It started a day or two ago. Three threads (I think?) jump from nearly 0% to 100% and go back as soon as I open task manager to try figure out what's causing it. My first thought was a virus or bitcoin mining trying to hide itself (though isn't that done on GPU's?), but Windows' Defender came up empty handed.

I know certain OS apps, like automatic VIRUS scans behave similarly, stopping when you click or type, but this culprit seems to only react to opening the task manager. It also doesn't start again until task manager has been closed for a while.

I thought it'd be fun to see how some of you keep your computer organized. Do you follow some general scheme, keep it arbitrary, throw everything on the Desktop or in Downloads or just abuse the search bar?

Feel free to go as general or as in-depth as you want.

When I was a child I never seemed to mind the winter, but in the past two or three years it's become exponentially harder for me to live through the cold and dark. I'm dreading the next few months.

The lockdowns in March and April were pretty agonizing because I had too many responsibilities but suddenly none of the support systems I had built up in my friend groups. I got through that because it was slowly getting warmer and I could just go on a walk if I needed space. But it's started snowing this week and I don't know how well I'm going to manage for the rest of the season, with it getting dark at 4 PM and seeing so few people. I get caught up in my own head in these destructive patterns of anxiety about past friendships and relationships and obligations that are very hard to escape from around this time of year. I have a lot of hobbies but I can't do most of them right now, so I kind of just end of staring at the wall or my phone for half the day, feeling bad that I screwed up a relationship or said something weird 6 months ago or whatever. On repeat for every day. I have some friends in the area who I like a lot, but I'm a little scared to leave my house from what I hear about the virus on the internet. I've been trying to do phone calls sometimes but they kinda just burn me out and make me feel worse.

I'm wondering if anyone else has a recurring problem with the winter like I do. I'm not sure if this is a normal thing and I'm just naive and haven't figured it out, or if most people are automatically as happy in the winter as they are in the summer. I've brought this up sometimes with people irl and they say "haha yeah I have seasonal depression too," but they mostly seem to just not like the cold (?), it's not the issue of banal-yet-existential dread and torturous self-probing that I can't avoid. I have a very sweet cat who will keep me company, and she's a good listener, but she doesn't talk a lot and she's hiding in another dimension half the time anyway. I journal and meditate every night, and that helps a little, but I really mostly rely on being able to go to pretty places to keep myself happy, and it's hard to do that when they're all closed or when it's too cold to be outside for a long time. If people have any thoughts or experiences I would love to read them.

thank you xoxo

Notice: This has been cross-posted to another website, and re-worded

I currently work in the eCommerce industry, and have hands-on experience building up a Shopify site from the ground up. As I watch all of the developments that Shopify makes both from a technical development standpoint and logistical standpoint, it becomes more and more clear to me that Shopify can begin to take on Amazon directly.

The introduction of Shop app, which aggregates all shipments into a single application including those outside of Amazon, also allows users to browse products from any particular Shopify store. The app also notifies you of any shipping updates, and when packages have been delivered.

From a technical standpoint, Shopify's main attractions come down to a few things: order management, credit card processing, customer management, and plugin integrations. This is the core of Shopify's platform for both larger and smaller businesses. Though due to Shopify's requirement of using their CMS to serve your content, enterprise users have to look elsewhere in order to build something called "headless builds", which essentially use alternate CMS mixed with Shopify's CMS to continue serving their content.

There are a few companies that make such software in order to build out a fully custom site while still using the Shopify platform as its core, though at the moment they are a little 'hacky' but still fully functional. Given the interest in Shopify's platform at such a high level, they are very likely working on their own headless framework which could allow for 1) mainstream stores to integrate their existing platforms into a unified Shopify marketplace, and 2) to allow stores to build out fully custom websites using the Shopify platform at its core and also enroll them into a unified Shopify marketplace.

Amazon has mostly become a front for cheap Chinese-made products, laden with review manipulation and questionable product quality. By instead bringing large brands on board with a unified Shopify marketplace, those stores can sell quality products backed by their brands which can gain trust from customers, and will give rise to smaller brands that may have been unnoticed by larger populations.
[ For example, I recently bought a pair of shoes from a very popular Shopify store: they represent quality, comfort, and eco-friendliness. I personally find myself more willing to spend money on quality products from companies I know I can trust. ]

What's everyone's thoughts? Are there any general problems that could come from Shopify trying to jump-start a full-blown marketplace? Do you think that companies would be willing to integrate their ERP's and CMS's with whatever API's or headless framework Shopify decides to build out?

Hello! If you've clicked on this I'd like to start off by apologizing for the title! I'm in a bit of a strange headspace right this moment as I try to digest some thoughts thrown my way today. I'm currently coming at this from the personal lens of myself, but I think there are some larger questions/generalizations that could be made and might be helpful for others.

