I used to use the Waking Up app for daily 20 minute guided meditations, and I want to get back into it, but these days I don't use a smartphone most of the time so I'm looking for something similar that I could load up onto the (offline) hardware music player that I use for music and audiobooks. Ideally a number of different similar-length guided meditations (where I could either loop through them in order, or pick one at random for each session). I'm still fairly new to meditation, so I'm probably not aware of all the forms/formats that this kind of thing can take, but the ones I'd been using are 20-30 minutes of mostly silence (but I'm not opposed to the idea of some kind of background white noise) with a guide providing verbal instructions around breathing and relaxation at the beginning, then providing occasional visualization exersizes or affirmations to focus on at occasional intervals.

A few searches shows no shortage of options for this kind of thing (both free and paid), but I'm wondering if anyone has any specific recommendations of something like this that they use or have used and would vouch for the quality. It seems like the kind of category where it would be easy to churn out a bunch of low-effort AI generated slop and disguise it as something else, which I would like to avoid.

Howdy hey folks, I've recently been trying out ProWritingAid (for the unfamiliar: a grammar/spell checker tool) specifically the premium version with the expanded tool set. And now I want to step onto the internet soapbox and talk about it. It's been.

Okay.

To preface, I've been writing (casually) for 'bout a decade, mainly short creative fiction. (And a few novel attempts. All of which are incomplete but I'm glad I did them) Throughout my time I've gone through a few tools, text editors and what-have-you-nots. With my ever so gleaming credentials established, let's get into the ramble.

Right out of the gate, automated grammar checkers and creative writing have a rather fun relationship. Half the suggestions are useful and the other half are useless. (This ratio can also tip forward and backward). They'll catch syntax errors, spelling mistakes, missing words or punctuation, all good things to fix.

It'll also flag intentional word choice, sentence structure and other creative decisions. Sometimes this can help but more often than not it'll be sucking the You out of your own words.

ProWritingAid (PWA) tries to sidestep this particular pitfall with Style Guides where it'll be more or less rigorous depending on the selected 'genre'. It's a mixed success. This flaw I don't think will ever be truly fixable given the inherent separation between Author and Tool. So we'll have to make do with clicking "ignore."

Now PWA does a bit more than just grammar check. During my time with it, I've currently used two versions. PWA Everywhere, and PWA Desktop. Everywhere is meant to integrate with your text editing software while Desktop is a contained application. They have similar feature-sets, but not identical. Specifically, Desktop has the Word Explorer feature: a tool that if you highlight a word it'll show some synonyms or you can dig deeper with alliteration, cliches, anagrams, rhymes, reverse dictionary and more. Pretty nifty. PWA Everywhere best to my knowledge and searching does not have this feature- which is disappointing.

Especially since everything else Desktop does, Everywhere does better. The UI alone is far more functional, without clipping or cramping. There's the convenience of direct integration. Some features like Single Chapter Critique (which I'll get into later, trust me) also blank screened in Desktop while working fine in Everywhere. Grand.

Besides the Word Explorer, PWA also gives you AI "Sparks" and Rephrases. I'll be entirely honest, I have these turned off (Which I am glad I was able to do). I don't have much to say here besides I like getting into the creative word weeds myself.

Alrighty, that then leaves me with two more things to discuss: Writing Reports and the Critique features.

Okay. The writing reports are useful. Able to be granular or extensive. They scan every selected element in the text and format the results into a nifty report (or in some modes, direct text highlighting) Having all that data visualized with tables, graphs and bars oh my, (with the occasional cross-work comparison) is a great look-at. Grammar-wise it'll run into the problems mentioned above, but otherwise, this has been the feature I've liked the most.

Finally I can get into the whole thing that inspired me to write this post. The Critique suite. Ohohoho, I have some thoughts about these. Human proofreaders are irreplaceable, just want to toss that out there (PWA also keeps that disclaimer in its header). My friends will never be escaping the random PDFs sent for their lovely review. I am ultimately writing for a human audience afterall. That in mind, I have run into a hilarious problem with the Single Chapter Critique.

Apparently I write too good to get use from it. Truly I am suffering here. In complete honesty, the actual point I'm trying to make is the AI is a kiss-ass sycophant. I fed five of my short stories from across the years into it, just to see what it'd say. It cannot be negative. In each and every one I was praised about various element of the stories. Glowing and gushing, could say no ill.

This is pretty useless. Sure it has the "Potential Improvements" section but it's... eh. In the name of curious study, I am having my non-writer friend compose a piece for me to feed to the machine spirit later. (I also only get three uses a day, compared to the unlimited reports with their nitty gritty)

Now, could this simulated praise be a sign I'm a genuinely good writer? Well I don't need the AI for that- I have friends zip-tied to chairs to feed my ego. (I forever cherish one of my close writing friends telling me: "You have a voice of a fantasy writer from the 70s with a thick series full of wondererous imagination written by a twice divorce middle aged man who is disgruntled with reality. It was never exactly reprinted as it was unknown, but the aging, withered pages hold such a gorgeous narrative that it sticks with you for the rest of your life.")

Back to the AI: Their shining critique falls apart when I look at the story myself and can point to several areas for improvement/refinement with a cursory reading. (Thank you creator's curse, you're my true reliable critic.)

Woe to me, I cannot escape personal proofreading. (Real talk: the hope was have it be able to do the cursory stuff so I could focus on the creative viscera. That's half the fun after all—)

There is two other Critique features, Full Manuscript Analysis and Virtual Beta Reader. I have used neither of these as I do not have any large manuscripts to toss into the jaws. To ensure jolly feelings, it's also a credit based system. So let's talk money.

Scrivener, a writing workhorse that even after years of using I still find new features and has long cemented itself as my text editor of choice, was $45 for a lifetime license. Fantastic software, it has earned its reputation.

ProWritingAid, a grammar and spellchecker was $115 (discounted price) for a year subscription. (Can I mention how idiosyncratic their tier system is? Free, Premium, Premium Pro? Why??? Just name it Free, Pro, Premium. Don't stack luxury words.) For $115, I get several features I don't even use, or aren't very useful. Oh, a discount for the aforementioned analysis credits. ($25 for 1, $70 for 3, $175 for 10. Full priced it's $50, $150, $500 respectively. Spend this money on an actual person please)

Now what's worst off is I wasn't even the one to spend the $115. That was someone else wanting to support me and my writing; an act I am quite grateful for and the meaning behind it. I feel bad complaining. I have hopes for PWA. Something that can act as a quick look proofreader would be wonderful. But perhaps I'm just asking for too much from what is again, a grammar and spellchecker.

So far, I don't know yet. I don't know if I'd call it good or bad. As I started with: it's okay?

Maybe I'll do a retrospective after a while once I've utilized it longer. Maybe features will be better fine tuned in the future.

And that leads me here. What have been y'all's experience with it, if any? Searching online has been miserable; I'd like to hear from other people.

[As a footnote, PWA was not used when writing this. Kinda forgot that I never set it up for browser. Tallyho]

The blog is daviramos.com

It is more like a 2000s blog than whatever blog means today. Just things I wanna write sometimes. It is not commercial, no ads. I like fast things. Images are heavily optimized, not mandatory, and always inside posts.

Bearblog is reliable and minimal without being barebones. I wrote about it before, so there's no need to go over it again here.

I really want to know if the way I’ve organized my blog makes any sense. Please keep in mind that I’m not a developer, programmer, or anything like that. I chose Bearblog partly because I already liked the default theme and didn’t need to change much. I appreciate minimalism, understand Markdown, a little HTML, and can "decode" simple CSS using a mix of intuition, Google, and ChatGPT. I only changed stuff that was not very deep and would not be hard to maintain.

:root {
    --width: 720px;
    --font-main: Verdana, sans-serif;
    --font-secondary: Verdana, sans-serif;
    --font-scale: 1em;
    --background-color: #fff;
    --heading-color: #222;
    --text-color: #444;
    --link-color: #3273dc;
    --visited-color:  #8b6fcb;
    --code-background-color: #f2f2f2;
    --code-color: #222;
    --blockquote-color: #222;
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
    :root {
        --background-color: #01242e;
        --heading-color: #eee;
        --text-color: #ddd;
        --link-color: #8cc2dd;
        --visited-color:  #8b6fcb;
        --code-background-color: #000;
        --code-color: #ddd;
        --blockquote-color: #ccc;
    }
}

body {
    font-family: var(--font-secondary);
    font-size: var(--font-scale);
    margin: auto;
    padding: 20px;
    max-width: var(--width);
    text-align: left;
    background-color: var(--background-color);
    word-wrap: break-word;
    overflow-wrap: break-word;
    line-height: 1.5;
    color: var(--text-color);
}

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
    font-family: var(--font-main);
    color: var(--heading-color);
}

a {
    color: var(--link-color);
    cursor: pointer;
    text-decoration: none;
}

a:hover {
    text-decoration: underline;
}

nav a {
    margin-right: 8px;
}

strong, b {
    color: var(--heading-color);
}

button {
    margin: 0;
    cursor: pointer;
}

time {
    font-family: monospace;
    font-style: normal;
    font-size: 15px;
}

main {
    line-height: 1.6;
}

table {
    width: 100%;
}

hr {
    border: 0;
    border-top: 1px dashed;
}

img {
    max-width: 100%;
}

code {
    font-family: monospace;
    padding: 2px;
    background-color: var(--code-background-color);
    color: var(--code-color);
    border-radius: 3px;
}

blockquote {
    border-left: 1px solid #999;
    color: var(--code-color);
    padding-left: 20px;
    font-style: italic;
}

footer {
    padding: 25px 0;
    text-align: center;
}

.title:hover {
    text-decoration: none;
}

.title h1 {
    font-size: 1.5em;
}

.inline {
    width: auto !important;
}

.highlight, .code {
    padding: 1px 15px;
    background-color: var(--code-background-color);
    color: var(--code-color);
    border-radius: 3px;
    margin-block-start: 1em;
    margin-block-end: 1em;
    overflow-x: auto;
}

/* blog post list */
ul.blog-posts {
    list-style-type: none;
    padding: unset;
}

ul.blog-posts li {
    display: flex;
}

ul.blog-posts li span {
    flex: 0 0 130px;
}

ul.blog-posts li a:visited {
    color: var(--visited-color);
}

/* MY CHANGES */

/* That is an entirely new class for text */
/* that goes below an image as a subtitle */
.subtitle {
    text-align: center;
    font-style: italic;
    font-size: small;
    font-weight: bold;
}

.upvote-button {
    display: none !important; /* Hides button, overrides other settings */ 
        pointer-events: none; /* Disable mouseif it visible */
}

.title h1 {
    font-size: 1.2em;
}

nav a {
    font-size: 0.95em;
}

footer {
	font-size: 0.95em;  
}

.spaced-line {
	margin: 100px 0;
	text-align: center;
}

/* Keep images centered */
img {
    display: block;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
}

For comparison, see Herman's blog to see something closer to the default. He’s the creator of Bearblog.

