I got a new shirt!!! Thanks, _refugee_! I love it. Been busy working. My wife and I got drawn into watching Poldark. She's particularly taken with the protagonist. My good friends launched https://futureswap.com two days ago. If you are into Ethereum and Defi, it is amazing. Ridiculously good returns for liquidity providers atm. Oh, and my dev hubski server has my local weather. Coming to a Hubski near you soon.
I like the look of the futureswap thing! Might put in some ether just to test it out. If i understand correctly, you basically become a lender and earn returns, as if you were the bank? And the platform "guarantees" your investment. It's hard to distinguish between platforms that just promise you can pull out your money anytime vs the legit ones, internet's full of scammers. But this seems legit enough for a quick try. Do you have a referral code?
Unfortunately, you'll have to wait a bit on FS. They got way more volume than they anticipated with their alpha and closed it early. I believe the original plan was 28 days. The alpha test revealed opportunities for traders to do something called 'backrunning', and it started to get costly for liquidity providers instead of providing a profit. No hacks, but they know several things they want to change before their beta launch. I'll ping you when it does. No one in crypto treats 'alpha' like 'alpha' or 'beta' like 'beta', however. I'm guilty myself. :) If trading remains un-gamed, then yes. If you put X USD in, you should get X + n USD out. That was the case until yesterday, when n turned negative.If i understand correctly, you basically become a lender and earn returns, as if you were the bank? And the platform "guarantees" your investment.
FOSS can lick my nuts. At 8am I decided to install Brave on my linux VM on the least-used PC to play games. 4 1/2 hours later and I'm up from VMWare 12 to VMWare 15, have upgraded Mint from 16 to 17, have lost copy-paste, have gained audio, am unable to find "the universe" and am currently binning the whole f'n Mint distro and attempting to do a clean install of Ubuntu 18. Windows or Mac I could have clobbered in the head and rebuilt three times over by now.
Is it copying and pasting into and out of the VM that you're having an issue with? I'm not that familiar with vmware, but there will have to be something like Virtual Box's Guest Additions to make that work. Google tells me that the something is called VMware Tools.
Yeah that's a program that effectively never works. "have you updated VMTools?" "of course I've updated goddamn VMTools." "On the host and the guest?" "Yes of course on the host and the guest." "and you've tried uninstalling and reinstalling?" "Yes I have followed the only three available steps anywhere on the Internet and no it has not fixed the problem." crickets
So lately I've been trying to get more serious about blogging about digital communities. One of the first series of posts I decided to tackle was about Pubski. It's not quite done, part 3 - where I break down a lot of the academic and personal significance - is still incomplete. However, I thought I'd share part 2, where I break down a bunch of data gathering and processing I did around Pubski as a network over time - there are a lot of interesting graphs & happy to answer questions / receive feedback! Here is a little sample: 
Neat! Some users are more talkative than I realized dang. Guessing that user-inactivated is applewood in a past life. EDIT: Maybe not? Could be all user-inactivateds ever in pubski. These hubski blogs (story and data) are fantastic. That last graph was a poppin’ ‘ski. The downward trend of Hubski comments over time (but consistent user activity) is a head scratcher. Newer users that replaced older users activity-wise just comment less?
My guess is the overall user base is smaller now than it was then, and a lot of us were more active a few years ago what with life circumstances having changed since then and all that.
Yeah @kantos, user-inactive is any user who has ever deactivated or w/e. And toward the headscratcher - agree with @ButterflyEffect's second point there - my cursory guess was that the core group of users were more tightly knit/more talkative in the early days. But it is a good question about overall user base, would be great to see that data as well!
I would assume it’s all user inactivateds and I love the ratio as a result, think it is nice and low Also could be older users just tend to comment less I would say I feel I’ve seen that trend in general. Hear from users like insom, tng, b_b wasox etc much less these days. Feel it’s a gradual factor of time and lives. You really can’t generally maintain the same level of investment in a community over time, up or down the ratio is bound to change
Makes me wonder the break-down of who's who in the user-activateds. I can get on board with you and bfx's theory. Lil' bit of a bummer, miss the updates from flac, pabs, and bootz - even if I was more a lurker then. Sweet seeing some familiar faces come back recently.
