Just recently started getting into rss feeds. Have set up a feed reader and some feeds for my favorite sports team and some news sites and blogs that interest me. But whenever I look up some recommendations for new feeds to follow, I'd say 90%+ of the recommendations are news sites like the BBC or NYT as well as tech news sites.

Does anyone have any feed recommendations that aren't just news websites? Maybe an interesting blog or something entirely different? Thanks.

I'll drop an interesting one that I found right here on tildes a few days ago, about life in Antarctica: https://brr.fyi/

Would love to watch videos that are well designed edited, especially done so in an original manner but have a low subscriber count (less than 75k subscribers?). The content could be vlogs, video essays, travel, design!

One of my favorite subreddits was about the show "The Leftovers". I don't know anyone in real life that has watched it and seeing what people thought while watching the show / after their first watch was great.

So, has anyone here seen the show and what are your thoughts about it?

Some of you may have noticed that the threads under some topics include a comment which consists only of some paragraphs quoted from the article posted in the topic, posted by the same user who posted the topic. (I’m choosing not to link to any examples, because I don’t want to single anyone out for special attention, in case they feel persecuted by this.)

@cfabbro and I were discussing this in a quiet corner of an old thread, and we came to the conclusion that this was a topic which should be discussed by more than just us two, in the hope of finding a Tildes-wide consensus about a consistent way to treat those quote-only orphan comments.

The Context

These quote-only comments are a side-effect of a deliberate feature of Tildes. When you create a topic there are three fields to be completed. The combination of fields you complete determine the type of topic you’re making.

• Title All topics must have a title. This is compulsory.

• Link A field for a URL linking to an article or video or other off-site content. This is optional.

• Text A field for adding text to your post. This is optional.

If you complete:

• Link but not Text - this creates a simple link topic: the topic consists only of an off-site link.

• Text but not Link - this creates a simple text topic: the topic consists only of user-provided text.

• Link and Text - this produces a complex link topic: the topic consists of an off-site link plus user-provided text. However, the user-provided text is not incorporated into the actual topic, but is split off into a stand-alone comment.

Some people who post links also like to include a relevant quote to summarise the article they’re posting, to let readers know what the article is about before they click the off-site link. But, as above, this quote gets split off as a stand-alone comment. It is no longer part of the post. It becomes an orphaned comment consisting only of the quote.

The Question

Given that these quote-only orphan comments exist, the question arises: how should we treat them?

It has been observed that there are two diametrically opposed approaches to this:

• Some people vote on them, seeing them as useful summaries of the posted article, providing some context for the discussion.

• Some people label them as ‘Noise’, seeing them as pointless extracts from the article, cluttering up the discussion thread.

In one recent extreme case, a quote-only orphan comment had both 16 votes and was collapsed due to ‘Noise’ labels.

This is creating some confusion among newcomers to Tildes (as well as some of the old-timers). How are they supposed to vote/label these comments? Well, there’s no clear precedent for them to follow.

@cfabbro and I decided to put it to all of you. Maybe by discussing this, we can come up with a consistent treatment for these comments.

So what do you think about these quote-only orphan comments? Are they useful context or noisy clutter? Should we be giving them votes or labelling them as noise?

AI Virtual Assistants are on the rise, and logically it seems like I could use one to support productivity, small business, neurodivergent accomodations, etc., BUT, when reviewing what's out there they don't seem super useful.

Otter seems the most useful because it can attend web meetings and record, contextualize screenshares, and sift the transcripts into action items, but it cant go to all webinar services and I'm not sure I can log into this in a corporate platform. Others seem to be able to check a calendar or make a reminder, but nothing I would pay for.

Some use cases might be gathering basic info from clients, scheduling meetings (calendly can handle this), blocking time for my task lists, writing basic email drafts, adding up expenses each month, sending reminders for customers, etc.

All of this could happen with various tools, but seem like good territory for an AI Virtual Assistant.

So, have you found any AI VAs that would be worth paying for? Anything that saves time or makes life easier?

Would anyone who watches more TV than I do (not hard) like to help me pick some shows for my parents to watch? On their own they just watch whatever's on cable/satellite channels and don't enjoy it very much. They're conservative-leaning boomers, but I like to give them subtly progressive stuff. In the past they have praised The Good Place (but, crucially, lost interest before the end of season 2). They really loved the first two seasons of Ted Lasso (will watch the third one soon) and of Only Murders In the Building (I believe they'll watch season 3 of that as well, when it's out).

