• Activity
  • Votes
  • Comments
  • New
  • All activity

    1. Three Cheers for Tildes (Android version) is open for alpha testing on the Google Play Store

      ~tildes Text 199 words
      Play Store link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes Alternatively, opt-in to testing via web:...

      Play Store link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

      Alternatively, opt-in to testing via web: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.talklittle.android.tildes

      Three Cheers for Tildes is an unofficial mobile app for Tildes, originally announced on Tildes' 5th birthday. The original announcement answers some basic questions about the app.

      It is still missing tons of features—hence "alpha"—but I felt it would be better to release something instead of waiting too long. Alpha version 0.5 is currently good enough for light use, to help check on Tildes once or twice a day. You can log in, vote, and comment.

      Notable missing features as of v0.5: Submitting topics; Markdown editor; In-app notifications; Comment labels; Sort options.

      The iOS version is underway and I am aiming to have it done by the October deadline achieved during our June fundraiser.

      Other iOS apps are already in beta testing: Backtick by @wababa and Surfboard by @earlsweatshirt.

      I'll try to keep this post updated with changelogs and known bugs.

      I don't have a public issue tracker for feature requests; feel free to leave requests in comments here. Thanks my Tildren!

      552 votes

    2. Thoughts on making Tildes groups more independent

      ~tildes.official Text 1318 words
      Hi. It's been a while since we had a ~tildes.official post, huh? There are a few things I want to discuss today about potential changes to the way that Tildes works. But first, a couple of other...

      Hi. It's been a while since we had a ~tildes.official post, huh? There are a few things I want to discuss today about potential changes to the way that Tildes works. But first, a couple of other things while I have your attention:

      Welcomes and thanks

      Welcome to all the new users! It's been great to see activity here increasing again lately, and I hope a lot of you end up enjoying the site and sticking around. It's really nice to read so many posts and emails from people who are excited about the principles behind Tildes. (And if you're someone who doesn't have an account yet and emailed to request an invite, I hope to get back to you relatively soon—there are about 2000 requests in the queue right now, and I'm trying to gradually work through them over the next week or so)

      I also want to say thanks to all the long-time users who have been welcoming and answering so many questions from the new people. As I mentioned the other day, my time to devote to Tildes recently is more limited, and it's been amazing to find that in practically every thread I open, people have already answered all of the questions (and often more comprehensively and eloquently than I would have). An extra special thank-you as well to @cfabbro and the other people who have been handling the demand for invites via Reddit, and to @mycketforvirrad, the unsung hero of the site who's constantly doing the thankless, almost-invisible job of re-tagging topics and making sure everything is organized.

      Reminders

      Also a couple of reminders and things to keep in mind:

      Whether you're an old or new user, if you haven't set up a recovery email address on your account, I highly recommend that you do. A lot of people who registered years ago are trying to come back this week and finding that they don't know their password any more, and it's much simpler if they did this. (The site itself really should encourage this more strongly—it's done in a secure and privacy-friendly way, and it's impossible for me to use it to send you any email because there's no way for me to see the actual address)

      It's already been brought up in various threads a lot, but I also want to emphasize that Tildes is not the same as Reddit, and is not trying to be a "replacement" for Reddit. There are a lot of similarities between the sites, but there are also a lot of differences. The site structures are different, many of the site mechanics here work differently, and the types and style of posts that are appropriate are not the same. Please try to look around at the site and the docs and get a feel for the place, don't assume that things will work the same way here as they do somewhere else (or that they should).

      One other aspect that's different between the two sites that's coming up a lot is that Tildes does not have user-created groups, and the groups aren't "owned" or run by specific users. Currently, the only person with "true" moderation powers anywhere on the site (like the ability to remove topics and comments) is me. This isn't because I want to keep absolute control or anything like that, but Tildes has been very quiet for the last few years and more moderators haven't been necessary. If the activity stays at this level or keeps increasing, we will probably need to add more moderators soon. And related to that, the actual main topic that I wanted to talk about:

      Should we try separating the groups more?

      Even though Tildes has almost 30 groups, until now, it's really always just been one community. New users are automatically subscribed to all groups and need to manually unsubscribe if they don't want to see the topics from that group, and logged-out users see everything when they visit the homepage as well. Most users stay subscribed to almost everything, with only some of them unsubscribing from more-niche interests like ~anime.

      I've always intended to make the groups more independent, but the site's activity has generally been too low for that to be feasible. All of the groups needed to be able to reach all of the Tildes users, but there have been significant downsides to doing it this way.

      One of the main consequences (which is becoming more obvious over the last few days) is kind of ironic: by showing all groups to all users to increase activity across all of them, it actually discourages activity in any individual one. For example, I follow video game news closely, and it's currently a very busy time with tons of events and announcements. But I wouldn't want to post all of those announcements to ~games, because it would completely flood the site and annoy everyone.

      I think we should probably take advantage of this current high activity level to try moving the groups towards being more independent spaces. This would involve switching away from the current "opt-out" approach to an "opt-in" one, and would probably need updates to a few different sections of the site to support it.

      A lot of the new users have been asking to add new groups for things they're interested in (sometimes very specific, niche things), and this would allow us to try some of them out more easily to see if they'd be able to sustain themselves. One of the benefits of the groups+tags system here is that it's relatively easy to test something as a group, and if it doesn't work out, all of the posts can just be merged back into a "more comprehensive" group as a tag.

      I've also been receiving a decent number of messages from Reddit moderators that are investigating whether they will be able to migrate their community to a different platform. I've had to tell them that the current structure of Tildes wouldn't easily support it, but making the groups more independent would change that.

      So overall, I'm looking for general feedback about whether we should try this soon, and if there are any major concerns we should be careful about. I also have three specific questions I'd like input on, related to how it could be implemented:

      1. What should logged-out users see on the homepage? Just a list of links to individual groups, and they have to pick a specific one to see any posts?
      2. Should logged-in users still have a homepage made up of all their subscribed groups mixed together (Reddit-style), or should we lean further into the separation by requiring groups to be viewed individually (forum-style)? (I think I'd want the mixed style to be available long-term, but maybe starting without it would help establish the individuality more strongly?)
      3. How should we transition existing users over to the opt-in approach? Should we effectively treat everyone as a new user, and get them to select the groups they're interested in from scratch? Or should we do something like use their activity (voting, posting) to pre-subscribe them to some groups?

      Thanks, please let me know what you think. The current growth and activity is a great opportunity for us to try some new things on Tildes that would be able to move it forward, and I hope we can figure out ways to do it well. (And if it ends up not working, we can always change things back)

      I've also given 5 invites to every current user, so feel free to use those if you know anyone that would like to join: https://tildes.net/invite

      (Edit: and to set expectations, I'm not sure how much time I'll have to reply to anything substantially, but I'll absolutely be reading all the discussions)

      533 votes

    3. Looking for beta testers for my Tildes.net iOS app!

      ~tildes Ask
      Happy Friday everyone! I'm making a post to see if anyone wants to beta test my Tildes.net iOS app Backtick. Background I've been wanting to create a Reddit app for quite a while, and just when I...

      Happy Friday everyone! I'm making a post to see if anyone wants to beta test my Tildes.net iOS app Backtick.

      Background

      I've been wanting to create a Reddit app for quite a while, and just when I got started, the API change chaos happened. Thankfully, I remembered signing up for Tildes.net a few years ago and decided to pivot to make an app for this site instead! The app is still a work in progress, but I believe releasing early and getting as many eyes on it during development results in a better end product (and it's more fun for me 😊).

      Features

      Here are the current features of Backtick:

      • Light mode/dark mode
      • Login to Tildes.net (suports 2FA)
      • Front page feed with sorting support
      • View, vote, and comment on posts
      • Reply and vote on comments
      • Collapse comments
      • View notifications
      • Full markdown rendering
      • Text-to-speech for posts and comments

      Here is a video demo of the app in its current state (updated for v1.8.1): https://youtube.com/shorts/iukQJyJbtw8?feature=share

      I know there missing features, but as I mentioned before, I would love to get as many people in as early as possible to help shape Backtick's future.

      Testing

      If you're interested in testing the app as I continue to work on it during my free time you will need:

      • An iOS 16 device
      • TestFlight (Apple's testing app)

      You can access the beta here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/gNH18NE9. If you have any issues please DM me your Apple ID email and I will send you an invite manually.

      Thanks, everyone! Have a great weekend.
      - Ash

      Edit:
      Getting some great feedback! I'll be tracking bugs and potential features here if anyone is curious: https://chatter-brick-3d3.notion.site/Backtick-Tracker-888150b641ae4c0ab39dc0345783bc50?pvs=4

      Edit2:
      I created the Discord server to help facilitate better collaboration with those who wish to be more involved. It will be a place for discussion around potential features, bugs, and general chat. I will still be taking in feedback via TestFlight and Tildes.net, so it's perfectly fine if you don't want to join.
      Join here: https://discord.gg/aah7nkfpBY

      194 votes

    5. Tildes is still in alpha-testing. It’s an unfinished product. Set your expectations accordingly.

      ~tildes Text 703 words
      Someone mentioned elsewhere that they signed up for Tildes “years ago during the beta”. That reminded me: Tildes hasn’t reached beta-testing yet. Officially, Tildes is still in alpha-testing...

      Someone mentioned elsewhere that they signed up for Tildes “years ago during the beta”. That reminded me: Tildes hasn’t reached beta-testing yet.

      Officially, Tildes is still in alpha-testing phase.

      The login page says “Tildes is currently in invite-only alpha...” And the Contact page says “To request an invite to the Tildes alpha...”

      We’re still in alpha-testing. Alpha-testing of software usually happens on an incomplete product before it is released to the customer.

      This is a very important point. Tildes is not feature-complete yet: there are literally hundreds of feature requests yet to work on before Tildes will be what people want it to be – and even that list is far from complete. In Agile software development terms, Tildes is a minimum viable product, or, in other words, “a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development”.

      Tildes works as it is, but it’s a bare-bones forum: you can post, and comment… and that’s about it. It’s a proof of concept. There are a few minor tweaks here and there, which give the impression that Tildes is more complex than it is, but they’re misleading. There are plans to make Tildes a more complex website but, right now, most of that complexity of Tildes exists only in people’s imaginations (and there have been some very imaginative people contributing to that list of future features!).