Ok, so for some background I am a "straight" man. My previous partners have all been women, with the exception of one who identified as female when we were dating, and my current partner is non-binary but female-presenting and has identified as such the entirety of the time we have been dating. I have previously viewed myself as straight and an ally to my partner and the lgbtq+ community. Today, I was having a long conversation with my cousin about his experiences coming out of the closet and with homophobia in our family. I mentioned at one point that I didn't feel comfortable making some assumptions/statements since I am straight and not a member of the community. He (very politely) brought up that, at least strictly technically speaking, the fact that I am dating someone who is non-binary means we are not in a heterosexual relationship and that I am not technically straight, more likely being bi or pan (if we could lets not turn this into the bi vs pan debate which I know is a controversial topic but not really what I'd like to focus on). He also made a point to stress that these are all technical definitions and that gender and sexual identity are very personal and if I don't feel that it describes me then it isn't for him to decide I'm wrong. This made me a bit uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable because while he's right, it feels wrong. I feel like if I began identifying as pan/bi, it would come off as a straight white male looking for a way to put himself in the position of being oppressed or marginalized for woke points. I don't know if it is because the college I went to was full of dudes like this, constantly looking for ways to be the victim, but its just something I feel deep in my bones. I don't really know though. I feel like if someone came up to me and described my life as their own and told me they identified as pan/bi I would agree and support them, but I won't extend that to myself. I don't know if its just a lifetime of assuming I was straight is why this is or if the term is actually wrong.

I guess to summarize/generalize, I'll put some reallly fucking loaded questions where I know the 'real' answer is "It is a deeply personal thing and will vary by person to person because the LGBTQ+ community isn't a monolith with all the same ideas" but I'm hoping maybe writing all this out and reading some of the results will help me color, process and digest my thoughts.

1. What/where would you put the line between straight and not straight (if anywhere). I know personally while I like to keep an open mind, I do heavily preference female-presenting people, whether they be trans, nb, or identify as a woman. But is that openness to dating someone who doesn't identify as a woman enough for me to be not-straight? I want to say yes, I don't think you need to date someone of a different gender to be not-straight. My cousin is bi but has exclusively dated men. I wouldn't tell him he isn't bi.

2. I am very uncomfortable with this question but do you feel there is a degree of "not-straight" you need to be to be an active part of the queer community. To kind of explain my thoughts on that: From an outside perspective, no one that hasn't been told my partner is nb would question if we said we were a straight couple. I've never and probably will never feel fear or be oppressed based on my sexuality. I dunno. I just feel really weird. like I'm inserting myself into a community I've always identified as an ally of but been an outsider to.

Anyway, sorry for this rant. I know the two questions are really loaded and I honestly feel like I know the answer to both of them. But just because i know the answer doesn't change how conflicted I feel and so I guess I'm just trying to work through some of the thoughts and conflicts.

I also want to take a second to note: I am actively talking with my partner about these thoughts and feelings. This is an ongoing discussion in our household, I am just looking for more perspectives and views to help me see things from different angles and work through my thoughts and feelings. Helping me through this is absolutely not the responsibility of anyone on Tildes and I don't want it to seem like I am putting that pressure on the community.

Discussions of progress or collapse often get mired in the question of significant discoveries and inventions. After wrestling with several organisational cencepts for various catalogues, and running into the Ever Growing List dilemma, I hit on what I call BOTI, or Best of the Interval (day, week, month, year, decade, century, etc.). It's similar to the tickler file 43 folder perpetual filing system of GTD. For technical types, a round-robin database or circular buffer.

(As with my bullet journal experiments, the effort is uneven but recoverable, which is its core strength.)

By setting up a cascade of buffers --- day of month, (optionally week or weekdays), month of year, year of decade, decade of century, century of millennium, millennium of 10kyr, a progressively larger scale record (roughly order-of-magnitude based), with a resolution of day but a maximum retention of (here) 10,000 years but only 83 record bins. How much you choose to put in each bin is up to you, but the idea is that only to most significant information is carried forward. Yes, some information is lost but total data storage requirements are known once the bin size and count are established.

Another problem BOTI addresses is finite attention. If you limit yourself to a finite set of items per year, say ten to one hundred (about what a moderately motivated individual could be aware of), BOTI is a form of noise-filtering. Items which seemed urgent or captivating in the moment often fade in significance with time, and often overlooked element rise in significance with time and context. 'Let it settle with time" is a good cure to FOMO.

There's the question of revisiting context. I'd argue that significance might be substantially revised years, decades, possibly centuries after a discovery or inventiion. So an end-of-period purge of all but the top items isn't what we're looking for. Gut a gradual forgetting / pruning seems the general idea.

Back to science and technology: It's hard to assess significance in the moment, and day-to-day reports of science and technology advances are noisy. I've been looking for possible sources to use and am finding little that's satisfactory. I'd like suggestions.

• Many newspapers and magazines run annual "best of" features. These typically include books, but not science (or at least not regularly). Some of the books are science- or technonolgy-related, though.
• There are the Nobel prizes, notably in physics, chemistry, and medicine, with lists at Wikipedia (linked). The Fields Medal in maths. Other fields have their awards, of which lists might prove useful...
• I'm having trouble finding something like a yearbook of science or technology, though some titles match, e.g., McGraw-Hill yearbook of science and technology. On closer look, this might answer my question, at least for yearbooks.
• Wikipedia has some promising but either inconsistent or untidily organised pages or collections, including the List of years in science, Timeline of historic inventions, Timeline of scientific discoveries, Timeline of scientific thought, among numerous other timelines. Compilations are useful but aren't themselves rankings. See also "never ending list" above.

