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    1. Your favourite creators who cover non-Anglo countries/cultures in English?

      (That title is kind of awkward, feel free to suggest a better one.) I came across aini's channel on Youtube a while back. She does videos on different topics focused on East Asia. Her most recent...

      (That title is kind of awkward, feel free to suggest a better one.)

      I came across aini's channel on Youtube a while back. She does videos on different topics focused on East Asia. Her most recent video being "Why Chinese People Will Choose $5 Over $10".

      I'm especially interested in native creators; those who can present a personal view from the inside. Even more so for countries that are not as well-covered for whatever reason—like places with less technological access or government limitation.

      My own preference is for a more analytical presentation. I.e. looking through an academic lens incorporating sociology, psychology, etc, rather than "footage of daily life". That style is still welcome, of course!

      22 votes
    2. Tildes Video Thread

      Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you. It...

      Find yourself watching tons of great videos on [insert chosen video sharing platform], but also find yourself reluctant to flood the Tildes front page with them? Then this thread is for you.

      It could be one quirky video that you feel deserves some eyeballs on it, or perhaps you've got a curated list of videos that you'd love to talk us through...

      Share some of the best video content you've watched this past week/fortnight with us!

      15 votes
    3. Game suggestions for a weekly online group

      My weekly D&D group has been running for a number of years now and unfortunately our current DM is suffering from some pretty severe burnout at the moment (both in life and D&D in general). I...

      My weekly D&D group has been running for a number of years now and unfortunately our current DM is suffering from some pretty severe burnout at the moment (both in life and D&D in general). I think ultimately we're going to end up shuttering our D&D campaign, and may well never pick the game up again as we've almost all soured on WotC/Hasbro after the OGL debacle.

      This week we entertained ourselves by messing around with image generation (velociraptor nun was a favorite result and became a bit of a running theme through the evening) but the fun in that can only last so long. We've also had some nights playing games like Dead by Daylight and Midnight Ghost Haunt but those are typically games we reserve for around Halloween. We also play some of the Jackbox Party Pack games, but they're only moderately fun to be honest.

      We're usually a group of 7, and this particular formation of the friend group has been meeting almost exclusively online and will probably want to continue that way for the foreseeable future. I'd like some suggestions for games we could play together (either video game or TTRPG that works well online) that are: mostly cooperative or at least team based (we're not very competitive), something that won't become repetitive and dry after a couple of sessions (goal-oriented I guess), and something that we don't have to pay a subscription for. The ability to drop in or out as life dictates would be a plus too. Any thoughts?

      21 votes
    4. My computer has lost its mind and I can't even begin to diagnose what's at fault. (It's the power supply.)

      UPDATE: It was the power supply. I've never even heard of such a weirdly anal issue, but after installing a new one, everything is a-okay. So, I've never really had issues with power supplies, and...

      UPDATE: It was the power supply. I've never even heard of such a weirdly anal issue, but after installing a new one, everything is a-okay.

      So, I've never really had issues with power supplies, and generally have always troubleshot (troubleshooted? trouble...shot?) my own issues with no real, well, issues. Until now.

      The other day, I got a helluva deal on a 6800 XT on Facebook Marketplace, the guy had the printout with the receipt, it's still under warranty for two years, whole shebang. So I upgraded from a Vega 56 to it. And there were zero issues. Admittedly, my power supply is only 650 watts, so I thought I might be missing some wiggle room there, and was prepared to need to upgrade. But the other night, it was fine. I stress-tested with a nearly-maxed-out 100+ FPS Cyberpunk 2077 and had zero issues, and followed that up with moderate use 144 FPS board games and things for the next few hours with a friend.

      And sometime after I went to bed (I left the computer on because I'm a bad man who doesn't take care of his things or some other vaguely acceptable excuse), Windows Update occurred. Again. It's been raising hell on me in the middle of the night any time I leave my computer on, but whatever. So in the morning (this was Sunday), I saw it wasn't working right, and just kind of... shitting itself. Had trouble getting out of BIOS, all this other stuff. Eventually, I realized it was ignoring my SSD, and after unplugging everything else and forcing it to boot from my SSD with the Windows 10 install on it, it said the install was borked and asked me to do recovery steps. None of them really worked. So at this point, I was assuming that I might have hit something with the SSD and damaged the SATA controller when moving the power for the GPU or something.