Here’s what I’ve changed: the font size for the blog’s name, the navbar, and the footer that says Powered by Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ is slightly smaller (0.95em instead of 1em). I added a guestbook and links to the English and Portuguese pages in the navbar. I also changed the favicon and the site's meta-image to different-sized images of Humphrey Bogart.

The English and Portuguese pages are in their respective languages and only list posts in those languages. I don’t know if it’s possible to customize the navbar further. EDIT: bearblog has a builtin voting feature which I removed with CSS. All pages and posts are configured with their appropriate language via Bearblog, which I assume browsers and search engines can detect. Does it make sense to make my blog bilingual this way?

Maybe this is a new feature, but Bearblog lets you organize posts into subfolders/subdomains. So I placed all Brazilian Portuguese posts under /br/, which feels logical and predictable. I haven’t shared them anywhere yet, so there’s no risk of broken links. On the other hand, I already have several English posts that have been shared elsewhere. If I move all English posts under /en/, I’d love to find a way to let the older links keep working gracefully. Is that possible somehow? Maybe that’s a question for Herman, but I have a follow-up: Other than my obsession with tiny details, is there any value in separating my posts under either /br/ or /en/? Titles and URLs are unlikely to conflict between languages, and if they do, I can always add a -pt or -en suffix like in example-post-pt.

Other than that, I’d welcome any advice on how to improve my blog—whether in big ways or subtle ones.

Thanks!

I keep seeing this phrase, mostly with relation to USA-Canadian politics right now.

I was curious enough to look this up and it seems this phrase came from a famous hockey player, Gordie Howe.

Now, I want to say that my initial thought before researching this was, "oh, elbows up must be passive resistance, it's like someone folding their arms waiting for you to calm down, it's like putting your elbows up on a table refusing to eat/being rude on purpose to prove a point"

What I found, and the crux of the question, is it seems like a license to practice violence, when you deem it necessary. It seems very, "ends justify the means" -- because it is inherently a very violent rhetoric. I feel the current use of the term is, "don't take shit from anyone if they are bullying you". But this completely disregards its origins.

My further search into the hockey part of it sounds like the player didn't just use his "elbows" in retaliation, it sounds like he was really actively violent (on the ice)...so...I guess I just don't get it, I don't get why a society would glorify such a violent backed terminology, to combat...extremely violent behavior (threats of annexation).

Genuinely interested to hear anyone's opinions on this phrase.

Bonus, I saw one explanation of the player that I thought was funny, his "rational and expert application of violence"

As the years go by, I’ve become increasingly annoyed (I choose that word intentionally) at the thought that there’s some “record” of my activity on the Internet somewhere, which was probably put together by my ISP. I “don’t have anything to hide” (other than perhaps the one or other ROM or movie that I download), but I also don’t want to randomly get fined or put in prison if, in a few years, our governments decide to retroactively criminalize certain activities (I’m thinking mostly about piracy).

I’m not tech savvy though. That’s not because I haven’t tried. I have. I spent countless hours reading about how one can keep one’s activity on the Internet “private”. To my knowledge, it isn’t actually possible. I mean, even if I didn’t use my real name anywhere, or didn’t have any social media accounts (thankfully, I don’t), just the fact that I have to use an ISP to surf the web means that at least they are “spying” on me.

So, I’m approaching all of you wonderful, tech savvy people (rather than ChatGPT or a search engine) to ask you if there’s something that I’m missing, and if there is a way (preferably a fool-proof one) to stop my ISP (or “anyone” for that matter) from collecting data on my activity on the Internet (particularly when I download ROMs or movies, which is the only “illegal” thing that I ever do).

Background:

I've been using a 9-year-old 13.3 inch Dell Latitude 7370 laptop running MX Linux to stream games via Moonlight from a beefier desktop machine. It is SO good and works flawlessly. My only complaint is the smaller screen size.

I would like to upgrade to a larger computer, and given that the computer will literally only be used for streaming games, it doesn't need to have great stats. I'm looking at used/refurbished models -- both for price and because buying something new feels like complete overkill for my needs.

My only requirements are:

• 17 inch screen
• USB-C charging

That's it! I'm assuming that literally anything I can get with that will work for what I need given that my small, decade-old laptop is already doing the same job perfectly. USB-C charging is a must-have for me. I already have USB-C power cords in all the places I plan on using it, and I don't want to have to use a separate charger for it.

My Situation:

Because I'm searching for used/refurbished models, I'm limited to what's available rather than going for any specific model of computer. I can easily find listings for computers with 17 inch screens. What I can't find easily is whether or not they support USB-C charging. Most sites don't have a filter for that, and a lot of the listings don't specify the type of charger used and just list "AC adapter" (or don't mention it at all). Many sites don't have pictures of the ports, or the pictures they do have are stock photos that aren't of the exact model.

Is there some easy way to find these that I'm missing? Some keyword, or a site that does have a filter for that, or brand knowledge that can point me in the right direction?

Also, if anyone has any recommended sites for used/refurbished laptops, let me know. I have had success with Backmarket for used tech before, but I'm open to recommendations.

The world outside my doorstep is unorganized chaos and I am blind to most of its existence.

Say I'm looking for a job. And I know what job I want to do. I can search for it on a job listing site, but there will still be many such jobs that won't be cataloged on the site and that I'll hence be missing. How can I find the rest? What are some alternative approaches?

Also there are two ways you can end up with a job: either you find it (going on a job search), or it finds you (headhunters etc.). Obviously the latter possibility is much better as it's less tiring and it means you end up with an over-abundance of opportunities (if people message you every week). What are some rules of thumb for life to make it so that the opportunities come to you? (and not only for jobs)

Often I don't even know what opportunities are on offer out in that misty unknown (and my ADHD brain finds it straining to research them (searching 1 job site feels almost futile because you don't know how many of the actual opportunities you aren't seeing)), so the strategy I resort to is imagining what I concievably expect to be out there and then trying to find it. This has several weaknesses: firstly I could be imagining something that doesn't actually exist and waste hours beating myself up because I can't find it. Or, almost even worse, my limited imagination might be limiting what sorts of opportunities I look for which means I miss out of the truly crazy things out there.

Here's an example of an alternative approach that worked for me once:

Last month I wanted to visit a university in another city for a few days to see if I liked it, and I needed a place to stay. I first tried the obvious approach of searching AirBnB for rents I could afford, but none came up. Hence I had to search through the unmapped. What ended up working was: I messaged the students union -> they added me to their whatsapp group -> sb from my country replied to my post on there adding me to a different WA group for students from my country -> sb in that WA group then DM'd saying I could crash on their couch.

I would have never thought of trying an approach like this when I set out, and yet I must have done something right because it worked. What? The idea to message the students union and join whatsapp groups took quite a lot of straining the creative part of my brain, so I'm wondering whether the approach I took here can somehow be generalized so that I can use it in the future.

TL;DR: Search engines don't map the world comprehensively. You might not even be searching for the right thing. What are some other good ways to search among the unstructured unknown that is out there?

[Edit] Details on the plan as it stands are here, potentially using one of these heat pumps.

Looking for advice before the weather starts to warm up! I'm running multiple GPUs for dev work in my small home office, and it's pretty much equivalent to having a fan heater running all day. Right now that's actually a bonus, but it really won't be in a couple of months.

The big heat generating components are all water cooled - partly just to fit them in a sensible amount of space, and partly because I figured I'd end up with exactly this problem and being able to physically pipe the heat elsewhere (ideally outside) would probably be necessary. The bit I'm trying to figure out now is how to actually make that happen...

Ideas so far:

• Stick an air duct on the back of the radiator and hang the duct out of the window: straightforward but messy, may be counterproductive depending how hot it is outside and how well I can rig up some kind of baffle between the open window and the duct.

• Put the whole radiator outside and drill a couple of small holes in the wall for the pipes: this was my first thought, but PC radiators and fans definitely aren't rated for outdoor use, and I'm not sure where to start looking for something that would be designed for that while still being suitable to hook up to the computer waterblocks. I'm also concerned about condensation on the electronics if the coolant gets below indoor ambient temperature overnight.