There is a goal here: trends over time. I've a few senses of directions of research and progress, possibly also of biases in awards. Looking at, for example, Nobels in physics, chemistry, and medicine from, say, 1901--1960 vs. 1961--2020, there seems to be a marked shift, though categorising that might be difficult. The breakpoint isn't necessarily 1960 either --- 1950 or 1940 might be argued for.

There is the question of how to measure significance of scientific discoveries or technological inventions. I'm not going to get into that though several standard measures (e.g., counting patents issued) strike me as highly problematic, despite being common in research. Discussion might be interesting.

Mostly, though, I'm looking for data sources.

(This is kind of a rant about Vimeo's website. It might be better in ~tech, or ~comp. Feel free to move it.)

I've always preferred using Vimeo to YouTube for finding interesting videos because it's more oriented towards artists than people just uploading random stuff. As mentioned in the recent What Creative Projects Have You Been Working On? thread, I had some nature videos I shot of hummingbirds and wanted to upload them somewhere. My spouse had uploaded videos to Vimeo before, so I thought I'd put them there rather than YouTube because I don't like dealing with Google.

The site is a hot mess. I've hit the following problems after lightly using it for 2 days. I uploaded a single video and set it to be public:

• No way to enter keywords or tags. Searching will only find your video if you mention the search terms in your title (and maybe your description).
• Some of their own pages are broken or missing. If I go to "categories" and click on "documentary" it shows me an error message saying the page doesn't exist. If I click on "arts" or "music" I go to that category and see videos available.
• No information on how to add your video to a given category. Is it done automatically? Is it done by someone on the staff noticing and adding it? I have no idea!
• My video has gotten a few views from people here, so it is uploaded and available for anyone to see. But if I search for "hummingbird" and limit the search to videos uploaded in the last 7 days, my video is not displayed. Why not? Who knows?
• I ran the iOS app without logging in and it showed my account but said I had no videos, even though others were able to see them. Logging in shows the videos and confirms that they are set to allow anyone to view them. WTF?
• I attempted to send them a message telling them about the broken links. When you go to the help section and click on "Contact Us," you get a fake chat window that's just a bot that will pick keywords out of your question and reply with articles that don't answer your question. In fact, they even ask below each one, "Does this answer your question?" with a button for yes and nothing else. There's no way to say, "No, this was unhelpful." If you scroll to the bottom of the list of articles they recommend, there's a button to send a message to their tech support.
• I'm on the free tier, so I wasn't expecting any sort of answer to my help question, but still wanted to let them know so they could fix it. But that didn't work either. They have enough sense to copy your question from the chat bot into the tech support form (nice!) but it strips out any URLs. (Thanks! Very useful since I was trying to report a broken URL!) But it doesn't matter anyway because after you choose a category (none of which are correct) and attempt to submit your form, nothing happens. You press "Next" and the button turns into a spinner for a few seconds, and then stops and turns back into the "Next" button. Nothing appears to have been submitted, but no error is presented.
• The site is full of dark patterns. I get that they want upgrade revenue coming in, and I have no problem with that. But they do things like have a blinking icon in your video's settings for "interaction tools." These are things you can do to monetize your video, or whatever. Stuff I will never need. All the options in this section require a paid upgrade and there's no way to turn off the blinking beacon (except, I assume, by upgrading).

I was considering upgrading to their bottom-tier paid account, but after seeing how much is broken, I have to wonder if they're circling the drain? I get using chat bots and forms to make it easier for their support people, and making sure users know about ways to upgrade, but this is ridiculous. Anyone else run into this?

I thought maybe we'd play this game again? This time the "iron chef" ingredient is good singing, but in a language that you don't understand.

Ground rules:

• One song per comment, so we can vote for them individually.
• One top-level comment per user, so pick your favorite song.
• If you want to post more than one song, reply to yourself to add more comments.

Previously in this series:

• Happy Songs
• Cover songs with an an unusual instrument

(This is a self-repost, hence the "duplicate question" tag.)

A guy named Adolf Hitler won an election in 1932. He won an election, and 50 million people died as a result of that election in World War II, including six million Jews. So what I learned as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important.

-Bernie Sanders

Good satire raises questions about reality.
(IDK the source, but I first heard it here)

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
-Antonio Gramsci, 1930

When I was a kid my parents warned me about the mind-numbing effect TV would have on me if I watched too much of it. They were referring to fluff entertainment, which I've consumed plenty of over the years. Meanwhile, my parents used the TV to watch important and meaningful shows like the news. Eventually Fox News. In the end, they were right— but not in the way they expected.

-@balooga, here

If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor.

-Voltaire

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force. When fraud is exposed, they must rule exclusively by force.

