Hey all, given everything going on, please keep checking on your communities. There was a recent death by suicide in Syracuse of a VA patient who had wrapped themselves in the trans flag prior to their death.

We're in this together, and I know it's going to get worse, and the only way we get through is with the support of each other. So, just, please check-in.

During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night.
The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn't look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn't feel like we're going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing. -Dan Savage

sorry for dumb question but here it goes: I remember during the first administration, Trump launched some tariffs against us and if I recall correctly, it resulted in the signing of the USMCA which replaced NAFTA.

So, where I get lost is, are these agreements non-binding? Like a country can just choose not to follow them and face no consequences before they expire? Cause I'd assume that what the U.S. is doing breaks the conditions of the USMCA?

and if it's non-binding, then that means that even if another agreement is signed yet again, if Trump wants to throw a new tantrum halfway through his presidency and do tariff wars again, there's nothing stopping him and we'd have to come up with and sign a brand new agreement yet again?

Hi everyone!

With my favorite F1 commentator joining the indycar crew and MBS acting crazy in F1, I want to dive into indycar a little bit this season.

I’m located in Belgium, when I checked the indycar live website it seemed like I won’t be able to stream indy500 here? (I don’t even know what indy500 is as opposed to the other Indy series? Which series should I follow? Who is awesome? Who is the stroll of indycar?)

I think it’s clear I’m a total noob here looking for some guidance. Any help is welcome, thank you!

Fix an annoyance.
Take out a level.
Revamp a system.
Expand a world.
Etc.

Pick a game, any game, and tell us what ONE thing about it you would change, and why. It doesn’t have to be feasible or reasonable or whatnot. You’ve got a magic wand with one charge left.

Also, your goal CAN be to make the game better, but it doesn’t have to be! Maybe you want to make the game more challenging. More chaotic. More hilarious. More broken.

Entirely up to you!

Also, you only get one change per game, but it’s fine to talk about what you would do for more than one game.

To be honest I have some problems explaining what I mean, which might be why I can't find a solution or explanaition for it.

I use firefox on Linux and out of habit i highlight text while reading it. I always did that and it helps me to read a lot faster and to relax my eyes while reading. It's something i don't think i can get rid of, even if I tried, it's just so deeply burned in.
As well I use to scroll the text I'm reading to the top out of the same reasons or maybe it's just habit as well, but I realised I cannot get rid of it as well :-)

So no to my problem:
Usually this works flawless, i can highlight text and have the cursor where I'm reading in the topmost visible line. But for some strange reason this does not work in the "new" wikipedia layout. where if I highlight text in the upper third of the page it scrolls upwards quite fast which just fucks up everything and makes my day bad. (this behaviour is not present in the old design which e.g. the germand wikipedia still uses)

Is it me?
Is it my browser?
Is there a way to get rid of this, so I can keep my workflow while reading and learing on wikipedia? Is somebody else observing this behaviour?
Where can I even start to look for a solution? I don't even know what to look for.

It truly bothers me, as I'm close to every day on it, and it might be my favorite website.
I heard there is a way to switch to the old wikipedia layout, which might be a workaround. But I actually like the new Layout a lot, so if there is a way to avoid that it would be great :-)

Homeland - 5/10

First paragraph works as both the tldr as well as the beginning of the review.

This show is all over the place. Some parts are really good, some parts are really bad, most parts are just meh. This show lends itself to be picked apart too easily. There are plot holes, convenient coincidences, contrived nonsense, and so often intelligent characters behaving like idiots over and over again which leaves you wanting to yell at the screen. So many eyeroll moments, cheesy stuff, questionable story writing, a lot of times that they tell, not show - it should be show, don't tell of course - and that classic trope that everything would have been solved if they just talked to each other, and another about just doing one single simple thing instead of getting distracted for dumb reasons. It is also pretty unrealistic despite trying to appear grounded. A lot of this show is too reminiscent of Jason Statham movies, if that makes sense. However I was entertained enough by it to keep watching, and it worked fine to pass the time when I was bored. Despite never really getting all that into the show as a whole, the good parts or episodes were worth the wait.

Family drama in this show was not good. It was just kind of something you had to sit through to get to those good parts. Monica Baccarin was fine and Damian Lewis was incredible, but I really just didn't care all that much about their relationship nor their children. It's a show that is being sold as an action spy thriller, but too large a part of it is this sort of more or less regular drama. It reminds me of The Americans where you of course don't watch it for the family stuff with the children, but because they were super cool undercover Soviet spies. This type of show's biggest weakness is this stuff. It just acts as filler and drags things out unnecessarily. And this goes for the main character's family too. The relationship with the sister was alright, but when the main character gets a daughter? Just kind of felt like a waste of time.

Most characters are pretty run-of-the-mill spy show stereotypes. Not great, not terrible. The main character, Carrie, was quite unique with a lot of depth, but she ends up going through way too many unbelievable situations. She and her tiny team, or even she all alone, saves the world half a dozen times. Her character at best decent, and that was only in the first few seasons. But then she goes completely down the drain and off the rails in season 4 and never recovered. I am probably in the minority with this opinion but I can't imagine most people see it this way since it's the star of a show that ran for 8 seasons so I guess take this opinion with a grain of salt.. but she just does not land for me after seasons 1-3.

She is highly unlikable. She is one of the worst mothers I have ever seen in any show or movie. She is very neglectful and abusive mother, she is also a mass murderer who practically never repents or regrets what she has done, she disobeys orders constantly, mostly making things worse, she uses people all the time, and she has such a massive victim complex so 90% of the time she blames someone else for her often fatal fuckups - of which there are a lot. By far the biggest problem with all this is that it is quite clear that the creators of the show want the audience to sympathize with her and are trying to pass her off as the reluctant hero. She was never that good a character, nor do I think actor Claire Danes is very good in the role - just alright. However season 4 and onwards she just in no way works. Just impossible to root for, which is of course a big problem when it's the main character. She's not a cool antihero, it just became a chore to watch her scenes. The best summation is something Saul said to her in season 2: "You're the smartest and the dumbest fuckin' person I've ever known." Characters that are supposed to be intelligent who then do such truly dumb things.. characters are only as smart as their writers. So it's just bad writing.

On a more positive note, there are a few characters I really liked: Astrid, Quinn, Saul, Max. Astrid was not in the show very much but she was great as the German spy counterpart in the BND. She just had a way about her and I felt the relationship she had with Quinn was quite interesting. She was a joy to watch, just like Quinn, played by Rupert Friend whom I recently saw in Hitman: Agent 47 which was an awful movie, so I was kind of nervous when he first appeared here in Homeland. Turns out though that he was just horribly miscast in the former because in this show, he is great! There's no nonsense with him, it's the "competency porn" feeling while watching him. Same goes for Saul and Max. Saul's actor Mandy Patinkin (who also played Inigo Montaya, couldn't believe it when I looked him up lol) steals most scenes he's in. He is great as the older, experienced spy, the mentor for our main character. His voice is both soothing and dramatic to listen to and even though half his face is invisible because of his huge beard, he still has such good expressions and body language that he really draws you in. As for Max, he was a very minor character to begin with but his role became bigger towards the final two seasons and like I said, it was a joy to watch him on screen and great that he was given more screentime.

Not much of a joy however was all the nonsense that they had to implement in order to make the show work - they took the easy route to explain things away instead of actually implementing them well. For example they practically never have surveillance drones or satellites available, nor nightvision or thermal cameras, so they constantly lose track of people that they are following. Nor do they have much more than pistols most of the time. The agency does have these things available, and more, so it's just dumb that they pretend it doesn't exist in this show - some special ops guys had nightvision one time in one of the first seasons but I think season 7 was the first time a thermal camera was used and then we saw it maybe twice more. There are also often no contingency plans. Back-up being nonexistent 90% of the time, handwaved or ignored with a quick line or reason that wouldn't really make sense. Plus, everytime they needed to make something thrilling, they added a time constraint element to do it.

Something I did like was the representation of mental illness. You really see the ugly side of Carrie's bipolar and even though I don't have it, and so can't actually speak to whether or not it's actually a good portrayal, it seemed good. I feel it's important to show regular people what it looks like, and I felt the same way with Max's neurodivergency - that he was quiet and forward added a lot to his character. He could have definitely just been the kind of techy nerd stereotype that is seen everywhere, but I'm glad they didn't go that route.

And another great thing, I think the best even, was Damian Lewis. It was such a shame that he was written out but it does make sense that they couldn't do all that much with his character. I have only seen him in Band of Brothers, but he was one of the highlights in that show too, so it's not surprising that I liked him in this one too. The best scene of the show for me was the one where he is wearing the bomb vest in the bunker next to all the high ranking officers. The up close shot of his trembling and shivering face.. I have no idea how he was able to even do that. He has won awards which is well deserved.

