Tildes is still in the process of being built and there's been much discussion on what kinds of content and posts we'd like to see here. Users have also been outspoken about the content and posts that they think should be discouraged. With this in mind, I thought it might be interesting for us to have a conversation about how to engage in a civil conversation with someone with whom you disagree, and what kinds of behaviors make a discussion worthwhile.

Here are a few links to get us started.

• A Better Way to Argue by Jay Heinrichs
• One Civil Conversation Please from schoolofthought.org
• The Danger of a Single Story a TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation a TED Talk by Celeste Headlee

So what do you think? How should we communicate with each other in order to really make Tildes a great place to engage with one another? Do you have any conversation tricks or rules that have been successful in your own lives? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

So I'm looking to get a nice pen for school (£25 max). Metal pens appeal to me although I'd be interested in others too. If anyone had some suggestions for nice pens that are suitable for long periods then it'd be brilliant :)

One of the features that I use on Reddit is the 'save' button. I like to be able to return to a post a day (or two) later and see where the discussion went after I first looked at the comments section. Is this functionality going to be implemented into Tildes as well?

Save button: https://i.imgur.com/eVBA839.png

Haven't been on much for a few days, so this may have been discussed, but I think it would be really nice to have the ability to have multiple subscription groups per user (I'd be happy to work on this once the code is open-sourced if people are interested).

The reason I suggest this is that I was realizing earlier that sometimes when I log in I'm just looking for computing, tech, and science stuff while at other times I'm looking to engage in some longer conversation about current events. I think it would be very nice to be able to have multiple subscription groups so that, depending on what I'm looking for during a given visit to the site, I could focus on that but still change it to something else easily next time I come online.

I was wondering if anyone else around here consistently reads any of the many webcomics out there. I really love reading XKCD, CommitStrip, Questionable Content, Alice Grove, and Mare Internum.

If you'd like to have a discussion about art styles, writing, the communities around the comics, how in the world Randall Munroe manages to continually come up with ideas for comics that make XKCD even more relevant for everything, or whatever else you might want to talk about, I'd love to talk with you about it.

Actually I didn't at first. But getting involved in more contentious discussions I've come to realize the downvote was merely used as a weapon for groupthink. It was used to facilitate echochambers by killing off dissenting voices so that they don't even show up. Taking Reddit for example, it happens across subreddits of all political ideologies - left and right - and even subs like /r/Android for criticizing things like the Pixel haha.

But I am guilty of this too, don't get me wrong. When I see a comment I dislike I itch to whack that downvote button and sometimes even do. Here, though, not having it forces me and others to actually engage the commentor they disagree with and get a good conversation out of it. I think this is so important if we want to be a site that facilitates good discussion and not easy to follow groupthink. Because I've noticed a large difference in even my own actions by how I am forced to respond to things without it.

Am I the only one who isn’t noticing much of a difference between reddit and tildes at the moment? The random alt right talking points popping up in the most innocuous of places is skeeving me the fuck out.

I'd like to suggest site search as a Tildes feature. It would be useful to know if a topic has already been discussed by people on the site. For instance I don't know if a search feature has already been discussed.

Or perhaps I noticed a topic I wanted to follow up on later that I can't find now. Or I there was a reply that said something interesting I wanted reference, etc...

Let me count some things in markdown.

0. Nothing
1. More than nothing
2. A pair of something.
3. A crowd.
4. The number of the semi-beast.

Now some space and jump into something else.

87. That's how many years ago it was when the Gettysberg address says four score and seven.

Again some space.

1066. Exterior. A field filled with smoking fires and armor piles. It smelled bad.

1067. The space odyssey year.

1068. June. 9th.

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, so please let me know if I should post this to a different group instead.

I have 3 drives on my current PC, but the C: drive is almost full (it keeps bouncing around between 2-1 GB left) and it seems to be slowing some programs down. Most noticeably Audacity stores temporary files in C: while I am working on large files and it often changes wait times on an edit to upwards of 30 seconds (meaning literally nothing happens for 15-45 seconds and then the change takes place, even if it's only a simple few second deletion).

Is there a way to set my D: or E: drive as the default drive of the computer so I can clear out some space on my C: drive and use the extra space I have on those drives? Thanks for any help or information you can give me.

