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

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

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

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

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

A long, complicated story, summarized: (apart from Tildes, on which I lurk) I swore off all social media years ago. Then my job required that I have an account on LinkedIn. I reconsidered, and attempted to make the least disclosive account possible in an effort to protect my privacy. Things aren't going well. Despite logging in with the correct credentials, on the same device, using the same browser; and with access to my signup email, and access to the phone I used to enroll, LinkedIn has flagged my account the second time I tried using it and now requires me to upload images of myself and my government ID to regain access to their cesspool. Are you familiar with their protocols and can share insights, so that if I start again I don't face the same problem?

I have read what LinkedIn says and I have read discussions on Reddit on the topic. LinkedIn says you can opt to "use your work email" or mail them an affidavit. These options were not given to me. Everyone else I have seen reporting facing this seems to have triggered the system by losing their login credentials or moving countries; what brought this upon me and can I avoid it?

1. Is it that I use a VPN, and it may have routed through a different IP address on the second login?
2. I use an email alias. Is LinkedIn purging accounts with email domains that offer aliases?
3. Is it a result of clearing cookies?
4. Is it easier to maintain a Google account (!) which LinkedIn allows as login without this ID thing coming up?

Please be gentle with your advice as I am kind of panicking.

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

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

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

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

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

Sydney Sweeney has been the subject of a lot of controversies as of late. But what I want to focus on is how media outlets have been covering the release of her two new films, Americana and Eden.

Some background:

Americana is a genre film. It was shot and screened in 2023 to relatively positive reviews. The company that financed it, Bron, went bankrupt shortly after the film's screening. Due to this bankruptcy Lionsgate was able to acquire the rights to the film for cheap. While the film was made on a nine million dollar budget, Lionsgate purchased it for three million, with two million of that coming from international rights sales. Meaning that Lionsgate only spent one million acquiring the domestic distribution rights. In order to get more VOD sales and streaming deals, Lionsgate gave the film a small theatrical release with next to nothing in marketing.

Eden premiered at TIFF in 2024. Directed by Ron Howard the film also stars Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Ana De Armas, and Daniel Bruhl along with Sweeney. The film was financed at a net cost of 35 million dollars. It received mixed to negative reviews and only Netflix was willing to purchase it. Ron Howard opted to go with a smaller distributor, Vertical (who are mostly known for straight-to-video trash but have been slowly building themselves as a more legitimate art-house distributor), due to wanting a theatrical release which no one wanted to give the film. Vertical made a deal for less than 20 million dollars for the film.

Now, each distributor had their reasons for acquiring each film. Lionsgate saw a cheap film with a rising star which was well-received. It was an easy profit for them and helps build up their library as they are looking to be sold off. Vertical, having released last year's acclaimed The Order, is trying to build a filmmaker friendly reputation. Buying a non-commercial film with a high profile cast and a high profile director gives them more exposure and allows them to be more in the conversation for prestige filmmaking.

The film's financiers, however, are the money losers in both situations. Whether or not the distributors lost money doesn't really matter. Money losers are money losers and these films should be described as such.

And this is where it gets weird.

In the wake of Americana's opening we got two different articles about the film's box office. One from Deadline and one from IndieWire. Covering for the film, arguing that they weren't money losers for the reasons I myself just gave earlier. This weekend, as Eden just released, Deadline releases yet another article defending the film's performance.

This is too much coverage for these films that no one saw. Comparable films never get articles like this. So what's going on?

Here's my conspiracy theory. Sydney Sweeney is friends with Jeff Bezos. She attended his wedding and a few months ago there were heavily circulated rumors about her being the new Bond girl a franchise that Bezos unfortunately owns.

The media outlets that cover the entertainment industry: Variety, Deadline, Hollywood Reporter, and IndieWire are all owned by the same person: Jay Penske. Penske and Bezos run in the same circles, rich guy circles, and have attended philanthropic events at the same time. What I believe is happening is that Bezos is using his influence and connections for these outlets to write out positive headlines for Sweeney, due to her controversies, to create a more flattering image of her and her career.

It's odd, to say the least.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One thing I loved doing that sort of fell out of my life was keeping a small note book and transferring everything important to a journal. Its what kept me mostly organized throughout high school and uni but things got a bit hectic after I started working. I just jumped to scattered Google Keep notes that are difficult to follow up on. I've since tried Obsidian to scratch that itch but that became even a more chaotic mess than Keep.

Jump to last week and my phone battery and USB port both gave up while traveling. Fortunately the person hosting me was happy to sell the old Samsung Note phone that had been gathering dust. Not a fan of the Samsung Ecosystem or the weird oversized form factor. But the integrated stylus is something I didn't think I needed. I just pop it out and the screen instantly goes into note mode. it's helped when I just need to jot something down or illustrate some idea. I could easily minute a casual meeting and shared the outcomes as an image set. Was a lot more personable than the ignored pdf document or a wall of text in a slack group and people were more likely to check it than ask for information that was right there.

