DISCLAIMER - The following is all my impression of discussions happening. I do not wish to call out any particular individuals or make any strong statements about 'truth' or 'fact'. This is a post about how all of this information made me feel and I will try my best to avoid language which paints any of this as definitive statements of truth.

Yesterday there was a thread which got nuked in which people were seemingly arguing on the validity of eugenics. Right now there's a thread about what's going on with Reddit which at times elevates the accusations raised by a group of troublesome individuals.

I'm not comfortable with people discussing whether there's any legitimacy to eugenics. I feel extremely alienated when people elevate accusations lead by kiwifarms and lineham and other bigots - frankly speaking I don't want to see anything lineham has to say on this website, ever, except perhaps when it is prefaced by a long post explaining the background of the troublesome individual and the post is being linked to explain why they are troublesome.

How do we stop this? Am I the only one who feels alienated and like I don't want to participate in Tildes anymore? If so, at what point is a discussion veering into the realm of intolerance and how can we stop this from happening and how do we culturally enforce this to happen?

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

Posted this over on r/highereducation, thought it might be interesting here.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, especially in the context of "free college" proposals. Subsidizing private colleges and universities would be a political non-starter. I'm assuming the government would have a "teach-out" style plan to transition schools off federal dollars. Regardless, the impact would be massive. I've briefly glanced at financial aid and revenue data for one R1 school, and it seems federal money makes up a significant (20-30%) portion of annual operating revenue. While that doesn't seem like much at first, I suspect enrollment would drop significantly at many schools if there was the alternative of going to a public university for free. Several thoughts come to mind:

• What percent of schools would close or merge?

• What would be some of the most surprising schools to close?

• How quickly would schools close? Would they immediately shutter, close at the end of the transition period, or struggle on for a few years?

• What is the breakdown of institution types (R1/2 vs SLAC vs engineering schools)?

• What would be the impact on religiously-affiliated colleges, especially Catholic schools (there's already many little-known ones in the middle of nowhere)?

• Of the schools that survive, what sort of strategies would they employ to remain solvent (lean heavier on foreign students, reduce admissions standards, have mandatory work-study programs to reduce administrative costs, create alumni contracts akin to tithing, invest more in the financial sector/Wall Street)?

Edit: Whoops, I thought I posted this in ~misc. Oh well.

I got a cheap mop at the grocery store last year thinking that would be enough, but it broke like a month ago and always left smudges all over my floors anyway. I never really liked it. It was one of those fixed sponges with a handle to squeeze it out rather than one that looks like Medusa.

I have wood laminate floors throughout my house, not true wood floors. Unfortunately, they're dark brown and show a ton of crumbs and smudges, so I'm looking for something sorta in the buy-it-for-life category. I.e. willing to shell out a little more if it makes a difference. I've had a vacuum for a year that has been good for all the crumbs (Miele), and I really love it.

Also what soap should I be using for best results?

Thanks, all!

My old TTRPG group hasn’t met in months now, and listening to actual play podcasts only scratches the itch.

Probably a long shot given the size of the site, but anyone interested in playing a TTRPG sometime soon?

I’m thinking something easy and low pressure, like Stewpot, or Fiasco or maybe a world builder like the Quiet Year/Microscope/Anomaly/The Ground Itself; I have the PDF for most of those.

But hey, if you have something you’ve been waiting forever to play: I’m here for it.

I have literally nothing to do tomorrow so drop a message if you’re interested! I’m in CST

I've always found a fresh desktop wallpaper now and then is a good way to stop your PC feeling stale, and keeps me enthusiastic/more productive.

That said, I always have a hard time finding one when the time comes.

Unsplash seems like a good resource, but can feel so impersonal just having a nice picture of some mountains or a field. I have some friends who I know just rock whatever the default wallpaper for the OS is -- I can't verbalize why but something that feels tailored, or an image that brings me some joy, makes me much more comfortable using the computer.

Unfortunately the popular spots online I'm aware of for sharing wallpapers tend to lean toward certain subsets of interests (such as contemporary geek culture and/or lewd anime women) which you may or may not be into.

I've toyed with the idea of just having a solid colour to avoid any kind of decision fatigue, but it feels like staring at a wall - it's nice to have something with some depth behind all the flat windows.

Curious what others here on tildes use for their wallpaper, how often they change it, and where they might source a new one.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

On March 17th, it was reported that the version of Nier: Automata on the XGP, the BECOME AS GODS edition, was a different and much improved version of the one found on Steam, the Game of the YorHa edition. This was particularly big news since the first port of Nier: Automata has been infamously buggy and broken for many, and it has never received an update since launch despite its widespread and massive success.

This version of the game not only fixes the resolution and FPS issues, but it also adds things like HDR and ultrawide support. This new port was developed by QLOC and have apparently included these improvements at Platinum Games' request. There have been longstanding rumours about disagreements between Square-Enix and Platinum about who is responsible for updating the game, thus its lack of updates (even though all other PC titles by SE and Platinum have received updates), and the original release continues to be completely unplayable for many even with the FAR mod.

Yesterday, March 18th, a Resident Evil and Evil Within YouTuber reported that the XGP version of Evil Within was effectively a new version of the game with significant additions and changes:

• first person mode + FOV option
• Infinite ammo mode
• Icons for lantern/sneaking in first person view
• Low/Medium options for Camera Bob
• The stamina has been adjusted, you can now run for 5 seconds at default stamina(was originally 3 seconds)
• All DLC Included
• Separate Achievement List from Xbox
• The game also feels less janky and smooth

First person mode has been a highly requested feature for the game, as it was added with the sequel (The Evil Within 2) and has been an often requested and modded feature to the original game.