Bingewatching the show over about a month instead of watching it week to week across 8 years probably did not do this show any favours. I think maybe it's easier to see through the formula then. Better shows barely even have formulas, but this one certainly does, and I'm not a fan of it. Every single season has ways that they can't trust anyone anywhere. It's always this small team versus the world. That's not unique to this show but it stands out because it's often the same way they do it - they think they can't trust anyone, there's a mole, they're on their own because reasons, etc. In any case, the show was an alright use of my time but definitely not going to watch it again.

Would love to hear anyone's thoughts about either the show or what I have written here!

I am using Windows 10.

That is perhaps a silly question to ask, but I did not find an answer.

Suppose that I have a playlist with 100 videos on VLC or some other video player. I wish for it to play all the one hundred files in random order, with the exception that any video that was already played (or, possibly, played to completion) will be excluded, and will not be played again. A video not played to completion would resume from where it stopped.

This should be persistent, so the next time I fire up the playlist it starts from where I left it and also remembers the videos that were already played and should be skipped. Ideally, upon completion of the playlist, I should be able to learn that it was complete, so I could get new videos/episodes of whatever shows I am shuffling.

Thanks!

EDIT: I understand I can actually pre-shuffle the playlist to get something very similar to what I am asking. However, I would rather not know what is coming next. Like it used to be when I watched TV back in the day. Thanks! ;)

Hello. I'm currently in the market for an Android tablet, not strictly for my personal usage, but for my family so there's one easily reachable touch screen computer around the house. The problems start with my requirements, which are... not exactly tablet market friendly:

• Available in France (and without overly high shipping costs)
• Long term manufacturer support so it isn't subject to suddenly become e-waste because they decided to stop providing updates after like 1 major Android release
• Ability to install an Android distribution that doesn't rely on Google apps such as LineageOS + microG
• Sufficient specs to use a web browser and play videos without issues.
• I'd like the model to be easy to repair in the same vein as the Fairphone but that's lower priority

The budget is best defined as "probably not enough" (I don't think I can afford to spend much more than ~400€). Given that I suspect from my initial search not yielding much that fitting all the requirements is impossible especially within that budget, do you have pointers on models that provide an acceptable compromise for what I'm looking for, or that somehow do match all the criteria?

Hilariously, the closest candidate so far within budget seems to be... The Google Pixel tablet, which despite being a Google product has a fairly straightforward way to get an unGoogled ROM on it.

Title.

As I peruse new, and new to me, music I generally average about 4-5 songs a month being added to my playlists. More often than not a song will just click immediately and get added, but sometimes it'll be an older song on an album I have heard/owned prior and found a new enjoyment of it or, more rarely, I'll be introduced to a song and end up liking it more as I listen to it over some period of time.

My wife and I are planning on reading the Odyssey this year and we have to pick an translation. I've always struggled to read in translation, mostly because I get paralyzed choosing — it feels like a big choice, and if I end up not liking the book I can never tell if it was inherent to the story or because of the translation.

Can anyone help me out here? I don't mind if it is prose vs poetry, but we are doing this for fun, so I would prioritize readability over faithfulness to the Greek. I don't want anything that sounds too modern, but I also don't want to have very modern language take me out of the epic setting. I am currently leaning the Wilson translation, based on some excerpts I have read, but I am open to being convinced otherwise. Thanks!

EDIT:

Thank you to all who recommended some translations. I am narrowed down to between Fagles and Wilson, and intend to do some side by side comparisons to choose a final one before diving in!

Every time I get a haircut, my barber hands me a small hand mirror so that I can bounce an image off the wall mirror and see the back of my head. My hair is noticeably thinner in the back each time.

I recently was at a function and saw pictures of me standing around, some of which included the back of my head. The thinning is clearly starting to stand out in a bad way.

I feel like I’ve got two options:

1. Do something to try to save my hair (medication?).
2. Shave my head and try to rock a bald look.

I’m open to tips, tricks, and guidance on either of these (or options I’m not aware of).

I’m not very attached to my hair, so this isn’t a super emotional thing for me. I’m also not scared of going bald since, as a gay guy, I’m well aware of how compelling a bald + beard look can be on some men (my beard isn’t thinning at all, thankfully).

There’s still a question of whether it would look good for me specifically though. Also I don’t know if I’m ready to give up on my hair just yet?

One advantage I do have is summers off (I’m a teacher), so I’m going to be able to do a bald test run in a few months without too much risk. If it turns out that I’m a complete disaster without hair, I’ll just stay home and let it grow back out.

Anyway, I’m open to any and all thoughts on balding, hair loss, hair loss prevention, etc. Tell me your own experiences and what decisions you made. Let me know the tricks of the trade.

Soldering/electronics repair enthusiasts: I am in need of a soldering iron/station for electronics repair and wiring, preferred budget is under $150, perfection can raise the budget to $250.

First line of this post is all that's really needed if you just want to provide advice on what to buy (which is just fine, people don't need to know how a car works for me to explain that they probably just need a minivan).
Below is what I have gathered thus far if perhaps there's more that you'd like to know about what I've seen and perhaps misunderstood so far.

At present I have a no-name, non-adjustable, extremely basic soldering iron that is more fire hazard than anything and a Weller soldering gun that is obviously not meant for electronics and small wires. The iron has been good enough for the occasional need to solder a couple of wires together to get something broken back up and working, but is not something I'd use on anything critical.

Ok, this is one of those thoughts I have in my brain and that I can't quite get rid of.
It breaks down into a couple of questions. For the purposes of this, I'm aware that what eyes see is the reflection of light bouncing off objects, but I'm curious the impact on the visibility of both objects and other lights.

A. If eyes emitted any light, could they still see anything at all?
B. If eyes emitted, for example, red light, could they see everything except red items? What about red lights? Does this change if the light is green or violet?
B.1. If they can't red things would they just be invisible?
B.2. If they can't see red lights, would it matter if the red light they're seeing is brighter or dimmer, and would it still be an invisible/blank space?
C. I'm not sure how infrared interacts here but I know animals that sense infrared do emit it, is there a reason that's different, if it's different.

The internet is mostly not super helpful with this, since eyes don't emit light, just reflect it and look glowy, but yeah, anyway... thanks for entertaining my weird fixation.

Recently my wife was complaining how her phone has been getting overzealous when flagging incoming phone spam, and as a result she's missed some important calls. It made me think about how easy it is for me to avoid spam calls, despite using a 3rd party dialer on my phone without any kind of spam ID features.

It's because around 15 years ago when Google started letting you pick your own phone number through Google Voice, I (for various reasons) needed to change my phone number. I ended up choosing one with what I thought was a really cool area code, and I've ported that number to every new provider I've swapped to so it's stuck with me since then. It turns out that all the spam callers, bless their hearts, like to spoof incoming phone numbers with the same area code as the number they're dialing. It means whenever I see a call coming from the same area code as my number it's ~100% guaranteed to be spam, and if I see a call coming from the same area code that I actually live in it's ~100% guaranteed to be something actually important (doctor, pharmacy, kids' school, something like that). It wasn't my intent when picking the number (I just wanted the cool area code), but it turned out to also be the perfect spam call ID system. (At least so long as I never move to the place that matches my area code.)

So I'm curious if anyone else has similar stories, where you did something for one reason but it turned out to actually be awesome for an entirely different, unexpected reason?

This is the tenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Our next book will be Born a Crime by Trevor Noah at the end of February.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

SOLVED
Bit of a long shot here because this is one of those issues where I search for the problem and you get a sea of replies like "have you checked the settings?" or "have you tried changing HDMI cables".

I just got a brand new LG OLED TV and I'm happy, but I've been watching Arcane on it and I notice jarring changes in brightness through the episode.
I'm playing through a native app (Stremio) on WebOS and it's not the source file, I've tested the same file on two different monitors and it's fine.
I went through the settings and disabled every autocorrect and "boost" capability the TV has to try and diagnose it, and the first pass did seem to improve the rate of changes, but it still happens maybe once every 5 mins of watch time.
From what I can tell it seems to be picking up particular colour/brightness changes in the source (Arcane is full of then being so vivid) and when it does, it just changes the brightness of the whole display.
I'm no expert here, I'm also colour blind, so I won't categorically claim it is definitely brightness changing, it could be contract or colour, I'm not sure, but it looks like brightness because the whole picture gets darker or lighter.

I wondered if it was actually flip flopping between SDR and HDR which honestly, it might be. If it is I have no idea how to fix that, as the TV seems to have no option to enable or disable HDR on native apps.

Any advice, thoughts, things to try would be appreciated. I'm technically orientated but I don't really know much about changing picture settings to be honest, I tend to pick the most basic/neutral setting and leave it like that.

Edit: I've dug out the old 4k firestick as suggested and don't get the flickering at all through that. Also running through the guide below helped make the picture look even better! Thanks everyone!
I might yet grab the service remote though and see if I can make the native apps work, then I can retire the firestick for good.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts who watched through the basho.