Beyond that, I'm more likely to jot down ideas, reminders and notes, and actually come back to them. I've also found the mazec3 keyboard that let's me write to text reliably and I prefer it to longer typing on touchscreen (used it for this post). The problem is that I really want to combine these tools into an actual workflow. Just checking if anyone has a consistent toolset to easily take stylus notes and to effectively organize and catalog the results?

I've tried messing around with Obsidian Canvas with the ink and draw.io plugin but it doesn't seem geared for spontaneous scribbles and complex shapes. And it all just ends up as a formatting chore that I keep putting off. Also spent some time looking through the Play Store for something off the shelf but everything there is now "AI Powered" and it's another red flag on top of overpriced in-app purchases. It all feels like a data harvesting or advertising scams and google is incentivized to push revenue generators and ad mills over actual functionality.

The Setting

For the past two months I've been dealing with a lot of stress because I've been trying to balance two extremely challenging remote university classes at the same time as my work has been asking more hours of me. More work hours are usually good for me because my job doesn't pay all that well, but they can be challenging because sometimes I'm asked to teach classes that are just outside my area of experience, so I need to spend more time learning the details so I can answer student questions.

This is the last week of classes, so right now I'm extra stressed because I'm trying to finish the last week's worth of classwork. I've still got one assignment to do which I haven't really started because I can't make much sense of this week's material; it's due on Wednesday evening. So my plan was to wake up early, go to the gym to get my workout out of the way, and then go to the library to study until my class in the afternoon.

Last night I discovered the mask for my CPAP unit is broken, so I tried to go to sleep without it.

The Day

If you have sleep apnea then you already know what trying to sleep without a CPAP machine is like; it's a miserable experience. I woke up five times last night, and when I woke up I felt miserable. I took so long to get up because of that, even though I couldn't sleep past 6:30 or so, I didn't actually get to the gym until around 9:00. Today was supposed to be a cardio day to give my muscles a bit more time to rest from my more heavy resistance workouts, but even then I only managed to do 20 minutes of fairly light intensity before I was exhausted.

After that I took a seat to cool down and get the sweat dry before I went to do a massage chair session. I pulled up Tildes and saw that one thread that's making the rounds about being attractive. And I'll be real, it came at just the wrong time. I was super angry about it and I spent more than half an hour writing and deleting all the things I wanted to say. I'm legitimately happy for the poster, but every single word they said made me hate them in that moment. My theme for the past year or so has been learning to love myself, but reading that post made me legitimately feeling like I wasn't just terrifyingly ugly and unloveable, but permanently so. To give you the context for why I felt like that would take a novel's worth of text, so I'll omit the majority of that and just tell you that in spite of losing a great amount of weight, I am still grossly obese, and having been so fat before means that my body is permanently deformed in an extremely unattractive way that cannot be fixed without a series of surgeries that are far more money than I will realistically have within my lifetime given my career; heck, I've already given up on the possibility of retiring. if I had the body of someone who was always at my current weight, it wouldn't be that bad, but as things are my body looks like one of those novelty inflatable "sumo wrestler" costumes that have been half-deflated.

While I was spending that time processing my feelings, I finally decided to not respond to that topic at all and simply click on ignore so that I could get it out of my head. Unfortunately, there is no ignore buton in my head. But at that time I was filled with so much nervous energy I needed to find a way to get rid of those thoughts. It turns out the gym is a pretty perfect place to do that; I skipped the massage chair, took a caffeine tablet, and got on the elliptical again. I pulled up a video workout and worked out all of my anger ("60 RPM is moderate? Fuck you!"). Every time I made a wrong move and my arm fat slapped against my side fat, It gave me more fuel for the fire. It got me fired enough to get through the whole workout, another 25 minutes at a much higher intensity than before.

After cooling down and doing my recovery, I went into the locker room, stripped, and took a shower. Taking a shower in the gym is something that I do partially because I sweat a lot and don't want to make my car stink too much, but on a more personal level it's something that I do as a kind of personal therapy. To do so requires me to lose my self-consciousness and body issues, at least up to an extent. It makes me feel just a bit more normal.

Today someone else was taking a shower at roughly the same time, and they just so happen to have chosen a locker just a few feet away from me. When they finished, they took their clothes out of the locker and moved over to a different bench to change. The obvious assumptions would be that they were doing it because they were trying to respect our space, or it was their modesty or body shame. But let's just say that in the moment it didn't help me feel like I was normal.

