Hey all,

There's been a huge amount of response to this post about Hyponotoad's banning that I think merits a lot more consideration than as just a bunch of fractured comment threads.

Some questions that come to mind:

~ What does it mean to have "quality discussion",?

~ How do you distinguish between quality discussion and not quality discussion?

~ What does it mean to act in "bad faith"?

~ How, as a community, do we best achieve tildes' stated goals?

I think this idea strongly aligns with Tildes philosophy of promoting "quality content", what is more quality than knowing a poster is qualified to make their claims. It separates the pseudo-science from the science.

I understand it is perhaps a cumbersome process to verify qualifications but the reward in return for having verified experts validated is hard to overstate.

I propose the flair be global and not restricted to within a group(as opposed to reddit) because if we're certain the individual has credentials that still remains in effect when they comment across disciplines. It also removes redundancy and allows the individual more freedom to branch to other communities.

The idea being if someone has a PhD in math they can flair their name with something like "PhD: Math" per post if they wish. As this is a voluntary addition (not collection) of user-data I don't think it goes against Tildes philosophy.

I'm always on the lookout for more tracks to add to my gym mix. Here are a few from mine that I think work well, with YouTube links. This is rock-heavy; I do love hip-hop and R&B in my gym mix, but everything I have there is really well known.

• Julian Casablancas - 11th Dimension
• Robyn - Hang With Me
• Nielson Hubbard - Captain of the Teenagers
• The Wombats - Tokyo (Vampires and Wolves)
• Teenage Fanclub - Is This Music? (instrumental)
• Steriogram - Walkie Talkie Man
• The Go! Team - Huddle Formation (Original UK Version)
• Korn - Word Up
• Bad Religion - Stranger Than Fiction
• Rob Bailey & The Hustle Standard - Hungry

Loads of people want to get to rich countries for various reasons:

• no war
• less crime
• better economic prospects
• no persecution
• no famine

The list is almost endless.

Should we, in countries not affected by such problems, accept these folks that want to get away for whatever reason?

Can we get an Edit history on posts (also potentially comments).

This is sparked by a post a few days ago in which a poster asked a question about people's standpoints on gay marriage and then published their standpoint as well, heavily against gay marriage.

I made my comment here questioning them on their standpoint and they edited their post without any evidence, making it look like I was jumping to conclusions.

Post history would prevent this kind of thing and would also equip commenters with the ability to see what OP has changed.

Please let me know if you agree or disagree for whatever reason, I am interested to hear other people's thoughts.

Edit: The poster in my comment link was banned shortly after that post. Linked by @Jedi here.

Let's take Google, for example. Google tracks where you physically are - why are some people so much against it? It doesn't hurt me, google just uses it to serve me personalized ads. Why are people so concerned about it?

Google even tracks, which websites do I visit - again, why should I care? When I want to browse anonymously, I use VPN. If I wanted to do something illegal, I guess I won't use google at all and install tor? I'm not sure what should I do in that case, but I'm sure, there are ways to get away from google's sight when people need to.

I don't understand, why some people fight for internet privacy so much. Could someone help me to understand it? What's your opinion on privacy and internet tracking?

I flew to Ely, Minnesota in August with my friend Jared.

Hope the images work, I'll rehost if they don't.

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2631.jpg

Me left, Jared right.

He takes a regular trip with his family into the Boundary Waters (BWCA) and my in-laws have a cabin on a BWCA lake. In order to avoid driving and to get some flying hours in, we took this tiny plane from Columbus, OH to Ely, MN.

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/flight-path.jpg

Red line is actual GPS route. Blue line is simply airport-to-airport route.

We were trying to avoid flying over large bodies of water because when you’re in a single engine airplane, you don’t have a lot of options besides swimming if your engine goes out (ours didn’t).

We meant to get fuel after Chicago but the day we were flying we had 30 (thirty!!!!) knot headwinds even low to the ground. It was stupidly impressive bad luck. So we had to stop in Gary, IN to grab some gas before heading up again.

