Someone posted this on the privacy subreddit. I also ended up finding this and this after doing a bit of searching. As someone who isn’t in the CS/IT spheres (chemical engineering is my background), Firefox has been my go-to browser for awhile, although I’m being made aware of the flaws of Firefox (most of which go over my head) and behavior of Mozilla. What can be done to fix this, especially considering that Firefox is the only FOSS browser with a significant user base?

I thought it'd be fun to see how some of you keep your computer organized. Do you follow some general scheme, keep it arbitrary, throw everything on the Desktop or in Downloads or just abuse the search bar?

Feel free to go as general or as in-depth as you want.

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2020/day/13

Join the Tildes private leaderboard! You can do that on this page, by entering join code 730956-de85ce0c.

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

(This is kind of a rant about Vimeo's website. It might be better in ~tech, or ~comp. Feel free to move it.)

I've always preferred using Vimeo to YouTube for finding interesting videos because it's more oriented towards artists than people just uploading random stuff. As mentioned in the recent What Creative Projects Have You Been Working On? thread, I had some nature videos I shot of hummingbirds and wanted to upload them somewhere. My spouse had uploaded videos to Vimeo before, so I thought I'd put them there rather than YouTube because I don't like dealing with Google.

The site is a hot mess. I've hit the following problems after lightly using it for 2 days. I uploaded a single video and set it to be public:

• No way to enter keywords or tags. Searching will only find your video if you mention the search terms in your title (and maybe your description).
• Some of their own pages are broken or missing. If I go to "categories" and click on "documentary" it shows me an error message saying the page doesn't exist. If I click on "arts" or "music" I go to that category and see videos available.
• No information on how to add your video to a given category. Is it done automatically? Is it done by someone on the staff noticing and adding it? I have no idea!
• My video has gotten a few views from people here, so it is uploaded and available for anyone to see. But if I search for "hummingbird" and limit the search to videos uploaded in the last 7 days, my video is not displayed. Why not? Who knows?
• I ran the iOS app without logging in and it showed my account but said I had no videos, even though others were able to see them. Logging in shows the videos and confirms that they are set to allow anyone to view them. WTF?
• I attempted to send them a message telling them about the broken links. When you go to the help section and click on "Contact Us," you get a fake chat window that's just a bot that will pick keywords out of your question and reply with articles that don't answer your question. In fact, they even ask below each one, "Does this answer your question?" with a button for yes and nothing else. There's no way to say, "No, this was unhelpful." If you scroll to the bottom of the list of articles they recommend, there's a button to send a message to their tech support.
• I'm on the free tier, so I wasn't expecting any sort of answer to my help question, but still wanted to let them know so they could fix it. But that didn't work either. They have enough sense to copy your question from the chat bot into the tech support form (nice!) but it strips out any URLs. (Thanks! Very useful since I was trying to report a broken URL!) But it doesn't matter anyway because after you choose a category (none of which are correct) and attempt to submit your form, nothing happens. You press "Next" and the button turns into a spinner for a few seconds, and then stops and turns back into the "Next" button. Nothing appears to have been submitted, but no error is presented.
• The site is full of dark patterns. I get that they want upgrade revenue coming in, and I have no problem with that. But they do things like have a blinking icon in your video's settings for "interaction tools." These are things you can do to monetize your video, or whatever. Stuff I will never need. All the options in this section require a paid upgrade and there's no way to turn off the blinking beacon (except, I assume, by upgrading).

I was considering upgrading to their bottom-tier paid account, but after seeing how much is broken, I have to wonder if they're circling the drain? I get using chat bots and forms to make it easier for their support people, and making sure users know about ways to upgrade, but this is ridiculous. Anyone else run into this?

A year ago, I asked if people would pay for social media platforms and search engines if they could guarantee no data collection and no ads (although in hindsight, I wanted to ask people for basically all software services) and people overwhelmingly said no. Given how Facebook is dealing with the election and YouTube has taken control of monetization for the sake of more advertisements, I wonder what do people think is the right way for software makers to make money.