Wow, this is really cool! Thanks for sharing the work you've been doing on this!
I've always been a positive happy dude. It's just who I am. But this week I finally broke; and it has given me a deeper understanding of those I know who deal with clinical depression (like my wife). I couldn't really DO anything. I wasn't sobbing in a corner, or a wreck, I was just ... incapable of anything. So I played video games for about two days straight. Today we are going away to a friend's vacation home. They are out of the country and can't get to it, and asked us to go check on it. Fortunately, it is also my wife's birthday. So we are getting away for a bit, together. It's going to be lovely. And just the break I need right now. (There's no internet there, too. That'll help me out immensely.) Oh. And I got onto TikTok. And I love it. Without reservation. A total blast!
I hear you. My band-aid to lift darker moods/thoughts lately has been a medium sized candle that can last for a few days. Something about a persistent little flame that inspires heat and light through to sundown grants a token of solace. Pushing back the darkness, ya know? Enjoy your time away.
Can definitely relate - generally consider myself to be a positive/optimistic person over the past couple years, but this week has been super duper tough. It's such a scary feeling to have my "well of positivity" run dry,. I've been getting nasty with my housemates, sour at work, and generally unproductive. Hopefully I can start filling back up, but gotta take it slow Have fun at the vacation home, sounds perfect!
Chatted with my boss about the depressive episode, and he had it the previous Sat-Tues. His boss had it the previous week, too. Everyone at work is being open and talking about where they are, mentally, and ... it's kinda amazing. We can support each other when we need it, and ask for help without fear. That right there helps immensely.
Observer. I don't think I'm a creator-type. Over my lifetime I have invested tens of thousands of dollars into musical equipment, GoPro cameras, drones, etc... and then I don't lead a life that uses them at all. I'm not jumping off cliffs, or playing gigs, or surfing, or whatever. I walk my dog. I write. I sit in my back yard and enjoy the big Douglas Fir tree and all the birds in it. So I'm just not a Millennial creator-type person. And I should be clear, I'm only on the dark gothy side of TikTok... there's a lot of lip syncing to music... but the songs are more death metal, hardcore EDM, and stuff. Camilla Severin and her clown character #Jojo is pretty much the epicenter of my TikTok experience. (darkrose_assassin, darkcorruptedbrains, xox_toxicat_xox, and of course camillaseverin are kinda the few people I follow, who then lead me to the other "dark side of TikTok" types of creators. I love the costumes and makeup.)
Has anyone else here played Outer Wilds? I completed it a few days ago and I can't stop thinking about. Plenty of games have had an emotional impact on me, but none quite like this. I feel a sense of emptiness now that I've finished it. Perhaps that sounds pretentious, but it is genuine. It's hard to talk about it without spoiling it. Every moment is filled with such imagination and depth that a relatively small game world feels huge. It puts most sprawling open worlds to shame. I think it may have become my favourite game of all time. Play it. I've been training pull-ups for the last few months and progress has been pretty good. It's interesting to see the sharp initial rise in reps as your muscle memory improves and your body gets used to the movement. Then increases become more gradual once improvement comes down to strength/muscle gain. I've also been blasting the core workouts which are never not brutal. But it's all to keep me in good stead for when I can get in the kayak again. I was supposed to be going to Slovenia in June to kayak on the literal paradise that is Soča river. Oh well, maybe next year... I've been taking an online course in logic and critical thinking. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, but the comment that johnnyFive left on this article I posted was the straw that broke the camel's back. It was at that point that it became too clear for me to ignore that it's unsatisfactory to read an article and just think "hmm that's interesting" without really examining it further. So thanks for helping me push back the dark. I'm coming to the end of the first part of course and I've already learnt a tonne. It started from the very basics, but it's been super useful and I dig the conversational, in-depth style it has. I'm looking forward to learning more.