Hello Tildes,

I've been doing bokashi composting for pretty much all my vegetable and fruit scraps since last year. Lately, I've been wanting to level up my game and recycle meat scraps and chicken/fish bones as well. That's how I came across these "foodcycler" devices. They basically chop up and dry food scraps in a sealed container. I assume it works much like how industrial composting machines work, except it's scaled way down. At around 300-400 dollars, they're certainly not cheap, and probably generate a lot of greenhouse gasses during the manufacturing process. What's more is, every time you run a cycle, it has to run for 4-8 hours, though the manufacturer says the device is "energy conscious."

I'm trying to assess whether I'll do more harm than good by buying one of these things to convert more of my food scraps. My ultimate goal is to try many different ways to recycle food waste and try to get my friends to try it out as well. Some of them have already shown interest in bokashi composting, but none has actually tried it out (too much work).

Do you think commercial "foodcycler" devices do more harm than good? How should we go about evaluating this?

Edit: I've asked this question on many different places, and it looks like the general consensus is there's no strong need for something like this unless you live in apartments, in a city/town that does not collect food waste. Some believe recycling food waste via the more traditional methods (e.g. bokashi, vermicomposting) would yield better results because the foodcycler would dry up and kill a lot of the bacterial presence, though I believe the dried up scraps can be somewhat "revived" by mixing them in wet soil. Nobody seems to be able to definitively tell whether using the foodcycler would be a net positive or negative, because there's no way to verify its manufacturing process. I may do an experiment on how much power it draws if I get my hands on one in the future.

Hey everyone,

I launched my little project LinkLonk here on Tildes back in December and wanted to tell you how it has been going and get your feedback/suggestions.

New changes since the launch:

• The temporary accounts now automatically get deleted after 30 days of inactivity. I didn't have the deletion logic at the time of the launch, but had it implemented about 30 days after launch. Automatic account deletion is quite destructive - removes the account from the database (thank goodness for foreign keys and cascade deletes) and from Firebase Authentication. I'm happy that there were nobugs when I ran it the first time.
• In addition to submitting external links you can now create text posts. The posts are Markdown-formatted (similar to Tildes). One novel thing is that you can post "anonymously". The database has a record of who the author is so the author can delete/edit their post, it's just the name is not show next to the post.
• Comments - each item has a comment section. The comments are ranked based on how much you trust the people who upvoted each comment (as opposed to being pure popularity). This is the same ranking system that is used to rank the "For you" page, but now applied to comments.
  • Unlike Tildes, the comments have a downvote button. The downvote does not bury the comment for everyone else. Instead, it makes your trust in upvotes of people who upvoted that comment go lower. So the downvote button effects what you see, not what others see. It is much harder to abuse that button that way. For that reason I feel much more comfortable putting it there. However, there is a second order effect. If you downvote a comment that someone else already downvoted - then you will trust the downvotes of that person. When they downvote some other comment - then it will rank lower for you. In a sense they earn your trust to moderate content for you by identifying comments you don't want to see.

In terms of users, there have been 260 user records created (some from my shameless plug comments on HackerNews). Of those, ~45 rated something - excluding those that were temporary accounts and were deleted. And I think we have 2 regularly active users (excluding myself). In my mind I had 10 as the number of active users that I was hoping to get by the end of 2021. At this rate we may reach it.

I was pleasantly surprised that there have been no misbehaving users. I didn't need to remove any content even once. This lead me to constantly postpone the implementation of a content reporting system. I hope it stays this way for a long time.

The whole idea of a trust based recommendation system is based on having someone to trust. Right now it is the RSS feeds that are generating most of the content recommendations for the active users. But ideally it would be mostly users recommending content to users. I have two priorities for the near future:

• Make the "single-player" experience better so the active users find value already. As an example, I added full-text search through items you liked
• Find more users to improve the "multi-player" experience. One option is to submit a "Show HN:" post on HackerNews. But you can only do it once and I'm not sure I'm ready to use that shot yet.

What do you think I should do next on these two fronts?

If you would like to give LinkLonk a try register with code "tildes" at https://linklonk.com/register. Feel free to comment on this post: https://linklonk.com/item/6347369602224750592

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

I floated an idea in the quitting reddit topic about setting up a sort of "Screenless Day":

Would anyone be interested in participating in a sort of designated “screenless day”?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about trying to organize for a while. I’m thinking it’s something we could set it up among us here at Tildes and shoot for, say, one day a month where we all agree to not turn on any of our screens and do literally anything else. The following day, once we come back online, we can talk about what we did, how it felt, etc.

It seemed like we have a few users here who might be interested, so I figured we could talk things out here about how we might implement it.

The main things I think we need to consider are:

Scheduling: having a specific calendar day centralizes efforts but also limits individual autonomy -- how can we organize this so it's simultaneously communal but also allows for individual flexibility?

Parameters: this is much more about the spirit of something than about hard and fast rules, but I think it benefits us to have a baseline guideline for what constitutes "screenlessness" (e.g. someone going on a hike might still use the GPS on their phone, and that can seem like a "violation" but is still very much in the spirit of the day)

I'll also qualify that I'm not beholden to "screenless" as the focus in the slightest. We could easily do something that's "unplugged" or "no social media" or whatever. Also I don't even have to be the leader of this! If someone else is wanting to take the reins I am more than happy with that, but I also don't mind driving the bus either.

Anyway, drop your thoughts here about how we can best roll this out. This is our brainstorming session, so nothing is set in stone and everything is up for consideration right now!

Hey everyone! Last time I translated an article, it generated all sorts of interesting discussion. so I thought I'd do it again and I think I found an interesting one that gives plenty of good ground for discussion.

Your fellow citizen, the oppressor

A new ideology is spreading in Germany. It divides society artificially in hostile camps. This madness must be stopped.

An essay by Jochen Bittner

Published 2021-03-10, 16:54, edited 2021-03-11, 10:27, DIE ZEIT № 11/2021, 2021-03-11.

They are two seemingly completely divorced events, but they are part of one and the same questionable ideological trend, which is currently spreading at universities, editorials and party headquarters.