I don't have all my thoughts together yet but wanted to post this after watching the last day of the basho to get the ball rolling on any discussion.

If you are like me then you are kinda over hearing about AI all the time; I get it, believe me. I've written about jobs on here before: my day job is absolutely infested with AI jargon, most of it pretty meaningless (flashbacks to "The Cloud"), and it's a constant everywhere else too, so yeah it's a lot and it's largely unimpressive. Image gen has gotten pretty ridiculous in the last 6-12 months, and video gen seems to be taking off next, and I've successfully wrangled various chatbots into helping with coding projects, etc.

Probably none of this is news to you, but I just found out that I can get AI to edit video. I've done a lot of short-form editing, and recently picked up some side work that is much lengthier, without realizing that the time I would spend hunkered over going through it would be exponentially more lengthy. Painfully so. Cue signing up for a trial of AutoCut, and hot damn it's like living in the future. I am as we speak watching it delete gaps, cut to speakers, add captions that are mostly correct & even formatted & unbelievably also do the VHS singalong/Tiktok "highlight the word being spoken" thing that all the cool kids are doing these days. It's not perfect, it's kinda finicky—I'm having to use a V1 when V2 is supposedly much better, and I'm having to chunk these beastly premiere timelines to get it to do anything at all, but wow—if this is your day job, are you worried? Cause it's a game changer for me but no one is going to replace me because no one else would bother messing with it lol, but on a corporate scale do people know about this stuff yet? I'm thinking our jobs may not be replaced by AI, our jobs will probably just become AI babysitting.

While many of you are an inspiration to others on your own creative merits, I wonder if there is anyone else who sets aside little (or big) passages and other quotations from authors, poets, film, or TV whose work gets you in the mood to write or in some other way encourages you into a certain manner of expression.

I keep around a digital notebook of some of my favorite thought-provoking, creativity-motivating, or words that paint an immediately vivid picture. Sometimes they add color to a character or world in an intense way, or they're clever ways to word things I wouldn't have thought to express from that angle. Sometimes they're ways of phrasing or writing a concept or theme that we don't often see in modern fiction but might work for a fantasy setting or elsewhere and I want to keep around that idea as a reference of how I might do something similar, but different.

Please share and feel free to provide some context if necessary, such as a passage from a sci-fi novel that really gets you motivated to write something science-y, or a bit about the person if the passage is from a memoir.

I've been using Google Keep (check boxes mode) for my work and personal to-do lists for a while now, and it's almost perfect for my use case. I love the simplicity and lack of options gumming up my process, and specifically I like the UI of having nested subtasks that all move with their head task when you reorder the top level tasks. That is to say, when you drag a headline task, all of its subtasks "roll up" inside it and "unfurl" when you drop the task into its new location. The fact that it syncs across devices is also really great, but not necessarily a deal breaker.

What is becoming a deal breaker is that you can only have 2 levels: top level or nested. I want more nesting levels, but with the simple touch-and-drag UI to which I've become accustomed.

Have any of you heard of/used an app such as I've described? I have issues using bigger, more fleshed-out apps because all the features distract my goblin brain, and the friction of having to use various touch menus or the keyboard on my phone to adjust indent levels keeps me from getting crap done.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: for now, I have settled on Workflowy. It seems to offer the most similar functionality with an acceptable number of interactions to do the things I want to do. Thank you to everyone who offered their experience!

Lately I've been taking an interest in American westward expansion and trying to get a better understanding of how the lines were drawn on maps in the past. Can anyone recommend a good video or interactive visualization that I can scroll back and forward through time to see the changes in detail?

Things I'm particularly interested in tracking:

• Indigenous lands (specifically how the boundaries of traditional/ancestral lands evolved into modern-day reservations)
• European claims like those of Britain, France, and Spain
• What was considered US/Canada/Mexico territory vs. no man's land or frontier at different points in time, from the governance standpoint of each of those nations
• Large and rapid settling movements like the Mormons into Utah, Oklahoma land rush, California gold rush, etc.
• Other factors like homesteading programs (I don't know much about this) and the transcontinental railroad, confederacy borders, trail of tears, etc.
• Notable battles/massacres marking bloody land disputes

I mean I guess that's a lot, this is basically "tell me about all of American history." 😂

I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp of the general political timeline and important events, I'm just realizing lately that I don't have a cohesive mental model of how it all fits on a map and changed over the years. I did find the Wikipedia page on Territorial Evolution of the United States to be interesting but it's a bit overwhelming and not very digestible. It contains this animated gif, which is awesome but I can't scroll through it at my own pace, and it's USA only.

I posted recently about needing a better job—well, if one has an interview for a better job (a much better job, hopefully), one needs to look the part. In the greater ATL area, two questions:

• I've gotten a variety of haircuts, from barbershops to salon-type places to Great Clips to at home with a Wahl, but they've topped out around 20 bucks. How do I find a really good haircut/face clean-up (brows etc) place? I don't want to just waltz in somewhere & end up looking ridiculous, but I don't even know where to start. It doesn't help that I have a kind of "weird" type of hair, where it's curly and kind of wiry, ethnically mediterranean/middle eastern, so if I get a regular clippers haircut it usually ends up looking chopped off.

• I also need a good suit, in toto; I have dress clothes but def. don't want to blow this one. National finance, I'm seeing business casual so suit/tie/shirt/shoes, nice enough to be unnoticeable is my goal. I have no idea how much a suit at that point would cost, but other than going to Brooks Brothers or Joseph A Banks I have no idea what the best approach would be (are those even in the same range lol)

Thanks again you all

Edit: i am a dude, sry

For the last 10-years or so, I've been much more interested in US history, it started because I wanted to be a more informed citizen, but continued because of how much recorded history differed from how I was taught. Then I started seeing how the lofty offerings of America, as an idea, had really never existed.

Like, when the rest of the world was watching the Soviet Union from the outside as it proudly proclaimed how amazing they were and everyone was kind of glancing at each other and whispering "They know we can see how it's going, right?" I wonder if the same is happening now, as countries watch US politics unfold. How close are we from a failure here or there to cascading failure?

I'm at a point of accumulated facts, doing my best to remove my personal bias, that I can't help but think we were arrogant to think we could keep a continent this large in one piece. The weight of national systems that can support a population this spread out is immense. The upkeep of infrastructure at this scale is a logistics nightmare. Passing any national laws has become the chore that just never gets done, we'll always get to it tomorrow. The people, Americans, can be amazing, but that's a truth of humanity, not nationality.

I'm sad to think I could be witnessing the end of something really impressive and inspiring, even if a lot of it was some makeup and nice lighting. Thoughts?

Tax time again!
I like to get this done as soon as possible to get it out of the way. I have all my tax documents at the ready, but several changes happened in my life last year (moved states, sold home, bought home, etc.) and the tax software I've been using over the last several years apparently "doesn't support" several of the tax forms (or even simply some of the boxes on the forms) I have for this year.

Trying to avoid the "Big Two" if possible.

The last time I ran off to see a doctor was about 10 years ago when I got a concussion shortly after graduating college. After that, I have visited optometrists and dentists, but not an MD. I had my own insurance at my first big boy job after school, but I didn't schedule any appointments [early 20s with plenty of other priorities] before I got fired after a couple years and lost employer coverage (ain't nobody got money for COBRA nonsense).

After that, I've been rather chronically underemployed and thus avoided the medical system entirely (with the above exceptions of my eyes & teeth) to avoid being told to go fix expensive problems [and not wanting the monthly drain of premiums].

Anyway, I (for better and worse) had an hours cut that got me eligible for Medicaid. I'd like to know what to say to get a head-to-toe physical (including mental health) with minimal hassle and needing to re-clarify what I want. Mental health-wise, I can state a suspected primary complaint: undiagnosed ADD due to lacking the H as a child as well as seasonal depression [the chronic depression was entirely downstream from the abovementioned ADD].

However, I have no idea what to tell the doctor to look for physically. Probably should get some kind of comprehensive blood screening done. Make sure my hormones, iron, etc… are all within normal bounds. Perhaps I have some conditions that should've spooked me into seeing a doctor five years ago, but I'm still alive and well, so they're no longer causes for alarm [even if they should be].

My sister is marrying a Canadian this year and wants to move to Canada very soon for lots of reasons. Usually, US citizens don't need a visa or even an eTA to enter and stay in Canada. The visa-free period is 6 months, but my sister is in a situation where she might need to be able to stay longer until she can get proper residence through a spousal visa, since the processing time for those currently sits at 10 months. Moving back temporarily is not an option, neither is waiting to move. As I understand it, you can apply to extend visitor visas, but that might not be the case for visa-free stays? We genuinely don't know where to get started looking.