• Set up some kind of actual exterior radiator (or heat pump?) outside, and use a heat exchanger between that and the PC cooling loop: seems more like the "proper" way to be doing this, but it's well outside my area of expertise and feels like there would be a lot of potentially expensive stumbling blocks. Also still has the condensation problem, I think.

• Just crank up the air conditioning: I'm not actually sure if the unit I've got has enough capacity, and it definitely seems wasteful to heat up the air and then use more energy cooling it again rather than dumping the heat directly outside, but maybe I'm wrong there!

I'm in a kind of awkward middle ground: I'm running enough hardware that this is getting to be an issue beyond what you'd get with normal end user setups, and I'm willing to put some money into fixing it (it's affecting my job and my home, after all!), but I'm self employed and nowhere close to the industrial or datacenter scale that tends to come up when searching for solutions.

Has anyone dealt with this themselves, or come across small office/homelab scale solutions that might work?

Why is it so hard get most people to care or even get them to engage in actual discussion about indirect effects of their actions?

I'm mainly going to be talking in the context of tech and privacy since that is my main sphere of concern but it applies to a lot more things.

I am not dismissing the effects of systemic incentives but there are trivial actions that anyone could do to lessen the likely negative effects that almost no one does.

The current climate makes it incredibly hard to actually eliminate personal impact but it still easy to minimize it with negligible impact on one's own life. Like in sw development the first 90% take 90% of the time and the other ten procent take the other half of the time.

Getting a minimal computer literacy of being able to navigate an unfamiliar GUI, explore and understand the settings and be able, read the messahes they are getting on the screen and willing to search their problems would make anyone much more resistant to any number of dark patterns, yet there is a tendency to defend tech illiteracy.

Personally I don't really do that much and I make compromises easily but sadly I get the impression that I am still in the small minority.

We recently did a Kagi trial giveaway, and I have since received another email from Kagi with 3 additional trial codes. I'm assuming other Kagi subscribers also received the same thing (I got my email on February 25 with the subject line "A treat from us"), so I figure we're due for another giveaway topic.

As before, if you would like an invite, please request it in a comment.

If you have invites to give, please PM them to requesters, then reply to their comment so that other givers will know they've been sent one and don't double up.

I've tried DDG for some time, but I keep finding myself using !g to find better results. I read a comment on Reddit that you just need to get used to searching things differently, but I'm starting to think that DDG just isn't very good. Kagi works well and I use the free version a bit for academic stuff, but I don't see myself paying for a search engine. Anyone have long-term reviews of search engines like Brave, Qwant, etc.?

The word "content" in this text means works that you can consume for knowledge or for entertainment, e.g. books, films, TV-shows, video games, scientific articles, podcasts, poems, music, all of those Youtube-videos you have saved for later never to be watched again, etc...

With streaming services, apps and tools becoming worse and harder to use while also increasing their subscription costs more often to appease investors, AI is taking over not only our future jobs but also our hobbies and passions, i.e. the very thing we were supposed to be able to make more of. Sponsored as well as subtle user-made advertisements are infesting site after site, but increasingly, the interactions these ads get also come from bots. Social media is no longer a place where I “trick” my peers into thinking I had a wonderful weekend - when in reality it was mediocre at best - but instead a battleground of different actors trying to inflate numbers for short-term gain. It feels like no film, no video game or book, no service, no image, no friend nor foe on the internet exists anymore for anything other than a fleeting moment of transactional gain. Nothing seems trustworthy anymore. Nothing seems genuine.

With the most recent YouTube video by Technology Connections (“Algorithms are breaking how we think”, 22. February 2025) that talks about “algorithmic complacency” and how people today let themselves be fed curated content instead of finding the content they are interested in, it highlights a shift I have felt the past year but never have had the words to express clearly, which is the following: People don’t care anymore.

And why should they? It’s much easier to come home from a long school or work day and just get cheap dopamine without having to put brain power into searching for entertainment. After all, I’m not trying to learn anything right now.

Now, I know I am preaching to the choir on this site. I don’t need to tell you of the bad effects today’s customs and practices on the internet will have on us and especially the next generation, both short-term and in the long run, but the worst one I can see is not back pain, short-sightedness, decline of web-searching skills or even gullibility. It is apathy.

Propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, manipulation, advertising, reaching voters, gaining consumers, decreasing attention spans and a willingness to pay more as long as no additional effort is required on my part. Escaping this fate seems to require an ever-increasing supply of vigilance and effort. The thought arises: What exists behind us?

Now, this might seem nonsensical. We all love to go back to older things from time to time. Stuff from previous generations has always intrigued us. But I am asking you, have you given any thought to the mind-boggling amount of content out there that has already been made? Think about all the books, movies, music, video games - although all this most probably was made with profit in mind, it was still made by people who chose to make it because they could.

The other side of the coin is realizing how small a portion all of this represents, when compared to the amount that has been lost to time, in one way or another. Why then, does it seem like the minuscule amount of content we have left from times gone is not treated with any respect at all? Why are alternatives to modern content taken from us just because they do not entail profit? Libraries have fever books, video games are taken offline, free software starts selling your data or making the free version have big restrictions, and then there is of course the whole case of The Internet Archive. I have even had to sail the seven seas to get ahold of books that don’t come in a format that confines them to a specific, paid app. This last part is seemingly becoming the only way of accessing a whole lot of stuff nowadays, which is a shame.

In essence, as archives and physical media die, we look to the corporations of today to satiate our craving for quality content, and in so doing, we alienate ourselves from our uniqueness and our soul. Why read a boring book when this streaming service is constantly getting new movies? Why make art when AI can make it for me if I ever need it?

It is precisely for these reasons that we need to keep a steady grip of the very thing that makes us human: our interest in creating. It is good for the mind, for the body, for the personality, for the diversity.

Thus, this is an argument for - or rather, a call to action to - spending time with content that was not made for one-time use, but rather, content that respects the time you put into it, be it book, film or game, not forgetting to let yourself be inspired and expressing yourself in the process.

I asked Claude for references to some ideas the ai had output earlier about a 16th century cardinal (Sadoleto). It's response was, Let me analyze the letter, and then this:

async function searchForSadoletoLetter() {
  try {
    const files = ['sadoleto_letter.txt', 'sadoleto.txt', 'sadoleto_to_geneva.txt', 'letter_to_geneva.txt'];
    
    for (const filename of files) {
      try {
        const content = await window.fs.readFile(filename, { encoding: 'utf8' });
        console.log(`Found file: ${filename}`);
        console.log("First 500 characters:");
        console.log(content.substring(0, 500));
        return content;
      } catch (err) {
        // File not found, try the next one
      }
    }
    console.log("Could not find any files containing Sadoleto's letter");
    return null;
  } catch (err) {
    console.error("Error searching for files:", err);
    return null;
  }
}

const content = await searchForSadoletoLetter();

// Since we don't have the letter available as a file, let's search for published versions online
console.log("The letter isn't available as a file. We would need to rely on scholarly knowledge about Sadoleto's letter to Geneva (1539).");
console.log("Sadoleto's letter was published in 'A Reformation Debate: Sadoleto's Letter to the Genevans and Calvin's Reply' (ed. John C. Olin).");

This strikes me as odd? Did Claude write a script to generate its own response? Have coders put something like this in as a gaurdrail?

edit: details about earlier convo

In an age of increasing misinformation and division, I've found that it's increasingly easy to find yourself in an echo chamber of opinions (of people and/or bots). And when I go searching outside that echo chamber, I usually don't find well reasoned discussion, but a different echo chamber with the opposite opinion.

This is especially true on sites like Reddit and Twitter, but also applies to pretty much every website (including Tildes) to some extent. Even newspapers aren't helpful as they are all largely owned by a handful of billionaires with an agenda. And real life isn't much better. My friends and family all share similar values and ideals, which is great for getting along, but it doesn't help me figure out how many people actually support something in particular.

The closest thing I've found to objective polling are elections. Unfortunately, they largely group everything into one of two buckets and don't have room for nuance on individual topics. Also, a lot of people don't even vote, which doesn't necessarily muddy the data, but it does leave out the opinions of a lot of people.

Is it even possible to determine this without an individual referendum on each topic? Am I worrying too much about something unknowable?

I come in search for somebody who knows a thing or two about VLANs or, if possible, had set it up for themselves at home (or work).

I have Mikrotik router and Ubiquiti Unifi APs. My goal is to have three separate SSIDs on my APs to differentiate clients. One group would be closest family (group 1), another friends (2) and the last one would be QR-setup guest wifi (3).

The reason is security. I run 24/7 server at home with many services that I don't want other people than #1 to see. But I also run ie. DNS there that I would like all to see (all three groups; or make them use other DNS via DHCP-set-DNS, ie. 1.1.1.1).

So far I believe everything from that list is doable with the right knowledge (that I have yet to achieve). But I would also like some other things and that's part of why I'm asking here.

• Is it possible to initiate connection from #1 to device in #2? Ie. from server to Raspberry that serves as temperature sensor for Home Assistant? Is it some built-in functionality like "higher number VLAN can access all lower numbers" or do I have to setup some exception on my router for speciric IP and port? Or specific LAN port (I have 24 port router, yet not everything is connected via ethernet)
• Do I have to set it all up in specific order? I have read that I can cut myself off from accessing my router if I setup VLAN incorrectly and that's what I don't want to do :-)

If you know how to setup VLAN and could provide some points to kinda carve the path I could stick to, I would be really grateful! I do not want manual of step-by-step instructions, rather some points to follow so I don't fall for something important I missed.

I will of course read up on it myself and will experiment a bit (I have old RB133 or maybe even RB433 around that I can use for learning), but it would be great to have some pointers.

Thanks in advance for any advices or recommendations.