      Most questions about “Why doesn’t Tildes do X?” or “Can Tildes do X?” can be answered simply by saying “Tildes is incomplete and X hasn’t been built yet.” There are some questions about missing features which can be answered by saying “Tildes was never intended to do X”, but those are far and away in the minority. Most flaws, drawbacks, and problems with Tildes exist because Tildes is still a proof of concept, rather than a finished product.

      It’s also worth noting that Tildes’ current feature set is absolutely not up to the task if the user base and site activity increase too quickly. There’s too much manual tinkering required at the moment to make things work properly: for one thing, there are no significant moderation tools on Tildes (that’s almost all done manually at the moment). There are still a lot of features yet to be built - and we don’t even know what some of those features are yet!

      To pre-empt the people who will rightly point out that Tildes is 5 years old: Tildes’ feature set was intended to grow gradually over time, in line with a gradual growth in users, activity, and the need for those features to exist. However, Tildes has not undergone much growth over the past few years, so the existing features were sufficient to manage the existing activity. Basically, the site didn’t need a lot of fancy features to handle the low traffic here.

      This sudden surge of new users might change that. But it will take time to build more features. That was always the intention, and it hasn’t changed now.

      Until then: Tildes is still in alpha-testing. It’s an unfinished product. Set your expectations accordingly.

      EDIT:

      If you're one of the many people who seem to be replying to this topic, saying "it's okay, I like this simple bare-bones site as it is"... then you're probably not part of my original intended audience for this topic. This topic was aimed at all the people who are arriving here, being taken aback at how simple Tildes is, and wondering where the advanced features are.

      However, we can still take the "set your expectations accordingly" message and apply it to you: "Tildes is an unfinished product, so you can expect it to change in the future. It won't be like this forever."

      Either way, "set your expectations accordingly" is the message here, whether you're expecting more features and not finding them, or whether you're expecting simplicity and enjoying what you see. Either way, you should know that things will change around here. Maybe slowly. Maybe quickly. Maybe they'll get better from your point of view. Maybe they'll get worse from your point of view. But, change they will.

      151 votes

    6. Tildes Userscript: Tildezy

      ~tildes Text 743 words
      Updated: June 29th 2023 Hello folks, Like many of the other people that have been around lately, I'm new to Tildes, I've been browsing it without an account since last Monday or so while waiting...

      Updated: June 29th 2023

      Hello folks,

      Like many of the other people that have been around lately, I'm new to Tildes, I've been browsing it without an account since last Monday or so while waiting for an email response (thanks @Deimos), and in that time I've been working on a little tool to add some QOL features I thought would make my experiences with the site feel better.

      I didn't plan on sharing it initially, because I didn't think I'd be able to get the javascript into a usable state, and I'm not fond of sharing my code in general, as I always get a big wave of impostor syndrome whenever I do, "What if they look at my messy code and see how silly I do some things", that sort of thing. But with Tildes I want to try to correct some of my internet behaviours, for years I've generally stayed as a lurker, never commenting or sharing content of my own, so, hello there, hopefully, I stick to my guns and you see more of me.

      Onto the script itself, currently, I've built five main features into it all of them being rather minor on their own, I did do bug testing on everything and couldn't find anything else, but if you notice anything please feel free to report it to me or post an issue on the repo. It's easy to miss bugs when you've only got one set of eyes.

      Tildezy Github

      The GitHub contains installation instructions if you've never used a userscript before, and contains some images showing off each feature described below.

      Comment Collapser The comment collapser was built because, with my shakey hands, I had a few times when I would click someone's name instead of the [-] beside it. With this feature *Triple* clicking anywhere on a comment, be it text or header, will collapse it as if you used the [-] button. It's set to 3 clicks as sometimes I double-click to begin copying a line and didn't want the conflict, but it can be changed to any amount of clicks on line 132

      https://github.com/TeJayH/Tildezy/blob/main/Tildezy.user.js#L132

      Group Stars/Favourites Allows you to click a ☆ beside each ~group on the Tildes homepage to *favourite* it, moving it to the top of the list. Supports as many or as few favourites as you'd wish.
      Scroll to Top Button Adds a button pinned in the top right of every Tildes thread that sends you back to the top of the page. No more scrolling or reaching for the home key
      Open Comments in New Tab Replaces the default function of a posts "x comments" to open the page in a new tab instead of the current tab
      User Colors This one is the thing that I made the entire script for, an entirely useless feature but one I love for silly reasons. Replaces the stock username color with a randomized one based on a hash made from the user's username. So everyone gets assigned their own color which will always be their color anywhere you see them. This one helps multi-person conversations flow better in my head
      New Comment Traveller Gives you navigation buttons either beside the Collapse Replies/Expand all buttons when scrolled up, or pinned in the top right when scrolled past those buttons. Navigation buttons jump quickly between each new comment in a thread.
      Markdown Buttons Adds a selection of various buttons under every comment box that automatically insert markdown for you. No more forgetting which bracket style goes first for a clickable URL.
      Settings Not really a *feature* on its own, but it exists. Adds a "Tildezy Settings" beside the Log In/Username button in the top right of the header, which opens a settings window to enable/disable any and all features of the script. Features can also be disabled by modifying lines 26-41 in the script, allowing you to hard toggle everything *including the settings itself* off should you wish.

      https://github.com/TeJayH/Tildezy/blob/main/Tildezy.user.js#L26-L41

      Hopefully, someone gets some use out of this with me, I look forward to chatting with you all.

      EDIT
      Refactored the code and added a new comment traveller feature based on some of the comments below.

      EDIT 2
      Up to 1.3.0, we've got markdown buttons now, see comment explaining the change or check out the github readme

      120 votes

    7. Three Cheers for Tildes: App updates and feedback (March 2024)

      ~tildes Text 319 words
      This is a recurring topic for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app, which is currently in alpha testing. I'll summarize the previous month's updates at the start of each topic, so people can...

      This is a recurring topic for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app, which is currently in alpha testing.

      I'll summarize the previous month's updates at the start of each topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

      Recently:

      Three Cheers version 1.0 is out for Android! (Mar 25, 2024)

      • Submit topics!
      • Added donation option in Settings
      • Share links from other apps to create a Tildes submission
      • Edit topic text
      • Delete topics
      • Require minimum Android 7.1.1
      • Fixed refreshing feed after login/logout

       

      iOS v0.11.3 (Mar 28, 2024): Fixed UI bugs and crashes on large iPhones (Pro Max series), particularly when using the in-app WebView browser.

      iOS v0.11.2 (Mar 8, 2024): Fixed crashes in Inbox under the Comments tab.

      Android and iOS v0.11.0 (Mar 3, 2024)

      • Added sort options for topics
      • Tap username on comment, and topic OP, to view profile
      • View markdown of topic OP
      • Fixed minor UI bugs
      • (Android) Fixed wrong profile showing via bottom tab, after logging into a different account

       

      Android and iOS v0.10.0 (Feb 15, 2024)

      • View and send private messages
      • Added button to send private message from a user's profile
      • Added "Tap to refresh" when a feed is empty
      • Show posted time in topic OP
      • Renamed bottom tab to Inbox (instead of Notifications)
      • (Android) Removed animation when using bottom tabs
      • (Android) Fixed crash when replying from a user's profile
      • (iOS) Fixed crash toggling Details in topic OP
      • (iOS) Fixed layout bugs with markdown tables
      • (iOS) Fixed UI bugs when replying in a user's profile
      • (iOS) Fixed minor UI bugs and crashes

       

      Last month's topic: February 2024

       

      Where to get it

      Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

      iOS version on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

      116 votes

    8. How you use YouTube in desktop and mobile devices. YouTube to limit usage of ad blockers soon.

      ~tech Text 59 words
      YouTube limits ad blocker usage in new test YouTube could be testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking (Update) So its clear now that YouTube is going to limit the usage of Ad blockers in the...

      YouTube limits ad blocker usage in new test
      YouTube could be testing a three-strikes policy for ad blocking (Update)
      So its clear now that YouTube is going to limit the usage of Ad blockers in the coming future
      I use Ublock Orgin with Firefox which basically used to block all ads and on mobile device I use NewPipe

      110 votes

    9. Three Cheers for Tildes: App updates and feedback (April 2024) — Version 1.0 is out for Android!

      ~tildes Text 257 words
      This is a recurring topic for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app, which is currently in alpha testing. I'll summarize the previous month's updates at the start of each topic, so people can...

      This is a recurring topic for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app, which is currently in alpha testing.

      I'll summarize the previous month's updates at the start of each topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

      Recently:

      Three Cheers version 1.0 is out for Android! (Mar 25, 2024)

      • Submit topics!
      • Added donation option in Settings
      • Share links from other apps to create a Tildes submission
      • Edit topic text
      • Delete topics
      • Require minimum Android 7.1.1
      • Fixed refreshing feed after login/logout

      Android v1.0.2 (Apr 13, 2024): Validate submission tags, fix submit UI bugs, fix comment UI bugs with horizontal rules.
      Android v1.0.1 (Apr 1, 2024): Fixed crashes on home feed

       

      iOS v0.11.3 (Mar 28, 2024): Fixed UI bugs and crashes on large iPhones (Pro Max series), particularly when using the in-app WebView browser.

      iOS v0.11.2 (Mar 8, 2024): Fixed crashes in Inbox under the Comments tab.

      Android and iOS v0.11.0 (Mar 3, 2024)

      • Added sort options for topics
      • Tap username on comment, and topic OP, to view profile
      • View markdown of topic OP
      • Fixed minor UI bugs
      • (Android) Fixed wrong profile showing via bottom tab, after logging into a different account

      Last month's topic: March 2024

       

      Where to get it

      Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

      iOS version on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

      109 votes

    10. Three Cheers for Tildes: App updates and feedback (January 2024)

      ~tildes Text 387 words
      This is a recurring topic for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app, which is currently in alpha testing. I'll summarize the previous month's updates at the start of each topic, so people can...

      This is a recurring topic for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app, which is currently in alpha testing.

      I'll summarize the previous month's updates at the start of each topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

      Recently:

      Android v0.9.1: Fixed crash double-tapping comment in profile, and other rare crashes and minor bugs.

      iOS hotfix v0.9.1: Fixed a possible crash opening the Notifications tab.