      So today, I got a new NVMe drive, booted from a 16gb flash drive, installed Windows 11 on it, and everything was fine. I was able to create a functional Windows 11 install, and it was fine. Until I got to the login screen. As soon as the screen asking for my PIN (on a complete, 100% valid Windows install) would load, that first frame, it would shut down hard. No BSOD, nothing. Just immediate shutdown. So I thought, "well, this seems like an issue for the POWER SUPPLY!" and removed the GPU, plugging my main monitor directly into the motherboard. Now, it was shutting down and power cycling before it even hit the BIOS, which is... weird as hell? So I thought "well, it gets further when a video card is in, let's put ye olden Vega 56 in and see how far that gets me!" and... it just works. I'm typing this from my fresh Windows 11 install with zero perceivable issues.

      So my question is: How is it that my computer was perfectly fine on Saturday night with my new video card under 100% load, but by the next day would decide seemingly at random based on some sort of schrodinger's cat theory when it would shut down and when it wouldn't.

      So, in summation, the four inconsistent scenarios, in tl;dr form:

      • New RX 6800 XT is installed, computer runs fine at 100% load while stress testing and then for hours afterward
      • 6800 XT installed, Windows won't boot and the power supply seemingly gives up
      • No video card installed, the computer starts power cycling before even reaching the BIOS
      • My old Vega 56 installed, everything is perfectly fine

      So, obviously there's something weird going on with my power supply, but if someone can set my sights on exactly why all of this has happened, and what the proper solution to make sure it doesn't again, or just... I don't know, typing this all out has made the last day and a half of my life feel much more worth it.

      And as an aside, my theory for why Windows was broken and I assumed my SSD was dying is as such: When it did the Windows Update and started trying to install it was the first time it powered down with no warning, which just broke Windows mid-update in a bad way.

      22 votes
    5. Any good PC games that are inherently slow or cooldown-based?

      I find myself in an unusual situation wanting to play PC games that can't suck me in. Bear with me, this is a weird and specific request. Ideally I want something I can easily pick up and put down...

      I find myself in an unusual situation wanting to play PC games that can't suck me in. Bear with me, this is a weird and specific request.

      Ideally I want something I can easily pick up and put down maybe 1-2 times an hour between tasks. Chess or Risk came to mind, but I don't want something that mandates input or else you forfeit. Also thought of Civ, but in the past I've played that for hours at a time. I haven't found a setting that could force me to slow down, but maybe there's a mod I could use? Seems like I need something that either has built-in cooldowns or allows custom time controls.

      Maybe there's some mobile games that are on PC that would fall into this category? I played "Egg, Inc" years ago, but remember the cooldowns started to extend into days which is when I stopped.

      For reference, I typically play via Steam, Epic, or GOG and I like these game genres: strategy, RTS, tower defense, puzzle/logic, city building, simulation, automation, and exploration. But since there's probably not many games like this I'm definitely willing to branch out!

      28 votes
    6. What do you guys think of these AI-generated stand up comedy specials?

      So I came across this new dudesy video titled "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead" and it put me down a weird rabbit hole. I'm not a Carlin super fan but I know some of his famous bits and respect...

      So I came across this new dudesy video titled "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead" and it put me down a weird rabbit hole. I'm not a Carlin super fan but I know some of his famous bits and respect his work and maybe that's the perfect setup for watching this because... I'm honestly blown away. I planned on listening to 3 minutes of it to make fun of stupid AI but ended up letting it run for the entire hour and actually laughed quite a bit. It all makes sense. It does sound like him. I don't know how much editing went into it, how much prompting and discarded material. I especially don't know if it just dug up old jokes somewhere else and copied them. But still.

