Do Jedi study warfare and tactics? I know they study dueling, but do they also look at more large-scale battles? I was thinking about the Clone Wars revival today and I was kinda wondering why the Republic entrusted their military power to what were essentially warrior monks. Was it just a case of “there’s literally no one else”?

For me, I was just browsing a random thread and somebody complained about a reddit-specific thing and then another user linked them to r/tilde with a message implying that Tilde was better about that issue and I checked it out and decided to follow to see how development went with the site. I never actually actively followed news about it, just mostly waited for invites to be handed out so I could see for myself. I like it so far, it feels more communal.

Hello everyone,

I plan on going back to college in the Spring while working full time. I think taking two online courses or a 1-1 split of online / in-person courses per semester would be more than manageable while working full time but my particular job is so slow (office environment) and I'm allowed to study during downtime that I'm considering taking at least three courses per semester. What do you guys think is a non-overwhelming amount of classes to take while working full time and have any of you been in this position as well?

I took a break from Tildes for a week and came back to look at things again with a fresh perspective.

One of the things I immediately noticed was how the earliest comments are the ones that get the upvotes to the top of the comment list, and tend to stay there, even when better comments and chains flow below.

I started thinking about why this is so pervasive. Not just on tildes, but everywhere. Reddit and tumblr both suffer this issue to a degree. At the end of the day, going through any comments requires a certain amount of time, and a certain approach to the existing library of commentary. If we lock in the amount of time an average person will examine comments (which...is not much), we’re left with the only thing to address: the approach to going through the existing library.

Plenty of proposals (mostly already done) come to mind. Perhaps you go by most active or most recent comments. Controversial perhaps, or sorting by newest, rather than most popular. Maybe some secret mix of it all (the reddit “hot” formula). What about complete and utter randomness? ...yeah remember that Certain Amount of Time we discussed earlier? It’ll only be a couple posts before the user will switch back to another sort method.

So what should we try? What HASN’T been tried?

What about multiple panes? User-selectable, arrangable, 1-4. Vertical columns of different views, updated dynamically synchronously or asynchronously for the most controversial, new, and active. You could see all the views at once, side by side, so that your time switching between views and waiting for page loads evaporates and 100% of that limited attention span is spent on the comments in each of the sorts.

Having the more rapidly-changing columns (newest, active) update synchronously (every # seconds, configurable) would allow a user to engage those comments in time for the next refresh. The less-rapidly changing columns could be set to be asynchronous- updating as the orders change (top, controversial). This can also be tweaked as the site gets either more or less active as a whole. So what might need to be asynchronous now while things are quiet, can be made synchronous later.

Again, all of this is just a possibility, or perhaps starting point for a way to address the overall issue of the first comments being the most voted on.

First post: hello Tildeans!

In fairness, the title question no doubt applies to those on traditional courses/paths too - such is software.

Anyway -- in my experience, reading technical material which is too advanced is without a doubt the most intellectually confusing, emotionally damaging, and personally rewarding part of learning about software development. How about you?

I started basically from scratch last September without any knowledge about programming or Linux except a very brief stint in 2010. I'm a somewhat disorganised person (to say the least), and my learning habits have reflected that: I've followed my nose and impulse, reading pretty much whatever I've felt like. But I've ended up with a presumably ridiculous ratio of hours reading about code vs hours actually coding.

I'm a lazy person, so I'd rather sit and struggle with something I am definitely not ready to understand than go sit in front of a REPL, working from the ABCs til I can do the A-Zs. But the longer I look into things, and the more I play, the more I realise how much coding is like an instrument -- you really do have to just sit down and practice your damn scales! My experiences also support the argument for that 'T-shape' style of mastery (learn one thing very well, then branch). 20-odd Project Euler problems in a week or two has taught me far more than several months half-reading or half-listening to online material.

(Though, I think my 'inverse-T' approach simply has it's own set of trade-offs, rather than being plainly weaker, but that's for another discussion...)

The most ridiculous thing about this field is that there is no end to things you've never heard of: and I hate not having heard of things. My usual style when getting into a new obsession is to read very widely, but it feels like this is at best wasted effort here, if not actively counter-productive. It takes just a few clicks through HackerNews (or say, a read of some of the comments on Systems Programming topics) to find a paragraph that is entirely impenetrable to me. Man, that pisses me off. I think maybe as an ego-defense thing, I've always tried to get a 'gist' of the conversation or topic, but I reckon now this probably just breeds half-formed misunderstandings at best (Alexander Pope, "a little learning is a dangerous thing" etc etc).