      Android and iOS v0.9.0 (Jan 22, 2024)

      • View user profiles ("all posts" feed; more options like bios coming in the future)
      • Tweaked app theme colors
      • Fixed various layout bugs
      • (Android) Fixed crash tapping links in comment reply preview
      • (Android) Fixed missing Share button on topic OP if logged out
      • (Android) Fixed black background setting on Android 9 and earlier

       

      iOS hotfix v0.8.1: Fixed keyboard blocking the Exemplary prompt dialog.

      Android and iOS v0.8.0 (Jan 9, 2024)

      • Apply comment labels (Exemplary, Offtopic, Joke, Noise, Malice)
      • Tap an Exemplary label you've received to see messages
      • Added Reply to text selection context menu
      • Quote selected text when replying
      • Fixed app incorrectly treating user as logged in after restoring a Google Drive or iCloud backup
      • (Android) Added Share button to OP in comments section
      • (Android) Support Android 14
      • (Android) Fixed rendering non-breaking spaces
      • (iOS) Fixed logout bug if no connectivity
      • (iOS) Fixed markdown table layout and CPU idle bugs
      • (iOS) Fixed rare crash collapsing a comment

       

      iOS hotfix v0.7.2: Fixed crashes in Notifications tab, and fixed crash inserting emoji in reply

      Android and iOS v0.7.0 (Dec 27, 2023)

      • Added a markdown formatting bar when composing a comment
      • Edit comments after posting them
      • View markdown of other users' comments
      • (Android) New setting: Quit confirmation
      • Fixed comment reply preview bugs
      • Fixed bugs viewing direct linked comments
      • Fixed numbered list bug
      • Fixed rate limit error message
      • Fixed crashes and UI bugs

       

      Android and iOS v0.6.x (Nov/Dec 2023)

      • In-app notifications of comment replies
      • Highlight and jump to linked comments

       

      Last month's topic: December 2023

       

      Where to get it

      Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

      iOS version on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

      108 votes

    11. Many updates to The Feature Formerly Known as Comment Tagging

      ~tildes.official Text 430 words
      A couple of weeks ago, I re-enabled the comment tagging feature. Since then, I've been keeping an eye on how it's being used, reading all the feedback people have posted, and have made a few other...

      A couple of weeks ago, I re-enabled the comment tagging feature. Since then, I've been keeping an eye on how it's being used, reading all the feedback people have posted, and have made a few other small adjustments in the meantime. Today, I'm implementing quite a few more significant changes to it.

      First, to try to head off some confusion: if you're very new to Tildes, you won't have access to this feature yet. Currently, only accounts that are at least a week old can use it. Also, the docs haven't been updated yet, but I'll do that later today.

      Here's what's changed:

      • The name has changed from "tag" to "label". I think it's better to use a different term to separate it more easily from topic tags since the features are very different, and "label" shouldn't have the implications that some people attach with "tagging".

      • As suggested by @patience_limited, "Troll" and "Flame" have now been replaced with a single label named "Malice". I don't think the distinction was important in most cases, and the meanings of them were a bit ambiguous, especially with how much the word "troll" has become over-used lately.

        Basically, you should label a comment as Malice if you think it's inappropriate for Tildes for some reason - whether the poster is being an asshole, trolling, spamming, etc.

      • This new Malice label requires entering a reason when you apply it. The reason you enter is only visible to me.

      • Another new label named "Exemplary" has been added, which is the first clearly positive one. This label is intended for people to use on comments that they think are exceptionally good, and it effectively acts as a multiplier to the votes on that comment (and the multiplier increases if more people label the comment Exemplary). Like Malice, it requires entering a reason for why you consider that comment exemplary, but the reason is visible (anonymously) to the author of the comment.

        Currently, you can only use this label once every 8 hours - don't randomly use it as a test, or you won't be able to use it again for 8 hours.

      The interface for some of these changes is a bit janky still and will probably be updated/adjusted before long, but it should be good enough to start trying them out. And as always, beyond the interface, almost everything else is subject to change as well, depending on feedback/usage. Let me know what you think—comment labels have a lot of potential, so it's important to figure out how to make them work well.

      105 votes

    13. Three Cheers for Tildes (iOS version) is open for alpha testing on TestFlight

      ~tildes Text 197 words
      TestFlight TestFlight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy Three Cheers for Tildes is an unofficial mobile app for Tildes, originally announced on Tildes' 5th birthday. The original...

      TestFlight

      TestFlight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

      Three Cheers for Tildes is an unofficial mobile app for Tildes, originally announced on Tildes' 5th birthday. The original announcement answers some basic questions about the app.

      iPhone and iPad support

      The app supports iOS versions as early as iOS 12.4, which includes iPhone 5s and iPad Air 1st generation.

      The app also sports an iPad dual-pane layout, similar to the tablet layout in the Android version.

      30-second iPad demo: https://youtube.com/shorts/S0tT2qM-Wh8

      Missing features

      Like the Android app, the iOS app is still missing tons of features—hence "alpha". Alpha version 0.5 is currently good enough for light use, to help check on Tildes once or twice a day. You can log in, vote, and comment.

      Notable missing features as of v0.5: Submitting topics; Markdown editor; In-app notifications; Comment labels; Sort options.

      Android?

      (Looking for the Android alpha? See the Android alpha testing announcement.)

      Now that the iOS alpha version is out, I can look at adding missing features to both Android and iOS. Thanks for your patience if you've been using the Android app in the meantime.

      90 votes

    16. There has never been a better time to game on Linux

      ~games Text 717 words
      I've been running Linux full-time pretty much since Valve released Proton. I remember submitting reports to ProtonDB back when it was just a shared Google Sheet! In the years that followed I made...

      I've been running Linux full-time pretty much since Valve released Proton. I remember submitting reports to ProtonDB back when it was just a shared Google Sheet! In the years that followed I made it a point to test and report out on different games as new versions of Proton were released and support improved. I thought it important that we have a good data set for what worked and what didn't. Over those years I tested hundreds of games and submitted as many reports to the database.

      In thinking back over my gaming in 2023, however, I realized that I fell out of the habit of submitting reports because I'm so used to Proton working that it's stopped occurring to me that it might not.

      That doesn't mean that there aren't some games that don't work -- it simply means that the success rate that I used to have (maybe 30-50% on average) has risen high enough that I'm genuinely surprised if something doesn't work (it's probably somewhere around 95% for me now, though that's biased by the types of games that I play). I actually tried to remember the last game that didn't work, and I genuinely couldn't tell you what it was. Everything I've played recently has booted like it's native.

      Honestly, I genuinely don't even know which games are native and which run through Proton anymore. I've stopped caring!

      I got my Steam Deck halfway through 2022. It was awesome, but it was definitely a bit rough around the edges. There weren't that many compatible games. The OS had some clunkiness. It matured though, and has gotten better. Among my friend group, I'm the only person who cares even a little bit about Linux. If you asked any of them to name three different Linux distributions they'd stare at you blankly because they wouldn't understand the question. Nevertheless, of my friends, SIX of them have Steam Decks and are now gaming regularly on Linux.

      There are currently ~4,300 Deck Verified games and ~8,700 Deck Playable games according to Valve. On ProtonDB, ~8,600 games have been verified as working on Linux by at least three users, while ~19,700 games have been verified by at least one user. There is SO much variety available, and the speed with which we've gotten here has been pretty breathtaking.

      This was my device breakdown for my Steam Replay for 2023:

      • 55% Steam Deck
      • 32% Linux
      • 10% Virtual Reality
      • 4% Windows

      The only non-Linux gaming I did was VR and some local multiplayer stuff I have on a Windows machine hooked up to my TV.

      I don't want to proselytize too much, but if you have a general interest in gaming, you could probably switch over to Linux full time and be perfectly happy with the variety of games you have available to you. Not too long ago, making the jump felt like a huge sacrifice because you'd be giving up so much -- SO many games were incompatible -- but it no longer feels that way. You can transfer and most of -- probably almost all -- your library will still work! Also, if a particular game doesn't work, there isn't too much sting because, well, there are thousands of others you can give your attention to.

      If you have a specific game that you must play, then it's possibly a different story. If you love Destiny 2, for example, then full-time Linux definitely is not for you. The same goes VR -- it's simply not up to snuff on Linux yet. There are other niches too that don't transfer over as well (modding, racing sims, etc.) so, of course, this isn't a blanket recommendation and everyone's situation is different.

      But for a prototypical person who's just your sort of general, everyday gamer? It's reached a point where they could be very happy on Linux. In fact, as proven by my friends and their Steam Decks, it's reached a point where people can be gaming on Linux and not even know they're doing that. That's how frictionless it's gotten!

      I don't really have a point to this post other than to say it's incredible that we are where we are, and I'm beyond appreciative of all the effort that people have put in to making this possible.

      83 votes

    18. Three Cheers for Tildes: App updates and feedback (February 2024)

      ~tildes Text 406 words
      This is a recurring topic for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app, which is currently in alpha testing. I'll summarize the previous month's updates at the start of each topic, so people can...

      This is a recurring topic for the Three Cheers for Tildes mobile app, which is currently in alpha testing.

      I'll summarize the previous month's updates at the start of each topic, so people can read the updates and then hit Ignore if they don't care about more frequent updates and user feedback.

      Known bugs

      • iOS v0.9.1 crashes when tapping a Details block in a topic OP. Fixed in v0.10.0.

      Recently:

      Android and iOS v0.10.0 (Feb 15, 2024)

      • View and send private messages
      • Added button to send private message from a user's profile
      • Added "Tap to refresh" when a feed is empty
      • Show posted time in topic OP
      • Renamed bottom tab to Inbox (instead of Notifications)
      • (Android) Removed animation when using bottom tabs
      • (Android) Fixed crash when replying from a user's profile
      • (iOS) Fixed crash toggling Details in topic OP
      • (iOS) Fixed layout bugs with markdown tables
      • (iOS) Fixed UI bugs when replying in a user's profile
      • (iOS) Fixed minor UI bugs and crashes

       

      Android v0.9.1: Fixed crash double-tapping comment in profile, and other rare crashes and minor bugs.

      iOS hotfix v0.9.1: Fixed a possible crash opening the Notifications tab.