In the summer of 2018, a black student at the college of Massachusetts accuses a janitor of racist intimidation. The janitor had asked her, what she was doing there. “Everything I did, was being black.” Said the student. That was enough to question not just her existence at the college, but her entire existence. Outrage broke out at the elite women’s university (yearly fee 78,000 USD). The university president apologized profusely, accused the janitor of racism and suspended him. Only now, a few days ago, the New York Times continued the story: After an investigation by a law firm ended, their report concluded that the space the student was occupying had been reserved and closed off for an event. That is what the janitor was referring to. Signs of racist behaviour were not found.

The second event was a shitstorm centred around the pop radio station Bayern 3 [Bavaria 3] in the last week of February. A moderator known for his polemics had talked himself into a rage including insults about a South Korean boy group; in the end he equated said boy group with a virus, for which we would hopefully soon find a vaccine. In a couple of hours, a global quake of protests arose under the hashtag #BR3Racist, and it did not take long for Bayern 3 to publicly apologize with the words “If a statement is deemed inflammatory and racist by many people, then that statement is.”

300 years of enlightenment, and only the feelings of many angry people are enough to count as truth? So, we burned the witches in medieval times rightly?

Fact is, that what comes out in such events is the result of a powerful academic movement that has found entry in all humanities, social sciences including law. It is a kind of thinking, where categories like skin colour, gender and other bodily characteristics do not play a vanishing, but a very important role, with more weight placed into it every day. Not what someone says, but if they are an “old white man” or a “privileged cis-woman” – cis means shortened: not transsexual¹ – says, is significant. And less the intent of the speaker is relevant than the impression of said words. That leads to a form of “Social Justice” where not individual circumstances are important, but alone the perspective of the real or fictive victim. If that sounds dangerous, then because it is.

The origin of this cultural step back is the combination of two models of explaining the world: the “Critical Theory” and “Intersectionality”. Both cannot be avoided in todays university seminars. Who wants to understand the swelling culture fight climate, which is also spreading in Germany, must learn to understand.

Looked at each in isolation, both models of Intersectionality and Critical Theory are useful. The term Intersectionality comes from the American law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. She found an important flaw in anti-discriminatory law in 1989. The car manufacturer General Motors had, in the 1970s, let go a wave of black women because they were part of the employees, who had only been hired recently. The women sued, without success. According to the court, the women were not discriminated as women, because there were still women in the offices of the company, who had not been let go. They had also not been discriminated as black people, because the company employed them in its factories. What the judges were not keeping in mind: black women only recently began to be hired in offices by GM – which was the reason why they were let go first.

The plaintiffs had been exposed to a special form of injustice, their characteristic as women and as black people. Crenshaw compared this to an intersection on which the women were standing and had subsequently been caught in two streams of discriminations at once.

Are injustices nothing else but products of structures?

The answer of classical liberalism to this question would be: Here there were two instances, where the universal right to equality of the individual were violated. It was racist that GM did not hire black women for so long. And it was sexist, that the women were only employed in offices. Every reasonable person must recognize this and want to remove these circumstances.

A different answer comes from Critical Theory, or better, the 21st century reprint of it. According to it, society is full of power structures, which are permanently connected to group characteristics like skin colour, gender and sexual orientation. Depending on which characteristics people fulfil, they belong into a “privileged” group or a “oppressed” group. Men oppress women. White people oppress black people. Heterosexuals oppress homosexuals. Cis people oppress trans people. Fully abled people oppress disabled people. If there are injustices between two such groups, they are nothing but the product of these structures. Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt school, claimed in the 1960s that because of these power inequalities people that supported these structures (according to Marcuse; the political right) should not be able to talk with the same tolerance as oppressed groups.

In the times of the student revolts postmodernism of the French philosopher Michel Foucault became more popular. Many of his followers understood it that way that there was no objective reality, but that the perception of truth depended on the particular position of power in society. Colonialism and relationship of the genders were examples how power influenced knowledge. Systems are still oppressive, even if the individuals are not aware of oppressive behaviour.

Again liberalism, optimistic to clarify would answer: Correct, as colonialism was based on the thought of superiority of white people against “inferior races”, and the discrimination of women results from the patriarchal misfire that different bodies should result in different social values. But haven’t the western, free societies on the last seven decades not detected theses chauvinisms and have made leaps forward? Racism remains a dangerous problem, but it is socially and juristically despised, women are by law made equal and are partially even supported by quotas. Gay people become heads of state and public officials, and the right to asylum grants oppressed people from the global south protection. Of course, there is more to be done, the liberal society is never finished, but the direction is right.
Sadly no, says Critical Theory in its newest reprint. Liberalism is not the solution, but part of the problem. It does not recognize the problems in the system, because it itself is an intellectual product of white men, therefore, a power structure. In her in the USA very successful book Critical Race Theory (2012) the lawyer couple Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic write, that liberalism does not offer the correct frame to solve problems of racism: “Different from traditional civil rights conversation, that (…) focus on step-by-step advancements, Critical Race Theory questions the fundaments of the liberal order itself, including the equality theory, the judicial arguments, the enlightened rationalism and the neutral principal of constitutional law.” You have to read that sentence aloud to yourself sometimes.

An in America also recognized author is Robin DiAngelo, who landed a New York Times bestseller with White Fragility – Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism in 2018. The book states that “Individualism” is an “Ideology” and white people had to, to reflect on omnipresent racism, always look at themselves as part of their race. DiAngelo also offers “Antiracism” trainings. In one of them for the employees of Coca-Cola, she demands to appear “less white” which also meant: “Be less oppressive, arrogant and ignorant.” Sounds racist? It is of course, except if one thinks such generalizations are legitimate to remove “White supremacy”.