Has anyone here done this, or been in a similar situation? Anyone who's immigrated through marriage and have had to figure out their stay like this, especially where it's not quite gone according to plan? Any and all suggestions and stories are welcome, we're all just 20-somethings navigating tremendous life changes without guard rails.

Heads up: the following is abnormally wordy even by my standards, and I'm the kind of person who regularly runs into the Discord character limit by accident despite the Nitro subscription increasing it. The underlying context is a set of two videos that by themselves reach almost 3 hours of runtime. I tried to sum up some of the main points enough that you don't strictly need to have watched the videos to follow while also not needing to slog through a play by play of the same video I recommended you to watch if you did. While I believe the subject is interesting, I fully understand if you don't have the time to dedicate to this. If you do and weren't scared away by the size of the scroll bar, feel free to read on.

Context

This all starts with the seemingly straightforward question in the title: How many Super Mario games are there? You would think it would be easy to answer given that this series is so massively impactful in video game history that to many it defines what a video game is. The truth, like most things, is a lot more complicated. jan Misali, who you might also know for their Conlang Critic series and various video essays on other deceptively complex subjects they find interesting, gathered data through a survey to collect people's answers to that question, and made a video on the subject. The video is about 45 minutes long, and that's only because they deliberately cut it short. The discussion that sparked from this video eventually led to them starting another survey at a larger scale with a revised methodology, culminating to a sequel to the previous video, this time with a two hours runtime, and it, too, was cut short. If you have the time to set aside for this, I would greatly recommend watching both videos as they're very insightful and most of what I have to say is commentary to these two videos (and doesn't even come close to covering as much as the videos themselves do).

What question are we even asking here?

Like all good debates on the internet, it starts with an ambiguity issue: What is a "Super Mario game"? In simpler cases, a video game series can be defined as the first game and its sequels and that's enough to establish an uncontroversial list. Things get more complicated when we look at an entire franchise especially one as massive as the Mario franchise, which contains a ton of video games, an even bigger pile of non-video game media... and works that blur the line. You can probably see where this is going, but I'll get back to that particular can of worms later. Focusing on the video games, among the entire franchise, the question focuses on the "mainline" series. That is what jan Misali refers to as the "Super Mario" series, distinguishing them from spinoffs and other games that are part of the franchise. You'll note that I specified "what jan Misali refers to as the "Super Mario" series", not "what the "Super Mario" series is".

Multiple-choice confusion

Using the video runtime as a yardstick, we are 2 minutes into the first part, and there is already a binary tree's worth of debate, and it's only getting bigger from here: the existence of a mainline series as a separate entity from the overall Mario franchise is commonly accepted, but not unanimously. Among those who do agree, there is disagreement on the scope of the mainline series (with how gargantuan the franchise itself is, even the spinoffs have their own spinoffs, and it would be a perfectly reasonable take to consider some or all of them, such as the Mario Kart games, as a core part of the series). Among those who agree on the scope, there is disagreement over what the first game of the series is (do we start at Super Mario Bros? Mario Bros? Donkey Kong? The Game & Watch series?). In order to keep the video at 45 minutes and not 45 hours, jan Misali picks one definition they feel is reasonable among others: the Super Mario series is one distinct series among others in the franchise, made up of Super Mario Bros. on the NES and its sequels, which are mostly platformer games. With this baseline established (even if the survey doesn't 100% agree), how do we figure out which of all the Mario games are the sequels to SMB1? There are many methods to go about this... And not only none of them converge to a single answer, they all diverge in different ways. Let's start with the most direct source of data jan Misali had access to as a direct result of the process of making the videos: the surveys.

The one thing we can agree on is that no one agrees

jan Misali isn't just presenting their own thoughts on the matter, they're also analyzing the data gathered from a survey they made before recording both videos. The first one merely presented you with a premade list of games and asked you which of them you considered to be a Super Mario games, and the second one goes more in depth but still had the same overall goal. If there was any sort of consensus (assuming the survey wasn't sabotaged or otherwise flawed enough to distort the ability to interpret the data to the point of uselessness), you could derive the broadly accepted list of Super Mario games from looking at the most common answers to the survey, right?

If you interpret "the most common answer" as "which games people overwhelmingly (>95%) agree are part of the series", the survey gives us Super Mario Bros, Super Mario bros 3, and Super Mario World (by the time of the second video, the second survey added Super Mario 64 to the list, as well as Super Mario Bros. Wonder)... which almost anyone who has an opinion on the subject would agree is a grossly incomplete list. If you interpret "the most common answer" as "which is the list that the most people agreed is the full list of the Super Mario series", you end up with a much more complete list of 18 games which by definition is what the highest percentage of people answering the survey agree on. You could consider it the survey's overall answer to the question... except the percentage in question is less than 2% (although in the second survey analyzed in the second video, this same list, with the at the time newly released Super Mario Bros. Wonder added, actually stood at just above 5%. Closer, but still very much a minority group within the survey). Almost everyone who answered still disagree to some degree with that answer. While there is plenty of insight to be gained from the data (including regarding the limitations of the survey itself), it also conclusively establishes that public opinion (or at least in jan Misali's audience) doesn't have a truly agreed upon answer to this question.

Hang on, let me call my uncle at Nintendo

So, we have an answer, but not the answer, and even worse (...or better, if you like analyzing seemingly trivial arguments that secretly hide a rabbit hole of semantics, linguistics and cognitive science) the only thing we can say about "the" answer is that it cannot exist. So let's try finding more answers by going from another angle. If we learned anything from politics, it's that an answer derived from polls can absolutely be wrong, so it makes sense to consider that there is an authoritative source that can give a definitive answer over public opinion. The most obvious lead would be Nintendo itself, the owner of the IP... except that instantly fizzles out because while Nintendo does provide a list of mainline Super Mario games on their website, the one they give you isn't the same depending on whether you ask Nintendo of America or Nintendo of Japan. We can also look at what Wikipedia deems to be the list of Super Mario games, which naturally is different from both Nintendo US and Nintendo JP's list, and on top of that is arguably inconsistent with itself: the page's release timeline lists Bowser's Fury as an entry like the others, but the infobox that redirects to the various Mario games under the "main games" section lists it between parentheses as a sub-entry to Super Mario 3D World, the same way it lists New Super Luigi U as a sub-entry to New Super Mario Bros U which the release timeline in turn omits completely. There are rational reasons to do it this way which I won't go into since jan Misali explains it in the videos themselves, but technically that means Wikipedia doesn't have an internal consensus either. The Super Mario wiki, while unaffiliated with Nintendo, is also a good candidate for an authoritative source, which gives you another, different, answer. We could go on, but let's stop here and conclude that, once again, there is no agreed answer.

Give me your argument and I'll tell you why we're both wrong

Neither polling the public nor going by the authoritative sources have given a concrete answer, which leaves us in front of the semantic rubble trying to piece back a coherent understanding of the Super Mario series. Not to try and find the Correct™ answer, we've already established there isn't one, but it would give us valuable insight as to why no one can agree to a specific answer in the first place. jan Misali spreads this approach over both videos as they give their reasoning from various angles. They deliberately haven't gone over this exhaustively, and neither will I (not that I would be able to), but I do have thoughts I'd like to share based on their observations... Which yes, means I've written 1,5k words establishing the base around the videos I want to talk about despite operating under the assumption the reader has already watched them before going over my own thoughts. I'm certain I could have been more concise, but I felt this was necessary so that this post could stand as a coherent chain of reasoning and not a completely disjointed rambling that won't make sense to anyone who hasn't made the significant time investment that fully watching the video essays represents, and still not make sense to most who did (and if I misunderstood something critical, someone reading this can point it out from my attempt to lay out the context rather than after 12 confused replies down the thread). I'll try and tie my thoughts together in broader parts with increasingly silly titles.

"Home console purism"

I will start by addressing this not because it's the most important (if anything it's the least important detail I have something to say about) but because it lets me introduce a talking point I'll reuse later. Something that jan Misali mentions early on is what they call "home console purism", defining it as the belief that the mainline Mario series, as a rule, cannot include handheld games. While they don't explicitly state this at any point nor do I have a specific reason to believe implying it was their intention, it somewhat came off to me like bringing it up as a flawed argument just to dismiss it, especially after it was brought up again regarding Super Mario Run as a comparison to the belief that mobile games "don't count". If you leave it at that, I absolutely agree that it's silly to exclude a video game for that reason, especially with the Switch blurring the line. After thinking about it, though, while I'd still disagree with using it as a reason to exclude a video game from a series in this specific case, I think it deserves to be looked at in more detail.

Gatekeeping or shifting perspective?

The least charitable interpretation of this argument is that handheld and mobile games are deemed to not be worthy of being included alongside the "real" games released on home consoles or PC, usually with a side of implying that you're a "fake" gamer if you play them (not to mention the higher layer argument from the same basis that also excludes any console games, leaving only PCs as the "true" gaming platform and everything else as lesser toys for kids) which can safely be dismissed as elitist gatekeeping. However, from a perspective of classifying games within a series, there is a much more sensible way to approach this argument.