This article from last year provides an alarming look into the woes that media preservation (specifically audio and video) is facing this century due to a content explosion that shows no signs of slowing down. It’s not a new problem, as journalist Bill Holland showed nearly 20 years ago (warning, it’s a long read).

To summarize: In the past, many predecessors to existing media studios did a bad job of archiving their collections of recorded material. In some cases they actively destroyed or threw out parts of their catalogs to make way for new material. This wiped out portions of the available media to be preserved, especially the older stuff. Now that most studios have improved their archival practices though, their remaining catalogs are facing a new foe: Moore’s Law.

The problem with LTO (tapes) is obsolescence. Since the beginning, the technology has been on a Moore’s Law–like march that has resulted in a doubling in tape storage densities every 18 to 24 months. As each new generation of LTO comes to market, an older generation of LTO becomes obsolete… Already there have been seven generations of LTO in the 18 years of the product’s existence… Given the short period of backward compatibility — just two generations — an LTO-5 cartridge, which can still be read on an LTO-7 drive, won’t be readable on an LTO-8 drive. So even if that tape is still free from defects in 30 or 50 years, all those gigabytes or terabytes of data will be worthless if you don’t also have a drive upon which to play it.

If the worst case scenario were to happen, this is apparently what it would look like according to “a top technician at Technicolor”:

“There’s going to be a large dead period,” he told me, “from the late ’90s through 2020, where most media will be lost.”

But not everyone is that worried, the article also includes this counterpoint,

“Most of the archivists I spoke with remain — officially at least — optimistic that a good, sound, post-LTO solution will eventually emerge.”

/u/boredop and I have been discussing the implications of this in the thread they posted a few days ago about a John Coltrane release, and in the course of that discussion they provided that second link to Bill Holland’s multi-part investigation (thanks!).

So my question is this: What direct or indirect measures would you theoretically take to prevent or mitigate the loss of the vast majority of recorded media from 1990 to 2020? Should any measures be taken to preserve these cultural artifacts?

By direct measures I mean innovations to physical archiving or storage methods. By indirect measures I mean public awareness, strategies for choosing what to save, workarounds, etc.

How important are lyrics to you?

For me, the words are probably as big a part of my experience of a song as the music itself. It's unlikely that I'll come back to a song if the lyrics don't speak to me. On the other hand, I know other people who claim not to care about the lyrics at all.

So, I was curious. If you are a person who cares a lot about the lyrics of a song, do you also read poetry? How do you feel about purely instrumental music?

Personally, I can appreciate instrumental music, but it's not something I tend to seek out. I enjoy poetry a lot (probably as much as music), both reading it and listening to it.

I'm interested to see if there's a pattern to this. :)

I am a university student who has just finished (survived is probably a more accurate word) third year and am going to begin a placement year at a programming company at the very start of July. I have been told that I will primarily be coding in C#, and that they will also teach me coding on the job, however I would like to get some form of a head start prior. I've already done some basic C++ beforehand, but I know that C# is slightly different and was wondering if anyone could suggest some resources that would not only teach me C# properly but also quickly. Like I mentioned previously, the place I am working at does not require me to know how to code properly, but it would be nice to have some footing before the placement starts. Additionally, I am also hoping that it will impress them so that my chances of landing a graduate job with them after my fourth year are increased!

Everyone has their own way of visualizing a problem they're working on, and every strategy has some reason for being used. Some people prefer text (e.g. pseudocode) while others prefer diagrams, for example. What do you use to make problems easier to approach, conceptualize, and solve? Why that particular strategy rather than some other one? What kind of practical implementations of your strategy exemplifies the benefits of your strategy for modeling the problem?

A few weeks ago I posted a project I was working on to read news from the command line. I incorporated the suggestions given in that thread (license, requirements.txt, etc), incorporated suggestions I've received elsewhere, and added a few features.

Here's the updated link: News Desk

Any feedback would be much appreciated!

Edit: And a specific point for feedback. I store the user's API key in ~/.nd_config/key which I think is a step up from requiring the user to set their key as an environment variable (which is how I had it originally). Still though, is there some way I can not store the key in plaintext and still have it in a format that is readable by the computer and can be used to verify API access?

In case you don't live in the US and don't know, it is very common for health insurance to be tied to employment.