Political Poison

Exactly here the political poison lies dormant, a concoction of Critical Theory and Intersectionality. It lets society appear as layers of opposing hostile groups – and every injustice is a consequence of those structures. That is the hot core of so-called identity politics. That is why it suddenly is a problem, if a white Dutch woman translates the book of the black US poet Amanda Gorman, even though when Gorman herself thinks that the translator is a good choice. That is why the peak officials of the SPD² are “extremely ashamed”, when Wolfgang Thierse (a not that young white man) warns, that identity debates could lead to new trench warfare which destroys the public spirit.

Skin colour, age, gender, are the basis of the presumption of guilt – from too little sensibility to racism. The clou, with which this kind of thinking is made waterproof is the mentioned idea of white fragility. It says: If white people fight the accusation of being racist, they are simply denying the reality of racism – and thus keeping it alive.

These already dividing teachings are often directly applied from the USA to Germany, despite the historic, economic and institutional differences. They are taught in seminars, spread in books and shared in editorials. The Critical Race Theory, writes lawyer Cengiz Barskanmaz on the online platform Verfassungsblog [Constitutional blog], can be used to “propagate a racially aware perspective for the German law”. “The interest of law students in Critical Race Theory is definitely high, with rising tendencies.”

Black people can be missing the right racial awareness, mind you. The German-British sociologist Natasha A. Kelly said in a recent discussion round about a black man from Kiel, who called his restaurant “To the Mohr’s head”³ simply hadn’t been through his “political awareness process” yet. The name of the restaurant remains racist, independent of the viewpoint of the man who named it, because: “It is not an individual thing, that you or me can influence, it’s something in the structures.”

The structures. They are everywhere, and they are more powerful than the individual and their arguments. It is a to political theory heightened deeply pessimistic, even in parts paranoid, world view. Of course, racism exists, and it makes murderers out of people. After the NSU terrorism, the murders of Hanau and the success of the AfD⁴ at the voting booth it is only understandable that the fear of the (luckily growing louder) migrant community in Germany is increasing. But who thinks that crime and extremism arise from the “structures” of this country, even from and especially from their immediate surroundings, accuses and alienates their main ally in the fight against racism. Such a rough interpretation of the truth is wrong in the same ways as the right-wing populist projection, Islamist terror comes from the middle of the Muslim community.

Pauli Murray, a civil rights activist at the side of Martin Luther King, once wrote: “When my brothers draw a circle around me to exclude me, I’ll draw a larger one, to include them. When they talk about the privileges of a weakening group, I’ll talk about the rights of all people.” From this inclusive philosophy this new, dangerous teaching of hostility does not only step back – it draws ever-shrinking circles with thicker and thicker brushes and divides society into more and more groups, which are supposed to oppose each other with more and more hostility. It is time to realize this madness – and stop it.

Footnotes:

¹ The term transsexual was used here verbatim. I think the term is outdated, but as I am not a professional translator, I was unsure if I should "update" it, as I think a translation should always be as close to the source as possible.

² The SPD is the major center-left party in Germany. They have formed the government together with the center right party, the CDU/CSU for decades now, but are fairly unpopular right now.

³ The word Mohr is a German discriminatory term to refer to black people. I would not put it on the same "pedestal" as the n-word as it is missing the historical weight, but nevertheless it should not be used any more. It still remains in use under the population in some historic remnants like a classic dessert called Mohr im Hemd (Mohr in a shirt) which is a chocolate sponge cake in chocolate sauce served with vanilla ice cream.

⁴ The populist rightwing party of Germany. Have gotten enough votes due to the refugee crisis to enter some local state governments and the German federal, but no other party cooperates with them as they are very obviously racist, islamophobic and have in some cases, ties to actual neo nazis.

Original article: https://www.zeit.de/2021/11/identitaetspolitik-rassismus-soziale-gerechtigkeit-intersektionalitaet/komplettansicht (paywalled, and in German, if we have German people here who'd like to verify my translation, I can give you a copy).

That marks the end! I hope you liked it and I hope we can have a good discussion about it. I've spend some time translating this so I'll take a break, go shopping and come back to this a bit later to form my own opinion in a separate comment. Be kind to each other!

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

When learning something new, often available resources are lacking in some departments - whether they're missing information, poorly written, or tedious and dry. But occasionally, some content just stands out as above and beyond the rest, serving to not only make the learning process enjoyable but also to kindle interest in further exploration. What is that for you?

This could encompass everything from computer programming to literary criticism, and could be in the form of a website, book, video tutorial, or the like.

If I add, remove, or change a topic filter, and then press the "Save" button, I get no indication that anything happened. It does work, but it's odd that it doesn't tell you it tried. What if something caused it to fail? (Maybe that case is handled?) I think it should say something like "Changes saved at 3:11:42PM", or something along those lines so you know it actually updated.

It would be nice if there was an extra box that allows you to add info that is private to the people on tildes. For example I would like to share creds to a game account, but I only want people on tildes to get that info, not the public who aren't users and just visit.

(This thread is a rehash of this thread, with the difference that you can give advice to any non-public figure you want from 10 years ago too, regardless of how old they are.)

(Also assuming they take you seriously, interpret it correctly, don't forget it immediately, don't cause a butterfly effect for doing so, etc...)

Advice for any generic 5-year old:

• If you don't know already, learn to write.

• If you don't know already, learn to read. (Neither of these are likely in most places but whatever.)

• If your parents tell you to not talk to strangers, what they mean by that is "don't talk to adults, unknown people who offer you things (which rarely happens anyway, lol) or people minding their own business." Most importantly, none of these apply to you current, or future classmates. Talk to them about things you might share in common.

(I would also include something about how watching children's cartoons are a utter waste of time but I have no replacement for those and I suspect only their parents would.)

Advice for me, 10 years ago:

• Pay attention to your future school material to make sure you don't lose it and call your teacher and interrupt class for everyone else.

• Some people will be very rude to you. You should probably tell your mom about it when you're home so she can tell the school staff about it. (You won't have time to tell your school staff unless you want to say that in fron of the people who will be rude to you. Also I have no clue if the staff will do anything about it.)