Thanks for the shout-out, and a course like that sounds like an excellent idea. I certainly don't hold myself out as a model, though :) I have played Outer Wilds and loved the start. I have every intention of starting anew here soon, since God knows I have the time. Plus it's been long enough for the beginning to feel fresh. I stopped playing it partially due to simple ADHD, but also because computer RPGs often feel really restrictive to me. You can only truly roleplay but so much, since of course they can't think of everything. It's the same reason I got bored with MMOs as a genre: the actual ability to play a role is extremely limited. Contrariwise, this is probably why I can stick with third-person RPGs a bit more (e.g. Final Fantasy), because I'm watching someone else's story rather than having the game put "me" in there but in a very limited role. The Outer Wilds' writing is good enough to make up for this quite a bit, but it still can't do everything. So admittedly I may have to lower my expectations a bit.
I think you may be talking about the RPG The Outer Worlds. A decent game but not a patch on Outer Wilds for me. Outer Wilds is an adventure/exploration game about a solar system stuck in a time-loop. There is no formal objective. Instead, you search the solar system as you please to learn about an alien race that came before you and their purpose in what is now your home. An easy mixup to make considering their similar names and the fact that they came out in the same year.
Whoops, you're absolutely right. I have also played Outer Wilds and enjoyed it!
I've heard it's good. I finally trudged through Horizon Zero Dawn and got involved in Outer WORlds instead and it's amusingly weird. It trudges a lot, though, and its combat system is rudimentary at best. I like that they've got a mathematical preacher looking to solve the ultimate equation named "Vicar Max."
I guess by your use of the word 'trudged' that you don't rate Horizon Zero Dawn too highly? It's coming to PC sometime in the future and I was optimistic about it. I enjoyed my time with The Outer Worlds. Good catch with Vicar Max, I hadn't made that link. I think that the companion characters are some of the strongest bits of the game. I especially enjoyed how they interact with each other. But yeah, as you say, the story plods in the middle. Then it's like: psyche! You're actually halfway through the final act. Wait, who exactly is the antagonist? Oh well, here's the final mission. I was also disappointed by how little weight it felt like your decisions had. There's the one big decision you make on the first planet which feels impactful. And there's a cool potential interaction with a companion too during the decision. But after that, nothing felt that important. In a funny twist of fate, the writer for Outer Wilds has now been hired by the creators of The Outer Worlds. Potentially to work on the sequel. Also, if you have a spare 15 minutes, there's a good video of the devs of The Outer Worlds reacting to a 12 minute speed run of their game. Obvious spoiler warning if you haven't completed it yet.
I actually really enjoyed HZD. Bought the disc like two years ago but never got around to it; when the expansion cost $10 less than the full monty basic-game-plus-expansion-plus-swag package, I bought the swag so Aloi stares out at me whenever i turn on the Playstation. The combat is imaginative; your loadout and your selections and your strategy and your sequencing all matters. It's a fairly rich story world with engaging mysteries. I think my basic problem is with how stupid Guerilla makes their AI. I can accept it if you have a rogue machine that forgets I'm there five minutes after I launch an exploding armor piercing arrow at its head because okay, machine AI evolves stupidly. But the fact that your human adversaries timeout even quicker is weird; it's like stealth-killing a kennel full of amnesiac golden retrievers. It's obviously a design choice to tilt combat towards lots of intense combos and other dumb shit but it also means that if you're primarily a sniper many of the quests become sort of an elaborate golf game. Which hey, I guess I need right now. I'll watch that speedrun later. I'm in the middle of salvaging the hope right now because I tend to play every side quest. For a few days it was annoying because I realized I was basically walking around waiting for people to ask me to do favors but also, shit, I could stand to do some good in the (virtual) world right now. My main beef? Right now? Is it's damn hard to find an interesting video game that isn't also somewhere post-apocalyptic where you're fighting corrupt madmen. It makes me wish there was more to do in No Man's Sky.