Some more information about their tastes: Probably no recurring kid stuff whatsoever (a side character or two in their late teens are probably fine). Good humor is fine but nothing that gets too goofy (might be why The Good Place was dropped). Nothing that's too heavily horror or mystery; no police procedurals (Only Murders was skirting that line). Anything that feels like generic, quintessential hollywood will probably be rejected outright (european shows will get more of a pass). And definitely, absolutely, not a hint of high fantasy, sci-fi or space travel of any kind. Some light romance is good; travel is good; places around the world instead of LA-is-everything.

I'm looking for modern shows with good writing and actors, don't necessarily have to be famous. Modern shows - especially shows made for streaming - are more likely to have portuguese subtitles available, which are a must.

Thanks!

EDIT: A clarification re: children - My parents love children. They have toddler grandkids and spend an unreasonable amount of time with them. They're just the kind of TV watchers who aren't at all interested in kid POV/kid centric episodes, because they don't identify with their worries and dramas anymore, so these quickly make them lose interest. I know there are people right here on tildes who feel the same way.

It's still OK for children to exist in the story, though. Don't overthink it too much :)

I use Github and Netlify to run some simple websites for free. It works well. However, I've been thinking of experimenting with a database-backed website for fun and Netlify doesn't have any persistence.

What's a good way to do this that scales to zero when nobody's using it? I want to be able to forget about it entirely for months or years at a time. When someone visits, it should start up and run on demand without costing me $20 a month on standby.

Back in the day, I used Google App Engine for this. I learned a lot of datastore tricks to get around its poor latency, but I'm lazy and don't want to do that anymore. I'm pretty sure I want a SQL database and full text search. Either sqlite or Postgres would do, but I doubt there's a cheap enough way to run Postgres.

Litestream looks interesting and so does LiteFS, except that it's pre-1.0 and I don't know what changes fly.io will make that I have to keep up with. If I used Litestream, I'd have to figure out how to run it and where to store the replication logs.

Edit: one nice-to-have is being able to easily dump the database and run it locally or on another cloud provider. (I don't anticipate it getting so big that it's impractical.)

Was a fun little project. I worked on the drinks myself first, then gave them to my roommate for a blind taste test, and asked her to describe the kind of character she thought the drink was about. If she wasn't at least mostly right, then I'd have to try again - but they somehow ended up a lot more accurate than I expected to be, despite the fact that she knows nothing about this D&D game, haha. I guess we're just really on the same wavelength?

Anyway, without further ado, here are the recipes! If there are any other mixologists on here, I'd love to hear what you think - and you want to try (something like) any of these drinks but are missing an ingredient or two, let me know and I'm happy to try to suggest a few possible substitutions.

Avery

• 0.75 oz chartreuse
• 0.5 oz montenegro
• 0.5 oz black walnut liqueur
• 0.5 oz distilled water

Liz

• 0.75 oz peated gin
• 0.75 oz crème de violette
• 10 drops lemon juice
• yuzu bitters

Matoya

• 1 oz mezcal
• 1.5 oz lemon tonic
• cardamom bitters

Morgana

• 1 oz plum gin
• 1 oz white rye
• 1 oz distilled water
• lavender lemon bitters

Sylvaire

• 0.75 oz cognac
• 0.25 oz pomegranate liqueur
• 0.25 oz grand marnier
• 0.75 oz peach juice
• peychaud’s bitters

V

• 0.75 oz peated gin
• 0.25 oz galliano vanilla
• 0.25 oz absinthe
• 1 oz peach juice
• hibiscus rosehip bitters
• cucumber twist (i.e. take a thin lengthwise slice of a baby cucumber and curl around the inside of the glass)

I'm finally ready to sacrifice my self esteem and faith in humanity at the altar of dating apps. My question for those of you with more experience with them is this - do different apps attract noticeably different pools of users? What have you noticed comparing the populations on different apps? Which wound up working best for you, if any of them did?

Any that had particular features that bothered you? I've been using Hinge for like a day and already discovered they have a separate queue for your best matches that they demand a premium currency to message :/

We have a language learner in our household and I am tired of listening to J-pop at random on road trips. Do any of you music lovers have japanese language songs or even better artists or bands you really like?

Thank you very much

A summarized transcription of the video No One Wants Sensuality.
Source PDF

Q: Bhante, you once said that the only reason one gives into sensuality is because one doesn't want it. What do you mean by that?