-George Orwell

If you do not use the person you are, you will lose the person you are and instead become the mask that you wear.
-Greg Guevara/Jreg

What do you need from your parents?

encouragement
-u/DeSteph-DeCurry

This will be a noisy thread. Please use the ignore feature if you do not want to see it in your feed.

This is a continuation of the original thread from election day, which was here.

These threads are intended as more conversational spaces to process the day and results. Consider this an open forum for your own thoughts and feelings.

There is also a thread here in ~news that's more focused on articles and events.

This will be a noisy thread. Please use the ignore feature if you do not want to see it in your feed.

We have a thread here in ~news that's more focused on articles and events, but I also want us to have a more conversational space to process the day. Consider this an open forum for your own thoughts and feelings.

Inspired by this post on lobste.rs, I thought it'd be fun for us all to post our homepages and talk about them. I'm posting this in ~creative because I think of a homepage as a creative endeavor, but feel free to move this to ~design or ~tech or wherever, mods.

Just post your homepage as a top-level comment, and we'll workshop in replies!

Yesterday, I was talking with my dad about western swing and similar country music in a conversation about my grandfather who was a mandolin player in a red dirt/western swing band on old timey radio in Texas during the post-war years. Unfortunately, I was never able to connect with my grandfather through music because I was still fairly young when he passed away, but I put on his favorite band, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, while I was thinking about him and getting some work done.

The Spotify top tracks led me to Steel Guitar Rag from 1936. Shortly after the 40 second mark, you will hear a guitar riff that sent me on a scavenger hunt, texting a couple different friends for help and skipping around songs for half an hour. The riff felt really familiar but more uptempo in my head than in the Bob Wills track. My first thought was the band WOLF!, maybe a track like Humdinger. Good song but not it. A friend of mine suggested Folsom Prison Blues, but that has a distinctly different riff in it.

Eventually, it struck me that I knew the riff from a King Curtis live album from 1966, I just needed to skip around until I found it in one of the tracks. The track is titled Medley: Peter Gunn / Get Long Cindy, and the riff starts after the 3:25 mark. Pretty similar don't you think?

I'm attempting to provision two mirror staging and production environments for a future SaaS application that we're close to launching as a company, and I'd like to get some feedback on the provisioning script I've created that takes a default VPS from our hosting provider, DigitalOcean, and readies it for being a secure hosting environment for our application instance (which runs inside Docker, and persists data to an unrelated managed database).

I'm sticking with a simple infrastructure architecture at the moment: A single VPS which runs both nginx and the application instance inside a containerised docker service as mentioned earlier. There's no load balancers or server duplication at this point. @Emerald_Knight very kindly provided me in the Tildes Discord with some overall guidance about what to aim for when configuring a server (limit damage as best as possible, limit access when an attack occurs)—so I've tried to be thoughtful and integrate that paradigm where possible (disabling root login, etc).

I’m not a DevOps or sysadmin-oriented person by trade—I stick to programming most of the time—but this role falls to me as the technical person in this business; so the last few days has been a lot of reading and readying. I’ll run through the provisioning flow step by step. Oh, and for reference, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

First step is self-explanatory.

#!/bin/sh

# Name of the user to create and grant privileges to.
USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT=

sudo apt-get -qq update
sudo apt install -qq --yes nginx
sudo systemctl restart nginx

Next, create my sudo user, add them to the groups needed, require a password change on first login, then copy across any provided authorised keys from the root user which you can configure to be seeded to the VPS in the DigitalOcean management console.

useradd --create-home --shell "/bin/bash" --groups sudo,www-data "${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT}"
passwd --delete $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT
chage --lastday 0 $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT

HOME_DIR="$(eval echo ~${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT})"
mkdir --parents "${HOME_DIR}/.ssh"
cp /root/.ssh/authorized_keys "${HOME_DIR}/.ssh"

chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chown --recursive "${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT}":"${USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT}" "${HOME_DIR}/.ssh"

sudo chmod 775 -R /var/www
sudo chown -R $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT /var/www
rm -rf /var/www/html

Installation of docker, and run it as a service, ensure the created user is added to the docker group.

sudo apt-get install -qq --yes \
    apt-transport-https \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg-agent \
    software-properties-common

curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-key fingerprint 0EBFCD88

sudo add-apt-repository --yes \
   "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
   $(lsb_release -cs) \
   stable"

sudo apt-get -qq update
sudo apt install -qq --yes docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io

# Only add a group if it does not exist
sudo getent group docker || sudo groupadd docker
sudo usermod -aG docker $USERNAME_OF_ACCOUNT

# Enable docker
sudo systemctl enable docker

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.27.4/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/docker-compose /usr/bin/docker-compose
docker-compose --version

Disable root logins and any form of password-based authentication by altering sshd_config.

sed -i '/^PermitRootLogin/s/yes/no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sed -i '/^PasswordAuthentication/s/yes/no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config
sed -i '/^ChallengeResponseAuthentication/s/yes/no/' /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Configure the firewall and fail2ban.

sudo ufw default deny incoming
sudo ufw default allow outgoing
sudo ufw allow ssh
sudo ufw allow http
sudo ufw allow https
sudo ufw reload
sudo ufw --force enable && sudo ufw status verbose

sudo apt-get -qq install --yes fail2ban
sudo systemctl enable fail2ban
sudo systemctl start fail2ban

Swapfiles.

sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile && ls -lh /swapfile
sudo chmod 0600 /swapfile && ls -lh /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile && sudo swapon --show
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Unattended updates, and restart the ssh daemon.

sudo apt install -qq unattended-upgrades
sudo systemctl restart ssh

Some questions

You can assume these questions are cost-benefit focused, i.e. is it worth my time to investigate this, versus something else that may have better gains given my limited time.