The "Call of Duty on the DS" problem

Nowadays, between the handheld PCs like the Steam Deck which can give desktop PCs a run for their money in terms of specs and the Nintendo Switch that refuses to be classified as a dedicated home console or handheld, the distinction would look a lot sillier, but the handheld game market used to be closer to an isolated sub-segment of the overall video games market than a fully integrated part of it. Disregarding the whole "exclusive releases" circus, faithfully porting a PC game to a home console was generally agreed to be feasible. Handheld consoles were another matter entirely. Most (all? was there a handheld notable for outperforming contemporary home consoles?) of the time, handheld consoles had vastly inferior specs to contemporary home consoles and computers making faithful ports of a given game to them a pipe dream if the game was too resource intensive, and a tendency to have a much more varied control scheme than you'd expect from home consoles, sometimes to the point of "porting" an existing game requiring restarting the game design process from scratch.

You've gotta hand it to the Need For Speed DS game devs, they certainly tried to make them similar to the other platforms

Where this starts mattering in this context is what this means for releases within an individual game series, and how game studios would treat developing a given entry for each system. Some just stuck to only home consoles or handhelds, some would aim for the best compromise between having a unified experience for a given game no matter which device you were playing it on and leveraging a specific console's unique features, some would confusingly release games under the same title on different platforms but actually make them completely different games (even Nintendo themselves are guilty of it!), and, most relevantly, some would deliberately make handheld games stand out from the home console games as a sub-series.

Why this doesn't really matter here, but the point I'm building up to does

This outlook makes a lot less sense if you look at the Super Mario series in a vacuum, which, as a mainly platformer series, struggles a lot less with making a handheld release that convincingly fits the vibe of the home console releases than other genres might (in no small part because designing a 2D game makes just as much sense as it does in 3D for this genre, making the specs gap between handheld and home consoles a lot less important), and as a first party franchise, Nintendo isn't going to be blindsided by a new console's weird features like a third party studio might since they're the ones making the console... But if you consider the market in general across the years, siloing the home and handheld side of a given series as two separate entities, with the home console being granted the "mainline series" role was a very real phenomenon. If you start from this premise and look at the Super Mario series which debuted on the NES, it makes sense to apply the same framework and say "None of the handheld games are part of the Super Mario series, they're part of their own series". I would still disagree, but it's definitely a lot more sensible to base it on past observations of the market than gatekeeping.

The Super Mario release timeline needs its own timeline

To elaborate, I would find this argument a lot more convincing back when the DS (which was so atypical that even porting a game from another handheld to the DS' bespoke dual screen and touch screen setup was a non trivial affair, let alone the home consoles) was the current-gen Nintendo handheld than now where the Switch 2 (a console with a mostly conventional control scheme and powerful enough that porting an arbitrary PC/home console game to it without visibly changing anything about the game makes just as make sense as any other platform) is about to come out. And with this I'm finally arriving to the talking point I wanted to introduce. If the evolution of the broader market can affect the validity of someone's criteria to determine which games are (or aren't) part of the Super Mario series, then we can generalize that to the following: A game can be (or no longer be) considered part of a series depending on when you ask even if absolutely nothing has changed about the game in isolation.

Sure they're all a Mario game, but which one is THE Mario game?

One thing that jan Misali picked up on from the original survey is a major ambiguity that made answering (and therefore interpreting the resulting data) harder is the remakes, remasters, enhanced versions with their own release, and other related weirder cases. These games range from almost completely identical to previous releases to non-controversially a variant of the same title but still different enough to provide an experience meaningfully separate from the original title, to different enough they're arguably not the same game, adding a dimension to the answer that makes enforcing a flat "yes" or "no" choice less useful. This is why the survey that led to the second video made it possible to call an entry a "mainline Super Mario game", a "major spinoff", a "minor spinoff", "not canon" and finally "not a Mario game" (and "unsure", just in case) at the same time as you answer whether you think the title is a distinct entry in the series (or you're unsure), to be able to clarify the general sentiment that if a game saw more than one release under different versions, they can all be acknowledged as an incarnation of that game without making each individual release an entry to the mainline Super Mario series of its own. This allowed the answers to be more nuanced, but this by itself doesn't help answering the original concern: if multiple releases can all be the same game, and that game is part of the series, can more than one of these releases be called a "distinct" entry? If you think there can't, which one is it? And this last question is what I'm going to focus on for my next thought.

Mario games are temporary but Doom is Eternal

Forced reference aside, let's look at other franchises for comparison. Doom Eternal, originally released on PC in March 2020, got a Switch port later in December that year. Thanks to skillful optimization allowing it to somehow run on glorified 2015 Android tablet hardware, this port is faithful enough that I don't think it would be controversial to call it the same game as the PC release compared to, for example, The Sims 2, where while a game named The Sims 2 was released on the Nintendo DS, it is so radically different from the PC release that I would consider it an entirely separate game (and for that matter not a part of the mainline Sims series, but I'll put away that thought before I completely lose the plot). If I asked "Between the PC and the Switch release of Doom Eternal, which is the main release?" and we assume "both" isn't considered a valid answer (which is itself debatable) I would expect the natural answer to be the PC release simply because out of two functionally equivalent releases of the same game, the PC release came first. Similarly, if we consider, as a general rule, that there exists one, and only one, release of a given game that embodies a distinct entry in the mainline Super Mario series, with any other release not counting (while still accepting that they're a version of that game), the earliest release being the distinct entry makes intuitive sense. After all, they're the original version of the game. If it could be of the future ones it would mean a release could stop being the distinct entry in a mainline series despite nothing having changed about the release itself, which doesn't make sense... right?

What's in a name?

Time to bring up that one point from earlier: there's nothing inherently preventing the status of a game release as a mainline series entry from being affected by external factors. Quick disambiguation note: I've been using the word "release" in the context of video games being made available for purchase, but the word "release" can also be used to mean a software update, no matter how minor. Video games also being software, this distinction is now going to matter. To avoid confusion, I will only use the word "release" to mean a game being made available to purchase and refer to a new software version for an already released game as an "update". With this cleared up: before internet connection became a standard feature in consoles, the general expectation was that releasing a game meant permanently locking down the state of its software. Game companies would not want to update a game between releases and end up with different versions of a physical game in circulation if they can't ensure that the customers would get the most recently updated copies as it would inevitably confuse players, so it would only be considered for truly major issues that weren't caught in time for the release. As broadband internet came into the picture, it suddenly became a lot less important to make sure the game stayed the same after release as you could simply get the customer to upgrade their game over the Internet. This quickly became standard operating procedure for PC games, with consoles catching up a bit later, including Nintendo's. And with it, came the practice of content updates over the lifecycle of a game before the next release.

Dragonborn... reborn?

Even if the individual updates don't change the game to a meaningful degree from one update to the next, as they pile up you can eventually end up with a wildly different game than what it was when it originally released, even if it's supposed to be the same entry into its series. If you agree that the release you accept as the distinct entry of its mainline series can change its characteristics over time, wouldn't it make sense to also agree that which release of a game you consider to be the distinct entry of the mainline series can also change over time? Let's turn to another series as an example: The Elder Scrolls, and specifically Skyrim which is infamous for its amount of re-releases. It is at the time of writing the latest game in its series, and has been since 2011... but is the by now almost 15 years old original release really still the main entry in the Elder Scrolls mainline series? As far as Steam is concerned, the game you can purchase if you search for Skyrim on its store isn't the original release, nor is it even the Legendary Edition release from 2013, but the Special Edition from 2016 (while also letting you buy the Anniversary Edition as a DLC to the Special Edition). With the original release no longer being on sale and the more recent Anniversary Edition being classified as a DLC rather than a "proper" release, it would make sense for me to call SE the "distinct" entry representing Skyrim in The Elder Scrolls over the original release. Is there an instance of this happening in the Super Mario series? It would be a huge stretch, but you could argue (although frankly I wouldn't agree) that Super Mario 64 isn't a distinct entry in the Super Mario series because you consider the Super Mario 64 DS remake to be the "true" entry in the series. Sure, claiming that Super Mario 64, the first Mario 3D platformer isn't a mainline Super Mario game sounds ludicrous, but so does "Skyrim (2011) isn't a mainline Elder Scrolls Game but Skyrim Special Edition is" and I did consider it a plausible argument. A slightly less unhinged instance would be to consider New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe to be the representative entry in the mainline series over New Super Mario Bros. U.

Strictly defined criteria and their pitfalls or: why is a sweater a Super Mario game?

By this point I've highlighted ambiguities over the meaning of pretty much word in the question "How many Super Mario games are there?".