      Android and iOS v0.9.0 (Jan 22, 2024)

      • View user profiles ("all posts" feed; more options like bios coming in the future)
      • Tweaked app theme colors
      • Fixed various layout bugs
      • (Android) Fixed crash tapping links in comment reply preview
      • (Android) Fixed missing Share button on topic OP if logged out
      • (Android) Fixed black background setting on Android 9 and earlier

       

      iOS hotfix v0.8.1: Fixed keyboard blocking the Exemplary prompt dialog.

      Android and iOS v0.8.0 (Jan 9, 2024)

      • Apply comment labels (Exemplary, Offtopic, Joke, Noise, Malice)
      • Tap an Exemplary label you've received to see messages
      • Added Reply to text selection context menu
      • Quote selected text when replying
      • Fixed app incorrectly treating user as logged in after restoring a Google Drive or iCloud backup
      • (Android) Added Share button to OP in comments section
      • (Android) Support Android 14
      • (Android) Fixed rendering non-breaking spaces
      • (iOS) Fixed logout bug if no connectivity
      • (iOS) Fixed markdown table layout and CPU idle bugs
      • (iOS) Fixed rare crash collapsing a comment

       

      Last month's topic: January 2024

       

      Where to get it

      Android version on Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.talklittle.android.tildes

      iOS version on TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/mpVk1qIy

      79 votes

    19. Experimenting with a way of avoiding deeply nested comment threads

      ~tildes.official Text 555 words
      One of the difficulties with a nested/tree commenting system is finding a way to deal with threads that get very "deep", when people continue replying back and forth under the same threads. The...

      One of the difficulties with a nested/tree commenting system is finding a way to deal with threads that get very "deep", when people continue replying back and forth under the same threads. The deep threads end up getting indented very far, and this looks bad, can be hard to follow, and wastes a ton of space (especially on smaller screens like phones).

      I'm not a huge fan of any of the ways that I've seen other sites try to handle this, so I've been trying to figure out if there might be any other possibilities that would work well. I've noticed that in most of the cases where a thread gets very deep, a lot of the depth comes from back-and-forth replies, where there's only one comment on each "level". So I'm testing a method that will flatten those sections out and just put a note on each comment that it's a direct reply to the comment above it.

      Specifically, the current method (which is now live), works like this: if a comment is at least 4 levels deep and only has a single reply, don't indent the reply any further. Instead, keep the reply at the same indentation and add a note at the top of it indicating that it's a reply to the above comment.

      I managed to implement this entirely through CSS, by writing what's probably the worst best chunk of CSS (really, SASS) of my life, which I want to show off here. If you don't know CSS and can't read this, trust me, you're better off:

      .comment:not([data-comment-depth="0"]):not([data-comment-depth="1"]):not([data-comment-depth="2"]):not([data-comment-depth="3"]) {
  &[data-comment-replies="1"] {
    & > .comment-tree-replies {
      margin-left: -1px;  // compensate for border

      & > .comment-tree-item > .comment > .comment-itself {
        & > .comment-text::before,
        & > header > .is-comment-deleted::before,
        & > header > .is-comment-removed::before {
          content: "(Reply to above comment)";
          font-size: 0.6rem;
          font-style: italic;
          margin-right: 0.2rem;
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

      One of the really interesting things about implementing this entirely in CSS is that we can easily change what level it happens at based on screen size. So I have it set to always start at depth >= 4 right now to help with testing and deciding whether it works well or not, but if we decide to keep it I could easily change the threshold to higher on desktop and keep it lower on smaller screens.

      As an example of how it works, the previous ~tildes.official thread works really well. @Amarok and @cfabbro had a long discussion about music metadata that went very deep. The thread ends up 16 levels deep, but this new change makes it so that it only indents by 5 levels instead of 16. Here's a comparison between how the end of the thread looks on my phone: before this change vs. after this change (yes, something's not quite right with the indentation lines yet).

      Let me know what you think. I'm mostly concerned that this might make it a little harder to follow long threads since the information from the indentation is lost, but I think we need to test it out in real threads for a while to see if that actually ends up being significant or just takes a bit of getting used to.

      76 votes

    20. Slight delay in Three Cheers for Tildes' iOS version, but coming soon

      ~tildes Text 275 words
      Update (Nov 1, 2023) The app is now available for alpha testing on TestFlight: https://tildes.net/~tildes/1bt0/three_cheers_for_tildes_ios_version_is_open_for_alpha_testing_on_testflight Original...

      Update (Nov 1, 2023)

      The app is now available for alpha testing on TestFlight: https://tildes.net/~tildes/1bt0/three_cheers_for_tildes_ios_version_is_open_for_alpha_testing_on_testflight

      Original post

      Hey Tildes, I failed to account for certain time-consuming parts of the TestFlight submission process, and so the first iOS alpha of Three Cheers will be delayed at least a few days. I'm disappointed I won't meet the promised October deadline due to this oversight. Sorry to anyone who's been eagerly waiting on the edge of their seat (@cfabbro). I've been working hard on the app though, and excited to release my first ever iOS app soon.

      It's in approximately the same state as the Android alpha version, which is to say, it's functional and pretty stable bugs-wise (fingers crossed), but missing a lot of features you'd expect from a Tildes app.

      For example, you currently can't: apply comment labels; see reply notifications; submit new topics; change sort options.

      The plan is to get this released and then go back and add new features to both the Android and iOS apps.

      If you're an iPhone user and looking for more features right away, check out Backtick and Surfboard, two great apps by talented developers.

      For Three Cheers, I've made a point of supporting iOS versions back to version 12.4, which includes iPhone 5s and iPad Air 1st generation. So if you're using an older iPhone/iPad that doesn't run the other apps, you might want to give Three Cheers a shot when it's ready.

      Thanks for bearing with me! I'll post another topic when the TestFlight link is ready. (And maybe request for this topic to be locked if needed.)

      75 votes

    21. We hired a man and a "girl"

      ~tech Text 239 words
      A rant honestly, but I thought this might belong in tech since it's a bit more of a tech society thing for me. I'm sure other industries have this issue too, but tech definitely does. If others...

      A rant honestly, but I thought this might belong in tech since it's a bit more of a tech society thing for me. I'm sure other industries have this issue too, but tech definitely does. If others disagree, please feel free to move it.

      So yesterday, we had two new hires show up and we were informed this in our weekly leads meeting, so this is a pretty private setting. When our manager gave a quick blur of one, it was "we expect a lot from him, he's a bit more knowledgeable, did well on our tech test", that kinda thing. And then, when discussing the woman, he kept referring to her as a "girl", so I pointed out that maybe we should use "woman" instead.

      I got made fun of - "maybe we can use lady or female or ..." honestly started tuning it out, can't remember the rest. Also accused of nitpicking.

      I've been in the industry for a while now and though in general things are good, every now and then something small like this happens and it makes you check the date (yes it's still 2018, I didn't go back 20 years).

      To be fair, I know my manager was being funny, but it's easy to joke at someone else's expense.

      Wondering, other's experiences on both sides. Have you noticed changes in your workplace, for better hopefully? Maybe other ways you were discriminated against or singled out?

      73 votes

    22. I interviewed the researcher behind the Misinformation Susceptibility Test

      ~science Text 239 words
      https://youtu.be/vodNabH5qoM But some important context: Earlier this month I saw a post regarding a Misinformation Susceptibility Test and was curious how 20 binary questions could be an...

      https://youtu.be/vodNabH5qoM
      But some important context:

      Earlier this month I saw a post regarding a Misinformation Susceptibility Test and was curious how 20 binary questions could be an indicator of someones media biases.

      I started digging into the related paper and while the methods and analysis was interesting, there was still a lot of questions. So I reached out to Dr Rakoen Maertens who headed the study and we agreed to a discussion on the assessment and his experiences in social psychology.

      The video above is an unlisted, unedited cut of the interview and I'd love to get some feedback:

      Firstly: I have offered the Dr a tildes invite and he may engage with any questions or discussion. Time was limited and there were a lot of topics that was only briefly touched on or overlooked. Here is the original paper and supplementary resources if you want to see some of the language model work and bigger 100 question tests.

      Secondly: I am going to do a more through edit and posting this on a dedicated channel. Since cutting off reddit, twitter and tiktoc; I've sort of rediscovered a love learning and investigations. I'd like to know if people like this form of engagement and discussions. No fancy production, just simply engaging with the research and academics behind topical and interesting ideas.

      I'm already reading into fandom psychology, UV reflective paint, children's TV and CO2 scrubbing technology.

      72 votes

    23. Potential new groups, and general discussion about the purpose and organization of the group hierarchy

      ~tildes.official Text 1242 words
      It's been almost a month since we had proposals for more groups to add. I apologize for taking so long with it—just as a quick explanation for why it's taken so long to get around to: I've been...

      It's been almost a month since we had proposals for more groups to add. I apologize for taking so long with it—just as a quick explanation for why it's taken so long to get around to:

      I've been working on some major background changes related to how groups and the overall abilities of choosing what to see (and not see) on Tildes work, which I was planning to implement at the same time the new groups were added. However, two weeks ago, someone used Tildes's donation page to test over a thousand stolen credit cards. This made a mess in multiple ways, and it's taken a lot of time to clean up and try to make sure it won't happen again (some of it was my fault for not implementing some protections fully/properly). Dealing with that took priority, and it meant that I wasn't able to finish the changes before being (mostly) away over the last week and a bit.