1. Obviously, any critiques of the above provisioning process are appreciated—both on the micro level of criticising particular lines, or zooming out and saying “well why don’t you do this instead…”. I can’t know what I don’t know.

2. Is it worth investigating tools such as ss or lynis (https://github.com/CISOfy/lynis) to perform server auditing? I don’t have to meet any compliance requirements at this point.

3. Do I get any meaningful increase in security by implementing 2FA on login here using google authenticator? As far as I can see, as long as I'm using best practices to actually ssh into our boxes, then the likeliest risk profile for unwanted access probably isn’t via the authentication mechanism I use personally to access my servers.

4. Am I missing anything here? Beyond the provisioning script itself, I adhere to best practices around storing and generating passwords and ssh keys.

Some notes and comments

1. Eventually I'll use the hosting provider's API to spin up and spin down VPS's on the fly via a custom management application, which gives me an opportunity to programmatically execute the provisioning script above and run some over pre- and post-provisioning things, like deployment of the application and so forth.

2. Usage alerts and monitoring is configured within DigitalOcean's console, and alerts are sent to our business' Slack for me to action as needed. Currently, I’m settling on the following alerts:
   1. Server CPU utilisation greater than 80% for 5 minutes.
   2. Server memory usage greater than 80% for 5 minutes.
   3. I’m also looking at setting up daily fail2ban status alerts if needed.

This will be a noisy thread. Please use the ignore feature if you do not want to see it in your feed.

Watch on YouTube
Other viewing options

Debate starts ~90 minutes from the time of this posting.

Info from The Washington Post:

Location: Belmont University in Nashville

Moderator: Kristen Welker, NBC News White House correspondent and co-anchor of “Weekend Today”

Details: The debate will be 90 minutes long and have no commercial breaks. It will be divided into six 15-minute segments that the moderator has chosen. They are: fighting covid-19, American families, race in America, climate change, national security and leadership.

Trump’s campaign has criticized the topics, saying they thought this was supposed to be a foreign policy debate. The head of the Commission on Presidential Debates said that’s not true.

Trump has criticized the moderator, Welker, as being biased, as he has other moderators. The commission and even a Fox News host have defended Welker’s integrity.

The commission also announced days before the debate that in light of Trump’s frequent interruptions during the first one, it will silence the microphone of the candidate who is not speaking during the two-minute opening segment for each candidate. After each candidate has two minutes, there will be an open discussion where both microphones will be on, but the commission urged civility in a statement: “It is the hope of the Commission that the candidates will be respectful of each other’s time.” The Trump campaign said it still will participate, despite the president criticizing a potential virtual debate as a forum where it would be too easy to silence his microphone.

I am looking for practical ways to prove the Earth is round using materials accessible to the average person. I have zero interest in disproving Flat Earth folks.

I am inspired by Dan Olson's (Folding Ideas) excellent video where he is able to do this measuring the curvature of a lake near his home that has a very specific geography that lends itself to this sort of experiment. I've seen all sorts of ways to prove this measuring shadows and poles, using gyroscopes, etc. and wanted to know if there are any practical guides for proving once and for all that the Earth is round for yourself relying on nothing more than experimentation.

What I'm not looking for:

• Math relying on flight times/charts
• Video/picture evidence
• Deductive proofs built on agreed upon premises
• Expensive tests
• Extremely time consuming projects
• Underwhelming results (relying on a probabilistic argument for a round Earth from the evidence.)

What I am looking for:

• Practical experiments
• Things I could potentially do without spending much money
• Tests that aren't largely comprised of accepting someone else's research
• Potentially math-heavy evidence
• Results that are strong and conclusive

I've thought of finding some easy to test version of Eratosthenes' proof using two poles. I've also thought about using a balloon and sending something to space like what is done in this Tom Scott video. Nothing seems well documented in such a way as for me to be able to follow it at home.

TL;DR: I think it would be a meaningful experience to have the power to prove the Earth is round by myself, for myself. I can only compare this desire to the desire a child with a telescope has when wishing to observe Saturn or Mars themselves for the first time. It's not to prove anything or to settle doubts, but for the personal value of independently observing this astronomical fact oneself.

Hey folks,

I hate Twitter with a passion and find it very hard to follow discussions because they are so terribly displayed in the official App/Website. Unfortunately I have to use it for job reasons and therefore I am looking for less headaches.

Is there an app which can show me Twitter content and discussion tree views like Reddit does?