• How many: No consensus on the number of games in the series, let alone which ones they are
• Super Mario: No consensus on what makes an individual game part of the series
• are there (present tense): No guarantee that the list can stay consistent with regards to time, in either direction

There is one left to achieve total semantic obliteration: games. This was inevitable, really. How could you overanalyze this question and not bring up nitpicking over the meaning of the term "video game" itself? jan Misali has already done most of the work for me, as part of the second video involves them mentioning that attempting to derive an appropriate list of mainline Super Mario game solely from an objective definition while is doomed to fail. Whatever the approach, you will always be working with an unstated semantic "guardrail" of some sort that cannot be comprehensively worded into the definition. The first basic example they give is "Anything with 'Super' in the title is part of the Super Mario series." Under any reasonable context we know what is meant by "anything" but without it, this definition includes infinitely many things that very obviously aren't Super Mario games. But even progressively narrowing it down to something that sounds sensible will still leave a semantic hole that includes something absurd. This culminates into the following bit:

So, maybe you can use this "has Super in the title" method as a starting point and add more stuff to it until it becomes a useful definition. And, in the comments from part 1, many people have tried to do exactly that. And very often what they come up with something like: "The Super Mario series consists of the games developed by Nintendo for Nintendo consoles that have 'Super Mario' in the title, excluding RPGs, party games, Mario Kart, sports games, and reissues of previously released Super Mario games."

At which point jan Misali unleashes their inner Diogenes and reveals what I've been hinting at in the header: Behold, a man mainline Super Mario game! However, while I'm all for leveraging semantic technicalities for the sake of comedy, I think this is a part where jan Misali loses the plot a bit. Even accounting for a VERY permissive understanding of what a video game is, I don't think I am a teacher: Super Mario Sweater plausibly counts as one. Obviously knowing the incoming storm in the comment section, they supplied the following definition for a video game: "interactive software with a visual display for the purpose of entertainment". I agree that if you accept that's what a video game is, I am a teacher: Super Mario Sweater is in fact a video game. What I don't agree with is that the definition itself is accurate enough.

My favorite video game is Tildes

jan Misali's last argument in the video in favor of IaaT:SMS being a video game is regarding the value of knitting as entertainment, which I'm not disputing, but that's not where I believe the issue with this definition is in the first place. IaaT:SMS does have interactivity, yes, and it was designed for the purpose of entertainment, but to me that is not enough to constitute a video game. For it to be one, the interactivity needs to be a necessary part of the entertainment, which isn't the case here. The interactive part, inputting your measurements, choosing a file and scrolling through the selected knitting pattern isn't the entertaining part. The entertaining part, which is knitting a sweater, requires none of the interactivity provided by the software; a completely non interactive slideshow of the various patterns would accomplish the goal just as well. And, while this was ultimately just part of jan Misali's overall point that you cannot bolt together a purely objective definition without relying on some level of unstated common sense, I think that point would have been better served by highlighting the holes in the provided definition of a video game itself than taking it at face value to poke a hole in the definition of the Super Mario series that relied on in the first place (not that this is even required, as jan Misali proceeds to show more examples of games that clearly wouldn't be argued in good faith by anyone to be part of the mainline series and are still noncontroversially video games, and then goes on to explore the ambiguities in pretty much every other part of the definition). You know what else counts as a video game under that definition?

• mspaint.exe
• Arch Linux
• Tildes
• Any movie DVD that features a menu
• BonziBuddy
• The Youtube video player
• The onboard widget display of the Logitech G510 keyboard
• Kangjun Heo's Rensenware
• A chat interface with an LLM whose system prompt instructed it to entertain the user without any further elaboration
• The firmware running on my pair of wireless earbuds (a LED counts as "visual display", right?)
• Twitch chat
• The YouAreAnIdiot prank website
• The Times Square ad billboards (yes, it's interactive, even if the controls are atypical)

You will note that even with my caveat, you could still argue that a lot of these still fit this alleged definition of a video game, so whatever a video game is, it's not just that. Instead of continuing this list and losing the plot myself for the second time in the process of writing this, I will point out that jan Misali's second video has been classified under the "I am a Teacher: Super Mario Sweater" game category, meaning that apparently Google agrees that this is in fact a video game. Shows what I know.

Video killed the Mario star

And of course, you can't cover debating what's a video game without also covering the video part. When people ask "how many Mario games are there", the video game part is implied, but there is definitely an argument to be made that being a video game is not necessarily a prerequisite to be part of the mainline Mario series, especially if you hold the belief that the Game & Watch games aren't actually video games (I personally do think they are, but it's debatable enough for jan Misali to not be fully sure, at the very least) but are still significant enough to be part of the mainline series (there is a Super Mario Bros. game in there, after all, and it's even a platformer!). This can also be further argued to include other media that aren't even games (if the NieR series can include stage plays, what's preventing the Super Mario series from including, say, its licensed movie?), though I personally don't have any non-video game candidate in mind to argue in good faith that they should be part of the series.

413 Payload Too Large

At this point I don't think I have much else to add that isn't basically paraphrasing jan Misali themselves, so I'll wrap up this post so I don't have to spend another day adding to it and proofreading, and I'm fairly confident that between it and all the other interesting points the video raised that I haven't mentioned there will be more than enough jumping points for discussion (and if I forgot something I wanted to add, I can always do that later). What are your thoughts on this? _{And did you realize before I pointed it out that I wrote over 5k words about the question without giving my own answer at any point?}

Recently I did an update on my Macbook and it started showing alerts about Apple Intelligence. I've heard a little bit of marketing about this but I haven't really spent any time trying to figure out if it is just hype. Well, I've tried it a few times and I'm completely underwhelmed.
One of marketed features is that Siri is much improved. That would be nice, I thought, because there are only a few use cases like "Set an Alarm" where Siri could ever do anything besides a google search.

So there are two times recently I tried to use this improved Siri to solve a problem. My background using AI: I use Copilot at work. I get mixed results for it, but it does use my local context (open files etc) and is able to ask follow up questions if my prompt is too vague.

First Use Case: I want to solve a technical problem on my laptop

• My Prompt: "Can you help me fix Discord so that audio is shared when I share a video stream"
• My Expectation: Maybe an AI summary of the cause of the issue. Maybe open up system settings or open up Discord or give an explanation of why this is a technical problem on Macs.
• Actual Siri Response: Does an internet search and shows some links. Essentially just did a google search which I could have done by typing the same prompt in a browser.

Second Use case: I want help finding a file on my laptop

In this case, I made a summary of my finances on my laptop a few months ago. I can't remember what I named the file or what kind of file it was. Maybe a spreadsheet? I know it was on my local computer.

• My 1st Prompt: Can you help me find a specific file on my computer
• My Expectation: Maybe some follow up questions where it asks me for a date range or something that is inside the file. Yes, I know that I can do this in Finder but I want Apple Intelligence to save me a few minutes.
• Siri: Shows the result of a web search on how to find files on a computer. The first few results are for Microsoft Windows
• 2nd Prompt: Can you help me find a specific file on my mac
• Siri: Tells me to use Command-space and use the search

In both cases, Siri just acted like a shortcut to a google search. It didn't even recognize that I was asking the question on a Mac. This is same as Siri has always been. I assume that it can still figure out to set a timer and do a few things, but it doesn't seem to be working in a way I would expect an AI to work at all.

We have this big project at work...an "all hands on deck" kinda thing that has us rank-and-file frontend devs working alongside our manager more closely than I'm used to. And it was fine, because I like the guy and he's been a decent manager. But this project is killing me.

On multiple occasions now I've written code, had it pass code review (often with his approval after a round of changes/guidance), and then every few days we get these massive re-write PRs from him where he completely rewrites large chunks of what we've done. It's leaving me feeling a few different ways:

1. Angry because how quickly your code gets replaced is a (imo, bullshit) metric used as a part of our annual reviews and promotion discussions
2. Doubting myself because in my head a good developer doesn't have their code rewritten that quickly.
3. Confused because features I thought I understood are constantly being rewritten leaving me wasting time trying to relearn how things work
4. Wondering what the point of writing code is if it's just going to be thrown in the garbage later in the week?

And like I'll be the first to admit I'm not the most proficient developer on our team. React and Typescript are relatively new concepts to me, despite a long career in web development. But I've been writing with it for about a year now and I had thought I was finally getting a good grasp on things. But now I'm wondering if I'm just an idiot? Is it imposter syndrome or have I actually somehow coasted through a 15 year career across various stacks and it's just now catching up to me?

Or is this just the nature of massive projects like this? We had a half-baked product scope to begin with and its getting daily changes with entire chunks of it not very well thought out by our PM. I can see how it would make sense that the more senior developer might see the need to refactor things when things are constantly changing and we're left writing code based on assumptions and half-written requirements. I'm also getting are comments on my PRs that request changes, but mid-comment he's like "I'll just take care of this because it's blocking me".

