I don't know if I'm the only one here but sometimes I want to say something but I don't want it tied to my account, my reasoning being the more details I let slip eg:

I've worked in IT

I've lived in that town

I own a labradoodle

..these things all piece together till you can profile it down to one person, you essentially de-anonymize yourself the more comments you make. Being that this is a public forum anyone can scan this information now or in the future building a profile on users possibly identifying them as a person, this is an unintended side effect as we don't post online comments expecting them to be traceable to our person. Consider the fact that advancing computing power and AI may eventually make it trivial to do such a thing.

Sure you can regularly create new accounts but then you reset the trust system.

My suggestion is having the ability to post a comment but not display your username, you would still be accountable to the trust system it's just that outside Tildes's server you wouldn't be identified. This would still discourage people from being a jerk because they're still affected by the trust system.

For the uninitiated, Surströmming is an infamous heavily fermented herring.

Below is my experience with it. Happy to answer any questions :)

Preparations

I “smuggled” (more on this below) it from Sweden a few months ago and yesterday evening my brother, a brave (or naïve) soul of a schoolmate of his, and I (not to mention our dog) opened it up near the river. We chose the riverside and the night time strategically, of course.

As was advised to us by a friend, we also took a bucket of water with us. Not – as some may wrongly assume – to vomit into, but to open the tin under water. Due to the fermentation continuing in the tin, it builds up pressure and when you open the tin, it inevitably and violently discharges the bile water. The best way to avoid it spraying your clothes is to open it under water.

The tasting

Since this was an impromptu action, – other than the bucket – we came only half-prepared. As condiments we brought only a little bread, a shallot and three pickled gherkins.

The hint with the bucket was greatly appreciated, as the opening of the tin was the most vile part of the whole experience. So if you plan to try it, do get a bucket! It stopped not only the bile spraying us, but also diluted most of the putrid smell that was caught in the tin.

Once opened and aired, the contents of the tin were actually quite recognisable. Fish fillets swimming in brine. The brine was already brownish and a tiny bit gelatinous, but darkness helped us get past that.

As for the taste and texture, if you ever had pickled herrings before – it’s like that on steroids, married with anchovies. Very soft, but still recognisable as fish, extremely salty, and with acidity that is very similar to that of good sauerkraut.

Washing the fish in the pickle jar helped take the edge of – both in sense of smell and saltiness. The onion as well as the pickles were a great idea, bread was a must!

In summary, it is definitely an acquired taste, but I can very much see how this was a staple in the past and how it can still be used in cuisine. As a condiment, I think it could work well even in a modern dish.

We did go grab a beer afterwards to wash it down though.

P.S. Our dog was very enthusiastic about it the whole time and somewhat sullen that he didn’t get any.

The smuggling

Well, I didn’t actually smuggle it, per se, but it took me ¾ of an hour to get it cleared at the airport and in the end the actual carrier still didn’t know about what I was carrying in my checked luggage. The airport, security, two information desks and the main ground stewardess responsible for my flight were all in on it though. And in my defence, the actual carrier does not have a policy against Surströmming on board (most probably because they haven’t thought about it yet).

As for acquiring this rotten fish in the first place, I saw it in a shop in Malmö and took the least deformed tin (along with other local specialities). When I came to the cash register with grin like a madman in a sweetshop, I asked the friendly young clerk if she has any suggestion how to prepare it, and she replied that she never had it and knows barely anyone of her generation who did, apart from perhaps as a challenge.