      Anyway, I'm finally getting back on track and am planning to add more groups very soon (and get those larger changes implemented not long after), so let's talk about that as well as some general discussion about the group hierarchy. First, here are the groups I'm currently intending to add and some thoughts and questions about them:

      New groups:

      • ~arts - This is one that I'm a little questionable about. I do think we need a space for these subjects, but there's some strange and confusing crossover with the existing ~creative. I'm not sure if ~arts should replace ~creative, and if we should just have a sub-group or something else for "things created by Tildes users". I'd appreciate input here.
      • ~design - I really like this idea, and think it can cover topics like graphic design as well as physical ones like fashion and architecture.
      • ~finance - This covers some of the other current gaps with existing groups. I'd like to try to fit topics oriented around business in here, as well as ones related more to personal-finance. I'm not certain about the name, but I think it might be the best compared to some of the other comparable options like ~money, ~business, ~commerce, etc.
      • ~games.tabletop - I think this will be a good way to start trying to split up the ~games content a little. For now, I want to just leave video game topics in ~games though, instead of splitting it into its own dedicated sub-group. I know this will probably be somewhat confusing and unintuitive in some ways, but I also think making it so that almost no content goes into ~games itself would be very weird.
      • ~games.game_design - I think this is a useful way to also split out some of the more "theory-based" topics from the other ones in ~games, which tend to be largely more along the lines of news and "ask" discussions. I also want to be able to do some tinkering with a group having multiple sub-groups, and this will make the first instance of that.
      • ~hobbies.automotive - This will be a bit of a test as well. So far, ~hobbies has been quite inactive so it's not truly necessary to split it, but a number of users have expressed interest in it, and I'd like to see if the dedicated sub-group helps motivate more activity about a specific subject.
      • ~science.social - Both the name and being a sub-group are a little questionable here. I'm open to changes, but again, please read below about the hierarchy in general first.
      • ~space - Fairly heavily requested as well, and I feel like it's distinct enough from the existing groups to be worth trying to give a dedicated section.

      Those are all the ones I'm planning to add for now. There are some other groups (and especially some sub-groups) that I think are very good ideas and would work well too, but I want to delay those a little bit to get the structural changes in, since I think that will make a big difference in helping people choose their content too. After these additions we'll have quite a lot of top-level groups (depending exactly what we add, we'll have around 25), and we might want to think about merging some of them before adding even more. On that topic:

      General group hierarchy thoughts:

      I haven't done a good job of defining the purpose of the group hierarchy, or explaining how I think about it. This has caused a fair amount of confusion and debates about the right place for groups/sub-groups, as well as (completely reasonable) questions like why we need groups at all, instead of just using tags.

      I think a lot of the confusion comes from the natural tendency to think about it as a subject-based hierarchy. That is, if subject B is a subset of subject A, it should be a sub-group. However, I think it's going to be more useful to try to treat it as a hierarchy of interest (or disinterest), where the hierarchy is based more around a perspective like "if a user is interested in subject A, they'll probably also be interested in the more-specific subject B".

      I think ~tech and ~comp make a good demonstration. From a subject-based perspective, computers are certainly a subset of technology, so it seems like it should really be ~tech.comp instead of two separate top-level groups. But if you look at it from an interest-based perspective, someone being interested in technology in general definitely doesn't imply that they're also interested in reading technical articles about programming. That's why they're split into separate top-level groups.

      Similarly, ~anime seems to obviously make sense to be a sub-group of ~tv, but I don't think there's nearly enough "interest crossover" to do that. You'd end up with a huge portion of ~tv viewers wanting to exclude ~tv.anime, since it's such a distinct subject.

      Overall, the purpose of the group hierarchy is to help people be able to find and avoid certain types of topics. Using a hierarchy for this will allow us to do things like "I want to see the gaming topics, but not from the League of Legends groups", which are practically impossible to do in a flat structure like reddit has.

      You can also think of the groups as something like "forced" or "implied" tags that are always on all of the topics inside those groups. With a tag-only system, every gaming topic would need to manually be tagged something like "video games" so that people uninterested in them can easily filter them out. The groups system makes this automatic and much more convenient and understandable.

      In the future, I think it will also be very important for the different groups (and some sub-groups) to be able to act as different "spaces" with their own rules, and possibly even different features or design.

      I hope that helps clarify the hierarchy a bit and explain why the organization has been done this way so far (and will likely to continue to be). Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts about the hierarchy and the planned new groups, I'm intending to add them later this week unless something else goes horribly wrong.

      And as usual, I've topped everyone's invites up to 10. You can get your invite links here: https://tildes.net/invite

      68 votes

    25. How can we change the site's structure/mechanics/patterns so that we're not discouraging posting "too much" on particular subjects?

      ~tildes.official Text 989 words
      Over the weekend, @skybrian posted a topic about feeling like you're posting "too much" if you submit too many links on the same subjects. As I said in my comment in there, I've definitely felt...

      Over the weekend, @skybrian posted a topic about feeling like you're posting "too much" if you submit too many links on the same subjects. As I said in my comment in there, I've definitely felt the same way sometimes, and I think we should try making some changes that can improve on this.

      One of the most common complaints about Tildes is that there isn't much content overall, and that most of it's very "general interest". This is largely because of how the site is set up now, where instead of having different communities, we basically just have one community that's lightly categorized by the groups. It's mostly the same users posting and discussing topics, regardless of which group they're posted in. This is totally fine and has worked well in a lot of ways, but it's also limiting in other ways, especially that it basically discourages posting "too much" about any particular subject because that will be annoying to all the users that don't want to see so much of that content.

      One of the best ways that Tildes will be able to grow is by being a place that's known for having good content on different topics. When I started /r/Games on Reddit, I was one of the heaviest submitters for quite a while, making sure that the subreddit was always full of the type of high-quality content I wanted to see. There weren't many viewers or commenters initially, but continuing to consistently post a lot of good content attracted more and more people, and eventually it became self-sustaining.

      We need to be able to take a similar approach here, but the current structure of the site is preventing it. For example, I'm one of the most frequent submitters to ~games (I've submitted about 1/3 of the topics in the last month), but I usually try to only post 1 or 2 topics there per day. I could easily submit 10-20 most days, but I know that will annoy a lot of users that don't care that much about games. That feeling isn't a good thing—it prevents any group from being able to "take off" individually.

      So to improve this, I think we're going to need to make some changes, and/or figure out some new patterns that we can use.

      First of all, I think it may be time to switch away from the current "opt-out" setup for groups (where you see everything by default) into an "opt-in" one where you have to specifically choose what you're interested in. This is something I've always planned to do eventually, because I think "forcing" everyone to see things that they're not especially interested in is both harmful to quality and causes a lot of strife. Switching will absolutely have some downsides too though, including that the activity in the more-niche groups will probably drop even more.

      It may also be best to switch away from "Activity" being the default sorting method. Again, this is something I didn't really expect to keep as the default forever, but it's been helpful while the site is small. However, having every new topic show up immediately in the most prominent position on the site just makes it even more annoying for people that aren't interested in the subject. For them, the top of the site keeps getting taken over by posts they don't care about. We're seeing this happen with ~music right now, because some users are trying to make it more active—which, again, should be a good thing—but I know that it's annoying some others.

      Some other things that might be worth considering include making it easier and more obvious that you can ignore individual topics and tags, adding new options for creating and filtering different "views", adjusting site behavior so it balances how many posts it shows from each group (but that would likely be confusing), etc.

      Another related topic I wanted to bring up (which @skybrian mentioned and I think is an interesting idea) is that we might be able to use "megathreads" more extensively somehow. For example, maybe having a megathread on a particular topic is a better way to judge the demand for a group/sub-group on a particular topic. Right now it's hard to do that because there isn't really any dedicated place to post if you're interested in something specific, but we might be able to encourage more activity by using a megathreads as almost a "testing ground".

      For example, if someone's particularly interested in woodworking, it would feel awkward to post a bunch about it in ~hobbies and effectively take over the group with woodworking content. But if there was a "woodworking megathread", it would be both more encouraging and contained (and easily ignored by other users), and if that thread started getting consistent activity from multiple users it would be a good indication that a ~hobbies.woodworking group would probably be able to stand on its own.

      I don't really have any particular plans for that kind of thing yet, but I think it's a possibility with a lot of potential, and we might even be able to find some ways to improve how megathreads work to support it. I'm definitely interested in hearing thoughts about how we could enhance threads to make them work especially well for that, including better ways for users to find and know about megathreads they'd want to read and participate in.

      I feel like this was a fairly scattered post with a lot of different thoughts in it, but overall I'm just looking for feedback or other ideas for ways we can adjust so that the site can keep growing and increasing in activity smoothly. This is important to figure out, and I think we're reaching the point where it's starting to become more urgent to do it soon. Let me know what you think.

      66 votes

    26. Apparently I'm autistic?

      ~health.mental Ask
      My son shares a lot of my traits, including being Gifted. He's in kindergarten now, and we were looking into getting him a IEP (individual education plan) because he's Gifted. In doing so though,...

      My son shares a lot of my traits, including being Gifted. He's in kindergarten now, and we were looking into getting him a IEP (individual education plan) because he's Gifted.

      In doing so though, someone brought up that it might result in an ASD diagnosis essentially - and they were right. Haven't had the formal test yet, but a lot of what I considered "idiosyncrises" in my son are also found in autistic individuals. Some of which I share. I have little doubt in the ultimate conclusion, which is that he's 2e (twice exceptional).

      And it seems quite likely I am as well. It's gonna be a niche audience, but anyone in a similar boat? It feels weird looking back and (at 34) retroactively realizing why I do certain things the way I do.

      Edit: I should add - it didn't really 'matter' to my development because I was Gifted. I can learn whatever, pretty darn fast. So I just taught myself social stuff, on purpose, when I was in high school and college. It takes a lot of effort on my part, but I can be "charasmatic". I ascribed the effort to my general tendency toward introversion, but it may have been, essentially, the mental cost of masking.

      Edit2: oh man I even went out of my way to try and alter my personality towards more extroversion in college because it seemed more normal.

      Edit3: and I taught myself to understand body language in high school, particularly to understand and help with reading girls I liked, and how they were reacting to various levels of flirtation.

      Edit4:
      My spatial sense is god level. My wife doesn't bother remembering where the car is, because I just know.

      My audition is similarly unrivaled, I hear things others don't, and my phonological loop is amazing - I can hold audio in my head for a time if I'm truly concentrating on something else.

      My imagination is virtually non-existent, I'm nearly a complete aphantasia case - the best I can ever manage is a pulse of a 2d image, kinda.

      I'm incredibly good at math, computer science, etc. I know more about science than... anyone else I've met.

      I've never really felt like I didn't belong, though. I just learned how to be an effective communicator from books and videos. I almost feel like I have weaponized ASD.

      65 votes

    27. Experimenting with some changes to information that's displayed on topics, and some other tweaks

      ~tildes.official Text 290 words
      I'm planning to test out various changes today and through the weekend, so I just wanted to put this thread out as a kinda-megathread for them. Functionality-wise, not much should be changing yet,...