It looks like we're getting some new sign-ups! Welcome to Tildes!

This thread is for you to ask any question you have about the site, from “what is the moderation philosophy?”to “what does that blue line next to some comments mean?” to “what is the general vibe like here?” Tildes has a lot of documentation, history, and embedded social norms that can be daunting or opaque at first glance, so here’s your opportunity to get help with anything you need.

Questions about anything and everything are fair game. Follow-up questions are encouraged! No question is too simple.

Also, a quick note: the only person who can speak in any official capacity on Tildes is our admin @Deimos. Everyone answering who is NOT him is just a helpful community member!

It is perfectly okay to ask any question — even if you think it’s been asked before, or even if you didn’t search for an answer beforehand. Just ask away, and someone will answer you!

This subject is a dead horse on most social media platforms (I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds of similar threads on /r/askreddit alone, for one), but I didn't find a thread about it specifically on Tildes from a cursory search (though I did find more specific threads about some aspects of it like this one as well as the broader prescriptivism vs descriptivism subject here and even the mirror opposite of what this thread is about, that is deliberately using non-standard language in a constructive manner) and I think that it might spark worthwhile discussion.

By and large, I agree that language should be seen from a descriptive point of view, meaning a language's rules are defined by how people speak it, not the other way around. As the need to communicate evolves, so does any given living language and a rigidly enforced ruleset would get in the way of this process. By opposition, the prescriptive approach views a language's rules as defining a "correct" way (making any other way incorrect) of speaking the language to be enforced accordingly. Following either approach to its respective logical extreme would be a dead-end but I do think the most reasonably balanced way to approach this tends a lot more toward descriptivism than prescriptivism.

While agreed-upon rules are still definitely useful to establish a language's identity and defining a standard helps both with learning the language and structuring how the language should evolve (and when learning it's probably best to operate by the book at first, literally or otherwise, until you're familiar with the language enough to reliably tell when bending the rules is advantageous), getting yourself understood is much more important than strictly "following the rules", and that's before considering the cases where the rules themselves are ambiguous, or their validity is a matter of debate, which itself brings up the much more controversial issue of what constitutes an authoritative source for a language's grammar in the first place. In practice, even if there is a consensus on something being a grammar error, most are benign enough to not risk the meaning of the sentence being misinterpreted anyway. And of course, there's the issue of people ostensibly wanting to be helpful using "correcting someone's grammar" as an excuse for gatekeeping, toxic behavior or derailing conversations into a pointless grammar debate.

For example, while my latent pedantry constantly incites nitpicking on those smaller mistakes, it's obvious that someone using "Your welcome" instead of you're is acknowledging gratitude and no one would argue in good faith that this could be misinterpreted as referring to an abstract hospitality belonging to the person they're addressing. Similarly, using "irregardless" (which presumably arose as a contraction of irrespective and regardless) might be argued as meaning the opposite of "regardless" since ir- is a negation prefix, making using that word a mistake due to the ambiguity. In practice, interpreting it that way in any sentence where the word actually appears would be very unintuitive so the ambiguity doesn't actually manifest... Though the argument I see much more often against its use is that irregardless is "a made-up word" and therefore incorrect (as opposed to all the real words which are, what, woven into the very fabric of the universe?), which is silly. I personally don't use this word, but I wouldn't bat an eye if I saw it becoming normalized either.

That being said, I believe there is such a thing as incorrect use of language that actually hampers communication and therefore should be discouraged, some of which I'll give examples below. I... got wildly carried away while writing it so I made it an optional collapsible box.

Which turns of phrase would you consider to be categorically incorrect? Did I commit one in this very post? If you chose to read through the content of the collapsible box above, do you disagree with some of my examples (or the entire premise of the question in the first place)? While I'm assuming English as the default for my own answer, feel free to talk about any other language you might know (ideally with context for non-speakers of the language).

Also, since I mentioned it in the post, another optional subject: which mistakes that people seem to care a lot about (and sometimes not even mistakes, given that the same treatment is occasionally given to perfectly correct turns of phrase due to misconceptions about grammar rules) do you think aren't actually important at all?

I'm looking for a book I read in middle school where people are factory farmed for their parts before they hit puberty by organic mech of some sort, but the protagonist escapes and is hunted but is able to hide in an abandoned (ship?) with some others and starts to fight back? For the life of me, my search skills are failing.

Ever since my diagnosis two years ago, I have had this as an ongoing conversation with my family. I always felt like there was very little accurate representation of ADHD in media. The few examples I could always think of were either very loosely coded as ADHD, or extreme stereotypes. I want to crowdsource some examples of ADHD representation in media, both good and bad.

Doug from Up: This is a common one that comes up a lot. I think it’s a really poor example. The only ADHD symptom is the squirrel joke they use a handful of times. It’s also (for my presentation at least) extremely inaccurate. Random things I see will indeed distract me, but Doug can come back from the conversation without a missed step. I think this one is extra harmful because it gives a false sense of how the ADHD brain works.

Dory from Finding Nemo: This is another common one people bring up. Dory’s intrusive and impulsive thoughts are much more accurate to my presentation, so it’s an improvement from Doug. I don’t like that she is often portrayed as stupid or careless. I’m not against a character with those traits, but with so few examples of ADHD in media, I think people may think it comes from the ADHD.

Evelyn Wang from Everything Everywhere All At Once: This example showed up recently on my Internet searches. I want to rewatch it again with the context of ADHD. I feel like it is probably a decent representation, but I can’t say for sure without a rewatch.

Percy Jackson: This is the only one on my list that is explicitly diagnosed with ADHD (and dyslexia and other issues). I will give them kudos for the explicit diagnosis, but I don’t think it’s a good representation. ADHD seems to just mean that he is bad at school. It seems that it has no impact on Percy outside of that. For my particular case, I was quite good in school, so it is inaccurate for me. I would be interested to hear if other people resonate more with it. Dyslexia seems to come up more in the books, so it may be a better representation for that.

Todd from Bojack Horsemen: I saved my personal favorite for last. I first watched Bojack Horsemen before my diagnosis, and ADHD wasn’t really on my mind. After my diagnosis, I realized how good of a portrayal Todd is. As a bonus, it is the only portrayal I have heard of that includes hyper focus (When Todd hyper focuses on writing the rock opera, and then the hyper focus switches to a video game). With the exception of the rock opera, I think I have had the same exact scenario play out in my own life. I had something I wanted to do, was able to focus on it, but was stolen away into a video game hyper focus.

Are there any other examples you have found?

Hello. I'm currently in the market for an Android tablet, not strictly for my personal usage, but for my family so there's one easily reachable touch screen computer around the house. The problems start with my requirements, which are... not exactly tablet market friendly:

• Available in France (and without overly high shipping costs)
• Long term manufacturer support so it isn't subject to suddenly become e-waste because they decided to stop providing updates after like 1 major Android release
• Ability to install an Android distribution that doesn't rely on Google apps such as LineageOS + microG
• Sufficient specs to use a web browser and play videos without issues.
• I'd like the model to be easy to repair in the same vein as the Fairphone but that's lower priority

The budget is best defined as "probably not enough" (I don't think I can afford to spend much more than ~400€). Given that I suspect from my initial search not yielding much that fitting all the requirements is impossible especially within that budget, do you have pointers on models that provide an acceptable compromise for what I'm looking for, or that somehow do match all the criteria?

Hilariously, the closest candidate so far within budget seems to be... The Google Pixel tablet, which despite being a Google product has a fairly straightforward way to get an unGoogled ROM on it.

Soldering/electronics repair enthusiasts: I am in need of a soldering iron/station for electronics repair and wiring, preferred budget is under $150, perfection can raise the budget to $250.

First line of this post is all that's really needed if you just want to provide advice on what to buy (which is just fine, people don't need to know how a car works for me to explain that they probably just need a minivan).
Below is what I have gathered thus far if perhaps there's more that you'd like to know about what I've seen and perhaps misunderstood so far.

At present I have a no-name, non-adjustable, extremely basic soldering iron that is more fire hazard than anything and a Weller soldering gun that is obviously not meant for electronics and small wires. The iron has been good enough for the occasional need to solder a couple of wires together to get something broken back up and working, but is not something I'd use on anything critical.

It’s been about a month and a half since our big Kagi trial giveaway, which means most people are probably about halfway through their trial periods, so I figured we were due for a follow-up.

To those who started using it recently, what are your thoughts?

What do you like and dislike about Kagi?

Do you think you will continue your subscription past the end of the trial?

Note: I’m not affiliated with Kagi in any way besides being a happy customer myself. I’m asking this entirely out of curiosity.

SOLVED
Bit of a long shot here because this is one of those issues where I search for the problem and you get a sea of replies like "have you checked the settings?" or "have you tried changing HDMI cables".

I just got a brand new LG OLED TV and I'm happy, but I've been watching Arcane on it and I notice jarring changes in brightness through the episode.
I'm playing through a native app (Stremio) on WebOS and it's not the source file, I've tested the same file on two different monitors and it's fine.
I went through the settings and disabled every autocorrect and "boost" capability the TV has to try and diagnose it, and the first pass did seem to improve the rate of changes, but it still happens maybe once every 5 mins of watch time.
From what I can tell it seems to be picking up particular colour/brightness changes in the source (Arcane is full of then being so vivid) and when it does, it just changes the brightness of the whole display.
I'm no expert here, I'm also colour blind, so I won't categorically claim it is definitely brightness changing, it could be contract or colour, I'm not sure, but it looks like brightness because the whole picture gets darker or lighter.