It's just really taking a toll on my mental health and how I feel about my job. I've been trying to find another job for a few months now, but I'm not having any luck. Job hunting sucks and when you're already demoralized as hell, it's hard to sell yourself to prospective employers.

Could really use some insight from other experienced devs, please!

I was diagnosed as an adult about 5 years ago. I'll spare my life story, but I've spent those five years doing everything I can to give myself an environment where I can achieve my goals, and I have done a great job with that.

Apart from getting meds, I've built a strong task management/journaling system, I've built mental habits that help me overcome anxiety spirals, I've forgiven my ADHD for existing, and I have healthier sleep/diet habits to keep my baseline up.

Lately, though, some new obstacles have come up with the birth of my son (now almost 4mo old). Tbf, I've been aware of these things before, but my son has definitely exacerbated them.

With the attention and care a child requires, my windows to do things are a lot smaller. Sometimes only 20 minutes. This has made things more difficult in a few different ways:

1. For me to start doing a lot of things, even things I am excited to do, I have a "ramp-up" period before I can really dig into it. I think this is basically the time I need to plan, prioritize, and/or remember where I left off before I actually execute.

2. When I know something will inevitably interrupt me, I avoid starting anything because interruptions like, super-duper piss me off. And I don't want to be pissed off.

3. Not really related, but somewhat. In general, I would like to be able to do more in a day. I'd say my peak operating time is 9am-3pm, give or take. Outside these hours, it's a lot harder for me to do anything outside of "shut my brain off" tasks like house chores.

As many with ADHD know, an understimulated brain is unpleasant. And how shitty is it that ADHD also makes it difficult to do the things you find intellectually stimulating?

I hope all this makes sense. I've already accepted that this is my life now, and I'm okay with it. Even still, I would love some practical, actionable advice to help me make the most with what I have. Double points if it doesn't involved upping my Adderall dosage or self-medicating with caffeine. Thanks everyone!

This is going to be a rant with a question at the end, asking how to end this infinite loop of nondelivery?

So my friend bought a new laptop from Lenovo back in December. It was supposed to be delivered by UPS but of course they were going to attempt to deliver it while my friend is at work.

He attempted to have it delivered to a relay point and the website agreed to this. The relay point never received it. When we called customer support, they said they can’t deliver it to a relay point. Despite the site letting us reprogram it to one.

Next, I chatted with Lenovo and they were like the agent cannot talk to UPS directly. There is an internal department that handles this, according to them. It will take three to five days for the investigation. No news after five days.

We called UPS again and they said they would deliver it on Monday. And then eventually on Wednesday before 1PM. My friend took half day off in the morning for this. The delivery guy called my friend at 3PM to deliver it. He asked to reprogram it to Friday. The deliveryman agreed. And now we are waiting.

If this package still doesn’t arrive, two weeks later, I am going to lose my mind!

This is even the abridged version. There was one point where the customer service person told us to go get it at the relay point when the website clearly said it wasn’t there.

I don’t understand how delivery companies like UPS fuck this up and insist on delivering during the workday.

What or how do you manage this endless circus of customer service representatives not being accountable for contradictions? Has someone cracked the code and figured out how to get it delivered at a proper time?

I get that it’s supposed to make things more secure, but it feels like a constant chore every time I try to log in somewhere. Grab a code from my phone. Check my email. Open an authenticator app. Repeat this process for every single account, over and over.

I know there are tools like YubiKey that are supposed to make 2FA easier, but the reality is that most websites don’t even support them.

I already use a password manager, and all my passwords are long, randomized, and secure. Is there something I am missing that makes this easier, or is this just as infuriating for everyone else?

My 5-year-old loves doing “science experiments” at home with me and her older siblings, but it seems that the online lists of experiments we’re choosing from are truncated to leave off all but the least dangerous activities. This makes sense for a lot of low-parental-involvement contexts, but I’m going to be directing and deeply involved in these experiments. And I want fire. Smoke. Sparks. I want to make these experiments feel adventurous so the kids get really excited about whatever we’re learning. Baking soda and vinegar volcanoes and elephant toothpaste just don’t cut it.

What experiments can you recommend using only relatively common household materials? Chemicals, candles, electricity, a stovetop, etc. (Assume that the experimenters will all be taking standard precautions, wearing PPE, and generally using the experiments as both an opportunity to learn about science and about the safety measures that go with science experimentation.)

Or if you know of any websites listing these more spectacular home science experiments, please share those as well.

Bonus if the experiments involve multiple possible outcomes that the kid can use pen and paper and elementary math to predict in advance.

Ok so I'm enjoying the hard SF thread but what I really enjoy about SF is the sociology, anthropology and psychology more than the tech and whether or not the wormhole is sciency enough.

Here's a wiki article on "social science fiction" for more context. There's definitely some overlap with both hard and soft SF, but I'm not looking for a rec just because it happens to be more space opera. I'm interested because of the themes of the work. Ursula Le Guin, Sherri Tepper, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood are some of the key classic authors I've read in this arena but I'm looking for who I've overlooked. Plenty of YA work fits here especially post Hunger Games but I'd mostly request adult works unless it's a very strong YA novel (Hunger Games itself holds up very well IMO actually). I'd say Becky Chambers - who's also put into the solar punk/hope punk subgenres - is a good example of more anthropological feeling modern work.

Some things don't age well - I really enjoy Tepper's Gate to Women's Country for its exploration of a post apocalyptic world where most men live outside the city in barracks, women live inside the city with the few men that choose to return to their mothers' homes, and only during festivals do the men and women get together with a chance for procreating. But it's an anti-sex worker world and one where homosexuality was "fixed" with a wave of a historical genetic hand.

I'd love to know your recs and maybe what perspectives it gave you or that it exemplifies well. If there's stuff that doesn't age well due to science changing or cultural values changing maybe just note that, sometimes they're still quite good reads with that context.

I am writing this short story. It is part of the overall book that I am writing, but it is also a story that can be enjoyed completely on its own. In that story, a planet-sized ship approaches our Solar System, and, ultimately maybe, Earth. For dimensions, let's say it is equal to 1.5 of Earth's diameter. According to Google, that's 25,512 19,134 kilometers. The Planet-Ship is probably less dense than Earth, as it is largely occupied by biomass and weird alien electronics. You may think of it as a round Borg cube, from Star Trek.

My "Round Borg Cube" is completely black and spherical, with a smooth surface without any visible features.

What I wanna know is...

• Assuming that the object is on a very slow path towards Earth, at what proximity will its effects be known?
• At which point will scientists observe its effects, view it, or detect it with instruments?
• If that is at all possible, what would be a threshold in which the "Round Borgs" would have to interrupt their movement in order to remain undetected?
• At which distance will it be visible to the naked eye (if at all)?
• And if they chose to get dangerously close to Earth, what would be the impact on our environment?

I understand that is a lot to ask, but I just can't trust GPT for that kind of stuff, even if their answers sound plausible. Perhaps someone with astronomical knowledge as well as an interest in science fiction will find my questions enticing. I don't expect precise answers because I am not providing precise information. So feel free to speculate on that scenario. In any case, I am grateful for any answer I can get.

Thanks!

So, I got convinced by a KC fan to buy KC 1 cause at least it was only 5 bux so not much of my money was going to Daniel Vavre (and I'm sure there some other fuckheads working for KC since he's director and probably gets to bring in a few people to work under him). But I admit, I really really love the game. Even though I detest him, I have to admit he knows how to make a good rpg. In fact it is one of the best action based (vs turn based) rpgs I've played (I definitely think it rates much higher than Witcher and I even like it over Elder Scrolls).

But I'm not a patient person and I love what I'm hearing about KC 2 (other than the intro quest which with combined with who directed it, will really grate on my nerves cause I'll totally be focused on its treatment of women. Usually I just roll my eyes at that kind of thing or it doesn't even bug me much but when it feels like the director is actually condoning of this kind of behavoir it's different). But part of me is going to feel guilty if I cave and buy it. But, I'm weak (I eat meat and I totally agree with the fact it's unethical both for environment and for how they treat the animals).

Anyone else have a game (or that game) that they dislike the people making it but love the game and if you bought it, how did you resolve it with yourself?

Just for fun, given that we're probably on the eve of the announcement of the announcement of the Switch 2, a look back on some of the online reactions when the first Switch was first detailed, pricing and all.

First, we have this (in)famous neogaf thread.

I don't see that happening. With that price, that paywall and that game line up, I see it below 40M after 5 years. Maybe even below 30M units.

With that price point and lineup? Fuck no.

Eventually if they drop the price big and have a lineup worth a shit maybe they can recover. Maybe. But starting off this bad doesn't inspire me with confidence.

On Reddit, the reception was equally as negative in volume, but the tenor was more reserved

Watched the presentation and was surprised at how little they did to promote the value of purchasing the Switch at $300.