Asked because I like the idea of reading about the past and feel unsatisfied by r/history and r/askhistorians mainly because reddit's search isn't that great and those subs have a much wider scope than most news archives.

I'm gonna do this on a Q&A format. Note that "old news" doesn't need to be news articles, it can be blogs for example.

If you read old news/articles, where do you get them from/find them?

What kind of "old news" do you read?

What historical period do you tend to read about?

If you're reading an article about a historical event you remember, how does your memory tend to compare to those articles?

How often do you do it?

What do you think about subreddits like r/twentyyearsago, since they're basically trawling through those news archives?

Short Summary:

• On Monday, approximately 20:00 local time, public shootings occured at multiple places in Vienna, Austria.
• 4 deaths in total, one perp, 3 civilians. 15 people are severely injured, including one member of the police.
• Attacker(s) is/were armed with a rifle and several handguns, and were wearing a dummy explosive vest.
• The dead perpetrator has been investigated over the night, identified as a sympathisant of IS ("Islamic State"). There have been multiple arrests and house searches of the people surrounding this person by Austrian SWAT (Kobra).
• Schools are closed on Tuesday (today).
• In total, six places have been hit: Morzinplatz, Salzgries, Seitenstettengasse, Graben, Bauernmarkt und Fleischmarkt
• The police is still currently working with military support.
• Locals are urged to stay home today and it's difficult to get reliable updates.
• The police has asked the public to refrain from posting videos/pictures on social media, and instead send it to them, as posting material could endanger the police and military working.
• Multiple perpetrators are possible, but not confirmed.
• The attack is currently considered to be an Islamic terror attack.

Best place to get news: @LPDWien (local police department Vienna) on Twitter: https://nitter.net/lpdwien They post relevant information in both English and German.

I am currently a junior in college and in search of summer internship for next year. I am not seeing much response and starting to wonder if it is an issue with my resume. Is there any chance one of you would be willing to take a look at it? Open to any and all feedback.

Thank you for your time.

Resume

Stop me if you've heard this one before:

• You get an idea for something you'd like to learn more about. (Maybe you have a question, maybe you want to explore a new hobby, or maybe you want to make a more informed decision.)
• You type something into a search engine.
• You click a result, only to realize that what you're reading is poorly written. It seems rushed, surface-level, and ill-informed. "This doesn't answer my question at all!" you think to yourself.
• You go back, and try another one, and another one, only to give up and put the idea back in your head.

I don't think these webpages are written to be useful in the first place. They seem to be written to attract attention to the website for other reasons (ad revenue, affiliate links, to draw attention to a product or service). Regardless of why it's happening, though, I want to find a better way to search.

The sort of content I'm looking for is written by someone who really cares about the topic. I want to learn from dorks and nerds and passionate people. Once I stumbled across this blog about extra virgin olive oil. The website isn't pretty, and it goes way more in depth than I'll ever need, but I trust the author, and there are some really interesting nuggets of insight on these pages. (e.g. "Another myth debunked: Heating EVOO makes it ‘toxic’")

Do you have any tips or tricks to more reliably find these sorts of sources (whether online or in-person)?

It seems like there are not that many new topics posted on Tildes, and that we could post a lot more. But I sometimes find myself reluctant to do so. Don't I post too much already?

Recently there was a survey and apparently many people think Tildes is too tech-oriented. I don't think it's all that tech oriented, not like Hacker News or lobste.rs, but that makes me a little more reluctant to post tech links. (Though, really, other people should post more of the kind of links they want to see.)

I suspect it's not just me. Periodic topics sometimes get a lot of comments. Periodic topics have been started specifically to avoid having too many top-level topics on one subject.

But, why are we avoiding this? What's wrong with posting more links? If this were a social bookmarking site, I'd be saving more links. Maybe I'd save a bunch of accordion links, without any regard for whether people are interested?