      I'm planning to test out various changes today and through the weekend, so I just wanted to put this thread out as a kinda-megathread for them. Functionality-wise, not much should be changing yet, but I'm going to be playing around with moving some things, changing some information that's displayed, and so on. For an alpha, the site's been way too stable. We're way past due to try experimenting more.

      I'll try to keep a list updated in here of what I've changed. So far:

      • On listing pages, the domain for link topics is now shown in the "footer", to the right of the number of comments (replacing the submitter's username), instead of in parentheses after the title. This makes it so that the information about the source of the post is always in a consistent position.
      • Link topics pointing to articles now show the word count (when we have that data) after the title, similar to how text topics always have. This should work for most sites, but not always yet.
      • Links to YouTube videos now show the video duration after the title. (This should be possible to extend to other sites without too much work)
      • Added a data-topic-posted-by attr to topics in listings to support filtering/styling/etc. via CSS/extensions.
      • Reduced timestamp precision on topic listing pages to always only show one level (before it would say things like "2 hours, 23 minutes ago", now just "2 hours ago"). It still switches to a specific date after a week.

      Please let me know if you love or hate anything in particular, but try to give it a bit of a chance and not just your initial reaction (which tends to be disliking change).

      65 votes

    29. What have yo been playing recently?

      ~games.tabletop Text 85 words
      Video games, board games, card games - whatever. I'm interested to know what you all have been playing recently. I've been playing a lot of D&D recently. My players have just delved deep under an...

      Video games, board games, card games - whatever. I'm interested to know what you all have been playing recently.

       

      I've been playing a lot of D&D recently. My players have just delved deep under an ancient keep to save an archaeologist from undead Tomb Spiders. I'm currently planning for this weeks game where they will hopefully encounter the giant spider brood mother.

      On the video game front, I've been playing through Duke Nukem 3D. That's a game that's certainly made the test of time.

      -LTADnD

      63 votes

    30. How is moderation going lately?

      ~tildes Ask
      I am a reddit refugee and I was drawn to this network by its mission, its decisive rebuff of chasing capital at all costs, and the overall vibe. I lurked for a while before I was invited to join,...

      I am a reddit refugee and I was drawn to this network by its mission, its decisive rebuff of chasing capital at all costs, and the overall vibe.

      I lurked for a while before I was invited to join, but shortly after joining I noticed something. While a good discussion from opposing viewpoints can help everyone broaden their horizons a bit, it felt like white supremacists were testing the waters. While I can't directly cite any threads, there were a couple instances where I felt one side was seeing just how close they could get without being obvious. But it felt like some of the subtler dog whistles were there.

      It felt very similar to how QAnon got a lot of people with the disinformative statistic about child abductions. After all, who's going to be on the other side "child abductions are bad?"

      After seeing a few threads and getting the same vibe, I stopped visiting the site for the last couple months. Life getting pretty busy also helped.

      I haven't been back long enough to determine for myself whether I'm in a "Nazi bar" or not. I would be happy to admit that it was all in my head. But it is a major concern for any up-and-coming social network. And that's an opposing viewpoint no one needs to take seriously. Was it in my head? Was I reading too much into things? Did all the nazis just go to X? More generally, how has moderation been with the influx of new users? The same, but more? A couple extra reminders doing the trick? Uptick in bans? Is this information already somewhere and I'm a bad user for not having seen it?

      62 votes

    32. The Results of the Actual Unofficial 2020 Tildes Census

      ~tildes Text 1643 words
      Collect and code, until it is done. And now it is. Ladies (the few that we have, I mean holy FUCK ), gents and everyone inbetween, welcome to the results of the 2020 Tildes census, which is only...

      Collect and code, until it is done.

      And now it is.

      Ladies (the few that we have, I mean holy FUCK ), gents and everyone inbetween, welcome to the results of the 2020 Tildes census, which is only 34% less horrifying than 2020 itself. And you better believe I'm going to keep this up for the whole post, because fuck the responses this year, while greater in numbers, were occasionally still [REDACTED].thanks, thought police

      In the year of the lord, 2020CAN YOU PLEASE END ALREADY, we got 350 responses in, which is a whopping 100 more than last year. I don't know how many accounts we have in total, no one does, and I'm too lazy to calculate the percentages right now because I'm calculating as we go so from the point of me writing this to clicking Post Topic an hour or two will probably pass.Update: I went to bed, so like 10 hours passed Absolute numbers is all you're going to get here, so fuck me, fuck you and fuck off.I need some alcohol

      Anyway, let's go through the census. I let JotForms compile this nice graphical report that is pretty much useless because it completely breaks once either sexuality, gender or the myriad of various operating systems the people on here have get involved. But it's still funny seeing it struggle. Have a link to the PDF. So back to good Excel, my old nemesis.

      Aggregated Data

      Thankfully, this time around you'll have access to generate all this shit yourself, HERE YOU GO. The thing is in JSON, so easily deserializable, etc etc. I'm sure you people are skilled enough at typing the words into the IDEs to magic the data into your memory.

      Important info: Empty answers are usually marked NO ANSWER, in case of numerical values it's usually -1 for age, -2 for the Kinsey scale (-1 is taken) and -69 for the 3 political values from the Sapply test, as these range from -10 to 10. Yes I made the default value -69. It's everyone's favourite number after all. Also, for some absolute FUCKED reason one of the values has 3 more entries than the other ones, I'm sure it has a totally VALID reason that has nothing to do with people entering bullshit. NOTHING.FuckingKILLME

      Also I can't be bothered to edit the "wrong" data out, i.e. typos in languages etc, so those are all in, maybe someone with more compassion than me can do that.

      Kowalski, Analysis

      First of all, I'm going to less graphs this year because it's fucking hard to aggregate things like ethnicity when you get responses ranging from black to a literal link of someone's You23AndMe results. Yes. I mean props to you for that but like, uh, FUCK, what am I going to do now? YOU ARE ALL MAKING THIS WAY TO FUCKING HARD. ლ(ಠ_ಠ ლ)

      This propagates to basically all responses and next year I'm probably going to captain a way straighter course with less options, because I can't fucking MAKE FANCY GRAPHS WHEN YOU GIVE ME TOO MANY INDIVIDUAL RESPONSESFUCKINGKILLME

      Personal Shit

      Geography

      Not much has changed, the US still dominates, Canada second, though the British are catching up. I'm sure you'll have your tea party eventually. Though with good ol' Boris in charge I don't know if annexing the yanks is such a good idea. Also, as there are no invidual option here for everyone to FUCK IT UP it's the most sane graph of them all. No fucked colours this year, I promise, it's all scale.

      Fancy Graph #1: Geography

      Age

      Fancy Graph #2: Age by decile For those wanting to repeat this, watch out, as the age by decile and specific age questions were exclusionary. You'll have to combine the results to get the same numbers. I hope. Unless I fucked up. Equal possibility.

      Also whoever entered 28.9, because of you I had to make the age field in my code a double instead of an integer. Fuck you.

      Gender etc.

      I honestly thought this was going to be the wildest answer, but y'all are such a minority that it's fairly sane. The real clusterfuck starts after this question. Also whoever wrote prefer not to say, DID YOU NOT READ THE PART ABOUT THE OPTIONAL ANSWERS, [REDACTED] PLEASE [REDACTED] AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-

      Anyway as I said, fairly standard results.

      Fancy Graph #3: Gender

      Trans? Value
      NO ANSWER 13
      no 312
      yes 23

      Yeah I'm not gonna make a graph for a yes/no question, if that's bigoted you may scream at me in the comments.

      Sexuality

      I MADE THE SCREENSHOT BUT I FORGOT TO ADD IT FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

      Kinsey

      Also forgot about you. Average is 1,37, idk what else to do.

      Ethnicity

      This was a mistake. 124 wrote white. 23 wrote caucasian. One person wrote causcasion. One person wrote that it's illegal to ask this question in their country. Someone wrote I bleed red white and blue.

      THIS WAS A MISTAKE.

      Kill me. Safe to say, that Tildes is, as someone put it perfectly: white af. Yes this was also a reply. KILL ME.

      Language

      Fancy Graph #3,5: LanguageThis was added later, and I'm really not updating the others.

      Religion

      I'm just gonna let the graph speak for itself, I don't have it in me to keep the anger up.

      Fancy Graph #4: Religion

      Politics, Education, Work

      This is where the fun begins. No, honestly not really.

      Politics

      If I average out our Sapply values, we get this compass result. Yeah we're all communists. So whoever said in their dislike the alt right people on this platform, I really don't know what you mean. If anything we need more to achieve PEAK CENTRISM. In all honesty, the people saying that this sub is a leftist echo chamber (there were a few), you may have a point.

      When we get to the magical field of how everyone identifies themselves politically, well, let's just sayah, there's the rage again I'M NOT GONNA REPEAT THIS NEXT YEAR, GREAT FUCKING IDEA. Whoever entered confused, I FUCKING AGREE. SINCE WHEN IS PINK A FUCKING POLITICAL AFFLIATION? We do have a pirate though.Nice

      You may wade through the rest OF [REDACTED] YOURSELF in the published data.

      Education

      Tildes is an educated lot, contrary to popular my belief after making this census. A good chunk of people have a Bachelors, Masters, PhD. Still only one MD though, so if you have a medical emergency take it up with... checks notes Ah fuck I can't reveal anything. ...Take up with them. JK please call your local emergency line when you need help

      Fancy Graph #5: Education

      Work

      Actually fairly sensible results, except a few, like that one person that entered not STEM, thanks for not giving me any useful information. You have the ability TO NOT ENTER SOMETHING. THIS GOES FOR THE PERSON WHO ENTERED meh AS FUCKING WELL, [REDACTED].

      Fancy Graph #6: Work

      Technology

      Fancy Graph #7: Computer Operating Systems

      Fancy Graph #8: Mobile Operating Systems

      Basically just like religions. You all have to many options, since we're all communists now according to average, and options are bad, you MAY ONLY USE WINDOWS VISTA FROM THIS POINT ON, OR THE GESTAPO WILL PAY YOU A VISIT fuck, wrong mass murderers

      About Tildes

      Have Acc? Value
      NO ANSWER 7
      yes 312
      no 29

      For consistency, and it didn't fit into the picture in a nice way.