I wondered if it was actually flip flopping between SDR and HDR which honestly, it might be. If it is I have no idea how to fix that, as the TV seems to have no option to enable or disable HDR on native apps.

Any advice, thoughts, things to try would be appreciated. I'm technically orientated but I don't really know much about changing picture settings to be honest, I tend to pick the most basic/neutral setting and leave it like that.

Edit: I've dug out the old 4k firestick as suggested and don't get the flickering at all through that. Also running through the guide below helped make the picture look even better! Thanks everyone!
I might yet grab the service remote though and see if I can make the native apps work, then I can retire the firestick for good.

Heads up: the following is abnormally wordy even by my standards, and I'm the kind of person who regularly runs into the Discord character limit by accident despite the Nitro subscription increasing it. The underlying context is a set of two videos that by themselves reach almost 3 hours of runtime. I tried to sum up some of the main points enough that you don't strictly need to have watched the videos to follow while also not needing to slog through a play by play of the same video I recommended you to watch if you did. While I believe the subject is interesting, I fully understand if you don't have the time to dedicate to this. If you do and weren't scared away by the size of the scroll bar, feel free to read on.

Context

This all starts with the seemingly straightforward question in the title: How many Super Mario games are there? You would think it would be easy to answer given that this series is so massively impactful in video game history that to many it defines what a video game is. The truth, like most things, is a lot more complicated. jan Misali, who you might also know for their Conlang Critic series and various video essays on other deceptively complex subjects they find interesting, gathered data through a survey to collect people's answers to that question, and made a video on the subject. The video is about 45 minutes long, and that's only because they deliberately cut it short. The discussion that sparked from this video eventually led to them starting another survey at a larger scale with a revised methodology, culminating to a sequel to the previous video, this time with a two hours runtime, and it, too, was cut short. If you have the time to set aside for this, I would greatly recommend watching both videos as they're very insightful and most of what I have to say is commentary to these two videos (and doesn't even come close to covering as much as the videos themselves do).

What question are we even asking here?

Like all good debates on the internet, it starts with an ambiguity issue: What is a "Super Mario game"? In simpler cases, a video game series can be defined as the first game and its sequels and that's enough to establish an uncontroversial list. Things get more complicated when we look at an entire franchise especially one as massive as the Mario franchise, which contains a ton of video games, an even bigger pile of non-video game media... and works that blur the line. You can probably see where this is going, but I'll get back to that particular can of worms later. Focusing on the video games, among the entire franchise, the question focuses on the "mainline" series. That is what jan Misali refers to as the "Super Mario" series, distinguishing them from spinoffs and other games that are part of the franchise. You'll note that I specified "what jan Misali refers to as the "Super Mario" series", not "what the "Super Mario" series is".

Multiple-choice confusion

Using the video runtime as a yardstick, we are 2 minutes into the first part, and there is already a binary tree's worth of debate, and it's only getting bigger from here: the existence of a mainline series as a separate entity from the overall Mario franchise is commonly accepted, but not unanimously. Among those who do agree, there is disagreement on the scope of the mainline series (with how gargantuan the franchise itself is, even the spinoffs have their own spinoffs, and it would be a perfectly reasonable take to consider some or all of them, such as the Mario Kart games, as a core part of the series). Among those who agree on the scope, there is disagreement over what the first game of the series is (do we start at Super Mario Bros? Mario Bros? Donkey Kong? The Game & Watch series?). In order to keep the video at 45 minutes and not 45 hours, jan Misali picks one definition they feel is reasonable among others: the Super Mario series is one distinct series among others in the franchise, made up of Super Mario Bros. on the NES and its sequels, which are mostly platformer games. With this baseline established (even if the survey doesn't 100% agree), how do we figure out which of all the Mario games are the sequels to SMB1? There are many methods to go about this... And not only none of them converge to a single answer, they all diverge in different ways. Let's start with the most direct source of data jan Misali had access to as a direct result of the process of making the videos: the surveys.

The one thing we can agree on is that no one agrees

jan Misali isn't just presenting their own thoughts on the matter, they're also analyzing the data gathered from a survey they made before recording both videos. The first one merely presented you with a premade list of games and asked you which of them you considered to be a Super Mario games, and the second one goes more in depth but still had the same overall goal. If there was any sort of consensus (assuming the survey wasn't sabotaged or otherwise flawed enough to distort the ability to interpret the data to the point of uselessness), you could derive the broadly accepted list of Super Mario games from looking at the most common answers to the survey, right?

If you interpret "the most common answer" as "which games people overwhelmingly (>95%) agree are part of the series", the survey gives us Super Mario Bros, Super Mario bros 3, and Super Mario World (by the time of the second video, the second survey added Super Mario 64 to the list, as well as Super Mario Bros. Wonder)... which almost anyone who has an opinion on the subject would agree is a grossly incomplete list. If you interpret "the most common answer" as "which is the list that the most people agreed is the full list of the Super Mario series", you end up with a much more complete list of 18 games which by definition is what the highest percentage of people answering the survey agree on. You could consider it the survey's overall answer to the question... except the percentage in question is less than 2% (although in the second survey analyzed in the second video, this same list, with the at the time newly released Super Mario Bros. Wonder added, actually stood at just above 5%. Closer, but still very much a minority group within the survey). Almost everyone who answered still disagree to some degree with that answer. While there is plenty of insight to be gained from the data (including regarding the limitations of the survey itself), it also conclusively establishes that public opinion (or at least in jan Misali's audience) doesn't have a truly agreed upon answer to this question.

Hang on, let me call my uncle at Nintendo

So, we have an answer, but not the answer, and even worse (...or better, if you like analyzing seemingly trivial arguments that secretly hide a rabbit hole of semantics, linguistics and cognitive science) the only thing we can say about "the" answer is that it cannot exist. So let's try finding more answers by going from another angle. If we learned anything from politics, it's that an answer derived from polls can absolutely be wrong, so it makes sense to consider that there is an authoritative source that can give a definitive answer over public opinion. The most obvious lead would be Nintendo itself, the owner of the IP... except that instantly fizzles out because while Nintendo does provide a list of mainline Super Mario games on their website, the one they give you isn't the same depending on whether you ask Nintendo of America or Nintendo of Japan. We can also look at what Wikipedia deems to be the list of Super Mario games, which naturally is different from both Nintendo US and Nintendo JP's list, and on top of that is arguably inconsistent with itself: the page's release timeline lists Bowser's Fury as an entry like the others, but the infobox that redirects to the various Mario games under the "main games" section lists it between parentheses as a sub-entry to Super Mario 3D World, the same way it lists New Super Luigi U as a sub-entry to New Super Mario Bros U which the release timeline in turn omits completely. There are rational reasons to do it this way which I won't go into since jan Misali explains it in the videos themselves, but technically that means Wikipedia doesn't have an internal consensus either. The Super Mario wiki, while unaffiliated with Nintendo, is also a good candidate for an authoritative source, which gives you another, different, answer. We could go on, but let's stop here and conclude that, once again, there is no agreed answer.

Give me your argument and I'll tell you why we're both wrong

Neither polling the public nor going by the authoritative sources have given a concrete answer, which leaves us in front of the semantic rubble trying to piece back a coherent understanding of the Super Mario series. Not to try and find the Correct™ answer, we've already established there isn't one, but it would give us valuable insight as to why no one can agree to a specific answer in the first place. jan Misali spreads this approach over both videos as they give their reasoning from various angles. They deliberately haven't gone over this exhaustively, and neither will I (not that I would be able to), but I do have thoughts I'd like to share based on their observations... Which yes, means I've written 1,5k words establishing the base around the videos I want to talk about despite operating under the assumption the reader has already watched them before going over my own thoughts. I'm certain I could have been more concise, but I felt this was necessary so that this post could stand as a coherent chain of reasoning and not a completely disjointed rambling that won't make sense to anyone who hasn't made the significant time investment that fully watching the video essays represents, and still not make sense to most who did (and if I misunderstood something critical, someone reading this can point it out from my attempt to lay out the context rather than after 12 confused replies down the thread). I'll try and tie my thoughts together in broader parts with increasingly silly titles.

"Home console purism"

I will start by addressing this not because it's the most important (if anything it's the least important detail I have something to say about) but because it lets me introduce a talking point I'll reuse later. Something that jan Misali mentions early on is what they call "home console purism", defining it as the belief that the mainline Mario series, as a rule, cannot include handheld games. While they don't explicitly state this at any point nor do I have a specific reason to believe implying it was their intention, it somewhat came off to me like bringing it up as a flawed argument just to dismiss it, especially after it was brought up again regarding Super Mario Run as a comparison to the belief that mobile games "don't count". If you leave it at that, I absolutely agree that it's silly to exclude a video game for that reason, especially with the Switch blurring the line. After thinking about it, though, while I'd still disagree with using it as a reason to exclude a video game from a series in this specific case, I think it deserves to be looked at in more detail.

Gatekeeping or shifting perspective?

The least charitable interpretation of this argument is that handheld and mobile games are deemed to not be worthy of being included alongside the "real" games released on home consoles or PC, usually with a side of implying that you're a "fake" gamer if you play them (not to mention the higher layer argument from the same basis that also excludes any console games, leaving only PCs as the "true" gaming platform and everything else as lesser toys for kids) which can safely be dismissed as elitist gatekeeping. However, from a perspective of classifying games within a series, there is a much more sensible way to approach this argument.

