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    1. Caught the cycling bug. Anyone else?

      Title says most of it. Something has clicked for me in the past new months and I've unlocked a level of enjoyment cycling I never had before. I've always ridden by bike since I was young, but only...

      Title says most of it. Something has clicked for me in the past new months and I've unlocked a level of enjoyment cycling I never had before. I've always ridden by bike since I was young, but only recently have I started doing it for health and fitness, and pure enjoyment. I'm addicted to seeing just how far (and how high) I'm able to go! What really did it for me was my first ride with decent elevation. I've always driven past cyclists chugging their way up in the hills and never understood how they did it, and never thought I'd be able to. Well, all it took was trying it one day to realize that while difficult, it was totally attainable, and since then I've been hooked. This has prompted me to also start following pro cycling, which I've done on and off before, but this year I'm very much looking forward to the Tour de France.

      Anyone else into this as a hobby (either doing or watching)? Anyone training for big upcoming rides, and if so what? I mostly just want to chat about what people's weekly rides look like!

      24 votes
    2. Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of June 15

      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...

      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.

      11 votes
    3. Ceiling fan light switch replacement help

      Solved! I'm trying to replace the light pull switch on the ceiling fan. Breaker is off, light bulbs are out. The old switch has two black wires that run into the light socket, out of the socket...

      Solved!

      I'm trying to replace the light pull switch on the ceiling fan. Breaker is off, light bulbs are out.

      The old switch has two black wires that run into the light socket, out of the socket comes a white and black wire. The black wire seems to be connected all the way through, the white wire obviously starts in the small socket fixture.

      How do I connect these wires? Further up is a crimp connecter on the white and black wires.

      I thought this was going to be easier.

      Edit: pictures hopefully fixed.
      I also don't have any wire nuts or similar connectors apparently so, I am running to grab that.

      Edited: link to pics deleted for my sanity

      12 votes
    4. Tildes Survey #9: How optimistic are you about the future? (Results)

      Original post Submit your response here! Direct link: https://survey.tildes.community/-/how-optimistic-are-you-about-the-future-9/ This survey closes on June 21, 2026 at 10:00 UTC The results will...
      Original post

      Submit your response here!


      The current plans for questions that will be asked in the coming weeks are as follows:

      Question Survey opens Survey closes
      Vote for the next 4 surveys 2026-05-24 18:00 UTC 2026-05-31 10:00 UTC
      What is your gender identity? 2026-05-31 18:00 UTC 2026-06-07 10:00 UTC
      What's your favorite video game? 2026-06-07 18:00 UTC 2026-06-14 10:00 UTC
      How optimistic are you about the future? 2026-06-14 18:00 UTC 2026-06-21 10:00 UTC
      How often do you visit/read Tildes? 2026-06-21 18:00 UTC 2026-06-28 10:00 UTC

      Keeping it very simple this time around with some Likert scales! (TIL the name of these)

      The person that originally submitted this question also mentioned doing this periodically (like every six months) so I figured for this first one I'd ask both how you feel about the future now and how you have felt in the past six months.


      Please submit your ideas for questions here! Even if they've been submitted already by someone else. All input is valuable! You can view all submitted questions on this dashboard.

      Thank you all for participating!

      The survey has been closed and the results are in!

      Thank you to all the 244 people that responded! Check out the dashboard for the full results!

      Thank you all again for participating! Hope to see you in the next survey! :)

      42 votes
    5. Formula 1 Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix 2026 - Race Weekend Discussion

      Warning: this post may contain spoilers

      Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix
      Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya
      June 12-14, 2026