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2647.jpg

Gary, IN

After grabbing gas, we were off. We saw the Blue Angels parked on the north ramp of the airport as we were taking off but it was too late to grab a picture. Turned out they had a show over the Navy Pier in Chicago a little later in the morning.

We know because we flew through the TFR (before it activated).

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2657-e1506799924440.jpg

Chicago, IL

We thought we only had about 15 minutes to get through the TFR which we thought we could barely make, but also thought if we’re going to get intercepted, would be pretty cool to get intercepted by the Blue Angels, then realized the time change to Central and that we had an extra hour still before the TFR went active. The Blue Angels did not intercept us.

Next we flew up towards Duluth. Still staying low because of the ridiculous headwinds, but that meant things were also super bumpy.

Jared puked for the first time ever in a small airplane. I always have a puke bag in the plane for emergencies but never expected to use it with two pilots on board.

So Jared pukes. The turbulence and motion wasn’t getting to me until then, but that puke-bile smell? Oh yeah. I could feel it.

The problem was that I only had one puke bag in the cockpit. If I had to hurl, it was going to be in the same bag Jared used earlier. Gross.

Furthermore, Jared told me point blank that if I hurled, he was going to need the bag back to go again.

Faced with the prospect of sharing a puke-bag and passing it back and forth, we decided to land and take a 45 minute break.

We felt better after taking off (and getting the back-up puke bag from the baggage compartment).

Anyway, here’s Duluth:

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2675-e1506800330868.jpg

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_3147.jpg

After turning the corner at Duluth, we went along Minnesota’s North Shore to drop Jared off in Grand Marais.

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2689-e1506800486520.jpg

Two-Harbors on the North Shore of Minnesota

Then finally, with the plane to myself, I flew over the Boundary Waters due west to land in Ely, MN.

http://photosoverohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IMG_2716.jpg

Somewhere in the BWCA between Grand Marais and Ely. Endless untouched nature.

Was a fun trip. 9.3 hours in the plane due to the ridiculous headwinds. I was super happy to get a burger on the ground.

New user here, just got invited and started poking around the site, and the thing that most stands out to me is the bright white theme of the site.

Its a big trend that most sites seem to not be catching onto, users want a dark theme at least as an option, because the blinding white webpages at this point almost seem dated, and if you're browsing at night/in a not very well lit room, they come off as harsh, sometimes almost blinding. You can see the demand for this being fulfilled with plugins on most sites, as the websites themselves seem to be slow to act. YouTube for instance is terrible with its default white scheme, but pretty nice if you do the "secret" dark theme. Slack too, although I use a plugin for that, same with Reddit and using RES to turn on a dark theme.

So while I know the list of things to do is probably a mile long, a dark theme would go a long way to making the site more appealing I think, and give it an edge as a more "modern" website.

Last night before bed, I was posting about some books that I really liked. One of them is called Stay: A History of Suicide & The Philosophies Against It. Another person noted that it sounded interesting, and I started to reply to that user. I got about a paragraph in before stepping back and thinking, "this isn't something I should write here," and deleting everything.

This morning, I rolled over and checked my phone. Anthony Bourdain, died by suicide at 61.. This hurts. I loved Bourdain, his work for years was to broaden our cultural awareness and open us up to new worlds. He was, in many ways, a tangible Star Trek. His death will be mourned by thousands, and that he was taken by suicide will be considered by many, many, other people with suicidal thoughts.

Suicide spreads as a contagion - it can be looked on almost epidemiologically. The way that we talk about suicide is... Telling. It's something that we try to avoid talking about, despite us almost all knowing someone who has died by suicide.

I have worked in mental health for several years and in high acuity settings the past year. I work with people experiencing suicidal ideation every single day. It is often my job to talk around what I consider to be a monster that lives in our heads. To try and convince or guide people away from their monster and take the day for themselves. Some of the people I've worked with have ideation only, sometimes they have had as many as two dozen hospital-resulting attempts in their history. This work is stressful, it's draining. It's very meaningful, especially when change or at least the flash of change is present. It hurts, too, when it isn't enough.