      Fancy Graph #9: Various Tildes Statistics

      Most people migrated off reddit, followed by Hackernews. The rest is various random shit, include like 5 different ways of "I don't know", but the one person replying Gab surprised me. Didn't think people would hop on Tildes off Gab, since Gab is basically extreme rightwing Twitter and Tildes is like, the antithesis to that. Leftist userbase, longform discussion.

      The long replies

      Once again, can't graph the shit outta this, so here's the collection of them. One reply per line. Had to format some replies to fit this format, I know someone did bullet points, apologies.

      What do you like about Tildes?

      What do you dislike about Tildes?

      What would you change about Tildes?

      Final notes

      To keep my sanity in check, although when I read this post, that probably didn't work out too well, I kept some notes.

      1. Someone suggested to ban all Europeans off the platform. You now have the stats, so I'm going to let you guess from where they are. Fucking hilarious.

      2. Someone very cordial managed to write an entire blog post into one of the final freeform boxes. I appreciate the feedback and I'm sure Deimos does as well, but why did you have to make so many empty lines? TBH it's more on Jotform for not removing linebreaks when giving you the CSV, it breaks the entire format.

      3. We should have a prize for that person who fit a textbook into the box for ethnicity, also amazing, you mad fucking lad (or lass, but statistics are on my side, lol)

      In closing, most answers were good and interesting, except for the part where I let you run wild with the politics question, holy fuck, but that's on me. To the people that reduced my IQ by a few points, well I took the piss outta you already, so I hope you have a great day. Everyone else, I hope you [REDACTED] on a few [REDACTED]. Wait, I think I mixed something up here.As you may have guessed, don't take this too seriously

      As always, see you all next year, same time?Unless I get banned, which seems like a good possibility when I proofread all this, so much angerI need to get laid, or drunkActually how high does this go?

      Cheers, I'm gonna go C͉̠̰͚͚͓ͪ̿̋̏̚O͓̯͕̙͕͎͈̫̦͐̊́Ṅ͕̮̣̺̖̣̖̈ͥͦ͊̽͒͠S̶̵̹̜͔͖͗͂̋̔̈̒͊̚Ú̷͔͍͇̪̥͍ͭͭ̔ͨ̄̇̅̕M̵͈̮͉̹͈͕̻̎̓E̛̯̝̭͉̼̍̎̐̋̑̎ ̷̵̮͔̬̙̠̣̬͉ͭ͒S̨͙̼̟̻̜̈̄͋̄̇ͨ͛́͟͞Ò̡̧͙̩̓̄͂̓͗́M̹̰̲̆̌E̴̡̲̟ͯ ̹͇̲̩͍ͨͨ͒̑͊̌͒͆̕͡F̵͊̊̾ͭ҉̘̲̝͎̥͔̠̺̙O̧̡̱̠̙ͤ͒ͪO̬̯̪͉͙̩̅͂̀̏ͫ̄̓͂D͎͓͍͔͙̰͕̒̒͒̓̃̍͂ͭ̀͢
      Grzmot

      60 votes

    35. Tildes helped my wife find work!

      ~talk Text 142 words
      So a few weeks back someone posted an article here about Super Recognizers. These are people that can instantly remember 80% of a persons face and can identify that face easily later on. It talked...

      So a few weeks back someone posted an article here about Super Recognizers. These are people that can instantly remember 80% of a persons face and can identify that face easily later on. It talked about how these people are getting hired by police departments across the world.

      It caught my attention because my wife has always been freakishly good at facial recognition and recall. Well, she took the test, which led to another test, and today she received her official invitation to join Super Recognizers International!

      This is a big deal because her company is about to go under and she has been considering leaving lately. This will open up doors for her to find work she can do from home on a flexible schedule. Thanks @skybrain for posting that article and thank you to the Tildes community for being here!

      54 votes

    36. Testing a new method (CSS custom properties) for the site themes - please report any issues you notice

      ~tildes.official Text 209 words
      In his never-ending quest to keep improving Tildes's theme system, @Bauke has reworked a major portion of it again, this time making it use CSS custom properties (instead of pre-generating a lot...

      In his never-ending quest to keep improving Tildes's theme system, @Bauke has reworked a major portion of it again, this time making it use CSS custom properties (instead of pre-generating a lot of theme-specific rules using Sass).

      This new method has a lot of benefits, including reducing the size of Tildes's CSS file to less than half of what it was before. It will also make it much simpler for people to override certain site colors or create their own themes using local CSS changes (e.g. through extensions like Stylus). (Note: please don't invest a lot of time into using it to customize yet, since it may still need to have further changes or even reverted)

      This is a relatively modern CSS feature that should have good support at this point, but it's possible there will still be some issues, or things that were missed during the conversion. If you notice any colors being wrong or other appearance changes (even minor ones), please leave a comment (including which theme you're using) so that I can fix them up.

      Thanks yet again, @Bauke!

      And I haven't done it in a while now, but I've topped everyone back up to 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

      54 votes

    37. Welcome to Tildes!

      ~tildes.official Text 718 words
      Welcome to the alpha version of Tildes! If you haven't read it yet, please start with the announcement post on the blog, since that explains a lot of my goals and general plans for the site:...

      Welcome to the alpha version of Tildes! If you haven't read it yet, please start with the announcement post on the blog, since that explains a lot of my goals and general plans for the site: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes

      Also check this page for some info about some of the basic mechanics in place: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics

      Beyond that, there are some other pages on the Docs site with a fair amount of information, and I'm working on gradually adding more to them.

      Please don't spread this too much yet

      I'd still like to keep it a bit quiet for the first little while, so I can make sure nothing explodes and pay more attention to the site instead of having to worry about who's talking about it and where. It's fine if you want to mention it to some people, but please ask them not to spread it around much as well. If you do tell people, it's probably best to send them to the announcement post as an intro.

      It won't have to be this way for long - this upcoming week, I'm intending to start trying to get some more public attention.

      Things that are missing, coming soon, etc.

      There's still a ton missing, obviously. Some functions have been disabled deliberately for now as well, because I'd like to see how things work without them before we start jumping to too many conclusions about what we "need" and how to use the site. I hope to have regular discussions about a lot of these ideas so we can figure out exactly how best to implement some things.

      Make sure to check on your userpage (by clicking your username in the top right corner or sidebar on mobile) - there are a few things in the side menu on there that are useful, like the light/dark theme toggle.

      There's a post here with some specific things I'm working on in the very near future: https://tildes.net/~tildes/a/high_priority_things_to_fix_add

      If you just want to experiment, please use ~test

      I set up a group named ~test that's specifically for trying things out and making a mess. It's the only one that you're not auto-subscribed to when you register (so that your home page isn't spammed up with the stuff from there).

      Please feel free to test things out in there, try to break things, whatever. I may periodically wipe it just to get rid of a lot of the garbage, so please don't post anything in there if you're not okay with it disappearing at any time.

      How you can help

      One of the best things you can do would be to just post things. Getting the initial activity going on the site will be one of the most important steps, so please just post things here (and comment on others' posts).

      I'd also appreciate any feedback, posts about bugs you discover, etc. You can just post anything like that in the ~tildes group as well.

      Inviting other people

      If you have other people that you'd like to invite, I think we should be able to start doing that very soon. I haven't given anyone their own invite codes yet, but it's something that I can do. If there's people you really want to get in right away, please let me know and I can give you some codes or otherwise help get them in. Message me here on Tildes about it, email me at deimos@tildes.net, or send me a message through Discord/Slack/whatever and we can figure it out.

      Please expect some turbulence

      Please keep in mind that, for the most part, this has been a one-person endeavor so far. I'm the developer, sysadmin, designer, writer, lawyer, manager, chair of the non-profit board, etc. I'm not very good at a lot of these things.

      There will definitely be some roughness for a while, whether it's awful design/UI choices, the site crashing and staying down for a while until I can get it back up, etc. Thanks in advance for your patience, it's all only going to get better from here.

      I'm excited to finally be able to let people see what I've been working on. Thanks for being here at the start with me!

      53 votes

    38. What game mechanic or boss could you just not overcome?

      ~games Ask (survey)
      What game mechanic, boss or puzzle in a game got you to give up? For me it was a drivers license test in Gran Tourismo 2 on the Playstation. I was so into racing sims that I had a decent steering...

      What game mechanic, boss or puzzle in a game got you to give up?

      For me it was a drivers license test in Gran Tourismo 2 on the Playstation. I was so into racing sims that I had a decent steering wheel and pedals set (like $80 in 1999). I even found a better coffee table to more comfortably fit it all. I had so many hours into GT1, various NASCAR entries, MOTO Racer, various Need For Speed games, etc.

      GT2 had a system where you had to upgrade your license to unlock more tracks. There was one where you had like 15 or 20 seconds to slolem through a course and then do it in reverse. After hours almost every night for a month straight of getting to within .5 seconds of qualifying for the license to unlock more tracks I just couldn't anymore. I gave up racing/car sims for nearly 15 years until XBox heavily pushed Forza Horizon and I gave it a try.

      It certainly didn't help that I had just recently been scarred from being stuck in a similar system in X-Wing vs TIE. There was a training mission where you had to take your X-Wing through a course with barrel rolls before you unlocked something (another ship or more dangerous missions?) that I was stuck on. After like 6 weeks of getting within a second or less to completion I finally found a cheatcode to bypass it. By then the damage to my enjoyment of the game had been done and I never did finish that game.

      51 votes

    40. I am a cosmologist, AMA

      ~science Ask
      Ok ok disclaimer, I am a cosmology PhD candidate, don’t have the degree yet. However I do feel comfortable at this point calling myself a cosmologist (I think for the first time ever). In any...

      Ok ok disclaimer, I am a cosmology PhD candidate, don’t have the degree yet. However I do feel comfortable at this point calling myself a cosmologist (I think for the first time ever). In any case, with all the new people here, I think an AMA might be fun. I will try my best to answer all of the questions I get asked, but it may not happen quickly!

      A bit about my research. I study the conditions in the early universe, specifically when the cosmic microwave background was forming, and I use CMB data to test our understanding of this era. The CMB formed roughly 300,000 years after the big bang, when the universe was 1/1000th its current size. The patterns that we see in the temperature fluctuations of the CMB can tell us a lot about the universe at this early time, and specifically we can try to use them to see if anything ‘unexpected’ happened at this time, like a hitherto undiscovered particle annihilating into ‘normal’ particles (for example).