I am totally willing to pay.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Sometimes I get into a back-and-forth... heated interaction with someone, and it goes on for a while, and then they stop responding. Afterwords, I might wonder if it was worthwhile. Maybe they got tired of arguing with me, or maybe they just thought the conversation reached its natural endpoint? Rarely, the conversation might end with us explicitly agreeing it was a good discussion, but that's kind of formal and not the usual case online.

Just stopping is my habit as well. If I don't want to talk anymore, I upvote the last comment (if I thought it was good) but don't reply.

In the case of repeated interactions like this with the same person, sometimes I wonder if I'm annoying them by replying to their comments too much, particularly if we disagree often. I've never been explicitly told to go away, but people are often reluctant to say things like that, for good reason since you never know how people will react.

It seems to me that upvotes don't tell me this. Upvotes tell you whether your comments make sense to the crowd. They don't tell you whether the person you're talking to liked your reply. Which seems like it would be good to know. It would be valuable feedback if the goal is to be a better conversationalist. That seems like a good goal to aim for?

I guess we could get in the habit of saying "good point" and all that, and sometimes things can be inferred from what people say if you're good at taking hints, but not all of us are. But we are all trained to upvote things we like already, and it seems like it would be nice to take advantage of that.

To the extent that people like to gather internet points, I wonder what sort of conversation would be encouraged if you got them by writing a good reply from the perspective of the person being replied to? But I guess it could be gamed pretty easily if two people cooperate, so we probably shouldn't keep a total.

Also, think about how this looks from the outside: if you are reading a conversation by two other people in a heated back-and-forth, how do you know whether they're having a good time or not? Maybe it seems obvious, but in some cases a heated discussion might look worse to outsiders than participants. If you could see that they liked each other's comments then it would seem friendlier.

Note that Facebook does tell you who upvoted a comment, but since it tells you everyone who upvoted it, it's even more information, maybe too much.

(This is a followup to @NaraVara's previous topic, focusing on a particular aspect of it.)

OK, let's give this a shot.

Feel free to share your thoughts about anything going on this week in the world of sports - an event you're looking forward to, a great game you watched that you recommend, a story that you're keeping tabs on, whatever tickles your fancy. Also, if you have any ideas/suggestions about this thread itself, feel free to chime in. My one suggestion is to please keep spoilers out of top-level comments.

Edit: We don't have a theme tune (yet) but just imagine this is the intro (other brands are available).

I'd like to learn Hebrew, and my understanding is that the OT vocabulary is very limited, though creative word use, particularly in Hebrew poetry is a challenge to understand.

I don't know enough about the distinctions between Ancient and modern Hebrew to be certain, but I believe they are significant enough that Duolingo won't be a good fit, particularly as definitions of words in ancient Hebrew aren't always agreed upon.

Are there any recommendations? I have the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and a couple other books, since I thought they would be good references, but a lot of the word formations are dependent on pronunciation, and reading descriptions of how to pronounce words isn't doing it for me.

Shadow of War keeps crashing on me now, which has provided the inspiration for me to finally sit down and get this off my chesticles. I think bad things happen in my brain when I read the news too much or don't get enough exercise.

I remember when tormenting NPCs in games used to make me feel very sad. I was almost driven to tears by the villagers in Black & White being flattened under a carelessly dropped boulder, in fact. Over the years, though, I've found that my capacity for cruelty toward NPCs has grown considerably. I'll give a long example:

So, got any confessions of your own? Is this a potential indicator of psychopathy? How many musically talented Pushkrimps have you recruited?

Follow-up to an idea I mentioned here.

My "specialty" is definitely soccer. I primarily follow the Spanish league but more or less keep up with the big 3-5 European leagues. I can easily post related content. I have a medium level of interest in other sports in general but am pretty out of the loop with most American sports.

Any thoughts on what you want to see?

I've been re-watching Avatar: Legend of Korra, and I've always thought Bumi's crazy stories would be super interesting to go into more depth on how they actually happened (if his descriptions were indeed true to life).

Then I thought it would be fun to have a sort of creative thinking exercise where the set up is provided and you have to come up with the details of how the characters got to it. Can you make it work?

Top level submissions will be the end state. You should reply to those top level submissions with how the subjects / characters got to that point while using the information provided in the set up.

Example:

"Yo Johnny, you remember that time we talked our way out of getting arrested using my pet rabbit and a dead cell phone?"

Reply:

"Yea dude, that was wild. I was shitting bricks when he walked up to my window with all that weed we had in the trunk. If Fluffy Jorge hadn't been in the back and your allergy pills hadn't wore off that you wouldn't have been all glassy eyed and looking like you were crying. I don't think he would have bought my fake ass story about your family being in a tragic car accident earlier that day."

I'll provide a couple to get y'all started with, but if you have any good one's feel free to submit those as top level entries!

Hey folks,

since I'm completely out of the loop regarding trends but totally interested in being a 'cool uncle', I am asking you (maybe people having kids around this age) for help!

What is a 'good' present for a 15 year old girl?

I don't know much about her interests or activities and since she is quite new to the family, I haven't had the chance to talk to her.