A big part of our education attempts is to be able to talk about the monster. It isn't easy for someone experiencing suicidal ideation to talk about it. There are fears that they will be seen as attention seeking - they are! It is a just thing to seek attention when you feel that you're losing the battle. There are fears that they won't be taken seriously - and often they are not. We minimize our problems to bad days or bad weeks or bad years. We say, "Just get over it," and sometimes people simply do not have the capacity to do it by themselves.

We would never, ever, tell someone with a broken arm to get over it without treatment. We would never, ever, tell someone with a bone protruding from their leg that they were just looking for some attention. And yet, this is how we approach mental health.

I have been suicidal myself, somewhere in the haze of depression that clung to me for about five years. Even as I write this, I feel the urge to minimize it and say, "but never to the severity of those I've worked with." Simultaneously minimizing my own experience and serving to stigmatize those that I serve. The monster's power lies in its language. The more we refuse to talk about it, the more we isolate, the more control it has.

I went to counseling for sixteen weeks, and was only minimally invested. It took me another two years after having left counseling to start using the tools. A big part of my own ability to hold on was the book, Stay, because of its humanistic approach to prevention, one that does not rely on religion. An unfortunate thing about working in mental health is that I now understand what it is to plant a seed and not know if it will grow or not.

Anyway, I wanted to write something about this when I saw the news this morning. One of the major themes of Stay is that suicide is theft not just from your friends and family, but from yourself. I have not felt suicidal or depressed for several years, and I can say that this theft would have been true. Except it doesn't include just my friends or family, but the people that I've interacted with and helped with similar thinking styles along the way.

I encourage you, if you think a friend or colleague is struggling, ask the questions. "How are you feeling today?" You never know how this might help. Do you feel like someone you know might be suicidal? Ask the question. Asking someone if they are feeling suicidal is not a significant trigger that may cause them to commit - though this fear often stops us from asking. Consider, they live with the monster every day, how welcome it must be to have someone else recognize it?

I will leave off with Hamlet's Soliloquy. I have never been huge on Shakespeare, lacking time to read. I read this as well in Stay, and now I listen to it frequently. I even had the opportunity to use it in a Group I lead the other day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYZHb2xo0OI

I'm going to intentionally leave this vague and open-ended, because I want to hear different perspectives hopefully without imposing my own views. I've heard some people express that the world is getting much better, for example, in terms of science, technology, and medicine. Other people feel that the world is getting worse, for example, in terms of climate change or political corruption. What do you think? Or is it that we're biased towards our own time period? In other words, do you think it's human nature to think that our own generation/time period is experiencing the best or worst or most significant period in history?

I'm currently using 24 hour sort, and it's great, minus one thing - threads older than 24 hours just disappear. Perhaps a better implementation would be to keep the threads showing up underneath the <24 hour ones, but prevent them from being bumped up by new posts.

Example - if I go to ~comp right now, there are only 5 posts. Older ones, imo, should still be visible, just no longer bumping.

I posted about it three days ago but in these last three days I really worked my ass off to include lots of functionalities and feel like the community is missing a lot of topics...
So, sorry, I won't spam this for the next days every three days but I felt like it deserved to be "bumped" in the activity feed at least once now that the default is just 24h.

As of today, the features are:

• management to choose which links top open in a new tab
• button to quickly jump to new comments in a topic
• button to quickly get back to the top of the page in topics (no, there isn't one to go to the bottom)
• live preview of the reply/topic box
• load external CSS to customize the UI
• add label to users

I'll just link to the original topic so you can have some context if you want, otherwise these are just the links to download it:

• Original Topic: https://tildes.net/~tildes/1oa/browser_extension_tildes_extended
• Chrome: chrome.google.com
• Firefox: addons.mozilla.org
• Source: Github (feel free to do modification and open pull requests if you'd like!)

I need feedback to know what else you'd like to see implemented or what have bugs or could be done in a different/better way!

Link: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

Full Text:

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996