      It feels like we just had awkward AI-wordsalad experiments and things like the infinite Seinfeld stream which was fun in a so-bad-it's-good kinda way but... I mean, it obviously was bad. The funny part was that it was unpredictably bad.

      But only a year later we're having some uncanny valley shit. I looked it up and apparently this started with a comedy podcast with an AI co-host which produced a clip for a fictional Tom Brady standup routine which turned out popular enough to get them sued, apparently.

      There's this part in the fake Carlin special where he talks about the future of entertainment being 24-hour streams where an AI comedian comments on daily news events in real time or something and I can't say I wouldn't watch that. Just to see what it's like. But I also get people calling it disgusting. It kinda is. I get [his daughter says "machine will ever replace his genius"](machine will ever replace his genius), she's right of course. But that video got close IMO.

      You can still point at little flaws here and there with AI generated content but with this trend, it will be 3 or 5 years before we get perfectly polished content machines that don't trip over any of the easy and obvious stuff. What place would such content have in the entertainment industry?

      What do you guys think?

      27 votes
    7. ZFS is crud with large pools! Give me some options.

      Hey folks I'm building out a backup NAS to hold approximately 350TB of video. It's a business device. We already own the hardware which is a Gigabyte S451 with twin OS RAIDED SSD but 34 X 16TB SAS...

      Hey folks

      I'm building out a backup NAS to hold approximately 350TB of video. It's a business device. We already own the hardware which is a Gigabyte S451 with twin OS RAIDED SSD but 34 X 16TB SAS HDD disks. I used TrueNAS Scale and ZFS as the filesystem because... It seemed like a good idea. What I didn't realise is that with dedupe and LZO compression on, it would seriously hinder the IO. Anyway, long story short, we filled it as a slave target and it's slow as can be. It errors all the time. I upgraded to 48GB of RAM as ZFS is memory intensive but it's the IOPs which kill it. It's estimating 50 days for a scrub, it's nuts. The system is in RAID6 and all disks dedicated to this pool which is correct in so far as I need all disk available.

      Now I know ZFS isn't the way for this device, any ideas here? I'm tempted to go pure Debian, XFS or EXT4 and soft raid. I'd rather it be simple and managed via a GUI for the rest of the team as they're all Windows admins as well as scared of CLI, but I suppose I can give them Webmin at a push.

      I'm about ready to destroy over 300TB of copied data to rebuild this as it crashes too often to do anything with, and the Restic backup from the Master just falls over waiting for a response.

      Ideas on a postcard (or Tildes reply)...?

      UPDATE:

      After taking this thread in to consideration, some of my own research and a ZFS calculator, here's what I'm planning - bear in mind this is for an Archive NAS:

      36 Disks at 16TB:

      9x16TB RAID-Z2
      4 x VDEVs = Data Pool
      Compression disabled, dedupe disabled.

      Raw capacity would be 576TB, but after parity and slop space we're at 422TB usable. In theory, if we call it 70% usable, I'm actually going to cry at 337TB total.

      At this moment, the NAS1 server is rocking 293TB of used space. Since I'm using Restic to do the backup of NAS1 to NAS2, I should see some savings, but I can already see that I will need to grow the shelf soon. I'll nuke NAS2, configure this and get the backup rolling ASAP.

      My bigger concern now is that NAS1 is set up the same way as NAS2, but never had dedupe enabled. At some point we're going to hit a similar issue.

      Thank you for all of your help and input.

      16 votes
    8. What do you use to manage your music library?

      I typically listen to music and discover new music through YouTube, but the gradual creep of ads and the possibility of videos being deleted in the future has made me interested in building up a...

      I typically listen to music and discover new music through YouTube, but the gradual creep of ads and the possibility of videos being deleted in the future has made me interested in building up a personal library of tracks on my own computer instead of streaming.

      What do you use to manage your songs, and buy songs when you find ones you like?

      My main computer runs Debian so I'd prefer Linux compatible options, but I'd be interested I hearing whatever other people use regardless.

      48 votes