I started using the Goodreads annual reading challenge years ago. I generally treat it as an arbitrary target to see if I can read that many books in a year. I have found myself in recent years enjoying hitting that goal, and have found myself slotting in more shorter books in my reading between larger stories that I'm reading to help me reach that goal. This has in turn helped motivate me to dive in to some older sci-fi and fantasy works, which are usually shorter or standalone.

If I'm a couple of books off the goal I set at the end of the year I don't mind, but it is interesting looking back over the last few years seeing how this goal has shaped how I read since I've needed to adjust my reading habits to maintain a similar number of books now that I have kids.

I thought it would be fun to see how other Tilders approach this, if at all:

• Do you participate in any reading challenges, and if you do, which one(s)?
• Have you found the reading challenge changing how you read, or which books you read?

Update us on your progress so far!

• What did/didn't you get done this week?

• Anything go according to plan?

• Anything go off the rails?

• Any successes or struggles to share?

• Do you need feedback or help on anything?

This is your topic to share anything and everything you want about what you’ve made so far.

I'm streaming Firefox to watch Riverdale, so I opened up Chrome to browse while I wait for them to join. Youtube has ads on it, and I realized I can't grab uBlock or anything (meaningfully) privacy focused. So, I wanna try out one of the cool new browsers, what do people use and recommend?

I'm on Windows and a proper techie, so give me anything that's a bit strange and off the wall as well! The only one I tried out recently was Comet, but it needs more time to bake, total waste of time IME. I remember using IceWeasel for some reason lol

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Obviously I don't want anyone to dox themselves here, but if you're comfortable sharing, what are some interesting oddities or landmarks in your state, county, country, etc.?

Think like "World's Largest Teapot" or "Carhenge". Or even smaller oddities or things that are unique to your area.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

A wizard has cursed you with billions of dollars! Why is that a curse? Because unless you spend it immediately* on something ridiculous** you'll become like the worst, asshole-iest billionaire you can think of. (Fill in your own blank).

Saving the world is out, philanthropy is out (unless it's utterly ridiculous), clever tricks to make the world better by finding a loophole and trying to outwit the wizard's curse are out.

If you try something that could be started with an "um actually" 🤓☝️you end up naming all your children and companies with the same letter before the end of the day, got it? Spirit of the rules!
I'm watching you. ತ⁠_⁠ʖ⁠ತ

*A project might take time but you're going all in on it, cash up front
** The point is that it's pointless. It might be accidentally useful but it's pointless.

ETA: I have been unjustly rate limited and will be replying when I can. Please take this opportunity to reconsider your charitable works and other attempts at public good and get back to airships and Animorphs movies. Ty

It transpires that after the first time changing my username, I didn't learn my lesson about using a possible deadname in an online identity. Well, I changed my name in real life for the second time earlier this year, and now /u/deimos has helpfully changed it for me here. When I was at Uni, my friends and I had a long conversation about what our Matrix-style hacker names would be. I picked Hex back then, and it feels fitting to bring it back in some form now. So with that in mind: Howdy, I'm h3x :)

If you were a character in the Matrix, what would your super cool hacker name be?

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I think we all know how things are at large, but I wanted to check in with people individually.

How are you doing right now?

This topic is a safe space to share fears, anxieties, and frustrations. If you need to vent, or rage against something, or wallow, or let it all out, you can do so here. It’s okay to feel what you’re feeling. I’m certain you’re not alone in that.

This is also a safe space to share successes, hopes, and progress. Just as it’s okay to dwell on the bad stuff, it’s also okay to highlight any positives. It’s little bright spots like those that help us see more than just darkness, after all. I’m sure other people could use some good news.

I'm extremely bearish on the US dollar and stock market and am wondering what other people think about how to prepare financially for the medium term future. I don't there's any other way you can cut it: there's a debt crisis and, worse yet, I don't think the US will be able to convince bond buyers that they're serious enough about the issue to avoid a debt spiral. The fact that gold has cracked 4000 (almost 4200 now, with BofA setting a 5000 target) seems to suggest that central banks are similarly pessimistic about a financial collapse. What do y'all think about where things are likely headed?

For a while now I have used VSCodium- which is just Microsoft's VSCode, but with as much of the telemetry stripped out (or rather, not built-in in the first place) as possible- but I've found myself with a desire to move away from Electron-based apps for a number of reasons.