Ajahn Nyanamoli (Nm): Well, what I meant was that universally, literally every human mind, regardless of the culture, education or religion, when a desire in regard to anything obtainable through the senses arises, that desire is oppressing. Desire is a need, a thirst, a hunger, it pressures you to act. You don't have to act and that's the whole point. As a human being you have a choice. But when desire arises, the automatic response is to give into that pressure of desire, and why would you be giving into the pressure of any desire? It's because it's unpleasant. If the pressure of the desire is neutral or pleasant, you wouldn't then make any effort and spend time trying to gain what your desire wants, because you'll already be at ease. But that desire is already unpleasant and in order for you to try and deal with that displeasure, you just give in to whatever the desire promises. That's what I mean, by engaging in sensuality, you do so to be free from the sensual pressure of the desire. When people say, "No, I enjoy my senses." That's a mistake, because if they were to stop and think, "When there is an unsatisfied desire, is that pleasant? Is that what I want?" They would realise that it isn't, or, "Can I fulfil desire by giving in to it?" No, you can never fulfil desire, because the point of desire is to stay a desire.

Q: It's based on non-satisfaction.

Nm: Exactly, it requires non-satisfaction for it to be. That's why if you stop and think about it you realise the only reason you are engaged with sensuality is because the pressure of sensual desire is unpleasant and you don't know any other escape from that pressure other than the temporary release of sensual indulgence.

That's the whole point, whenever you encounter any form of displeasure, your only way of trying to deal with it is through acts of sensuality, which is why and how people turn to food, music, sexual intercourse or even meditation hoping for some pleasurable experience to lift them up when they're feeling down or depressed, they just commit harder to sensual activity, because that's the only thing that seemingly relieves oneself of that pressure. However, you're just making it worse because the more you're dependent on running away from that pressure of sensual desire, the more pressure that desire will exercise over you.

Q: So what should you do?

Nm: Well,in a way, you don't have to do anything. If you start seeing your own sensual desires as something that's controlling you, something that you are enslaved by, then you have to start seeing that 'nature' before you give into the desire. And then it becomes obvious, clear as day, that it's very unpleasant. Even sometimes when you can satisfy your desires, but maybe not quick enough, that's unpleasant. Either way, that desire is rooted in a disagreeable feeling, i.e. that pressure that's very unpleasant. So if you want to free yourself from it, you have to first start restraining your senses and from making it worse through giving in to that pressure of desire.

You're training yourself to be stronger than something else. But in order to start doing that, you need to start resisting that thing. If you just habitually give into desire, and at the same time expect to somehow magically be free from the pressure of the desire, well that's just a contradiction in terms. Restraint needs to come first if you want to be free from desire. Then the obvious painful nature of the desire in itself becomes apparent. Initially when people start restraining, they notice more pain and they assume that it's because of their restraint. But it isn't. The restraint cannot cause you pain, it can only reveal the underlying pain of the desire that is already there.

Imagine that you're tied to five powerful animals and they are running towards the objects of their desire, you naturally run with them to avoid that extra painful pull that you will experience if you try standing your ground. The animals are stronger than you, they pull you. It's unpleasant. But that doesn't mean that that initial pain is not there if you run with them. Running with them enables them to pull you even harder. So initially, you have to accept that sharp pain of restraint, which eventually you can see that actually it's not the restraint that's the problem, the restraint just shows you what happens when these animals are pulling in their respective domains. If the animals wouldn't be pulling, there wouldn't be any pain revealed by the restraint. Imagine the animals are tamed and calm, and they just move around slowly and you can just remain seated and not have to run with them. You are restrained, the senses are tamed and there is no pull, no pain.

It's something anybody could benefit from, just learning how to say no to themselves, gradually, in regards to this and that, in regard to unnecessary things like luxuries and indulgences. Because each time you give in carelessly like that, the animals get more to feed on which means they get more powerful, which means each time they pull you, you'll be less and less able to resist those desires.

Quite often, and I'm pretty sure many people can relate, your own desires take you to places you don't want to be, that you know you will regret even before you go there, yet you can't help it and you're just dragged there. How will it then be when old age or sickness sets in? When your senses start to fail, yet your mind is fully dependent on that pleasure that you get from that temporary satisfaction of your desires. When the only resemblance of relief from any disagreeable feelings, is now taken away. When the senses can't enjoy sense objects anymore, when eyes can barely see, when it's hard to hear, when it's difficult to chew, when the body doesn't move correctly, when it's not young and doesn't have that much energy. Yet your mind is dependent on that constant chasing after sense pleasures and now that's just taken away. How will it be when the unpleasant feelings arise, and they will, and you have even less ground to deal with it.

Q: It will feel like an unwanted solitary confinement.

Nm: Exactly. That's why people are terrified of solitude. They can no longer escape what they have been running away from.