Of course, fans will buy it at any price, but many consumers are gonna see two confirmed launch titles, a paid online service from a company with no proven record in that regard, and Nintendo's history of lackluster third party support and sparse releases. Consumers are liable to perceive better value in Sony's or Microsoft's offerings.

What large games they did show (Zelda, Mario, Xenoblade 2, etc.) looked good, but really not digging the console itself currently. Not a good value proposition.

EDIT: The more I try to inform myself, the uglier this whole situation looks. This console just doesn't look good.

The games from in-house Nintendo look fantastic, it contrasts so starkly with what I posted above. I don't get it. Hardware and all such related services are not their thing at all, not even remotely.

Some opinion pieces as well

The Nintendo Switch is going to be a flop.

Sorry, but it’s true, and what’s ridiculous about the whole thing is that it’s a result of Nintendo making exactly the same mistakes that turned the Wii U into a disaster – an astonishing lack of games and a price that’s too high – £280 – given said astonishing lack of games.

so I have a setup where I have a NUC that has docker on it, one of the containers is my nextcloud that I use for sharing my files across my computers.

I also have a synology NAS which is connected to my NUC via NFS and the files themselves are stored on that NFS file via a docker volume mount.

Hopefully that made sense.

My problem: not often but it does happen where my router has an issue, today it just needed a restart. another time it was cause I deliberately disconnected it from the power not realizing it would mess up the connection between my NUC and my NAS.
Why is this an issue? it causes my nextcloud to freeze up as the files it is supposed to share are no longer available. necessitates me restarting my NUC to get the connection going again.
Thankfully hasn't happened often but still something that can be scary in the moment. My question is, is this just one of the pitfalls I have to accept of utilizing a NAS the way I am or is there a way to connect a Synology to a NUC and ensure router issues don't cause the nextcloud docker instance to freeze?

My wife of 3 years just told me last week that we're getting a divorce. It completely blindsided me, as there was no marriage counseling or communication about the marriage having problems from them before this, but I can't say I don't understand at least some of their reasons. They made it clear that there was no fixing things or repairing the relationship. They're leaving no matter what I do.

Other than the suddenness, they seem pretty willing to be amicable and compromise as needed, at least to an extent. We won't be able to properly separate for a while it seems like, though it's hard to predict the exact timeline at this stage. I'm currently planning a too-expensive last-minute flight back to the States to stay with my family for a little while, since I need some distance and they can be a source of comfort.

I can obviously hire and rely on a lawyer for handling the legal side of things (which will be complicated, to say the least), but I'm truly at a loss for how to handle it emotionally. I'm in my late 20s but I've never even been broken up with before this. Go hard or go home, ig. I hope there are others here who have good advice to share for this situation, because I don't know what to do now that the bottom has dropped out of my life like this. It feels like my whole future is gone. I was in a bad depressive episode already and obviously that's not been improved by this.

(Also, if one of our closer mutual online friends who lurks here is finding out this way -- sorry, she owns the Discord server so I can't exactly bring this up there. I welcome DMs from y'all.)

So I've hit on this a bit before here, but it's been a while—I stopped looking for jobs last summer & spent the rest of 2024 getting some things sorted in my own head about what I actually wanted to be doing, what I valued, and why I wanted to change anything in the first place. I love my job, not just because it's remote but honestly mostly because it's remote, but it does not pay enough & may not for a long time, so I have sort of collected together online weekend/evening/contractor part-time gigs on top, which altogether come out to around 90k. After all my soul-searching (& getting on the millenial ADHD meds train, whew), I'd reeeeally love to focus all of that into one job instead, as the downfall of the gig economy approach is not just the time investment required, it's that there's no opportunity for advancement—if I could keep one or two side hustles going, great, but that way I'd be free to let them go as needed as well, which would be a huge relief.

So that's the source for my very specific number; I would of course take more money lol.

I have experience in: adult training/instruction, CRM management, writing/editing, process analysis/efficiency/optimization, video/content creation (doesn't really fit with the rest but my resume is kind of nuts unfortunately)

I am really good at: soft skills/written & verbal communication, IT support, learning new things real quick but also very thoroughly & being able to teach them to others, making things work better/faster

I have degrees in: library science/research, education (no comp sci : / feel like that was my big mistake career path-wise, I've tried some online options more recently & am currently making headway with claude as a coding partner lol).

The real sticking point is I am currently remote & would have to make way more than 90k to be willing to go back to an office every day. My current job was an out-of-left-field career move that I wouldn't have even guessed existed, so I am open to literally any suggestions.

Hey - I'm wondering if we've got any real-life recommendations for AI's out there?

I'm not looking for a list of AI's - they're everywhere! What I'm interested in is whether and how anyone here has started to use an AI on a regular basis to the extent that you consider it genuinely useful now?

For example,

• At work with have a ChatGPT3 wrapped app in Slack which I use quite often to improve summaries and formal comms I write. I think everyone knows it's basically good at that.
• I use Pi.ai as a "sympathetic" and filtered advisor for more sensitive topics relating to mental health that I have to deal with - it's useful insofar as I'm less worried about hallucinations or bad output when I'm using it. This might be misplaced confidence to be fair, but I've not had a bad experience with it so far.
• I use ChatGPT built into Apple Intelligence more and more since getting a device capable of using it. I think the use case I'm most warming to is that "search" is less and less useful nowadays because of blog spam and assumed corrections to my searches. I can use ChatGPT as a replacement to search in a growing number of use cases.

What I'm wondering about:

• Gamma.app promises to be a .ppt replacement via AI. I'm skeptical. I have to summarise and present a lot of content at work. Having a means of an AI doing some of the lifting here would be incredible, but I remain unconvinced.

Any sites/services you use regularly and effectively that you'd recommend?

I'm posting this in good faith, both out of curiosity and self interest. But up front I'll say that I'm not interested in scams, schemes, or get-rich-quick stuff.

I work full time as a teacher, but ever since we had a baby, my wife and I are just barely breaking even financially. Not struggling, but $4k/year would make a massive difference in our lives.

It seems like I'm stuck in this spot where getting a low wage job after school hours isn't even worth the time missed with my family, considering how awful the pay is. Summer work is tough because it has to justify the extra daycare expenses, and again, it's so much missed time with family for such a low reward. Higher paying gigs don't seem as interested in seasonal help from what I've encountered so far.

For the record, I'm not really interested in crypto or casino bonus schemes. I also don't have enough to invest right now to truly put investing over the edge into a meaningful return.

What are some low-risk/low-investment/low-reward side hustles?

So during covid pandemic, a big issue that I kept hearing about in the news and on the Journal podcast was that the economy is hot which is bad and causes interest rate spikes from the Fed if you are in the U.S. or Bank of Canada if you are in Canada.

tbh, I never fully understood that. we live in a consumerism, materialistic and capitalist society. i thought that people buying non-stop was what corporations and American govt valued, hence why we are hit with ads everywhere we go. and yet it was somehow a bad thing and was causing economic issues?

so I looked into it and came across a reddit post that basically explained it in simplistic terms like this:
the iPhone costs 1,000$. now, if not many people can afford the iPhone cause it's out of budget, what that implies is that not many people have 1,000$ which means that 1,000$ is hard to get which raised the value of the dollar, which is good for the economy.
If a lot of people can afford the iPhone, it means lots of people can afford to spend 1,000$ which means it's not as unique position to be in anymore, to have 1,000$ in spending money which apparently makes it worth less, cause more people have access to such funds.
Moreover, besides lowering the value of the dollar, more people being able to afford the iPhone is apparently also not a tenable situation cause apparently supply for iPhones could not meet the demand if it's suddenly now in so much more demand, so the value of the dollar going lowering is not only bad for the economy, but also has an effect on supply-chain issues.

Now, if I understand correctly, during covid and shortly after, the stimulus checks were given to people, both middle and lower class. the stimulus checks allowed for lower class to be able to afford more basic necessities from what I heard. This also however, also caused middle class people to be able to afford both more basic necessities and also to spend on luxuries (gonna continue with my current example of the iPhone). So the lower and middle class people having more spending power to be able to afford their necessities and maybe splurge a bit on luxuries causes the value of the dollar to go down cause now things are more affordable to people. and the value of the dollar going down causes wall street/the fed to freak the fuck out. and this causes them to raise interest rates, which has a domino effect of causing unemployment which obv leads to less people having spending power which causes a dampening effect on how much people are buying which brings the value of the dollar back up and the Fed is happy again.

I know I have probably oversimplified some parts cause I am not an economics person and God forbid the Journal podcast actually do their job and breakdown how the economy is screwing people so most of what I know comes from online research and what I can glean from the news but is anything I said incorrect?

cause if what I said is correct, that means that whenever the government keeps saying "the economy is fine" in response to people saying the times are tough, I get confused how that's a counterargument from the govt and not actually a subtle confirmation that times are tough for people. cause what it actually means is "the value of the dollar is fine, but the people are hurting cause that is needed for the dollar to be fine"?