The "Call of Duty on the DS" problem

Nowadays, between the handheld PCs like the Steam Deck which can give desktop PCs a run for their money in terms of specs and the Nintendo Switch that refuses to be classified as a dedicated home console or handheld, the distinction would look a lot sillier, but the handheld game market used to be closer to an isolated sub-segment of the overall video games market than a fully integrated part of it. Disregarding the whole "exclusive releases" circus, faithfully porting a PC game to a home console was generally agreed to be feasible. Handheld consoles were another matter entirely. Most (all? was there a handheld notable for outperforming contemporary home consoles?) of the time, handheld consoles had vastly inferior specs to contemporary home consoles and computers making faithful ports of a given game to them a pipe dream if the game was too resource intensive, and a tendency to have a much more varied control scheme than you'd expect from home consoles, sometimes to the point of "porting" an existing game requiring restarting the game design process from scratch.

You've gotta hand it to the Need For Speed DS game devs, they certainly tried to make them similar to the other platforms

Where this starts mattering in this context is what this means for releases within an individual game series, and how game studios would treat developing a given entry for each system. Some just stuck to only home consoles or handhelds, some would aim for the best compromise between having a unified experience for a given game no matter which device you were playing it on and leveraging a specific console's unique features, some would confusingly release games under the same title on different platforms but actually make them completely different games (even Nintendo themselves are guilty of it!), and, most relevantly, some would deliberately make handheld games stand out from the home console games as a sub-series.

Why this doesn't really matter here, but the point I'm building up to does

This outlook makes a lot less sense if you look at the Super Mario series in a vacuum, which, as a mainly platformer series, struggles a lot less with making a handheld release that convincingly fits the vibe of the home console releases than other genres might (in no small part because designing a 2D game makes just as much sense as it does in 3D for this genre, making the specs gap between handheld and home consoles a lot less important), and as a first party franchise, Nintendo isn't going to be blindsided by a new console's weird features like a third party studio might since they're the ones making the console... But if you consider the market in general across the years, siloing the home and handheld side of a given series as two separate entities, with the home console being granted the "mainline series" role was a very real phenomenon. If you start from this premise and look at the Super Mario series which debuted on the NES, it makes sense to apply the same framework and say "None of the handheld games are part of the Super Mario series, they're part of their own series". I would still disagree, but it's definitely a lot more sensible to base it on past observations of the market than gatekeeping.

The Super Mario release timeline needs its own timeline

To elaborate, I would find this argument a lot more convincing back when the DS (which was so atypical that even porting a game from another handheld to the DS' bespoke dual screen and touch screen setup was a non trivial affair, let alone the home consoles) was the current-gen Nintendo handheld than now where the Switch 2 (a console with a mostly conventional control scheme and powerful enough that porting an arbitrary PC/home console game to it without visibly changing anything about the game makes just as make sense as any other platform) is about to come out. And with this I'm finally arriving to the talking point I wanted to introduce. If the evolution of the broader market can affect the validity of someone's criteria to determine which games are (or aren't) part of the Super Mario series, then we can generalize that to the following: A game can be (or no longer be) considered part of a series depending on when you ask even if absolutely nothing has changed about the game in isolation.

Sure they're all a Mario game, but which one is THE Mario game?

One thing that jan Misali picked up on from the original survey is a major ambiguity that made answering (and therefore interpreting the resulting data) harder is the remakes, remasters, enhanced versions with their own release, and other related weirder cases. These games range from almost completely identical to previous releases to non-controversially a variant of the same title but still different enough to provide an experience meaningfully separate from the original title, to different enough they're arguably not the same game, adding a dimension to the answer that makes enforcing a flat "yes" or "no" choice less useful. This is why the survey that led to the second video made it possible to call an entry a "mainline Super Mario game", a "major spinoff", a "minor spinoff", "not canon" and finally "not a Mario game" (and "unsure", just in case) at the same time as you answer whether you think the title is a distinct entry in the series (or you're unsure), to be able to clarify the general sentiment that if a game saw more than one release under different versions, they can all be acknowledged as an incarnation of that game without making each individual release an entry to the mainline Super Mario series of its own. This allowed the answers to be more nuanced, but this by itself doesn't help answering the original concern: if multiple releases can all be the same game, and that game is part of the series, can more than one of these releases be called a "distinct" entry? If you think there can't, which one is it? And this last question is what I'm going to focus on for my next thought.

Mario games are temporary but Doom is Eternal

Forced reference aside, let's look at other franchises for comparison. Doom Eternal, originally released on PC in March 2020, got a Switch port later in December that year. Thanks to skillful optimization allowing it to somehow run on glorified 2015 Android tablet hardware, this port is faithful enough that I don't think it would be controversial to call it the same game as the PC release compared to, for example, The Sims 2, where while a game named The Sims 2 was released on the Nintendo DS, it is so radically different from the PC release that I would consider it an entirely separate game (and for that matter not a part of the mainline Sims series, but I'll put away that thought before I completely lose the plot). If I asked "Between the PC and the Switch release of Doom Eternal, which is the main release?" and we assume "both" isn't considered a valid answer (which is itself debatable) I would expect the natural answer to be the PC release simply because out of two functionally equivalent releases of the same game, the PC release came first. Similarly, if we consider, as a general rule, that there exists one, and only one, release of a given game that embodies a distinct entry in the mainline Super Mario series, with any other release not counting (while still accepting that they're a version of that game), the earliest release being the distinct entry makes intuitive sense. After all, they're the original version of the game. If it could be of the future ones it would mean a release could stop being the distinct entry in a mainline series despite nothing having changed about the release itself, which doesn't make sense... right?

What's in a name?

Time to bring up that one point from earlier: there's nothing inherently preventing the status of a game release as a mainline series entry from being affected by external factors. Quick disambiguation note: I've been using the word "release" in the context of video games being made available for purchase, but the word "release" can also be used to mean a software update, no matter how minor. Video games also being software, this distinction is now going to matter. To avoid confusion, I will only use the word "release" to mean a game being made available to purchase and refer to a new software version for an already released game as an "update". With this cleared up: before internet connection became a standard feature in consoles, the general expectation was that releasing a game meant permanently locking down the state of its software. Game companies would not want to update a game between releases and end up with different versions of a physical game in circulation if they can't ensure that the customers would get the most recently updated copies as it would inevitably confuse players, so it would only be considered for truly major issues that weren't caught in time for the release. As broadband internet came into the picture, it suddenly became a lot less important to make sure the game stayed the same after release as you could simply get the customer to upgrade their game over the Internet. This quickly became standard operating procedure for PC games, with consoles catching up a bit later, including Nintendo's. And with it, came the practice of content updates over the lifecycle of a game before the next release.

Dragonborn... reborn?

Even if the individual updates don't change the game to a meaningful degree from one update to the next, as they pile up you can eventually end up with a wildly different game than what it was when it originally released, even if it's supposed to be the same entry into its series. If you agree that the release you accept as the distinct entry of its mainline series can change its characteristics over time, wouldn't it make sense to also agree that which release of a game you consider to be the distinct entry of the mainline series can also change over time? Let's turn to another series as an example: The Elder Scrolls, and specifically Skyrim which is infamous for its amount of re-releases. It is at the time of writing the latest game in its series, and has been since 2011... but is the by now almost 15 years old original release really still the main entry in the Elder Scrolls mainline series? As far as Steam is concerned, the game you can purchase if you search for Skyrim on its store isn't the original release, nor is it even the Legendary Edition release from 2013, but the Special Edition from 2016 (while also letting you buy the Anniversary Edition as a DLC to the Special Edition). With the original release no longer being on sale and the more recent Anniversary Edition being classified as a DLC rather than a "proper" release, it would make sense for me to call SE the "distinct" entry representing Skyrim in The Elder Scrolls over the original release. Is there an instance of this happening in the Super Mario series? It would be a huge stretch, but you could argue (although frankly I wouldn't agree) that Super Mario 64 isn't a distinct entry in the Super Mario series because you consider the Super Mario 64 DS remake to be the "true" entry in the series. Sure, claiming that Super Mario 64, the first Mario 3D platformer isn't a mainline Super Mario game sounds ludicrous, but so does "Skyrim (2011) isn't a mainline Elder Scrolls Game but Skyrim Special Edition is" and I did consider it a plausible argument. A slightly less unhinged instance would be to consider New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe to be the representative entry in the mainline series over New Super Mario Bros. U.

Strictly defined criteria and their pitfalls or: why is a sweater a Super Mario game?

By this point I've highlighted ambiguities over the meaning of pretty much word in the question "How many Super Mario games are there?".

• How many: No consensus on the number of games in the series, let alone which ones they are
• Super Mario: No consensus on what makes an individual game part of the series
• are there (present tense): No guarantee that the list can stay consistent with regards to time, in either direction

There is one left to achieve total semantic obliteration: games. This was inevitable, really. How could you overanalyze this question and not bring up nitpicking over the meaning of the term "video game" itself? jan Misali has already done most of the work for me, as part of the second video involves them mentioning that attempting to derive an appropriate list of mainline Super Mario game solely from an objective definition while is doomed to fail. Whatever the approach, you will always be working with an unstated semantic "guardrail" of some sort that cannot be comprehensively worded into the definition. The first basic example they give is "Anything with 'Super' in the title is part of the Super Mario series." Under any reasonable context we know what is meant by "anything" but without it, this definition includes infinitely many things that very obviously aren't Super Mario games. But even progressively narrowing it down to something that sounds sensible will still leave a semantic hole that includes something absurd. This culminates into the following bit:

So, maybe you can use this "has Super in the title" method as a starting point and add more stuff to it until it becomes a useful definition. And, in the comments from part 1, many people have tried to do exactly that. And very often what they come up with something like: "The Super Mario series consists of the games developed by Nintendo for Nintendo consoles that have 'Super Mario' in the title, excluding RPGs, party games, Mario Kart, sports games, and reissues of previously released Super Mario games."