My Lenovo laptop and Dell desktop have subpar specs on them, so playing a AAA game from the last decade is out of the question. They struggle to run Team Fortress 2, BioShock, and Minecraft at 30 FPS, but 1990's boomer shooters and some indie titles play fairly smoothly. Here are some of the games that they can run:

• Doom (1993 to Final)
• Quake (1-3)
• Deus Ex (2000)
• Max Payne 2
• Half-Life 2 and its episodes
• Portal series
• Batman: Arkham City
• Celeste
• Hue
• The Stanley Parable
• Borderlands 2

Any suggested games would be greatly appreciated.

Alright, first post. Let's do it.

I have seen this post from 3 years ago asking about guitar pedals and the like. But that's old, and I wanna start a new discussion post. With that out of the way...

What are the pedals y'all rockin? What's your setup? Do you have any pedals currently in your possession or those you are gunning for? Also, if you have any stories about pedals, which ones are your favourites or smth else, I would love to hear! I figure we've already had the discussion about buying your dream guitar so anything about dream pedals are cool too!

You can find my answer here.

I love hearing about obscure or forgotten films that people are passionate about. I was in a thread on Reddit, IIRC, and someone mentioned The Man From Earth. I just watched it for the first time and I can see its appeal.

I'm sure you have more than one. For me, a couple of favorites off the top of my head are Wristcutters: A Love Story and Wings of Desire. And some old timey classics that I rarely hear mentioned anymore are I Know Where I'm Going and The Lady Eve.

Just finished this book this morning and wanted to do my usual jump to reddit to read what others have said/are saying about it. But as I have decided to leave reddit indefinitely, I have come here!

Have you read this book? What did you think of it? Any Cosmerenauts on Tilde yet that are anxious to discuss the implications of the book?

Personally, I enjoyed the book, but found it very quick and convenient in terms of plot and structure. It bothered me a tiny bit, at first, until I read the postscript and saw that he was going for a "Princess Bride" structure, and suddenly the whole book reframed itself in my mind. It wasn't convenient, it was a bedtime story. Every chapter being 3-5 pages, and being a non-stop string of events, that was its strength now.

From a cosmere perspective, it's interesting that this book is obviously very late future compared to most cosmere books. I'm not wise enough to know exactly where, but the mention of Spaceships landing on planets indicate we're not in Kansas any more.

Few small glimpses into Hoid, which was interesting, if nothing revelatory.

How did you all feel?

Here, I am asking you to talk about the sports you love. They may be either obscure or popular and well-known. What is their place in your life? Have you practiced those sports, or are you simply a fan and an expectator? What people don't get about the sport you love? What are some common misconceptions you would like to dispel? How would you convince someone to learn more about those sports?

To set the stage, I've always been a fan of non-nonsense reliable phones. My cellular usage started with a Nokia brick, moved on to a few Motorolo flip phones, then entered the Blackberry world as soon as data service become available in my area. With the demise of RIM, I went o a Moto X, made a misstep in to the Samsung world, then to a Pixel, a Pixel 3XL, and now a Pixel 7 Pro.

I only made the jump to the 7 Pro due to the 3XL starting to show it's age. The charging part wouldn't always connect, the battery would barely make it through the day, and the case was starting to fall apart. Of within three days of removing the case I dropped the phone, cracking the glass back....

The 7 Pro is awful to hold, without a case. I was waiting a week for the Spigen Liquid Air case to show up, and during the time I hated using the phone. The camera bulge felt awkward and sharp, the surfaces were slippery and the phone would slide around. The rounded edges of the screen would produce phantom taps, just all around a bad experience. Now that I've added the case though, it feels a whole lot better.

The user experience has been fairly good, thought not without some annoying bugs. I did the migration from my old Pixel to my new one, and while it did a reasonably job, preserving the launcher layout etc, the app installation process was strange. Google Play tried to install all the apps, but was stalled. I had to tap on each app to manually install them, they were just sitting there "Pending...", whether I was on battery or charger, WiFi or mobile. Once everything installed, and I added my accounts, it was fine, and now apps auto-update.

Notifications are acting a bit funny with Reddit is Fun, although that won't be an issue for much longer :-(. If I get notified of Mod Mail and a Message in RiF, tapping the notification message does nothing. This worked fine on the 3XL. I've also had one spontaneous reboot, and one night where the phone was plugged in, but decided not to charge. Lots of people complained about heat issues, which was a problem for me on the 3XL, but only in extreme cases. After sitting out in full sun with the 7 Pro, I'd say it is about the same, possibly a bit better regarding it's overheating. Many people also reported that the phone would feel warm/hot in their hands for the first few days as it "learned" your behavior. Never experienced that. Battery life and (lack of) heat levels have remained the same.