Is there anything 'universal' today that might work? 😅

Thanks for your thoughts and discussion.

I'd like to hear your stories of things your parents did with good intentions that went wrong. This is mine.

When I was very young – old enough that I can remember it, but young enough that I wasn't going to school full time yet – my mother would volunteer at a local nursing home. I never met my maternal grandmother. I think she died a year or two before I was born. I have a vague memory of meeting my maternal grandfather, and there are photos of it, but he died when I was still quite young. Maybe 4 or 5. I don't believe either of my grandparents were in ill health before their deaths. But I think that their deaths affected my mother and she wanted to help other elderly people, so she started volunteering at the nursing home.

I have 2 older brothers who by this time were in school most of the day, leaving my mother and me at home alone. I think she also got bored of doing housework and wanted to do something useful with her time. (I can't say I blame her!) I suspect she also thought that the residents of the nursing home would enjoy interacting with a child, even if it wasn't their own grandchild. So she took me with her. I think she wanted me to learn to value elderly people and to learn to value community service.

Unfortunately, she failed miserably. What I learned was that old people are scary as fuck and I didn't want to be anywhere near them. You this was a nursing home. This was not an "old folks home" where they play canasta, have dances, and engage in elderly hanky panky. This was end-of-life care for people dying of cancer, and the now-preventable diseases like polio. The entire place reeked of vomit, and the old people were hard of hearing and weird. They were almost always in a bed or wheelchair, and usually in hospital gowns. There were often sounds of screaming from other rooms where some patient was in terrible pain from whatever ailment they suffered.

The residents were all old and gray haired except for one. He was a young man. He had to be younger than my mother who would have been in her early 30s. He was probably 20-ish years old. His hair was not gray - it was dark black and close cut with electric clippers, though not quite a crew cut. He was always in a hospital gown and always in a wheelchair that had an IV pole on it (though I don't recall there ever being anything hanging from it). And while he looked normal, he had some sort of mental deficit where he could only grunt and moan. I would often see him loudly moaning and gesticulating as if trying to point at something to say, "give me that," or "take me over there."

The one bright side to this place was that there was a woman in a red and white striped uniform who pushed around a cart full of every type of candy imaginable! I wanted so much to get a peanut butter cup or a chocolate bar from her, but no. Her candy was strictly off-limits to me. (I don't know whether it was cost or health that made my mother refuse to ever let me have a piece of candy.)

I'm pretty sure my mother was trying to teach me the value of both old people and volunteering to help our community. But as a ~4 year old, it was too much. It instead taught me that getting old meant pain, suffering, and eventually death, and that old people are scary as fuck. I didn't want to get old or be around old people. (I eventually got over it and now am nearing being an old person myself. 😉)

So I thought I'd try a little experiment here. Here are 2 songs I like from the same band. They're very different songs, and here's why I like them:

I Got You - This is a song about infatuation. It conveys that feeling I had when I was smitten with someone as a teenager. It feels very intimate to me, like the singer's directly expressing his innermost feelings to the person he's infatuated with. Or perhaps thinking of what he would say if he had the guts. It's very much a new wave pop song, and is probably the most well-known of Split Enz songs, at least where I live in the US.

I See Red - This is very much a song of rage. To me it's about a guy who's been dumped, or maybe who was infatuated with someone, and now they're with someone else. Whereas "I Got You" was very poppy, this is more punky. (I mean it's still pop, but with a punk flavor.) Putting it together with the previous song makes a lot of sense to me, even though they have such different tone. It's like the 2 songs together tell a story. I also love the phrase "down the drain like molten toothpaste." There's just something so illustrative about "molten toothpaste."

Anyway, just thought I'd share these random thoughts.

Hey, all. I'm back four weeks to the day after you guys gave me a lot of great advice about potentially making a 2D RPG out of my tabletop RPG. I decided to try both Godot and Unity given what people told me and I completed two tutorials for each over the last few weeks. After completing these two tutorials, I have some questions that I hope maybe some of you can answer to help me choose between the two.

TL;DR at the bottom. This is a long post.

For context, here's the tutorials I did:

Godot - https://www.davidepesce.com/godot-tutorials/
Unity - https://learn.unity.com/project/ruby-s-2d-rpg

To be frank, the Unity tutorial wasn't really an RPG. There were no stats, no quests, XP. It was much more of an adventure game. That's fine, it still gave me a lot of time inside the engine to learn a lot of basics.

So, working with each one had it's own up and downs.

Unity's use of an external scripting program seemed to hurt me quite a bit, from simple things such as forgetting to save before going back to Unity (I did this way too much) to having to declare public variables in the script and then filling them in the Unity GUI rather than just doing it all by script. The editor itself also seems to be kind of heavy, I was get the spiral beach ball for a second or two every time I went between the script editor and Unity and I have a machine that can edit 8K video without proxies. These general load times and stuff like that seemed to come up regularly. Tilemapping in the tutorial didn't include autotiling, I assume Unity has this somewhere built in? Or do you need to purchase an asset to get this functionality?