                                             How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu's debut novel, How to Life Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, could be described as a story about contemporary family life disguised as science fiction. It concerns a young man who has spent most of the past decade in a small time machine in his job as a time machine repairman. He makes calls on people who have rented time machines for recreational purposes but have become stuck in time and must be rescued by him. As the novel progresses, it is revealed that this man's name is the same as that of the author, Charles Yu. The protagonist is a lonely and rather sad fellow, who spends much of his non-working hours drifting along in his capsule, thinking about his past and his parents, especially his father who disappeared long ago. Accompanied only by his dog and a computer that has the pixilated face of a female and a cartoon-like voice, Charles hopes to one day locate his father in some alternate universe to which he apparently has traveled in a time machine. Charles's parents, a few clients, and several street performers are the only other humans that he encounters during the course of the story. He makes one trip to a city in Minor Universe 31, a residential and entertainment world made mostly from a science fiction "substrate," where the company for which he works is headquartered. His objective is to have maintenance work done on his time machine and when he goes to pick it up, he encounters his future self. Panicking, he draws his service revolver and shoots his future self in the stomach, just as his future self is attempting to tell him that the key is the book. He has no idea what this means as he stumbles into his time machine and races away. On the capsule's console, he finds a manual-type book that has the same title as the novel.

With the help of his computer, he realizes that he must read the book and make amendments and additions to it as he goes along. At some point in the future, he must give the completed book to his past self, who then will shoot him and begin the rewriting process again in an endless cycle. Charles realizes he has become stuck in a time loop. By the rules of time travel, if he changes anything that happens during this loop, he risks entering an alternate universe from which he might not emerge. Under the circumstances, escaping the time loop appears to be extremely difficult. He may be doomed to spend the rest of his life in the time machine, writing the book, giving it to himself, shooting himself, and starting the cycle again. The book is a manual about time travel, but it also offers advice on how such a traveler should live within or use time wisely. The main use of Charles's time is in thinking about his father and mother, but he begins visiting periods in his past in his time machine, watching his younger self interact with his parents. Eventually, he discovers that the book given to him by his future self is literally the key, because it holds a key that unlocks a box that his mother gave him, inside of which his father left clues to where he went in time. This inspires Charles to realize that he can break out of his time loop through the power of his mind and memory. He does so and rescues his father from the past time in which he is stuck. As the novel ends, it looks as if the family has a chance to regain normalcy and move forward with a better understanding of how to cope with the difficulties of life by facing the problems of the past with courage and honesty.

                       Praise

“Glittering layers of gorgeous and playful meta-science-fiction. . . . Like [Douglas] Adams, Yu is very funny, usually proportional to the wildness of his inventions, but Yu’s sound and fury conceal (and construct) this novel’s dense, tragic, all-too-human heart. . . . Yu is a superhero of rendering human consciousness and emotion in the language of engineering and science. . . . A complex, brainy, genre-hopping joyride of a story, far more than the sum of its component parts, and smart and tragic enough to engage all regions of the brain and body.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Compulsively rereadable. . . . Hilarious. . . . Yu has a crisp, intermittently lyrical prose style, one that’s comfortable with both math and sadness, moving seamlessly from delirious metafiction to the straight-faced prose of instruction-manual entries. . . . [The book itself] is like Steve Jobs’ ultimate hardware fetish, a dreamlike amalgam of functionality and predetermination.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Douglas Adams and Philip K. Dick are touchstones, but Yu’s sense of humor and narrative splashes of color–especially when dealing with a pretty solitary life and the bittersweet search for his father, a time travel pioneer who disappeared–set him apart within the narrative spaces of his own horizontal design. . . . A clever little story that will be looped in your head for days. No doubt it will be made into a movie, but let’s hope that doesn’t take away the heart.”
—Austin Chronicle

“If How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe contented itself with exploring that classic chestnut of speculative fiction, the time paradox, it would likely make for an enjoyable sci-fi yarn. But Yu’s novel is a good deal more ambitious, and ultimately more satisfying, than that. It’s about time travel and cosmology, yes, but it’s also about language and narrative — the more we learn about Minor Universe 31, the more it resembles the story space of the novel we’re reading, which is full of diagrams, footnotes, pages left intentionally (and meaningfully) blank and brief chapters from the owner’s manual of our narrator’s time machine. . . . . Yu grafts the laws of theoretical physics onto the yearnings of the human heart so thoroughly and deftly that the book’s technical language and mathematical proofs take on a sense of urgency.”
—NPR