It seems like we need something like folders. When new links are posted in a folder, they don't get listed individually at top-level. You could drop a bunch of links in a folder if you felt like it, without feeling like you're monopolizing conversation, because people would have to open the folder to see what's there. Or maybe instead of folders it would be something like creating a playlist. You could start a topic that's basically a list of links, and then anyone can add links to it if they want.

It seems like groups don't really do this, somehow? They feel a bit too open and exposed. Everything shows up on the front page regardless of group. (I mean, you can filter or unsubscribe from groups, but many of us don't. Partly because they're too broad. Who's going to unsubscribe from music just because they aren't interested in some music?)

So instead we use topics and post links as comments. It sort of works, but it's given me a lot of practice at writing markdown-formatted links on a mobile keyboard, and they appear differently in search and aren't tagged.

It seems like links posted within a topic and posted top-level should be more similar in the UI. Maybe if there's some conversation about a link within a topic, a moderator could promote it to top-level? Maybe a lot of topics would start that way, and then the site would feel a bit more full.

Does anyone know about flashing a Google mini or amazon alexa or similar device with some other firmware to make it run funky custom stuff and not phone home or is that kinda just impossible?

I tried searching for this on the general Internet but there was too much clutter from the manufacturers to find anything.

This post is born from another discussion we have currently on tildes about the benefits of LineageOS. Please, check it out if you wanna discuss about the benefits of the custom ROM scene.
Here, instead, I ask primarily about hardware, not about software. Although, as always, they later intersect.

My question comes from my search for a new phone, I have been rocking a Moto G5 Plus since 2018 (it was released in 2017 and I bought it second-hand) and my experience has been great overall. I knew that I could root this phone so that I did in September 2018 and from there I haven't gone back to stock ever since. Mistakes aside, the experience has been great overall and has nourish my interest in computing. But, this phone is 3 and a half years old and I definitely notice it. One, due to the wear and second the 2GB of RAM my model had (XT1680). I'm in no hurry in a change though, I think I could use it for some more years and I can say that thanks to an amazing community that still supports this phone. (Seriously, I am using Android 10 with the latest patch, unthinkable!).

Nevertheless, as a thought experiment, or as a backup plan, or useful for anyone interested in being part of custom ROMs, I would like to ask you guys which do you think are the most dev-friendly phone in the market right now?

The criteria would be:

• It has a unlockable bootloader.
• The kernel has been released and is available.
• Has a community that constantly supports it.
• It doesn't have 2GB of RAM

Please, write any phone you have the idea that has a modding scene. I'm afraid that some will not be available in my country, but I want to make it as international possible so I insist, write any phone that has that criteria. And feedback for the english will also be appreciated.

Hi! I've heard tilderinos talking about the gemini-verse on some other posts; I tried it out this evening and it honestly felt strange browsing in terminal and even stranger navigating the web without search engines. I was wondering if anyone had a gentler introduction than the official site? I feel like I've got a ship, but no map to this new verse.

Here in the States, you hear about your insurance company waiving co-pays for tele-health therapy visits in these “uncertain times,” but searching for providers confronts you with even more uncertainty. How do you evaluate their practices for safety and privacy? Every other practitioner subscribes to a different platform. Some, to my horror, use Zoom. Others have adopted a software suite to manage their entire practice. These therapists rely on the same company for scheduling appointment reminders, recording session notes, billing insurance, and running a video chat. When I have requested to connect via Signal, they express a preference for their platform, usually citing HIPAA compliance. One recommended a finding a provider who uses paper records as the only avenue open to me. But wasn’t there a time before companies like Spruce, SimplePractice, and TheraNest, where sensitive session notes were somehow distinct, less “networked” than today? How are therapists determining the privacy and security protections of their platform? How do I? Does anyone have experience with these companies?

TL;DR: I did not know each individual group had wikis and I find them pretty great (the LGBT and tech ones in particular). Do they get updated regularly, are they searchable via the site-wide search, and who can contribute to them exactly?