On the plus side, Unity overall seemed easier to use for a non-programmer. A lot of things are done through the GUI. Animations seem easier to handle for sure. The Unity tutorial was also more written for someone that hasn't coded much as it explained what specifically the code was doing (so I assume more resources for Unity will be helpful in that way that perhaps Godot will not).

For Godot, GScript was easier to use than C#, but I do feel like it was easier to get my head around prefabs in Unity than the Node system in Godot. The Godot tutorial took almost twice as long as the Unity one, but I don't know if that's because Godot is more difficult or the combination of the Godot tutorial being more thorough (I feel like I mad an actual, if very uncomplicated game, plus I did Godot first, which probably helped me just learn more about scripting and thinking like a programmer that I took into Unity). The node/scene system seemed more difficult to get my head around than game objects and prefabs. That said, my Godot program felt very tight. There weren't things happening that I was having a tough time explaining or figuring out why they weren't working quite right, at least at the graphical level (this might have more to do with the Godot tutorial using 8-bit graphics and Unity using a more modern sprite look). Having the scripts in the editor meant I never ran into a case like in Unity where I couldn't attach code to a game object because it was failing to compile, but it was failing to compile because it wasn't attached to a game object (that headache took at least a half an hour to sort out).

Overall, I was able to finish both tutorials mostly understanding what the code I was given was doing and was able to edit it to get some different affects and kind of just play around. So, on that level, I'd say they're about equal.

One big thing I want for sure out of the engine we use is to be able to handle a lot of conversations and variables there from. We're hoping to make a "choices matter" (TM) game, and very story/dialog heavy. Ink seems like a good plug-in to do this in Unity, but implementation doesn't seem easy (though I did find a pretty good looking tutorial that may help de-mystify). Godot seems to have some assets available for handling dialog trees, but i haven't had a chance to really dig in to them yet. So, that could definitely be a decider for me: which engine has assets that make a dialog/choice heavy game easier to make.

While I had originally thought about making a tactics RPG for this project, looking around at both the Godot and Unity scenes, it seems like few people are making these types of projects that are giving out free advice on how to make them work in those engines. After talking with my team (I have a team!, see my post from a while back), it seemed like a good idea both to keep the game within the scope of a novice, but still tell the story we wanted, to do a skill role system instead. Since this came from a tabletop session anyway, seemed to make the most sense to do skill rolls rather than develop a whole combat system.

TL;DR - Looking for advice on which engine, between Godot and Unity, would be handle a 2D RPG that relies on a lot of dialog and choices along with skill rolls for the gameplay. Thanks in advance!

It seems like there are not that many new topics posted on Tildes, and that we could post a lot more. But I sometimes find myself reluctant to do so. Don't I post too much already?

Recently there was a survey and apparently many people think Tildes is too tech-oriented. I don't think it's all that tech oriented, not like Hacker News or lobste.rs, but that makes me a little more reluctant to post tech links. (Though, really, other people should post more of the kind of links they want to see.)

I suspect it's not just me. Periodic topics sometimes get a lot of comments. Periodic topics have been started specifically to avoid having too many top-level topics on one subject.

But, why are we avoiding this? What's wrong with posting more links? If this were a social bookmarking site, I'd be saving more links. Maybe I'd save a bunch of accordion links, without any regard for whether people are interested?

It seems like we need something like folders. When new links are posted in a folder, they don't get listed individually at top-level. You could drop a bunch of links in a folder if you felt like it, without feeling like you're monopolizing conversation, because people would have to open the folder to see what's there. Or maybe instead of folders it would be something like creating a playlist. You could start a topic that's basically a list of links, and then anyone can add links to it if they want.

It seems like groups don't really do this, somehow? They feel a bit too open and exposed. Everything shows up on the front page regardless of group. (I mean, you can filter or unsubscribe from groups, but many of us don't. Partly because they're too broad. Who's going to unsubscribe from music just because they aren't interested in some music?)

So instead we use topics and post links as comments. It sort of works, but it's given me a lot of practice at writing markdown-formatted links on a mobile keyboard, and they appear differently in search and aren't tagged.

It seems like links posted within a topic and posted top-level should be more similar in the UI. Maybe if there's some conversation about a link within a topic, a moderator could promote it to top-level? Maybe a lot of topics would start that way, and then the site would feel a bit more full.

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Melbourne metalcore outfit Alpha Wolf dropped their second LP today, their first with vocalist Lochie Keogh. A thorough evolution of their sound, A Quiet Place to Die picks up where their previous release, the EP Fault, left off and goes bigger, harder and more bone shattering. With this release, Alpha Wolf arguably moves to the forefront of the nu-metalcore movement, combining elements of hardcore with nu-metal. The result is very down-tuned guitars chugging like crazy that occasionally make way for crushing breakdowns and on the fly harmonics. Keogh's vocals are raw and unflinching, as he barks out some dark themes and has come great pit calls. While there is mostly just non-stop chunky riffs, the band shows they can write ballads, in their own way, with tracks Bleed 4 You and Don't Ask.

For fans of Architects, Fit For a King, Stray From the Path and anyone that thought even the heaviest nu-metal bands weren't heavy enough.