“How to Live Safely is a book likely to generate a lot of discussion, within science fiction and outside, infuriating some readers while delighting many others.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“An extraordinary work. . . . I read the entire book in one gulp.”
—Chris Wallace, GQ

“A great Calvino-esque thrill ride of a book.”
—The Stranger

“Science and metaphor get nice and cozy in Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. The novel joins the likes of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and Jillian Weise’s The Colony, fiction that borrows the tropes of sci-fi to tell high-tech self-actualization narratives.”
—Portland Mercury

“A brainy reverie of sexbots, rayguns, time travel and Buddhist zombie mothers. . . . Packed with deft emotional insight.”
—The Economist

“A funny, funny book, and it’s a good thing, too; because at its heart it’s a book about loneliness, regret, and the all-too-human desire to change the past.”
—Tor.com

“A keenly perceptive satire. . . . Yu’s novel is also a meditation on the essentials of human life at its innermost point.. . . Campy allusions to the original Star Wars trilogy, a cityscape worthy of the director’s cut of Blade Runner and a semi-coherent vocabulary of techno-jargon cement these disparate elements into a brilliant send-up of science fiction. . . . Perhaps it would be better to think of the instructional units of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe in terms of the chapters of social commentary which John Steinbeck placed into the plot structure of The Grapes of Wrath.”
—California Literary Review

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is the rare book I pick up to read the first several pages, then decide to drop everything and finish at once. Emotionally resonant, funny, and as clever as any book I have read all year, this debut novel heralds the arrival of a talented young writer unafraid to take chances.”
—largehearted boy

“A wild and inventive first novel . . . has been compared to the novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Jonathan Lethem, and the fact that such comparisons are not out of line says everything necessary about Yu’s talent and future.”
—Portland Oregonian

“Bends the rules of time and literary convention.”
—Seattle Weekly

“Getting stuck with Yu in his time loop is like watching an episode of Doctor Who as written by the young Philip Roth. Even when recalling his most painful childhood moments, Yu makes fun of himself or pulls you into a silly description of fake physics experiments. In this way, he delivers one of the most clear-eyed descriptions of consciousness I’ve seen in literature: It’s full of self-mockery and self-deception, and yet somehow manages to keep its hands on the wheel, driving us forward into an unknowable future. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is intellectually demanding, but also emotionally rich and funny. . . . It’s clearly the work of a scifi geek who knows how to twist pop culture tropes into melancholy meditations on the nature of consciousness.”
—io9

“Funny [and] moving. . . . Charles Yu’s first novel is getting ready for lift-off, and it more than surpasses expectations which couldn’t be any higher after he was given the 5 Under 35 Award . . . How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe is one of the trippiest and most thoughtful novels I’ve read all year, one that begs for a single sit-down experience even if you’re left with a major head rush after the fact for having gulped down so many ideas in a solitary swoop. . . . Yu’s literary pyrotechnics come in a marvelously entertaining and accessible package, featuring a reluctant, time machine-operating hero on a continual quest to discover what really happened to his missing father, a mysterious book possibly answering all, and a computer with the most idiosyncratic personality since HAL or Deep Thought. . . . Like the work of Richard Powers . . . How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe fuses the scientific and the emotional in ways that bring about something new.”
—Sarah Weinman, The Daily Beast

“One of the best novels of 2010. . . . It is a wonderfully stunning, brilliant work of science fiction that goes to the heart of self-realization, happiness and connections. . . . Yu has accomplished something remarkable in this book, blending science fiction universes with his own, alternative self’s life, in a way, breaking past the bonds of the page and bringing the reader right into the action. . . . Simply, this is one of the absolute best time travel stories . . . even compared to works such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells or the Doctor Who television series.”
—SF Signal