After I got out of the gym I got a message from my employer saying I've got a new class scheduled. A good thing, I guess, since many of my other classes have run their course. I could really use the money, and with any luck the classes I'm taking next term are not going to be nearly as challenging.

The Rest of the Day

It hasn't even happened yet. It's not even noon. The title was a lie, I guess.

The question is, then, was this partial day representative of my life? For the most part, yes, it is. I think these thoughts and feel these feelings every day, and I go through the same affirmations and rationalizations to deal with them every day. Today was just a little bit more emotionally intense than normal.

So why did I decide to post it? To be honest, I don't entirely know. Maybe I'm still processing some of those feelings from reading that post that set me off today. Or maybe I just want to say something for people who are dealing with the same feelings. Maybe I'm even feeling a little bit guilty from the impostor syndrome given previous comments I wrote about self-love. But I'm not posting this because I want people to feel sorry for me, or because I need help coping with it. I'm a strong person, and I actually do have a good sense of self-worth and self-love even if it's constantly under threat of the other thoughts in my head. Maybe I'm just selfishly using this public space to process some of my own feelings, or I'm engaging in some twisted form of narcissism. I just hope that you, the one reading this now, have taken something from what I had to say.

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

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

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

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

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

I thought it would be fun to explore what people on Tildes use for things like email, file synchronisation, webhosting, backups, streaming, password management, etc.
Are you using a common big tech service? Are you self hosting? Something in between? If you are self hosting what does it look like? Are you running bare metal, using containers, a complete proxmox setup with a legion of VMs? And of course, what software are using on top of it all?
I am also curious to see how satisfied you are with your current setup.

To be extra clear, this is not about the OS you are running on your personal computer, we've had plenty of discussion like that already ;).

And also to be extra clear, this isn't just about self hosting.

Posted in ~tech because I want a broad discussion, not just the ~comp folks.

I'll start

I have been trying to move away from a lot of the big tech services for a few years now. For me it isn't an absolute where I don't want any Google or Microsoft in my life, I just don't want to be reliant on them for what I see as critical parts of my personal infrastructure.

Running servers and maintaining them including infrastructure on top like reverse proxies, docker, Kubernetes, etc is something I am fairly familiar with. But it isn't something I quite enjoy or trust myself to do for a lot of important stuff. Specifically when it comes down to security and making sure backups are in order. This means that for a lot of things I have opted to use other services. But in a way that allows me to move away to a different one quite easily.

File storage & synchronization

For years I made use of Google drive, but after running into various sync issues and the lack of Linux clients (even though I am now back on Windows) it was the first service I moved away from big tech.
For this I make use of a hosted Nextcloud instance on Hetzener's "storage share" plan. Honestly, no big complaints here about the core functionality. Files get synchronized just fine and Hetzner takes care of updates and backups.

Email

For email I make use of my own domain in combination with mailbox.org mail hosting.

Media streaming

I still have quite some music, movies and series on my hard drive. For this I use Jellyfin, which works quite well. Though the native apps have some issues where it will start transcoding things that don't need transcoding at all. This isn't an issue with third party apps. On android, I use findroid. On the ipad of my SO I had to compromise a little bit, the best app there seems to be Infuse which isn't open and requires a subscription for some advanced features. Though for Jellyfin playback the free version seems to work fine so far.

Jellyfin itself is just running on my desktop PC. I have been thinking about a NAS of sorts, but decided to hold off on it for now as my computer is effectively always on whenever one of us wants to watch something.

Password management

In the past I have used KeePassXC which with the browser extension works quite well on my desktop. But keeping it synced to my phone as well was sometimes a bit finicky. So last year I decided to switch to Bitwarden with the idea that I can always switch to vaultwarden if I decide to.

Edit: DeaconBlue's setup reminded me that I also use Aegis which backs up encrypted to nextcloud.

Backup

For backups I make use of Hetzner's storage box plans. In order to create the backups I make use of restic, but to make things a bit easier I have opted to use the Backrest front-end for it which basically takes care of scheduling.

VPS for various random scripts and experiments

I am also running a Ubuntu server VPS, also on Hetzner infrastructure, which I use to run a variety of scripts, experiment with stuff I might want to self host, etc. The scripts it runs are mostly related to discord moderation and one I maintain for the /r/history team (even though I am no longer active on reddit).

Webhosting & Domains

While I have a VPS, for simple hosting and since I need to buy my domains somewhere I am making use of a hosting provider in the Netherlands called mijn.host. They are quite affordable and customer oriented.

If you have ever see me share images on Tildes this is also where I have my own image hosting thing running. Which is basically ShareX configured to upload images to a simple PHP endpoint I created that resizes images, strips their exif data and renames them.