      Qualifying Results -- SPOILER
      Pos. No. Driver Team Q1 Q2 Q3 Laps
      1 63 George Russell Mercedes 1:15.717 1:15.228 1:14.679 13
      2 44 Lewis Hamilton Ferrari 1:15.625 1:15.418 1:14.743 14
      3 12 Kimi Antonelli Mercedes 1:15.977 1:15.295 1:14.998 14
      4 1 Lando Norris McLaren 1:16.287 1:15.361 1:15.001 14
      5 3 Max Verstappen Red Bull Racing 1:16.352 1:15.484 1:15.021 12
      6 6 Isack Hadjar Red Bull Racing 1:16.427 1:15.754 1:15.077 14
      7 81 Oscar Piastri McLaren 1:16.138 1:15.518 1:15.090 15
      8 30 Liam Lawson Racing Bulls 1:16.673 1:15.585 1:16.542 14
      9 27 Nico Hulkenberg Audi 1:16.066 1:15.768 1:16.657 17
      10 16 Charles Leclerc Ferrari 1:15.964 1:15.281 DNF 8
      11 41 Arvid Lindblad Racing Bulls 1:16.425 1:15.840 8
      12 5 Gabriel Bortoleto Audi 1:16.616 1:16.001 9
      13 43 Franco Colapinto Alpine 1:16.590 1:16.191 12
      14 10 Pierre Gasly Alpine 1:16.599 1:16.261 12
      15 87 Oliver Bearman Haas F1 Team 1:16.571 1:16.389 15
      16 55 Carlos Sainz Williams 1:16.881 1:17.827 15
      17 31 Esteban Ocon Haas F1 Team 1:17.073 9
      18 23 Alexander Albon Williams 1:17.424 9
      19 11 Sergio Perez Cadillac 1:17.545 6
      20 77 Valtteri Bottas Cadillac 1:17.757 9
      21 18 Lance Stroll Aston Martin 1:18.758 8
      22 14 Fernando Alonso Aston Martin 1:18.815 8

      Source: F1.com

      Grand Prix Results -- SPOILER
      Pos. No. Driver Team Laps Time / Retired Pts.
      1 44 Lewis Hamilton Ferrari 66 1:32:28.105 25
      2 63 George Russell Mercedes 66 +19.561s 18
      3 1 Lando Norris McLaren 66 +23.719s 15
      4 3 Max Verstappen Red Bull Racing 66 +40.497s 12
      5 81 Oscar Piastri McLaren 66 +58.661s 10
      6 6 Isack Hadjar Red Bull Racing 65 +1 lap 8
      7 10 Pierre Gasly Alpine 65 +1 lap 6
      8 43 Franco Colapinto Alpine 65 +1 lap 4
      9 30 Liam Lawson Racing Bulls 65 +1 lap 2
      10 41 Arvid Lindblad Racing Bulls 65 +1 lap 1
      11 5 Gabriel Bortoleto Audi 64 +2 laps 0
      12 55 Carlos Sainz Williams 64 +2 laps 0
      13 31 Esteban Ocon Haas F1 Team 64 +2 laps 0
      14 11 Sergio Perez Cadillac 63 +3 laps 0
      15 16 Charles Leclerc Ferrari 62 DNF 0
      16 12 Kimi Antonelli Mercedes 61 DNF 0
      17 87 Oliver Bearman Haas F1 Team 60 DNF 0
      NC 23 Alexander Albon Williams 55 +11 laps 0
      NC 14 Fernando Alonso Aston Martin 37 DNF 0
      NC 27 Nico Hulkenberg Audi 29 DNF 0
      NC 77 Valtteri Bottas Cadillac 15 DNF 0
      NC 18 Lance Stroll Aston Martin 5 DNF 0

      Fastest Lap: Lewis Hamilton // 1:20.122 on lap 44 👀
      DOTD: Lewis Hamilton

      Source: F1.com


      Next race:
      Austrian Grand Prix
      Red Bull Ring
      June 26-28, 2026

      14 votes
    6. Shopping around for a new-and-improved backup solution

      A few days ago, I posted this and quickly realized that the world of data backups is far richer than just sudo rsync -av --delete --exclude=Videos /home /home_bkup. So now I'm window shopping the...

      A few days ago, I posted this and quickly realized that the world of data backups is far richer than just sudo rsync -av --delete --exclude=Videos /home /home_bkup.

      So now I'm window shopping the top Linux-supported backup solutions: borg, duplicacy, kopia, restic and--oh look--a core borg dev just dropped his own new-and-improved solution, vykar.

      Restic was the first tool I started to research, and I thought I really liked it, got as far as installing, initializing a test repo, creating a couple of snapshots. But restic seems to be, hmm, fussy about the source and destination paths, absolute vs relative paths, etc.

      The fact that merely renaming a parent directory (or grandparent, or great-grandparent, etc) causes restic to treat every unchanged byte below that as brand new ... that's a recipe for giant, bloated repos, and it's unacceptable to me ... and hey, lookit that, borg does not do that. So now, restic is out and borg is in.

      But what other pros v cons are there, that I haven't even realized need to be considered? What advantages/disadvantages do other apps offer? Which ones can I easily automate with nightly/hourly cron jobs? Which ones have their own even-better automated solutions?