Over the past couple months I've made far more visible progress than in any before, and I think a large part of that is learning how to admit when I am completely unable to access some sentences written in English, and how that's totally fine. My path is a lot clearer, and a visceral notion of sub-goals and stages of learning is a really nice thing to have. It's very relaxing to skim a blog post that goes completely over my head and think 'NBD'.

So, what are your experiences? Blocked by hubris/a short attention span like me? Or perhaps the opposite problem - finding you could grasp way more than you gave yourself credit for, after sticking too long with what you already knew? (These questions definitely intersect with things like perfectionism and imposter syndrome.)

I'm really curious to hear how you've dealt with things you feel you 'should' understand -- or how you manage the sheer volume of potentially-useful information out there (RSS, Pocket, something else?). Thanks for reading.

I'm posting this as a text post so I can give some additional background.

For those not in the loop, BronyCon is an annual convention hosted in the Baltimore Convention Center organized by fans of TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It started in 2011 and it peaked in attendance in 2015 with 10,011 present. This year was the 10th BronyCon, and they had 5,465 attendees. That's nothing to sneeze at, but it's a far cry from 2015, and it would be expected to go down further as Bronies continue to go on in life and become less involved with the community. In addition, the show is expected to end with either season 9 or 10, which would shrink the community even further.

Rather than attempt to convert into a general entertainment convention (and try to compete with the likes of Comic-Con) or become a small convention like they started out, the organizers have decided to make 2019 the last BronyCon, and to make it a 4-day event (August 1-4) to go out with a bang.

There are other MLP conventions (you can find a list of those that have/will happen here), but BronyCon was the original convention for fans of Friendship is Magic, and none are as big as it.

With all this being said, you can see the announcement on the website, and in the video from the closing ceremony. I was there, and it was a huge shock. The lower-level staff were not told either, so as to prevent the news from leaking early.

So, what are your thoughts? To any current or former Bronies, do you plan on attending? For those who never cared for or watched the show, have any similar things happened to TV shows/movies/etc you are a fan of?

A buddy and I were having a discussion the other day about the benefits of a platform like Twitter. He’s a guy who uses no social media. The only true benefit I could find is that Twitter allows for almost instant access to news and information. Other than that, it’s a cesspool.

Do the benefits of social media outweigh the very obvious negatives? I’m starting to wonder these days. I think social media has worked to polarize us far more than we would have been had it not existed.

So I have a few high school friends in Facebook who recently have become more radical (islamophobia, racism, sexism, identitarianism, etc.). As I said in a recent thread I have almost everyone but family blocked on my feed, but sometimes I make it a point to go to their profiles and see what they have posted. It usually is a lot of disinformation, misdirection, and dog whistling. I try to call them out because younger kids in my town look up to people like them and I'm worried they will become a bad influence. I also hope that, even though they will probably not become anarchists (or even run-of-the-mill conservatives) tomorrow, at least they will be a bit more empathetic to other people's pain.

My question is, do you think it is useful to do this? Will their posts or my rebuttals make any difference at all? How do you react in these situations?

More broadly speaking, is it important to have people calling bullshit when other people say blatant lies? Or is it useless and that energy would be better spent somewhere else?
On the one hand even if it is just for signaling to other people (in my particular example, muslims, the LGBTQ community, etc.) that they are not alone it seems like a good thing to do. On the other hand, I'm finding it less and less likely every day that anyone will change their opinion on anything without a massive investment in bots/shills/astroturfers. Or a good psychedelic trip :-D.

I am curious to hear your experiences regarding this and it is something I have discussed in person with other people and I always hear good arguments from both (and more) sides. Hopefully this is the right group/kind of thread and I'm doing the tag thing correctly, it is my first thread here !

I have recently bought a Nintendo Switch and have been happily playing on and off for a bit.

While it is general knowledge that its eShop is sub-optimally organised, instead of lamenting about it, let us together list and discuss which cheap and well-hidden games we found by chance (or heavy digging) that are surprisingly enjoyable.

To start of, here is the one I found recently:

• SkyPeace (0,99 €) is a typical side-scrolling arcade game – you fly on your rocket-powered surf board and collect coins, while avoiding enemies. The game is quite fast-paced and getting a high score is not that easy. Especially for this amount of money, I think it is a great game to play a level or two during breaks at work.

To clarify, this thread is not about indies in general – there is a very good thread on must-have indies already. Here I am trying to list (and discuss) obscure and hard to find titles, that are still enjoyable.