• Crying will often attract those people to you and give them satisfaction, it's better to do it at home to your parents. (Also, those people shouldn't dictate the morality of crying.)

• If you hear a word you don't know about from your classmates, it might refer to someone's genitals, particularly If it starts with X. (like a 5-year old would know what genitals are but anyway)

Some people will tell you or pressure you to do dumb things. ('Dumb' being needlessly harmful to others or humiliating to you.) Don't listen to them. (I have no clue how they will react to this however.)

To my mother, 10 years ago:

• In the future, it will be unanimous consensus that you should track everything your child does on the internet until they're a teenager and not have them spend more than like, 2 hours there. I'm not kidding about this.

• This is the ideal time to introduce your child to chores apparently.

• Telling your child to not talk to strangers will be a mistake, because your child will also assume 'strangers' to be his classmates, which is bad for obvious reasons. By 'strangers' you mean "adults, unknown people who offer you things (Have you ever seem this happen? Serious question.) or people minding their own business."

• Your child being autistic will mean your child will need more elaborate explanations for following social norms than most people.

• Children can often have their mouths not grow enough, and lack room for teeth to organize themselves properly. This will happen to your child, and if you wait too long, your child will have terrible teeth and need to use braces and palatal expanders to fix it, like your husband.

(I would probably also include something about my grandma dying of cancer, but my mom has never had problems with spending time with her parents so it's not really advice.)

Last week there was a discussion where a few folks took the plunge and quit reddit, including myself.

@acdw mentioned us having a ~noreddit community to support each other and I actually really liked the idea. But in lieu of that, I thought maybe a follow up thread might be a good idea. Just to see how everyone who quit reddit is doing, what challenges they've faced, and maybe share alternative ways to kill time.

For me, I've done pretty well. I've been to reddit a few times by accident (damn you, muscle memory!), scrolled a little, then remembered I quit. Then I mov on to something else. In its place I've spent a lot more time on twitter and medium. I have a very strong love/hate relationship with both of those sites. There's a lot of decent content there, but there's a ton of garbage to sift through. Very much like reddit in that regard, but not quite as easy to fine-tune, imo.

Anyone got any good recommendations?

Ubuntu has this package installed by default:
network-manager-config-connectivity-ubuntu

It's only purpose is to provide settings for NetworkManager to send requests to connectivity-check.ubuntu.com , and based on the result (AFAIK) detect redirection by captive portals and open an ISP's page (think public WiFi, or hotel rooms, where you need to authorize to access the net).

Well, connectivity-check.ubuntu.com is hosted on Google cloud (you can check that by running:

dig connectivity-check.ubuntu.com
whois [the IP from previous query]

), so by default Ubuntu sends requests to a Google cloud page.
I don't say Google counts daily active Ubuntu users (because many of those have the same IP), or that Google actively logs and analyzes that data. But some of you guys may not like that behavior.

So what's the fix?

Purge the package

sudo apt purge network-manager-config-connectivity-ubuntu

If you do need a captive portal detection, create your own config file to query some HTTP (not HTTPS) page of your choice, in the example below I have a Debian page used for the same purpose. Use your favorite text editor to create and edit /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/90-connectivity-custom.conf :

[connectivity]
uri=http://network-test.debian.org/nm

Restart NetworkManager

sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager

If you run an Ubuntu derivative, please report if you have network-manager-config-connectivity-ubuntu installed in the comments.

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

So recently I've been kind of hating big parts of where I am in life, most of all where I live. I am still living with my family, and while they are all good people, our place isn't the biggest so there isn't too much privacy most of the day. So over the years I have basically started to quietly resent everyone in this house, which got exacerbated over the quarantine (and even much more when we were all stuck at home for 14 days when we got the corona and were in isolation).

I've been thinking that basically the only way to make sure I don't go fully insane is to finally move out. Also, I don't really want to admit it to myself, but I am not very independent, and I feel like I really need to change that. This year I will be finishing my Bachelor's degree, so that seems like the perfect time I would like to aim for. The problem is that after I am done with the degree I want to continue by doing a Masters in the same place. The obvious easy solution is to just rent some place with roommates I'd have to find, which is probably what I'll try to do.

But I have also been engaging in a lot of fantasizing - escapist thoughts involving doing my Masters in a different country. I was already thinking about this a bit before starting my Bachelor's degree, but I ultimately decided not to, which might have been a good call as I was definitely even more of a baby back then. But now, as I have another opportunity I have again been thinking about this a lot.

I am from the EU, so I could study in any other EU country for free. Mostly I've been thinking about Finland, or other Scandinavian countries (maybe kind of cliche?). It would definitely be really hard though, and I am not sure am I strong enough to do this. As I said I am kind of a not very independent wuss, so I am kind of scared if I could survive by myself in a different country with basically no one I could fall back on. Finding a place to live would also probably be quite hard and I would very likely need to find a part time job there, because even though I spent almost 2 years saving up money at a part time job, the countries I am looking at are more expensive than mine so my savings wouldn't most likely be enough. Hopefully there would be some student dormitories available that would be quite cheap? I don't really care too much about how prestigious my university is, but it could also be nice that I could choose a better rated one somewhere.

I hope I wouldn't lose my current best friends. I probably have some very overblown expectations about this though. I always dream how I would meet some new cool friends, maybe even find a relationship. I am quite an anxious person, especially socially anxious which I'd also hope I would have to overcome a bit. But I probably wouldn't magically become more extroverted, and less anxious. I might even just be unable to make any friends there, but I'd hope that I would be kind of forced to make some and get out of my shell so to speak. Suddenly having to do everything by myself, while having a job, in a foreign country might be too much though.