I've held four jobs over the last twelve months. Health insurance has been the most frustrating part of it. I'm married, I have kids. I don't want to go months without health insurance. My wife is self-employed so no employer subsidized insurance for her. We live comfortably so no option for government subsidized insurance.

The cheapest plan with insanely high annual "deductible" of something like $10,000 (the money you have to pay before insurance will pay) I can get independently is around $1000 / month. For comparison, with my current employer, my part of the insurance is around $440 month with a $3000 / year deductible.

During the past year I've four different insurance companies, one of them paid entirely out of my own pocket, no coverage for dental care for a while, no coverage for eye care for a while. Really WTF? Why are teeth and eyes so different from other medical care?

I'm now three weeks into my current position, insurance coverage with this employer began on the first of the month (so after about one week of working) — another gripe, the waiting periods to start coverage; my position before this had me working six weeks before coverage began; this time I had no idea when it would begin until I spoke to HR on my first day. I finally got my new insurance cards yesterday.

So today I decided to try to cancel my out-of-pocket coverage. I have until the sixteenth to cancel for this month. Haha, no. I can't. Not only are the human operators not working today (which granted is a Saturday), but the website is shut down for the weekend. I can't make any changes until Monday.

If the cost to me was the same, or close, I'd just buy my own insurance all the time instead of dealing with the hassles of constant change. But the costs are no-where near close. And I've got college tuition costs coming up very soon, so it's not like I'll have money to spare.

I feel like health insurance in the US is the worst of all possible worlds.

Trailers

• Battlefield 5 Official Multiplayer Trailer

• FIFA 19 Official Reveal Trailer with UEFA Champions League

• Origin Access Premier: Official Reveal Trailer

• Unravel Two Official Reveal trailer

• Sea of Solitude: Official Teaser Trailer

• NBA LIVE 19 Official Reveal Trailer

• Madden NFL 19 - Official Reveal Trailer

• Command and Conquer: Rivals - Official Reveal Trailer

• Anthem Official Cinematic Trailer

• 4 Minutes of Anthem Open World Co-Op Exploration Gameplay - E3 2018

Thoughts?

I’ll go first. Back in the late 1990s I worked at a startup out of Seattle. The founders had a previous exit and had a winery in Sonoma. They flew us all down there and things started out fun. We had a scavenger hunt in San Francisco, we all picked grapes at their winery, and saw how the wine was made. The third day got weird. We were all supposed slaughter a goat and eat it. No one wanted to kill the poor thing, so a farm hand did it, and we all ate the terrible meat.

On the final evening we were all sat down in a barn with lots of candles. We did some semi-normal stuff like write down everything we have been avoiding in our lives, then we burned the lists.

Next, the person running the thing thought it would be a good idea to reenact the biblical thing where Jesus washes poor peoples’ feet. But she got it backwards, and some of the VPs were supposed to wash the CEO’s feet.

A couple of us vocally freaked out, then the whole thing fell apart and we all went home early.

I know my story may be extreme, but does anyone else have any misguided or just strange team building events like this in their work history?

So I've been having a slightly off-topic discussion on a thread here and figured this would be a good subject to have wider input on.

I don't think markdown adds anything to Tildes and I think it actually degrades the experience for new users. Right now we're mostly old experienced reddit users and mods, but that hopefully will change. To me, markdown adds a not insignificant hurdle to formatting. Markdown has very few uses besides reddit and Github, and even then there's a few different types.

I suggest a WYSIWYG text box with a tabbed HTML option for those who want to use code formatting. Let's use something that's standard and encourages users to learn useful code.

Tell me why I'm wrong Tildes!

Edit: I primarily use mobile, so maybe that's part of the disconnect here. But it seems I'm the only person who cares and still thinks markdown is almost useless. I'm fine being in the minority. I still feel it's a good idea to look beyond the bleeding edge to the time when there's 300,000 or 3,000,000 uses.

Have a good day everyone!

A bit of context: in July 2017 germany implemented the Netzdurchsetzungsgesetz, a law which allows german authorities to fine Social Media companies with over 2 million users if they persistently fail to remove obvious hatespeech within 24 hours and all other cases within a week. A write up of the law and background information. Information about the definition of hate sepeech in germany.

I am interested in your opinion: Is this governmental overreach and infringes on the freedom of speech or is this a long needed step to ensure that people feel safe and current german law is finally being followed?