      Ask me anything about the early universe, or physics writ large, and I will do my best to answer!

      51 votes

    41. Standardization of household goods / end user goods

      ~life Ask (advice)
      This is an off-shore sweat-shop knock off variant of @Akir 's "Kitchen Towel" installment of "Someone Asks Basic Life Questions to the Internet" thread, which was very popular. Short problem: So...

      This is an off-shore sweat-shop knock off variant of @Akir 's "Kitchen Towel" installment of "Someone Asks Basic Life Questions to the Internet" thread, which was very popular.

      Short problem: So many different types of stuff around the house and I'm sick of it.

      Longer problem:

      I have dozens upon dozens of types of towels, gifted to me from teenage years from someone, and I've never managed to be able to buy my own towels. And it sucks. They're all different types and styles and sizes and fabric and....I'm old now and I hate it and I just want to fold ONE type of towel in the bathroom and ONE type of towel in the kitchen. I would like different colours for different purposes, maybe I can decorate them myself or whatever -- but I want standardization. From @Akir's thread, I learned about "Flour Sack Towels" from @tanglisha and omg where had that advice been all my life. I feel like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel for kitchen towels.

      What I need:

      Recommendations for all types of household goods that have stood the test of time, where I can obtain the same product from multiple sources or one long standing brand that is not interested in diversification.

      one common type, common functions, common properties

      Example: Corelle dishes. I have "big plates" and "little plates" and "bowls" that are all the same size and form, and at thrift stores I can easily find replacements of these common types, even if they were made decades apart and in different patterns. All exactly the same: serves the same and washes the same and stacks the same. The company seems uninterested in discontinuing their line of products and I love them for it. I need the Corelle of all things.

      What are your trusty brands and types of "things" that are so obvious you'd never have to think about buying any other types of? Something so standardized that in your region they're just known as "----" instead of what they are actually called or brand name or size?

      Do you know a brand that just makes ONE thing forever and they'll never change? Or a public domain type of thing that's an industry standard? I need to know what they are. Nails? Screws? Tools? Computer things? Cables? Cutlery? Knives? Types of household chemicals? Spices? Meat cuts? Margarine? Storage bins? Kinds of wood? All kinds of things, please.

      Side question about existing, gifted, singleton household towels and socks :

      I'd like to ask about what to do with my existing million different types of socks and towels. I want to buy my own as an now older adult. At what point should I flat out tell them to stop giving me socks and towels? Do I just suck it up and keep quietly re-gifting them to food bank? What about all the ones in current rotation? I would hate to throw out stuff but at this point I'm nearly ready to do it.

      49 votes

    43. Nuclear fusion discussion

      ~science Ask
      I'm a big fan of nuclear fusion as a concept and hope to shift toward doing active research in the field at some point. I'd like to open this discussion to talk about topics regarding nuclear...

      I'm a big fan of nuclear fusion as a concept and hope to shift toward doing active research in the field at some point.

      I'd like to open this discussion to talk about topics regarding nuclear fusion as a future energy source. To start, I'll lost a couple of ongoing fusion efforts I'm familiar with.

      ITER:Of course the biggest fusion project is ITER, the massive multinational collaboration which is building a massive tokamak reactor in France. Unfortunately ITER will never produce power for average people, as it's purely a test reactor with no plans to be connected to the grid. The following effort to build a functional grid connected reactor, DEMO, isn't set to be built until at least 2050. This has resulted in a considerable number of private ventures trying iut experimental alternative approaches.

      HELION:At the time of writing this, there's quite a bit of buzz surrounding Helion energy, both because of the ambitious timeline theyve recently proposed as well as the investment of Sam Altman of OpenAI fame. Helion uses an FRC topology, which I personally think is a really cool idea. Basically it's a tokamak without the physical shell around it, and is kept sustained by the internal plasma physics. Helion also has another interesting quirk, they are not pursuing the typical DT fuel strategy, but are instead planning to use DD fusion to breed He3 and use DHe3 fusion as the primary energy source. I think this is a good idea because DHe3 fusion is "aneutronic", whereas DT fusion produces high energy neutrons that are somewhat of an unsolved problem to deal with. I wonder though, how they intend to deal with the inevitable tritium pollution that DD fusion creates, and how they will separate that out before Iit creates neutrons anyway.

      TRIALPHA:In addition, another major company TriAlpha Energy, also pursued FRCs, hoping to use an alternative proton-boron11 mix to achieve aneutronic operation. I think they've sort of pivoted toward being more a neutron source than working toward breakeven.

      HB11: A recent proposed approach is HB11, which is also going for proton-boron fusion. Now with Tri Alpha this seemed really dubious, because hydrogen boron has a much lower cross section for fusion than other options, even the DHe3 that Helion is doing. In addition, boron has way more electrons than hydrogen, so a proton boron plasma has more electrons with causes more bremsstrahlung loss. HB11, however, thinks they can overcome this through high energy laser acceleration. They want to use a high power laser to shoot a fuel pellet into a target. This supposedly will work much better than heating the stuff, because the laser will impart a specific impulse and thus the thermal spectrum of the impact will have a much higher Q factor centered around the cross sectional peak. I'm not really convinced on this, just because I feel like that thermal spectrum would only last for the first few atomic layers of impact before it doesn't really matter amymore.

      CFS: The next option I would consider to be one if the most popular fusion startups is Commonwealth Fusion Systems. They have what I'd consider the most conservative approach, they are attempting to build a Tokamak design like ITER, but hope to reduce the size considerably by taking advantage of advances in superconductor technology with REBCO tapes.

      W7X:The next reactor type I'll mention was in the news a lot a few years back, the Wendelstein-7X in Germany. This is a stellarator design, the crazy twisted car wreck of a thing you may have seen before. The stellarator is shaped that way so that it doesn't require an induced current like the tokamak to have magnetic helicity, because the shape does that automatically.

      ZAP:Another well liked dark horse is Zap Energy. They're not as flashy as the other reactors but seem to be working off solid physics that have been proven out over many years. They're trying to do sheared flow z-pinches, which is basically creating a lightning bolt that's perfectly straightened out and super dense.

      DPF:One more somewhat obscure option is Eric Lerner's Dense Plasma Focus approach. I'm a little puzzled by this option because it seems to be the exact opposite of Zap, where they make an incredibly twisty lightning bolt instead of a straight one.

      FUSOR/POLYWELL:There are a couple reactor types that get mentioned often but are more or less obsolete are the Fusor and the Polywell. A Fusor is a neat device that can be built to fit on a desktop and still produce actual fusion reactions, but has a fundamental design flaw of a physical electrode inside the plasma that introduces too much conductive heat loss. The Polywell is a more advanced concept thay tries to create a "virtual" cathode with orthogonal magnetic mirrors, but I think after many years of experimentation researchers were unable to validate the formation of such a virtual cathode.

      NIF:One option that is sort of tangential is the NIF, which you might have heard technically produced more energy than it produced. I dont think its necessarily going to go anywhere, mostly because it's more a weapons program than an energy program, but I think the chirped pulse amplification technology they use is really cool.

      GENERAL-FUSION:And finally I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the very highly funded and publicized General Fusion. I definitely give them points for pure childlike wonder. The original pitch was they were going to take a giant swirling tornado of molten metal, fire a ball of plasma into the eye of the storm, then smash the whole thing from all sides with a hundred giant hammers. To be honest is such a wild concept that I don't really know if it really makes any sense or if it's a fever dream. It's undergone a few revisions after finding out that certain parts of its concept just weren't going to work. This doesn't inspire a ton of confidence, but also shows flexibility in their thinking.

      There's definitely lots of other companies with other variations, but this gives a general idea of the huge range of ideas and approaches being pursued. I think it's a really cool field to explore and I'd love to hear all your thoughts about it.

      48 votes

    46. What do you use to journal with?

      ~tech Ask (survey)
      The recent PKM thread had me thinking about what folks are using as journaling app/portal. I do use Obsidian for my second brain right now and genuinely love it. But I find the mobile app on...

      The recent PKM thread had me thinking about what folks are using as journaling app/portal. I do use Obsidian for my second brain right now and genuinely love it. But I find the mobile app on Android to be a bit clunky, if I'm honest. Seems slow to open even with very few plugins. For jounaling I've used DayOne for years. I started back when it was iOS/MacOS only, but then switched phone to Android and haven't been back. But now they have an app and web app for that. What I don't like is the somewhat goofy format it saves in and it's on their servers. They used to allow you to at least leverage your own Dropbox, but no longer.

      For the past several months I've tried several FOSS options. Main criteria is that I could host it myself, supports offline entries stored in an open file format (preferably MarkDown), and had either multi platform app or a decent web app. That lead me to try these:

      Memos
      Pros:

      • Great persistent web app
      • Slick UI that is light and snappy
      • markdown support
        Cons:
      • Stuffs the .md inside a database file so can be a bit cumbersome to export data
      • No offline support. There is a 3rd party app that hopes to implement it

      Flatnotes
      Pros:

      • Incredibly simple
      • Another easily deployed app
      • Flat Markdown files
        Cons:
      • Web app on mobile is almost unusable as in it doesn't scale well to smaller screens
      • Very early development, but very likely to stay as minimalistic as it is now.
      • No offline and very unlikely to ever have it

      Joplin
      Pros:

      • Multi platform apps that perform well
      • End-to-end encryption supported
      • Could replace both DayOne and my To-do solution (Google Keep)
      • Offline support
        Cons:
      • More database stuff instead of flat markdown files

      One solution I've been testing lately is using IAWriter to write to a 'Journal' folder within my Obsidian vault on Google drive Obsidian Vault > Journal > 2023.... for example. This works surprisingly well. Of course IAWriter is a bit spendy at $29 for Android and then more $ for other platforms as they're sold separately.

      So I'm curious what other people are using for just simple daily journaling, random thoughts, etc. If there's an approach I've missed I'd love to hear it. Joplin is so dang close but not having the structure of plaintext files is a no go for me as I don't want to be trapped by any one product should something happen to the development down the road. Doesn't have to be free, but I want control of the entries either on my own server or cloud storage.

      46 votes