Primarily, I'm ideologically opposed to the trend in which everything is an Electron-based web app packaged as a "desktop application", but on a slightly more functional note, Electron seems to behave poorly in Wayland contexts, especially on Arm64 devices.

In terms of feature set, I'm not too interested in complexity. Something open-source, relatively clean / light-weight, capable of providing a project overview and a number of tabbed or vsplit / hsplit buffers. Something with comprehensive syntax highlighting and some form of language server interface. Something theme-able, and good to look at, with relatively intuitive or well-established keyboard shortcuts. I don't much care for integrated terminals, extensive debugging tooling, or any form of built-in AI assistant.

I have been trying out Micro, with a set of plugins which allow for a project overview, a language server, and a number of other QOL improvements, but it has a list of breaking issues that will likely not be solved for years given the speed at which pull-requests are addressed, if at all. Even so- it hits most of the marks that I find most important to me.

But I'm also interested in what other people use; what other programmers find matter to them. So what text editors, or IDEs do you swear by (and please don't suggest VIM- it's overwhelming ;])?

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I dream with a new mainstream handheld console that is neither an extension of a regular console experience, a smartphone, or a wine-powered Linux machine

When I was a kid in Brazil, we had a manga and anime club in my town. It was somewhat official. At our gatherings, there were lots of manga and VHS tapes that we exchanged and duplicated when possible. There were always two or three kids, each with a Nintendo DS. Sometimes more. For us, they were the rich kids. Back in 2005, it was unimaginable for most kids to own a DS, or even a Game Boy for that matter. They connected their devices and played some kind of Pokémon. I pretended I did not care and did not pay them overt attention. My envy knew no bounds.

At least a decate later, when the PSP was already going out of fashion (and was therefore much cheaper), I managed to get a PSP Go. It came fullly cracked with hundreds of games. I loved that cheap little thing. I eventually graduated to a PS Vita, which I believe was the finest piece of hardware I ever had in my hands. But the proprietary memory card was pricey, and so were the games. I didn't have lots to play. It's a bittersweet memory.

Seeing how the Vita became an emulation powerhouse makes me regret selling it.

I never owned a Nintendo DS, but a friend of mine lent me his for several years. I loved that too, but the stylus felt like a gimmick, and I would have gladly swapped it for regular controls. I was not a fan of the dual screens either. But at least it was interesting, you know? They were trying to do something different, and I respected them for that.

Now I have two retro handhelds, the Miyoo Mini Plus and the RG35XX H (Anbernic). Cheap Chinese products, but decent enough. Setting them up correctly was not hard, but it was laborious.

Maybe I am crazy, but I still think handheld consoles could work in the mainstream. It won't happen, of course. But it would be awesome to be excited by hardware once again. Something unique that is not a phone or a way to play Windows games on the go. With games that are developed explicitly for handhelds, with UIs that are adequate for small screens and crazy features that wouldn't make sense in the living room. A sturdy piece of tech that is always there for you, suggesting nothing but escapism.

One can only dream.

My current computer is finally old enough that we need something new. Something nice. Something that doesn't run modded Xcom 2 at sub 15fps. But the long gap in my knowledge has left me wondering in a state where I don't even know enough anymore to make educated decisions on a new PC build.

Here's what I do know:

• I want a microATX board
• I want a quiet and smaller case
• I want to keep my current Geforce 3060
• My Budget is roughly 1k, but flexible

Past that, my knowledge is now pretty much out of date. Is AMD currently better? Is Noctua still a good and quiet fan? How fast does ram really need to be? Are things pretty standard priced, or do I need to wait for Microcenter to have a sale?

Thanks for your help, appreciate you!

I work for a GIS company and our tools have not grown with our projects and client base. We use ArcPro personal geo databases (GDBs) for ALL data. We recently had a project where shit really hit the fan, one major issue was related to invalid values from poor version control. Everything uses personal GDBs and is just "version controlled" by dating filenames in Explorer. It would have been trivial to fix in a proper database. We also have operational constraints, like we can only have one person doing X job at a time since all the data for X job is in a personal GDB.

But I'm just an analyst. I've garnered some attention for my technical expertise beyond processing the data. PostGIS is a thing so it isn't as though we'd be recreating the wheel. How can I push for that sort of change? I'm thinking I can sell it using how much we lost on this project because of these avoidable failures. I'm also wondering if I can make this an opportunity to create a "database administrator" position for myself