Honourable mention: PikaPods

PikaPods basically provides you with docker hosting of a wide variety of open source apps in a very user friendly way. I have experimented a bit with it and while I don't have a current use for it I do think that it is a neat service other people might enjoy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My last dashcam was a total dud and wasn't even operational for 6 hours. I'm hoping to get some community recommendations on reliable units with good image quality. If you would also share the approx. length of time you've had/used it that would be a huge help as well. Thanks in advance!

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

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

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

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

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

A fancier way is here — but either is great.

—-

For those using iOS with a bookmark on their homescreen, you may have been plagued like me with Tildes opening in a private window instead of the session where you’re logged in.

I don’t know why I didn’t think about this sooner, but it’s so easy

Shortcuts > New > Create New Tab > Open URL (remove the variable and put in https://tildes.net) > context menu next to the title of the shortcut > Add to Homescreen > Photo (left image option) > select your tildes logo that i forgot to tell you to save

… done. Now Tildes will always open Safari in an authenticated session. ezpz.

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

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

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

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

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

I've been thinking perhaps I'll need to get one of the desktop LLM UI. I've been out of touch with the state of the art of end user LLM as I've been exclusively using it via API, but tech-y people (who are not developers) mostly talk about the end-user products that I lack the knowledge of.

Ethical problems aside, the problem with non-API usage is, even if you pay, I can't find one that have better privacy policy than API. And the problem with API version is that it is not as good as the completed apps unless you want to reinvent the wheel. The apps also may include ads in the future, while API technically cannot as it would affect some downstream usecases.

As a dual use technology, the table doesn't include the extra retention period if they detect an abuse. Additionally, if you click on thumbs up/down it may also be recorded for the provider's employee to review.

I don't think OpenWebUI, self hosted models, etc. would suffice if they are not built to the same quality as the first party products. I know I'm probably asking for something that doesn't exists here, but at least I hope it will bring to people's attention that even if you're paying for the product you might not get the same privacy protection as API users.

I enjoy Tildes a lot for its thoughtful discussion and well curated links. It's a site you can enjoy casually and not get addicted to.

But sometimes you're dealing with a cold, or laying in a hotel room after a long flight, or just feeling lousy, and you start to long for that infinite scroll, dopamine hit, image / video cornucopia. Or really, there are just times I want to laugh at memes, people's drama, etc., until I'm ready to get out of bed and back to the world.

In the old days, we had things like memebase, or early reddit to scratch that itch. But these days social media algorithms have gone nuts. For example, I can't spend five minutes on reddit without finding myself in a racially charged discussion. Platforms like TikTok likewise seem appealing (an endless scroll of silly videos would be great), but again the algorithms are there to highlight conflict and make you miserable. I feel like even if you work hard to curate on these platforms, you're not safe.

So for anyone who feels like me: is there a solution to this? Perhaps a fedeverse instance still small enough to avoid astroturfing. Or non social-media options with a huge amount of content (something like thedailywtf, or hitting random on a quality web comic). I would love to hear about what you enjoy when you're looking for internet junk food.

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer: I do not like LLMs. I am not going to fight you on if you say LLMs are shit.

One of the things I find interesting about conversations on LLMs is when have a critique about them, and someone says, "Well, it's no different than people." People are only as good as their training data, people misremember / misspeak / make mistakes all the time, people will listen to you and affirm you as you think terrible things. My thought is that not being reliably consistent is a verifiable issue for automation. Still, I think it's excellent food for thought.

I was looking for new music venues the other day. I happened upon several, and as I looked at their menu and layout, it occurred to me that I had eaten there before. Not there, but in my city, and in others. The Stylish-Expensive-Small-Plates-Record-Bar was an international phenomenon. And more than that, I couldn't help but shake that it was a perversion of the original, alluring concept-- to be in a somewhat secretive record bar in Tokyo where you'll be glared into the ground if you speak over the music.

It's not a bad idea. And what's wrong with evoking a good idea, especially if the similarity is just unintentional? Isn't it helpful to be able to signal to people that you're like-that-thing instead of having to explain to people how you're different? Still, the idea of going just made me assume it'd be not simply like something I had experienced before, but played out and "fake." We're not in Tokyo, and people do talk over the music. And even if they didn't, they have silverware and such clanging. It makes me wonder if this permutation is a lossy estimation of the original concept, just chewed up, spat out, slurped, regurgitated, and expensively funded.

other forms of conceptual perversion:

• Matters of Body Image - is it a sort of collapse when we go from wanting 'conventional beauty' to frankensteining features onto ourselves? Think fox eye surgeries, buccal fat removal, etc. Rather than wanting to be conventionally attractive, we aim for the related concept of looking like people who are famous.
• (still thinking)