“Within a few pages I was hooked. . . . There are times when he starts off a paragraph about chronodiegetics that just sounds like pseudo-scientific gibberish meant to fill in some space. And then you realize that what he’s saying actually makes sense, that he’s actually figured out something really fascinating about the way time works, about the way fiction works, and the “Aha!” switch in your brain gets flipped. That happened more than once for me. There are so many sections here and there that I found myself wanting to share with somebody: Here—read this paragraph! Look at this sentence! Ok, now check this out!”
—GeekDad, Wired.com

“In this debut novel, Charles Yu continues his ambitious exploration of the fantastic with a whimsical yet sincere tribute to old-school science fiction and quantum physics. . . . A fascinating, philosophical and disorienting thriller about life and the context that gives it meaning.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“With Star Wars allusions, glimpses of a future world, and journeys to the past, as well as hilarious and poignant explanations of “chronodiegetics,” or the “theory of the nature and function of time within a narrative space,” Yu, winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 under 35 Award, constructs a clever, fluently metaphorical tale. A funny, brain-teasing, and wise take on archetypal father-and-son issues, the mysteries of time and memory, emotional inertia, and one sweet but bumbling misfit’s attempts to escape a legacy of sadness and isolation.”
—Booklist

“This book is cool as hell. If I could go back in time and read it earlier, I would.”
—Colson Whitehead, author of Sag Harbor

“Charles Yu is a tremendously clever writer, and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is marvelously written, sweetly geeky, good clean time-bending fun.”
—Audrey Niffenegger, author of Her Fearful Symmetry and The Time Traveler’s Wife

“Funny, touching, and weirdly beautiful. This book is awesome.”
—Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World

“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is that rare thing—a truly original novel. Charles Yu has built a strange, beautiful, intricate machine, with a pulse that carries as much blood as it does electricity.”
—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The View from the Seventh Layer and The Brief History of the Dead

“Poignant, hilarious, and electrically original. Bends time, mind, and genre.”
—David Eagleman, author of Sum

Korea is rather anti gay. This way they can be together in public without scorn. Is this cover up a common practice in other parts of the world?

Whenever I notice a couple like that, I always want to cheer for them, give them a thumbs up, or shout out loving words of support, but I ultimately just do nothing. Otherwise it acknowledges the fact that their cover is not perfect, which will probably cause them more anxiety than relief.

If anyone out there who did that is reading this, just know : i am rooting for you!

Okay, it's been a little while since the last speedart thread, but I think we are ready for another one! All the same rules apply.

Remember, the purpose of this thread is not necessarily to create a masterpiece, but to encourage people to dedicate some time each week to improve their art as well as providing critique and support. Thus this thread is open to all either as constructive critics and/or artists!

There is no official theme, but if you are looking for inspiration checkout this month's Pictures of the Day over at Wikipedia Commons.

Now grab your materials, set a timelimit, and get creative!

Has anyone here used NixOS for any significant amount of time as their daily driver? I've been considering using it since I learned about it, I really like the idea of how it manages packages, but I'm a bit hesitant, particularly about the availability of packages, and how the whole folder structure changes from the usual Linux. I'm also worried since I haven't seen any guide about how to use python other than the usual advice to get a virtualenv for everything.

I consider myself a fairly advanced Linux user, I have used Arch as my daily driver for 4 years, and Linux for like 10 years, as a side note, so I'm not really that afraid of troubleshooting.

I know this doesn't happen often, but I've seen it happen a few times and I think it would be useful to have a notifications page for edited comments. When someone replies to me I get a notification, I can reply to it and/or mark it as read, and forget about it. Sometimes the person that replied to me edits the comment to add extra information, but since I've already marked it as read I may never see the added info. I'd like to receive a notification whenever one or more editions are made to a reply I received that I've already marked as read.

I originally posted this as a comment here but thought it might deserve it's own discussion.

I think that the rise of megathreads/ultrathreads/collections of threads on reddit has been a large detriment to the site.

