things like the default ORM or template system (though these have gotten better in recent versions), Flask has some architectural issues with request and other global variables, and Pyramid perhaps suffers from a relatively small ecosystem and lack of "one way to do it".

What are your experiences and preferences?

In light of @Deimos mentioning that we have a lot of "favorite" topics going around, how about something a little meatier?

I've seen it a few times already around threads that someone uses the word "guy" to refer to a poster and the response is "I'm not a guy". I'm not trying to invalidate this stance, but rather make this argument in the same way I argued for a singular "they". Consider the following:

• the plural form, "you guys" is already neutered. I can walk up to a group of women and ask "How're you guys doing?" and it doesn't draw any ire
• we've similarly neutered "dude" in both the singular and plural, but it's especially casual and almost familiar
• "gal" sounds like something out of the forties, "girl" is diminutive, and "person" is clinical / formal
• we don't have another common, non-gendered, non-specific term that fits the "sounds right" criteria and fits in the environment like the one we have (wherein users are getting to know each other and don't know exactly how to address one another).

I realize that this is probably masculine-normative and therefore problematic, but my main goal here is to stimulate discussion on a meatier topic (gender) without having it be an incredibly serious topic.

[EDIT]

I want to clarify a few things, as this reads a lot more trolly than it did 6 hours ago.

generalizing "guy" is a sexist idea because it attempts to make the masculine the generic (what I called "masculine-normativity" above). However, there isn't a term that adequately replaces "guy" but is neutered (@Algernon_Asimov brought up that "dude" fits, but is as more casual than "guy" than "person" is more formal). [Edit edit: I'm an idiot. They pointed out that "dude" as I had defined it earlier in my post would work just as well, but they did not agree that it has been neutered]

Instead of bringing this up as purely a matter of diction, I set myself up as an antagonist to see what would happen. And for this I apologize.

That said, I feel like there is some good discussion here and do not want to call making the thread a mistake. More that mistakes were made in the manner of its posting.

I went through the topics and did not see a previous on on this, so I am curious what your current favorites are, from both a single player experience offline (no pvp or multiplayer mode) or MMORPG wise?

Bonus points for new MMORPGS and undervalued titles which are just fun and engaging to play. I have to have the ability to get up and walk away at a moments notice for work purposes, so pvp and requirements that I spend a lot of continuous time are hard to find in a fun game, even if I do not get called away like that for days at a time. I am into strategy more than FPS, but all are welcome!

the reason why reddit feels so fractured is because all sides of the political compass are so split. id like to see one single ~politics channel and see how it works out, if everyone can keep it civil.