      Do I even want encryption? All of my drives/volumes are LUKS encrypted, and anything I would store remotely would also get encrypted before it ever left my LAN ... plus, I'm just a bit nervous about having the backups encrypted, requiring working, functional software to restore/recover data from them....

      That may not seem like such a big concern, perhaps, but I am currently working my way thru decrypting a bunch of 10-15 year old TrueCrypt-ed volumes, which requires using an old, outdated version of VeraCrypt and a somewhat "cross-my-fingers" effort to find KeePass repos old enough (also outdated, KeePass 1.0 repos) to still contain the various passwords I used to encrypt those ancient volumes ... but also still use new enough master passwords that I can still get the KeePass repos unlocked.

      With rsync, I can literally just go into any backup, find the specific version of the specific file(s) I want to recover, and manually copy it back to my workspace. Is anything like that option available in any of these deduplicated/encrypted solutions, even if they're not encrypted? If (eg) a borg repo is created w/o encryption, the data is still all just borg-specific blobs, right? Or can I navigate into the repo and just manually grab files?

      Oh yeah ... for reference, the past 10-ish years, my backup routine has been to create a new, dated, destination folder, starting with a full backup of my /home folder (excluding things like Videos, Music, VMs, other bulky stuff that gets backed up separately/differently), and then running nightly diff backups into the same folder, while also maintaining a "one-day-older" second backup of the whole thing on a 2nd HDD ... then, every 3-6 months, zipping up the current backup folder and starting a new one.

      At any rate, there you go; that's the kind of stuff I'm thinking about now, as I overhaul my 20-year-old, 20TB (but could be 2TB) backup system.

      Any and all feedback, recommendations, tips are welcome. Danke.

      18 votes
    7. Does generative AI have a natural limit without a major innovation?

      I was musing about this recently with the recent models becoming more capable. The core of gen AI is the model, which is trained on a massive dataset. To date, gen AI has improved because the...

      I was musing about this recently with the recent models becoming more capable. The core of gen AI is the model, which is trained on a massive dataset. To date, gen AI has improved because the models have become larger, more efficient, the data they are trained on has become better and the software/harnesses around them has improved to help query them.

      As I see it, surely the bottleneck will soon become the data they are trained on? If we imagine a scenario where a models could consume an infinite amount of training data, and there is no limit to the training time or quality. The sum of human skill/knowledge is the limiting factor. Gen AI should (in theory) never be able to out preform or push the boundary of the sum of humanity at time of training.

      Or, counterpoint, is there enough randomness and speed to iterate that gen AI can actually step change and improve if training times/cost were less prohibitive? Most companies/models today will save good output and feed it back into the next iteration, but right now that's taking months. What if that took minutes?

      What do you think?

      Is gen AI going to take us to general intelligence?
      Will gen AI get to a place where it's "intelligence" and reasoning is actually better than the sum of Humanity?

      27 votes
    8. Save Point: A game deal roundup for the week of June 14

      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...

      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.

      11 votes
    9. Front HVAC not working in minivan

      Ok so this is our wheelchair van, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to take it to the shop but I am hoping for an idea of what is going on. We have a 2014 Dodge Grand Caravan with less than...

      Ok so this is our wheelchair van, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to take it to the shop but I am hoping for an idea of what is going on.

      We have a 2014 Dodge Grand Caravan with less than 45k miles that's been fully modified for wheelchair use. (This shouldn't impact much but it does mean the electric is a bit more complex). It has separate front and rear controls and separate driver passenger front controls for the HVAC. The rear works fine, but the front passenger stopped switching off of the heat maybe a year ago. I forgot about it because we don't drive the car often and since we don't have a front passenger seat in the vehicle, no one is right in front of those vents. The driver side and rear kept working fine.

      In the past month, the front vents no longer have any air movement with the very small exception that occasionally when I switch the AC on there's a bit of a very short, light cold breeze. Even more rarely sometimes at highway speeds this breeze will continue longer.

      No setting change this afaict, there's no defrost, no switching to a different temp or set of vents that makes the blower work.

      I did check the fuses under the hood and they look fine, I haven't gone behind the glove box, in part because I suspect this is going to be out of my skill set.

      Suggestions for what could be the cause? Again I know I'll need to get it to a mechanic just hoping to have knowledge going in.

      13 votes
    10. We're so back

      Had to spend my whole day without refreshing Tildes every 5 minutes 😔 My browser already renamed the Tildes link on my new tab page to "502 Bad Gateway"

      107 votes