I was looking through the "note-taking" and "productivity" tags for recommendations on a new note-taking app when I came across the extension resources wiki article in "Tech". It hasn't been updated recently but it made me realize one of the reasons why I find places like reddit useful is that the "Pinned FAQs", "Beginner Guides to <Hobby>", and "Megaposts" on reddit are an excellent source of (for lack of a better term) "peer-reviewed" recommendations and are often the catalyst for fun discussions.

I have, through my time here on tildes, discovered so many excellent recommendations even by just using the search bar and browsing threads - to the point that if say, a reddit and tildes post give me conflicting recommendations, I would trust the tildes post 9 out of 10 times. The climate of posts here are less inflammatory and the discussion on pros/cons are more calm, friendly, and thought through. I admit they have impacted my views on a bunch of things (not least of which is trying firefox as my main browser).

Are resource dumps like that something that the community here find viable in general? Are there plans for updating their implementation to be more easily accessible or is it too far removed from the discussion-based fluidity of the site? I understand that there are other places online to find information, but rarely do I find it at this level of transparency of bias and (on average) free of any bloat.

I guess I'll end this little thought stream with a thank you for all the people who post here and a curiosity for the future discussions to come. I've lurked a lot and learned a lot.

These days I was thinking about making UPDATE posts for things I wrote about my personal life. So I typed "update" on the search bar and did not see anything of the sort. Are those discouraged? Was the question simply never asked before? Should I just add more information to the existing post, (without notifying any of the original commenters)?

Hi folks, I hope this is ok to post.

Flow (also known as 'the zone', and others) is a mental state of profound task-absorption that makes a person feel one with the activity in which they are involved - I'm sure many of you have experienced it.

I'm on a team of people doing research on flow theory, and we focus on people employed in software development. Our goal is to help make the office a better place for employees, by understanding when and why people enter flow. We prepared a survey for some work- and flow related topics, and it would be of great help if you could take and maybe even share it.

Completing the survey only takes 2-5 minutes of your time, and we will handle your anonymous entries with utmost care.

Link: https://forms.gle/efqTMk2oVDVEGcgT6

Thank you!

So I’m just sitting here wondering why they returned so soon, 2 months Doesn’t seem like a very long time considering the money and preparation involved.

I did a quick search to try and find the answer without any luck, so wondering if anyone on here can shed some light on the reason.

I'm thinking of paying for some cloud storage and I'd like to hear your recommendations and experiences with cloud storage providers. I'd like the best bang/buck and preferably something that works well with Linux (Void is my current distro). I had been using Keybase as they offer 250GB of space for free(?), though I recently learned they've been acquired by Zoom which...concerns me. Plus, I can't seem to get the filesystem mounted on Void for some reason =/.

Here are a few I'm considering:

Major Players

• Google One: $20 a year for 100GB

• Microsoft 365: $70 for 1TB of storage + Microsoft productivity suite (that I probably won't use all that much)

Out of these options, I think I'd prefer Microsoft at this point.

Smaller Players

• Cloudamo: $25 a year for 100GB. Bonus that it's built on open-source tech and looks pretty flexible.

• pCloud: I've been seeing this recommended in my current search for a provider. But... seeing as of this posting the website is down, I'm not filled with confidence.

• Wasabi: More of a DIY option, it'd be ~$72 a year for 1TB.

Cloudamo looks the most promising, here.

Complete DIY

• I have a 2TB drive that I guess I can expose to the Internet as a fileserver. Dunno what my ISPs policy on this is and I wouldn't be confident in its reliability.

Well, those are a few options. Got any more?