Some friends of mine have also been speaking fairly highly of the FDA lately. Mostly with regards to 3D printing materials (face-shields, replacement parts, etc) being allowed into medical settings. They've been saying that in normal circumstances, some of these processes could've taken months or years. There is something to be said for safety and process, but I'm glad the maker-community mindset of rapid prototyping is playing nicely with the FDA for a change (and in such trying times nonetheless)!
Almost a year late, but I've finally edited my last travel video. I was avoiding it because the actual trip had a couple unpleasant undertones. And then I lost the footage from the rest of the trip and got my camera stolen in the Netherlands so the whole video making thing was just a bad memory. I'm glad I finally did it, so it's not hanging over me anymore. I find sometimes there are some tasks like this that just increase in guilt factor over time, and the mental load of having it on the "to do" list becomes too much. It turned out really good too - nice shots, funny moments, great location.
Home improvement is largely done now. There's only one more IKEA delivery to go before we're good for a long while. I'm betting my money on some form of stay-home order continuing until the end of the year, so I want home to be as cozy as can be. Which has also led me to finally get around purchasing a mobile airco unit. I was on the fence last summer. But last summer I could escape to the properly airconditioned office and simply stay there for as long as I could. I'm not expecting that to be possible this year. We have good isolation and the angle of the home means sunshine in the summer only shines in before ~11am and after ~4pm, so we now have a rollable unit that we can put in the office for work and in the bedroom to keep both cool. It does feel like it grinds against my principles, as if I'm caving to climate change somehow, but I know I'll lose my goddamn sanity if I'm stuck inside most of the summer in the heat. So 9400 BTU it is. Last night was maybe the first in a few weeks were I slept with only one interruption. I don't know about y'all but I've been waking up 5, 6 times a night on average, with way more dreams than before. At least I'm in a good rhythm now; I go to bed around 11-11:30pm, wake up at 8:15-8:30 and start working around 9. Work has been good, but a lot this week. I'm in a new project that is very fucking cool - we're on a large government pilot to create a new MaaS app, and I'm in the core team as the lead data guy for everything from analytics to research. If our app turns out to be successful and people ditch Google Maps in favour of our app, I could end up in mobility data heaven. But I still have my NYSERDA geotool to finish in the next fortnight. Which is proving quite a behemoth task, as I'm singlehandedly stitching hundreds of thousands of records together and beating ArcGIS Online with a hammer until it works how I want it to.
Scored about 20 lb of legos this weekend for $50 and it’s been a blast. Spent a couple hours sort everything and now I’m going to try and rebuild the sets. My daughter is finally old enough to start getting into them as well so it’s been a super positive experience. Other than that, still employed, baking bread, lots of gardening. Oh bees I got bees, though they arrived all f-ed up and queenless still trying to figure out how to resolve that problem.
That lego haul sounds amazing, if you don't mind me asking, where'd ya come across such a great deal? Always looking for cheaper ways to expand the collection! Also, if you build anything cool share to #lego or something, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to see it.
Something is going very wrong. I don't know if its drugs, psychology or the extensive damage shingles did to my nervous system, but something is very wrong. I feel as though I'm unraveling. Things that were coherent and reasonable now seem diaphanous and silly. I lose myself for hours in arguments with people determined to spread plague and harm others and literally am unable to stop until I've burned myself out. I miss meals, medication. It keeps me up into the wee hours of the night until the tranquilizers finally kick in. I speak, English comes out, but not understanding. I worry that this is how it feels to lose your mind. Already discussed with my therapist. Just worried.
Ethno-nationalism is super prevalent on Instagram and its weirding me out. There appears to be no moderation of what look like straight up white power accounts. I've reported them but I get this sneaking suspicion that Zucc doesnt actually care if Nazis are using his platforms.