Also another random thing that I would like about this is I would kind of like to change my name at the same time and I am fantasizing that it would work out nicely. I don't dislike my name too much, but I feel like I would like a different one much more, and that it would kind of help me become myself more or something? I don't really want to change my name legally, I am more thinking that I would just start telling people that my name is <name I like more>, so it would kind of be more like a nickname. Yeah, writing that out I should probably try telling some friends to just start calling me by the name, even though I feel like they would just be like why and cringe a bit.

I know I am probably fantasizing about studying abroad too much, and that it wouldn't be that great, studying abroad most likely wouldn't help me find a relationship or anything, but I'd think it would definitely force me to become more independent. I feel like I am once again coming up on quite a big decision in my life and I am still not really sure how to proceed. Did anyone here study abroad, for the whole degree, or even as an exchange student - Erasmus or similar stuff? Any other thoughts would be appreciated too. Thank you for reading, I hope my writing isn't too much of a messy stream of thoughts.

Edit: Thanks to everyone for your responses, you are all so nice, uplifting and motivating <3. I will definitely be seriously researching much more about studying abroad, and while I can't guarantee I'll go forward with this plan, I'll try working towards it for now. I still have almost 2 months to decide, and if I decide to go ahead with it, it would still be at least a year away. But I promise to you guys, that I will at least move out of my parents house for my sanity, one way or another.

Up until recently my girlfriend’s grandmother had a relatively good life. She’s taken care of, had some interesting allucinations, slept most of the day and had funny interactions with her grandaughter, some of which ended up on Instagram.

In recent weeks, she started refusing food and spent days at the hospital. The sudden lost in autonomy made her hostile. It’s a struggle to change her diapers. The situation was made worse by the feeding tube up her nose, which she attempts to remove non-stop, and can only be replaced at the hospital. We had to restrain her arm. That is no way to live.

She's made it very clear she does not want to be in this world any longer. Today I heard a hundred year old lady scream, multiple times: "just let me die!".

I don't know what to make of it.

Edit: I'd like to thank everyone's answers. I wasn't really looking for a solution since the legal situation in my country does not allow for any wiggle room. But it is always nice to read the smart people of Tildes passionately explore their ideas, sharing knowledge with compassion. Sometimes it is enough to feel less alone. Thank you and good night.

I've been learning a bit more Python, going through a Udemy course to expand my skills a little. One of the programs the course guides you to make is a little dictionary, but it currently only runs once and then quits.
I'd like to adapt it to use a nice TUI that keeps itself open until the user specifies they want to quit, using something along the lines of npyscreen. However, this library uses classes, and that's not something I'm yet familiar with. I'd rather have an understanding of what classes are, how they work, and why to use them before I take the plunge and start fiddling around with npyscreen (although I'd be interested to hear if you think that I should Just Do It instead).
Can anyone give or point me towards a good explanation of the what, how, and why of Python classes? Or better yet, a tutorial that will give me something to write and play with to figure out how it all fits together?
Thanks!

(Topics like this need people to have more sympathy for the other because we're talking about real people's sexualities and discrimination these people often face every day and have deep feeling abouts, so be nice.)

If I had to (uneducatedly) guess, some of them would be:

• Your sexuality (and the word allosexual) being as good as unknown by most people.

• Asexuality being a big umbrella (hence the title being demisexual/demiromantic/asexual/aromantic rather than just asexual)

• Allosexual and aromantic people being confused for "people who only want sex"

• People not believing you when you say that.

• Being perceived as an anomaly or lying, along with people promising that you will realize the truth one day.

• Overly religious people seeing your sexuality as a virtuous rejection of degenerate lust/sin and as an unnatural anomaly simultaneously.

• People seeing your sexuality as being "free" from dating or porn consumption or above identifying yourself by how un-sexed you are. (True, but obviously very reductive and usually contingent on the insecurities of the people seeing you that way.) (This is admittedly something I struggle with.)

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Friday Security Briefing

Hello there! I hope you're all looking forward to something this weekend. Today's briefing will cover a captivating tale of scheming against financial centers, woes of virtual networking, and the possibility of Russia behaving quite unnecessarily.

"Listen, or your tongue will make you deaf." ~ Unattributed proverb

Wall Street targeted by new Capital Call investment email scammers

The tactic of exploiting enterprise email systems remains a successful and active attack vector for bad actors. The emerging development is the use of "capital call" style scam, wherein scammers pretend to have investor or insurance business with the business.

"In an example shared by the researchers, the scam email attached a Capital Call Notice for US $970,357.00 to be deposited into a bank account under the fraudsters’ control."

"If the targeted investor was duped into wiring the funds, then it is likely that money would be quickly moved into other accounts and withdrawn by mules to prevent the payment from being returned to the victim."

The flexibility that cryptocurrencies provide to discreetly rearrange money may actually be disadvantageous for banks in certain situations.

Source: Tripwire, Wall Street targeted by new Capital Call investment email scammers

High severity Linux network security holes found, fixed

(CVE-2021-26708) Alexander Popov of London has discovered five security holes in the Linux kernel's virtual socket implementation. This is concerning, my personal use of virtual networking systems could be a lot more thought out. I do tend to keep my use of libvirt to a minimum but ideally I would be running my virtualization workstation on a separate box optimized for safe practices.

"These holes entered Linux when virtual socket multi-transport support was added. This networking transport facilitates communication between virtual machines (VM) and their host. It's commonly used by guest agents and hypervisor services that need a communications channel that is independent of the VM network configuration. As such, people who are running VMs on the cloud, which is pretty much everyone these days, are especially vulnerable."

Source: ZDNet, High severity Linux network security holes found, fixed

Ukraine: DDoS attacks on govt sites originated from Russia

Ukraine is proposing that information on the threat actors responsible for a DDoS on Ukrainian government websites originated from Russian domains.

However, they did not claim that the threat actors were affiliated with the Russian state.

I am curious about the motivations if this was sanctioned by Russia. Are they testing their capabilities against a softer target in order to learn from the European and American Cyber-Defense response? Perhaps this was a way for Russia to demonstrate it's competency at cyber warfare.