In the research article, "Searching for Mr. Hyde: A five-factor approach to characterizing
'types of drunks'", scientists identified four types of clusters:

• Cluster 1 - "Hemingway"

the largest and included those who reported only slightly changing when intoxicated. Specifically, members of this group reported decreasing less in Conscientiousness (e.g. being prepared, organized, prompt) and Intellect (e.g. understanding abstract ideas, being imaginative) than the rest of the sample. Notably, two previous studies have found that, on average, these two factors reportedly decrease the most with intoxication (Winograd et al., 2012, 2014), so the moderate decreases demonstrated by this group make its members stand out as being ‘‘less affected’’ than drinkers in some of the other groups, much like the author Ernest Hemingway, who claimed that he could "drink hells any amount of whiskey without getting drunk".

• Cluster 2 - "Mary Poppins"

composed of a small number of drinkers (approximately 14% of the sample) who are particularly Agreeable when sober (i.e. embodying traits of friendliness), and decrease less than average in Conscientiousness, Intellect, and Agreeableness when intoxicated. Accordingly, members of this cluster reported experiencing fewer overall alcohol consequences than those in the Mr. Hyde cluster (described next). The Mary Poppins group of drinkers essentially captures the sweet, responsible drinkers who experience fewer alcohol-related problems compared to those most affected.

• Cluster 3 - "Mr. Hyde"

defined by larger than average intoxication-related decreases in Conscientiousness, Intellect and Agreeableness. In other words, members of this group, much like the dark-sided Mr.Hyde, reported a tendency of being particularly less responsible, less intellectual, and more hostile when under the influence of alcohol than they are when they are sober, as well as relative to members of the other groups. In the significant model associating overall negative consequences with cluster membership, the Mr. Hyde cluster drove the association. This was the only cluster that was statistically more likely to experience alcohol consequences, suggesting that individuals in this group not only embody less savoury personality characteristics when drunk, but also incur acute harm from their drinking (e.g. experiencing a memory blackout; beenarrested because of drunken behaviour; see Hurlurt & Sher,1992, for a full list of YAAPST items)

• Cluster 4 - "The Nutty Professor"

tended to be particularly introverted when sober but demonstrated a large increase in Extraversion and decrease in Conscientiousness when drunk, relative to their sober levels
of these traits. They also tended to report having the most overall discrepancy between their reported sober and drunk FFM traits, as indicated by the lowest ICC of the four clusters (0.05). Surprisingly, membership in this cluster was not associated with experiencing more alcohol-related consequences within the past year. So, although the personality change displayed by ‘‘The Nutty Professors’’ may be the most dramatic, this does not appear to be associated with elevated harm – at least in terms of the alcohol-related consequences assessed in this study.

Although I don't drink, when I used to I would be the most extroverted person in the room (or gaming lobby). I distinctly remember making friends with everyone that I encountered online and in-person. Cue the next morning when I have to cull all the new contacts I received because I knew I would never talk to those people again unless I was drinking. So I guess I am a nutty professor since I am always the most introverted person in the room sober. This was an interesting study, and I think it is interesting to note the individual differences of people when inebriated, and what causes those individual differences.

I read the AskReddit thread on "What costs less than $100 that changed your life?" (link unavailable since I'm at work) but someone responded "SQL" - jobs just open up that make a ton of money.

I did a cursory search on Indeed and holy moly they were right -- SQL jobs get easily 2x what I make now. I'm pretty good at Excel and that sort of thinking, so I was thinking I'd try taking a class.

Do yall have any recommendations as to a good course to take in SQL, preferably online, preferably free or cheap? I'm willing to pay a bit if it'll mean I can make a lot more, but I'm currently not making a ton, haha.

Any responses welcome, including ideas as to how to break into like, tech-oriented fields as well.

This idea is inspired (at least for me, there are probably actual forums like Tildes to draw better comparisons to and take better inspiration from) by Danbooru (P.S: This image is just SFW scenery but the site as a whole is not) , where they have meta tags for stuff like image resolution, if it has commentary, it it's translated, animated, GIF, etc.