At which point jan Misali unleashes their inner Diogenes and reveals what I've been hinting at in the header: Behold, a man mainline Super Mario game! However, while I'm all for leveraging semantic technicalities for the sake of comedy, I think this is a part where jan Misali loses the plot a bit. Even accounting for a VERY permissive understanding of what a video game is, I don't think I am a teacher: Super Mario Sweater plausibly counts as one. Obviously knowing the incoming storm in the comment section, they supplied the following definition for a video game: "interactive software with a visual display for the purpose of entertainment". I agree that if you accept that's what a video game is, I am a teacher: Super Mario Sweater is in fact a video game. What I don't agree with is that the definition itself is accurate enough.

My favorite video game is Tildes

jan Misali's last argument in the video in favor of IaaT:SMS being a video game is regarding the value of knitting as entertainment, which I'm not disputing, but that's not where I believe the issue with this definition is in the first place. IaaT:SMS does have interactivity, yes, and it was designed for the purpose of entertainment, but to me that is not enough to constitute a video game. For it to be one, the interactivity needs to be a necessary part of the entertainment, which isn't the case here. The interactive part, inputting your measurements, choosing a file and scrolling through the selected knitting pattern isn't the entertaining part. The entertaining part, which is knitting a sweater, requires none of the interactivity provided by the software; a completely non interactive slideshow of the various patterns would accomplish the goal just as well. And, while this was ultimately just part of jan Misali's overall point that you cannot bolt together a purely objective definition without relying on some level of unstated common sense, I think that point would have been better served by highlighting the holes in the provided definition of a video game itself than taking it at face value to poke a hole in the definition of the Super Mario series that relied on in the first place (not that this is even required, as jan Misali proceeds to show more examples of games that clearly wouldn't be argued in good faith by anyone to be part of the mainline series and are still noncontroversially video games, and then goes on to explore the ambiguities in pretty much every other part of the definition). You know what else counts as a video game under that definition?

• mspaint.exe
• Arch Linux
• Tildes
• Any movie DVD that features a menu
• BonziBuddy
• The Youtube video player
• The onboard widget display of the Logitech G510 keyboard
• Kangjun Heo's Rensenware
• A chat interface with an LLM whose system prompt instructed it to entertain the user without any further elaboration
• The firmware running on my pair of wireless earbuds (a LED counts as "visual display", right?)
• Twitch chat
• The YouAreAnIdiot prank website
• The Times Square ad billboards (yes, it's interactive, even if the controls are atypical)

You will note that even with my caveat, you could still argue that a lot of these still fit this alleged definition of a video game, so whatever a video game is, it's not just that. Instead of continuing this list and losing the plot myself for the second time in the process of writing this, I will point out that jan Misali's second video has been classified under the "I am a Teacher: Super Mario Sweater" game category, meaning that apparently Google agrees that this is in fact a video game. Shows what I know.

Video killed the Mario star

And of course, you can't cover debating what's a video game without also covering the video part. When people ask "how many Mario games are there", the video game part is implied, but there is definitely an argument to be made that being a video game is not necessarily a prerequisite to be part of the mainline Mario series, especially if you hold the belief that the Game & Watch games aren't actually video games (I personally do think they are, but it's debatable enough for jan Misali to not be fully sure, at the very least) but are still significant enough to be part of the mainline series (there is a Super Mario Bros. game in there, after all, and it's even a platformer!). This can also be further argued to include other media that aren't even games (if the NieR series can include stage plays, what's preventing the Super Mario series from including, say, its licensed movie?), though I personally don't have any non-video game candidate in mind to argue in good faith that they should be part of the series.

413 Payload Too Large

At this point I don't think I have much else to add that isn't basically paraphrasing jan Misali themselves, so I'll wrap up this post so I don't have to spend another day adding to it and proofreading, and I'm fairly confident that between it and all the other interesting points the video raised that I haven't mentioned there will be more than enough jumping points for discussion (and if I forgot something I wanted to add, I can always do that later). What are your thoughts on this? _{And did you realize before I pointed it out that I wrote over 5k words about the question without giving my own answer at any point?}

Recently I did an update on my Macbook and it started showing alerts about Apple Intelligence. I've heard a little bit of marketing about this but I haven't really spent any time trying to figure out if it is just hype. Well, I've tried it a few times and I'm completely underwhelmed.
One of marketed features is that Siri is much improved. That would be nice, I thought, because there are only a few use cases like "Set an Alarm" where Siri could ever do anything besides a google search.

So there are two times recently I tried to use this improved Siri to solve a problem. My background using AI: I use Copilot at work. I get mixed results for it, but it does use my local context (open files etc) and is able to ask follow up questions if my prompt is too vague.

First Use Case: I want to solve a technical problem on my laptop

• My Prompt: "Can you help me fix Discord so that audio is shared when I share a video stream"
• My Expectation: Maybe an AI summary of the cause of the issue. Maybe open up system settings or open up Discord or give an explanation of why this is a technical problem on Macs.
• Actual Siri Response: Does an internet search and shows some links. Essentially just did a google search which I could have done by typing the same prompt in a browser.

Second Use case: I want help finding a file on my laptop

In this case, I made a summary of my finances on my laptop a few months ago. I can't remember what I named the file or what kind of file it was. Maybe a spreadsheet? I know it was on my local computer.

• My 1st Prompt: Can you help me find a specific file on my computer
• My Expectation: Maybe some follow up questions where it asks me for a date range or something that is inside the file. Yes, I know that I can do this in Finder but I want Apple Intelligence to save me a few minutes.
• Siri: Shows the result of a web search on how to find files on a computer. The first few results are for Microsoft Windows
• 2nd Prompt: Can you help me find a specific file on my mac
• Siri: Tells me to use Command-space and use the search

In both cases, Siri just acted like a shortcut to a google search. It didn't even recognize that I was asking the question on a Mac. This is same as Siri has always been. I assume that it can still figure out to set a timer and do a few things, but it doesn't seem to be working in a way I would expect an AI to work at all.

So I've hit on this a bit before here, but it's been a while—I stopped looking for jobs last summer & spent the rest of 2024 getting some things sorted in my own head about what I actually wanted to be doing, what I valued, and why I wanted to change anything in the first place. I love my job, not just because it's remote but honestly mostly because it's remote, but it does not pay enough & may not for a long time, so I have sort of collected together online weekend/evening/contractor part-time gigs on top, which altogether come out to around 90k. After all my soul-searching (& getting on the millenial ADHD meds train, whew), I'd reeeeally love to focus all of that into one job instead, as the downfall of the gig economy approach is not just the time investment required, it's that there's no opportunity for advancement—if I could keep one or two side hustles going, great, but that way I'd be free to let them go as needed as well, which would be a huge relief.

So that's the source for my very specific number; I would of course take more money lol.

I have experience in: adult training/instruction, CRM management, writing/editing, process analysis/efficiency/optimization, video/content creation (doesn't really fit with the rest but my resume is kind of nuts unfortunately)

I am really good at: soft skills/written & verbal communication, IT support, learning new things real quick but also very thoroughly & being able to teach them to others, making things work better/faster

I have degrees in: library science/research, education (no comp sci : / feel like that was my big mistake career path-wise, I've tried some online options more recently & am currently making headway with claude as a coding partner lol).

The real sticking point is I am currently remote & would have to make way more than 90k to be willing to go back to an office every day. My current job was an out-of-left-field career move that I wouldn't have even guessed existed, so I am open to literally any suggestions.

Hey - I'm wondering if we've got any real-life recommendations for AI's out there?

I'm not looking for a list of AI's - they're everywhere! What I'm interested in is whether and how anyone here has started to use an AI on a regular basis to the extent that you consider it genuinely useful now?

For example,

• At work with have a ChatGPT3 wrapped app in Slack which I use quite often to improve summaries and formal comms I write. I think everyone knows it's basically good at that.
• I use Pi.ai as a "sympathetic" and filtered advisor for more sensitive topics relating to mental health that I have to deal with - it's useful insofar as I'm less worried about hallucinations or bad output when I'm using it. This might be misplaced confidence to be fair, but I've not had a bad experience with it so far.
• I use ChatGPT built into Apple Intelligence more and more since getting a device capable of using it. I think the use case I'm most warming to is that "search" is less and less useful nowadays because of blog spam and assumed corrections to my searches. I can use ChatGPT as a replacement to search in a growing number of use cases.

What I'm wondering about:

• Gamma.app promises to be a .ppt replacement via AI. I'm skeptical. I have to summarise and present a lot of content at work. Having a means of an AI doing some of the lifting here would be incredible, but I remain unconvinced.

Any sites/services you use regularly and effectively that you'd recommend?

Hey all!

So I was thinking of how when looking at privacy, having a platform being a walled garden (i.e. data not being found on search engines) can feel like a worse experience for what is regarded as the open internet.

I don't have a solid solution for this. So my question to you is,

How do you respect privacy while sharing content for search engines on a platform?

Game designers of tildes, lend me your aid.

My BIL, the life-insurance salesman, has decided to splurge on this year's family reunion and he is renting a castle in SW Ireland next summer. I have been given the task of designing and running a murder-mystery game on one night for the ~20 people who will be staying there. Salient facts:

I refer to my inlaws as the barking and snapping (Irish surname)'s. Hilarious but sarcastic to a fault. They have little patience for depth or lore or much historical detail. This will most successfully be a game of nasty betrayals and sudden twists and turns.

There's something like 18 rooms in the castle, with extensive grounds. But alas we will be there at the beginning of July so there will most likely be a lack of atmospheric ground fog. I love a good outdoor setting, so I will most likely try to get people running through the woods and across the lawns.