"The National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity (NCCC) at the NSDC states that these DDoS attacks have been massive and have targeted government websites in the defense and security sector."

Possible retaliation?

"Last week, news leaked that Ukrainian law enforcement, in cooperation with the US and French police, arrested alleged Egregor ransomware operation members.

Three days later, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) issued a press release about the Egregor arrests and seizing the ransomware group's equipment."

Source: Bleeping Computer, Ukraine: DDoS attacks on govt sites originated from Russia

The US emigration thread brought back a lot of thoughts I've had about leaving the UK, and I imagine a decent number of us have at least idly wondered about a serious move - especially after a year like we've just had.

For me, the difficulty has always been figuring out where to go: politics/climate/healthcare/lifestyle/language are a delicate balancing act, and I don't think anywhere's a slam dunk. Everyone's going to have their own take on what perfect looks like, and what compromises to make mapping that to the real world!

So let's assume you're packed and ready to go, nothing holding you back. You've still got to navigate inbound immigration, handle the language, find a job, all that good stuff - but the world is your oyster. Where would you choose to go?

I've had derealization since august 2019, and about 1-2 months after that I started having uncomfortable existential thoughts. It all started with super reductionist thinking which made me aware of nihilism and had me struggle with that for a while before I finally stumbled upon existentialism which basically rendered nihilism void.

However, after that I read about Sam Harris and got into the whole free will rabbit hole, but nowadays I take solace in knowing that most philosophers believe in free will and think Sam Harris is a goof.

After that they kinda subsided for a while... but nowadays I freak out over the whole "self is an illusion" thing that's super prevalent in buddhist/drugs users/science circles, and it's by far the hardest to overcome. Like, with nihilism the solution is existentialism, with free will, well, there's compatibilism, but this? It seems like everything skews toward it being true and it deeply scares me. In fact, if it is true indeed, doesn't that automatically render existentialism and free will impossible as well? I mean, existentialism relies on the self and free will to create meaning, so if those aren't real, then the meaning crumbles apart as well. And free will also seems dependent on a self to exist.

Most people seem to not really care either way when I talk about it with them but for me it's nearly an obsession and I feel like I've discovered some sort of dark secret truth that I wasn't meant to see.

Does anyone else have this issue?

I'm a 23 year old male originally from Southern California, and like the title says I'm curious to see if anyone else near my demographic has seriously looked into emmigrating in light of the past year and a half.

What factors motivate you to move?
What would be an ideal location for you?
What timeline would are you looking at?

One of the main motivators I seek to emmigrate is climate change. As the world continues to progress and evolve I do not think the United States will be able to equitabbly address the changing landscape and ways of life. As for when I would want to move, I'm not sure; currently it seems like a far off probability, but I know it's a choice I will have to make in my own lifetime.

I sometimes feel like music videos get the short stick and aren't appreciated as the unique and fascinating art form that they've become. I think a lot of us got into them back in the heyday of MTV/VH1 but they've gone far beyond that in the internet age. I'd like to invite everyone to share some of their favorites in this thread - new or old, popular or obscure, anything goes, and share as many as you like.

It might sound silly to most, but I have had one for years now.

I started to really listen to music on my own volition in the early 2010s when I was in my early 10s, and I was really big into EDM at the time (big room house, brostep, electro house, progressive house, etc).

At some point in 2014 I wanted to expand my tastes so I ended up on rateyourmusic.com which is the kinda place you always end up on at some point if you go down this path the way I see it, and at first I just checked the overall charts and shrugged since it wasn't my kind of music at all (The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Radiohead, etc), but at some point it started bothering me; "why is all that crappy old music so highly regarded?" and I started giving the stuff a try. Didn't like it at all, but I somehow starting feeling compelled to try and understand/appreciate it.

Eventually, I fell down a sort of rabbit hole when I started reading discussions on how some music is "objectively better" than others and I completely believed it. Pushed around by the extremely harsh disdain towards the EDM I loved and godly praise of the type of thing I just mentioned, I just kinda felt like I was supposed to move on and basically listened to a lot of stuff like that.

Another while later I eventually realized that the whole "objectively good/bad" thing is one ugly sack of false shit, but I've been really burned out since then, and now I don't even really feel the music I used to like. Problem is, at this point the act of crawling through the charts looking for new music, constantly listening to new stuff, thinking about genres, etc, is so deeply ingrained in my behavior that I can't seem to stop. I have music on at nearly all times, and I force myself to listen to everything in full despite not feeling it at all.

Something that's also gotten me is the whole repeated listening thing, I've always really loved the idea of being able to enjoy something you initially didn't care for or were lukewarm towards by simply repeatedly listening to it. That also caused me to disregard my own impressions and force myself to repeatedly listen to almost everything. I'm mostly out of that phase now, but I sometimes still find myself digging through random stuff I've given low ratings and listening to it again purely to see if I suddenly like it, but it has literally never even worked once. I also think this has been a contributor to me being burned out on music.

At this point I kinda feel like I'll never truly enjoy music again like I used to and it's really sad. Sometimes it does return a little, but if have to explain it with a rating, I can't say I've ever really felt anything above a 7/10 again, most of the time it's between a 3/10 and 6/10. I totally realize I just need to take a break, but I simply can't seem to stop (through a lot of effort I have actually managed to take a full break last month, but I immediately relapsed when I resumed this month, and even without that it doesn't seem like it helped all that much). What a lot of people have with things like gaming and food, I basically have with music.

Does anyone else have anything like this?

I have some music links I was thinking of posting. However, I didn't want to flood ~music with 10 new links at once. It can make a category look like it has really homogenous content to newcomers when a single poster has posted a bunch of links at once. What I'd like to do is post one per day for the next several days. But I don't want to potentially forget one day because I got a little busy, or whatever. Would it be useful to be able to create a topic but set it to not post until a particular day or time?