Should we consider that but for tags like long and short read or watch, videos, reposts/duplicate posts, spoiler threads, recurring.[ ], maybe news article authors too (also appropriated from Danbooru), since these can supercede any topic or group and will rarely be suggested in any single one of them?

If it's not clear what that looks like, imagine all the normal tags being suggested/typeable at the top and all the meta tags being suggested in a separate search box just below the current one, which are displayed regardless of which group you're in, since they can apply to all the site.

• On Youtube.
• Official multilink (Spotify, Bandcamp, ...).

Basically, an equivalent of JustWatch.com for music. I just tried looking up an obscure song to see if any streaming services had it and am amazed I can't find some sort of dedicated aggregator. I remember someone posting links in previous threads to a website that had various streaming options for each particular song recommended but I can't even remember what site that was.

I am mulling over starting a side business that would involve selling physical products. I would like to set up a web store for this, but want to keep the amount of web development I have to do to a minimum. I would also not like to invade my customers' and potential customers' privacy. Can anyone recommend a way to approach this? I'm a software developer, but don't do much web development and don't really want to do development for this project beyond just getting the site up and running. What options exist for setting up a simple web store?

I've done a search and see things like Shopify. I've heard of them and get the impression they're reputable, but other items in my search seemed kind of scammy. Are there things I should look out for in this space?

The longer I use Tildes, the more I question the effectiveness of ~news.

/r/news made sense on reddit, where they didn't have a robust cross-group tagging and filtering system. I think Tildes be better served by eliminating ~news entirely and replacing it with a news tag with a date property, which would allow for nice chronological filtering for catching up on news stories, especially if the article date could be scraped somehow. Miss a week of news? Search the tag with a date range, get all news stories for last week, perhaps with a minimum comment threshold to see what sparked discussion.

I think ~gov (or politics) would be needed as a replacement, as it's a major driver of most news stories, but there's so much more to politics than just news, and those discussions don't exactly fit anywhere nicely at the moment, esp if it's a random blog post relating to recent events in the news. Almost every other group serves as a nice catch-all for most other common news categories.

The only issue I would see would be when ~gov would overlap with the other categories, which would likely happen a lot..but that happens with the current ~news too. I think that could be further mitigated by having a sort of x-post system blurring the lines of tags and groups even more, where ~gov would take precedence but posts would then also appear in the tagged groups for users not following governance otherwise.

That's actually a foundation of my more insane idea of completely eliminating traditional groups by letting people build their own groups in the form of prioritized tags, but that's another post for another time.

TL;DR: How long should a graphics card last? What can I do to make them last longer?

This is perhaps an odd question to ask, but I've been a console gamer for most of my life and have only been all-in on PC gaming for maybe 1-2 years and I think I may be missing something.

So there has been about three times when I have spent money on a half-decent graphics card, and each time they have failed me. The first one was a genuine hardware failure, probably a memory failure judging from the artifacting. The second one failed for reasons I have been unable to figure out. It didn't appear to be overheating, but I was getting driver errors that suggested it were; reinstalling from scratch did nothing to fix it.

The last, most current one is the one that bugs me the most. I'm getting the same problems; driver crashes just like overheating, except this one has better temperature monitoring and I can see that isn't happening.

I previously thought that the reason why my graphics cards would always crap out on me was because those were cheaper cards from less reputable manufacturers, but this last one is really bugging me because it's relatively high end and from a reputable manufacturer - it's a Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700, complete with the giant AMD reference cooler. I'm getting it RMAed, but since I didn't keep the receipt I am still going to have to pay to fix it even though it should theoretically be under warranty.

I've done a ton of searching to find out how I can possibly solve this myself, but I am frankly astounded by how little information the drivers give out on Windows. I'm seeing that the device is being reported as unavailable but nothing whatsoever as to why.

To make matters worse, it seems like this isn't actually common for other people. Most people seem to be replacing their graphics card because they are obsolete, not because they physically fail.

So basically what I am asking is, how long is a graphics card actually supposed to last for? Do I just have astonishingly bad luck?