The family loves their games and takes them seriously but I figure this shouldn't last more than a couple hours or they will lose focus.

I haven't conducted one of these before but I have plenty of relevant experience. I want to keep it simple with a streamlined and elegant ruleset... but it's important to also find a moment somewhere near the end to scare the living shit out of all of them.

What I have so far: Discovering the Dead Body kicks it off. A couple obvious clues and a couple less-obvious ones will get people haring off into different rooms.

Each "player" has two modes. If the lighting is normal then they are playing as themselves and actively searching for the killer. If the lighting, however, is blacklight and the person within wears a black veil then they are ghosts, and must share a clue from a list on a card. All players will be ghosts at some point, including the Dead Body. If they enter a room with blacklight, on goes the veil.

I want to incorporate the history of the locale, as well as that of deeper legends. I mean, it's fucking Ireland. But I don't want the Disney version. One of my most successful history videos is about ancient Ireland so I'd love to incorporate something of the actual historical record instead of just a bunch of Celtic fantasy bullshit.

Some will be drunk, some sober. All will be barking and snapping. Piling on some poor defenseless unfortunate (usually one of the younger aunts or uncles or cousins) is their favorite entertainment. Subplots that subvert that bullying dynamic are also welcome.

Have any of you created an experience like this? How did you approach it? What kinds of ideas does it inspire in you?

So bit more than one month ago my very old Microsoft Sidewinder X4 keyboard broke the membrane on the 'A' key, meaning it was effectively kaput. I decided that I wanted to try a mechanical.

The Search

My use-cases are as follows, in the order of importance:

1. Gaming
2. Programming
3. General typing

These were the first requirements I settled on, based on my limited knowledge of mechanical keyboards:

• ISO nordic layout
• Full size: Because I make heavy use of both numpad and the insert-delete-home-end-page island of keys. Whatever it is called. I have zero interest in compromising on the standard layout.
• Nice to have: Metal body
• Nice to have: General high-quality
• Nice to have: Wireless, but only if 2.4Gz.
• Nice to have: Tactile switches
• Nice to have: Backlit keys
• Nice to have: Simple elegant aesthetic. I especially want to avoid typical gamer aesthetic.
• Budget basically unlimited

With these requirements I eventually settled on Keychron Q6 Max with Jupiter Brown. But just before ordering one, I started thinking about the height of the keys on a normal old-school mechanical.
I don't remember when I have last used one, all my recent keyboard had been modern low-profile so I didn't have a reference for what I was buying other than images.
I started reading about wrist problems from keyboard height and the recommendation of a wrist rest. I looked at the Keychron options and saw that they only had rests that were completely detached from the keyboard.
Thing is that I move my keyboard around my desk a lot, so I figured that having a wrist-rest that was not attached would become an annoyance.
After this I decided to just stick to what I am used to and added another requirement:

• Low-profile

Unfortunately when you set requirements for 100%, ISO, and low-profile, then the otherwise extensive Keychron catalogue becomes super limited. So I started looking elsewhere.
At the time there was a new post about a search engine on the /r/MechanicalKeyboards front page.
Using this I discovered the Cherry MX 10.0N. This seemed like a good deal. High quality all-metal body.
The only real sticking point was that the switches are linear with very short actuation, but I liked the look of this keyboard so much that I decided I could probably learn to live with it.

The review

The keyboard looks great in person. The all-metal body feels very solid and high-quality. It's got good heft and sticks to the table. The entire board is very thin and feels good to rest on.
The keys also feel high quality with minimal wobbling, and long keys sound and feel the same whether pressed on the edge or in the middle.

That's all the good stuff. Now on to the less good.

The foot

The adjustable foot in the back has no real positions. Meaning that there is no point in adjusting it where it will click in place and stay there, and it is under constant spring pressure to return to the stowed position. This means that the only thing keeping the extended foot in place is the weight of the keyboard. As mentioned I move my keyboard around frequently, and this means that everytime I move it I have to readjust the foot.
Additionally, it's highest position is sort of a balancing point, meaning that it you are a bit off, or accidentally push the keyboard a bit in this position, then the foot will suddenly collapse.
It's a minor annoyance, but one that is unique to this keyboard since I don't see this kind of foot design anywhere else. Otherwise the full-length metal foot is really nice, if only they had added proper click positions in its travel.

The switches

As mentioned, these are linear with very short actuation. CHERRY MX LOW PROFILE RGB SPEED switches to be specific. My first thought when trying to type with these was "Oh my god I hate this, how can some prefer this?!".
Constant mistyping was the name of the game. I was so used to being able to slightly miss a key, but still only actuate the intended. But that doesn't fly with this keyboard. If you depress any key even the slightest, it WILL actuate.
For gaming I first didn't understand why I sometimes kept jumping. I eventually figured out its because the mere weight of my thumb resting on the spacebar can be enough to actuate it sometimes.

After 1 month of regular usage, I can confidently say that my thoughts are now "Oh my god I hate this, how can some prefer this?!". Okay, I improved my typing somewhat to maybe half my mistyping. Gaming is still a pain, and I've had to regularly rest my thumb on the table instead to stop the sudden jumping.
Unfortunately this keyboard does not have hot-swappable switches, so there is no fixing it unless I want to buy a soldering iron and replace every single key, which I am not willing to.

Key spacing

So while the keyboard is technically 100%, Cherry has still designed it to be as compact as possible. One area where they have shaved off the length is the spacing between the main keys and the arrows keys and those above. Aswell as on the other side with the numpad.
I didn't know this prior to puchasing this keyboard, but apparently this spacing is essential for my muscle memory to be able to find those keys. The lack of spacing has meant that maybe 25% of the time I use them, I press the wrong key.

Overall

Now the issue with the switches and spacing is really an issue of preference. These aren’t quality issues. They were designed this way because some people like it (somehow). So if this keyboard looks interesting to you, and these preference design choices don't bother you, then I can only recommend the Cherry MX 10.0N. It really is a very high quality keyboard.

For me though, I just can't overlook these choices, so I have started looking for another keyboard again. I'm currently split between the Cherry KW X ULP and Logitech G915 X Lightspeed. None of them are full-metal body unfortunately. The cherry one seems to be the higher quality, but the the key caps remind me of laptops keys, which I really hate the feel of. Maybe I'm overreacting to it. The Logitech one is lower quality, but has all the the features that I would want. If you know of something better then please do leave a comment. I might reconsider my low-profile requirement. I'll give it at least another month before I become serious about switching again.

There are, in my extremely well-informed and unbiased opinion, not enough discussions about creative writing here on Tildes. Let’s change that. If this gets any meaningful amount of interest, I’ll make it a recurring thing (hence the date in the title—look at me, being all forward-thinking)! 😸

Your goal: Write a creative short story based on the prompt provided and post it in this thread.
Deadline: Per ISO 8601, 2025-01-21T23:59:59-05:00. Here’s a link to decode that mess for non-robots. Two-weeks-ish from the posting of this topic, basically.
Prize: A $20 Proton code! I’m sure all of you insufferable delightful privacy nerds advocates already know what Proton is, but here’s a link for completeness’s sake. It’s already purchased, so you don’t have to worry about any sudden impoverishment robbing you of that sweet, sweet encryption.

Your prompt: Write about someone who finds out their everyday routine has been secretly impactful to strangers in ways they never imagined.

I’m not one much for rules, so there aren’t many:

1. It must be creative writing. Creative fiction and creative non-fiction are both allowed, but if you’re going the second route, ensure you have a strong understanding of what creative non-fiction “feels” like.
2. There aren’t any hard length limits, but the internet tells me that “short story,” as a term, tends to be defined as 1,000–7,500 words. Because I always uncritically believe whatever the first search result I read on the internet tells me, you should probably aim for that range or it may count as a soft demerit. Also, only one submission per person.
3. The winner will be decided entirely by my personal whims, not comment votes. If I let it be decided by votes, the first commenter would basically auto-win, so we’re committing the greatest internet faux pas: relying on subjective judgment. 🙀 That having been said, I have varied tastes and high media literacy (if I may say so), so you should be fine. Probably. Giving a character my name and making her the best person in the world will definitely help your chances.
4. It must be written just for this thread; no previous work. I mean, I have no way of verifying that you didn’t start before now, I guess, but I’ll spot-check a sentence or two online to ensure originality.
5. If you post your full story as a comment in this thread, use collapsible formatting. Collapsible formatting keeps the thread navigable and respectful of others’ submissions. If your work relies on formatting beyond Tildes's simple markdown/images/et cetera, you’re allowed to host a document file/webpage somewhere and link it here, too.

Have at it, and I hope y’all have fun! All of you, whether you’re writing or not, are heavily encouraged to comment your feedback for posted work as a reply! Don’t let your fellow waves feel unappreciated. Putting yourself out there is scary.

(Also, yes, the survey is closed and it’s being actively processed. I promise we’re working on it! It takes time to make pictures and read 577 individual responses to a long survey.)

Edit: I have sent my link to three different people and I am out. Assuming they sign up. However, a lot of people also have invite links that commented. I guess a system would be for the invite-giver to reply to the comment of the invite-receiver to keep track?

—-

I received a link during Thanksgiving that lets me invite several people to a free trial of Kagi.

I tried convincing friends to try it out but most of them were not even interested in a free trial to a paid search engine.

If any of you are interested, please let me know.

I'll give you my link in private and you can register yourself to the free trial.

Posting just in case people are on the same boat as me.

--

Also, I hope it's appropriate to start a topic on this?
Let me know if this is frowned upon.