Inspired by a similar thread @kfwyre posted a while ago.

I've been given an Android phone for a work contract and I don't want to carry two devices, so I will likely migrate from my Blackberry Z10 soon. The BB10 OS (not to be confused with BBOS, which ran the Bolds, etc. of BB's heyday) was intuitive, useful, and wayyyyy better than most people who never used it would have expected, only being doomed by the app gap. I'd have considered buying another Blackberry this year if I hadn't been given this other phone. I have long been wary of Android due to both privacy concerns and UI/UX gripes. Having tooled around for a couple days already, I'm struck by how many simple things I apparently can't do out of the box, and the fact that there are so. many. ads. Even in the apps! I know I will root and de-Google the device as much as I can once I get a hang of the OS.

So, I'm mainly looking for app recommendations, but general advice is appreciated as well. My use case is very functional - email, scheduling, messaging, browsing, navigation, weather, and calls. Preference given to FOSS and/or ad-free apps, but I'll pay up if it's really worth it. So far I've uninstalled a bunch of bloatware, installed Firefox, found SwiftKey to be the only half-decent replacement for Blackberry's terrific keyboard software, and the best free no-ad weather app looks to be a Norwegian one called Yr.

Hey all! I got the idea for this from looking at the thread asking the users what they want to see more of on Tildes. While I unfortunately don't feel I have much to contribute in the way of ~arts, ~books, or ~humanities, I do have a love of ~music! (And an electric drum-kit, that I hooked up to my laptop yesterday)

I remember there being a thread about music collaboration a while back, and while it looks like nothing came of it then, I figured the time was ripe for another try! My idea is this: People record themselves playing any instrument they want (or know how), and post that recording as a top level comment. Others in the thread download the format (midi, wav, whatever) and add their own instrument into the mix, posting as a reply to the top level comment. Think of it like crowdsourcing a song, I suppose.

To start us off, have a link to a google drive folder of mine which has a couple drum beats (3 wav, and 1 midi). Import those, riff off em, and post what you got! I'll see if I can do the same if anyone else has audio they'd like to share.

If this thread goes well, maybe we could make it a recurring topic!

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

There's been quite a bit of discussion lately about people don't want to see, but not that much about what sort of content we do want to see. What would you like to see more of?

For the official stance, I'll repost the instructions that most of us are probably skipping over by now.

Tildes prioritizes high-quality content and discussion
Please post topics that are interesting, informative, or have the potential to start a good discussion.
Please avoid posting topics that are primarily for entertainment or that don't have discussion value.

This seems vague, and we probably have different ideas of what's high-quality and what counts as good discussion?

I'm also wondering if we should be here more for the links or for the discussion. When I arrived, I was just happy to find a quiet place where I could post links to articles that I found elsewhere and were particularly interesting to me. (But I think I had gotten into a rut for a while after getting obsessed with the pandemic and politics.) Maybe we should try posting more links?

Let me preface that I'm well aware that if given the choice between frequent, untargeted ads or fewer targeted ads, the average Tilderino's response would be "Neither."

However, given that social media at scale has yet to establish a sustainable business model that doesn't rely on advertising (people like free content, after all), it seems advertising has become a necessary evil (and has pervaded nearly all forms of media for the past century regardless).

With that in mind, I think coming up with creative solutions to deliver relevant advertising while preserving user privacy and avoiding destructive feedback loops (i.e. where the search for ad revenue compromises the user base and content generation) is an interesting thought exercise. This is one of social media's largest problems, imho, but it might be easier to analyze just Reddit as a platform due to its similarities (and notable differences) to Tildes.

A couple thoughts of my own:

• Whitelist "safe" subreddits - A massive problem for Reddit is identifying content that brands want to avoid association with (e.g. porn, violence, drugs). While new subreddits crop up every day, the large ones do not change so fast and could be classified as safe content spaces (e.g. /r/aww)
• User subreddit subscriptions - Rather than target ads based on the subreddit currently being viewed, why not use the subs people have voluntarily indicated they are interested in?
• Allow users to tag content - While people can report content to the mods today, there is no ability to tag content (like Tildes has) from a user level. Content that's inappropriate for advertising may not necessarily be a reportable offense. By allowing users to classify content, better models for determining "good" content vs. "bad" could be developed using ML.
• Use Mods to determine content appropriateness - User supplied data may introduce too much noise into any given dataset, and perhaps mods are a better subjective filter to rely on. Certain subreddits can have biased mods for sure, but without trying to overhaul content moderation entirely, could mod bans/flair be used to indicate suitable content for ads?
• Use computer vision to classify content - While this wouldn't work at scale, an up-and-coming post could have a nebulous title and difficult-to-decipher sarcastic comments. The post itself could be an image macro or annotated video that could be used to determine the subject matter much more effectively.

To be clear, the spirit of my initial prompt isn't "how can Reddit make more money?" per se, but how can it find a sustainable business model without destroying itself/impacting society at large. Facebook and Twitter seem to have optimized for "engagement" metrics which leads to prioritization of outrage porn and political divisiveness. Snapchat and Instagram seem to have succumb to being mostly an ad delivery engine with some overly-filtered content of "real life" influencers (read: marketers) strewn in between. None of these seem like a net-good for society.

What are all your thoughts? Perhaps Big Tech social media is irredeemable at this point, but I'm trying not to take such a defeatist attitude and instead explore any positive solutions.

Here's the server info, again thanks to @Icarus.

Just a quick update that I have completed the communal village portal hub and storage building. Check it out! Major biomes are located on the first floor (with an attached dock incoming) and the second floor is for key areas like the Trader and Boss altars. Be wary of going into dangerous biomes alone if you're new, especially the Plains or Swamps.

Third floor will be a communal storage and miscellaneous area, feel free to use it however you wish. Put your bed up there and make it your room if you want.*

*I just need to add a fire pit.