I'm a mod for a few large subreddits that utilizes them (and I know a good portion of people reading Tildes right now are as well), and as time goes on I've started to dislike them more and more.

At first they were great - they seemed to silo off all the posts and noise that happened around an event, and made the lives of mods easier. Posts that should've been comments could now be removed, and the user could be pointed towards the megathread. Users could go back to the post and sort by new to see new posts, and know that they'd all have to do with that one topic.

I believe that this silo actually hurts the community, and especially the discussion around that original megathread, more than it helps. As modteams I think we underestimate the resilience of our communities, and their ability to put up with "noise" around an event.

The fact that we are in a subreddit dedicated to that cause should be silo enough - each post in that subreddit should be treated as an "atomic" piece of information, with the comments being branches. By relegating all conversation to a megathread we turn top level comments into that atomic piece of information, and subcomments into the branches.

But that's just a poor implementation of the original! There are some edge cases where this might make sense (take /r/politics, it wouldn't make sense to have 9 of the top 10 posts just be slightly reworded posts on the same issues), but I think this can be remedied by better duplication rules (consider all posts on a certain topic to be a repost, unless the new post has new or different information).

There is something to be said about the ability to generate a new, blank sheet of conversation with a post, that is not marred with previous information or anecdotes. New comments on a megathread post don't have that luxury, but new posts do.

Additionally, I feel like the way reddit originally conditioned us to view posts is to view them then not check them again (unless we interacted with someone in it or got a notification). This prevents potentially great (but late) content from gaining visibility, as a non-negligible portion of the population will still be browsing the subreddit, but will never click the post again.

I think it's cool to see who invited a user on their profile page, but who have I invited? Is there a page I'm missing? I think it'd be cool to just see that stuff.

Some sort of public user tree would be pretty neat too.

Side question- after public release, will the invited by section on old profiles continue to stay? I think that'd be a pretty cool way to show alpha testers imo.

When something big happens, there are often a lot of different posts, which results in the conversation being scattered all over the place. Is there any policies on users creating megathreads for these big events, or if there will be some kind of megathread system build into ~ in the future?

What are some of your favorite videos that explain deep topics in depth?

I've recently been on a 3blue1brown binge (youtube) and am looking for more videos of that ilk. Doesn't have to be a series or a consistent uploader, one off videos are sometimes the best. Just thought I'd ask ~comp if there's anything in particular that comes to mind.

This is in part inspired by the video posted by /u/Deimos in the Technical Goals section of Tildes, titled Simplicity Matters

song.link

Not sure how many Rezz or even electronic music fans there are here, so I'm interested to see the response.

Rezz released this single from her upcoming album yesterday.

I'm a huge Rezz fan, and this song is awesome, but I kind of hope that the full album will have some more variation. I like the song, but it came on autoplay earlier today and for a second I questioned whether it was from Mass Manipulation. It seems like Rezz is rehashing the same formula just a bit too much. Sure, every artist has their sound, but I kind of expected something a bit different.

A new, relatively unknown artist that I think has been incredible so far is 1788-L. He sounds like a mix between Porter Robinson and Rezz. I hope Rezz can add some more variation to her distinct sound to make it a bit different, similar to 1788. Maybe the upcoming deadmau5 collab will be promising in this regard?

What do you guys think? Again, overall, great song.

Obviously this assumes you agree that humans have a soul, but even if no one agrees on what the soul is – if you agree that people have them at all, then when did they start having them within the historical context of human evolution?

There are a few ways this question could be approached depending on which frame of reference you choose to use, so I'm curious to know which frames you guys find useful and most relevant.

I think this site is a really neat concept, especially because the quality of discussion on Reddit has really deteriorated (which has happened concurrently with Reddit's shift from discussion and news to "repository of Internet culture"). I like online discussion, and IMO this site's design is better than Hacker News, so I'm probably going to start using this site. Is there anything I should know about this site? This is my first post and I'm not too sure how things work.

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.