Hanging alone? Spending time with friends? Loved ones? Going out dancing? Drinks? Sitting down with a good book? Playing games online with friends? Going hiking? Cooking? Gardening?

Also, how often do you get to spend your Friday nights in the manner you most enjoy?

I'd like to thank everyone who has ever participated in these topics, but this will be the last topic in this series that I post. I've discussed the idea of this series with others and several users have pointed out to me that it was a little strange for us to have a topic dedicated to only three days.

So Monday, hopefully around 11:00 AM US Central Time, there will be a new topic posted that will continue the goals of this series, but allow for a larger window of participation.

I made a topic talking more about these changes, why I started posting this series of topics, and what I want to accomplish with its replacement.

Even if you don't have any plans for the weekend, and just want to talk about how you are doing, this is a good place to do that too.

You can find last week's topic here.

So, Tildruids, what (or how) are you doing this weekend?

So, in a nutshell, the writing quality and character development declined a lot in the last season ... except I mostly didn't notice (or mind), until I started reading online about how much - and why - everyone else hated the last season.

I got as far as S08 Ep03 (the White Walker battle) without reading any online commentary, critiques, etc. On my own, I did feel some characters' activities/behaviors were a bit 'off', but I still loved the episode overall (except literally too dark, hard to see some scenes).

Then a friend commented on some disappointing thing in the episode, and how 'everyone' was bitching about it. I started reading online ... and that's when I started seeing the flaws in the last season.

Granted, even if I had stayed offline, just watched it myself, there probably still would have been things that pissed me off ... Euron's magical dragon ambush, the whole Missandei capture/murder thing, and Dany embracing the Dark Side. I can't imagine I would have overlooked those.

But, by reading everyone else's gripes online, watching bitter youtube reviews, etc., the last 3 episodes sucked a lot more for me, because I saw all the flaws, many of which I would have missed.

So, to sum up, I blame all y'all for ruining GoT for me.

Thoughts?

Shouldn't there be loud and clear opposing voice to Trump overstepping historical boundaries?

When Trump declares emergency to expedite arms sales to Saudi Arabia and UAE or when he approves secret nuclear power tech sales to Saudi Arabia

When Trump urges US Fed to cut interest rates

When Trump lifts sanctions on firms linked to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and when Trump conceals face-to-face encounters with Putin

I've been feeling lonely for quite a while now..

Sometimes I strike a conversation with someone seemingly randomly because I wonder who they are, what they're doing here but I always feel like I'm doing something wrong, like, I shouldn't be doing this, I feel kind of.. creepy, awkward. I've only been able to do this online because in real life, I just freeze and my mind just races with stress and I just give up and just decided overtime to not attempt that and avoid it.

So well, I'm just left wondering, how? How are you supposed to meet new people?

I think it's safe to say that, in our modern world, everyone has an individual and complex relationship with technology. We're all experiencing the growing pains of uncharted territory, as computers, phones, and the internet continually revolutionize experiences from the everyday to the extraordinary. Unfortunately, it can often feel like every step forward also brings regressions, and what's good for some is not always good for others.

I'm interested in hearing about the ways that technology works for you in your life, both the good and the bad. Some guiding questions:

• What's better in your life because of technology? What is worse?
• How does it impact your career, hobbies, and interpersonal relationships?
• Are there tradeoffs you have to make for incorporating or ignoring tech for certain tasks or aspects?
• Are there areas in which you hope for the increased presence of technology?
• Are there areas where you actively keep tech out?
• Do you think that the problems created for us by technology are design flaws in the tech itself, or are they merely a mirror for pre-existing issues at the human level?

I know "technology" as a term is very broad, but I've intentionally left it that way because I want people to self-select the things most important to them, whether that's their computer, the internet, a phone, an online platform, an assistive tech device, etc. Also, don't feel obligated to list out every piece of tech, as it's gotten so prevalent to be almost omnipresent. Instead, just focus on the things that have a significant impact on your day to day life.

Heya!

The question is rather straightforward. Even though I said smaller, size doesn't really matter for this - the focus is more on the community aspect rather than it being small. Here's my non-exhaustive list (in no particular order):

1. Tildes - This is unsurprising. It's definitely large for a "small" community, but it's managed to preserve it's culture very well, which is rather impressive. It's cozy and has high quality discussion.
2. Various Discord servers and IRC channels. This one is harder to pinpoint, to be honest. As far as IRC channels/Discord servers goes, some of the more niche gaming ones are probably some of the nicest environments. IRC-wise, I really haven't managed to find any particularly active ones, outside of the ones for the next list member...
3. tilde.town and probably the larger tildeverse. Not affiliated with Tildes, but generally just... a nice place to be. It's rather quiet a lot of the time, but their main IRC channel is, frankly, quite great. When it's active.
4. A lot of Mastodon instances, although of course not all. The fediverse is generally a nice place to be, although politics on there is kind of mushy and one sided. Genuine interactions on there, however, are extremely common and sorting by the global timeline is quite nice (most of the time.)
5. rateyourmusic is a nice community of those who are passionate about music. It's quite nice overall, though.

There's definitely a lot I've missed out, mainly because I probably don't know about them.

So, what are some of the smaller (or not) communities that you enjoy?

@Whom asked me to cover this post for today.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Vancouver @ NYRB
LA Galaxy @ Orlando
Atlanta @ RSL
Montreal @ LAFC
NYCFC @ Chicago
FC Dallas @ Vancouver
DC United @ New England
Portland @ Philadelphia
NYRB @ FC Cincinnati
Houston @ MNUFC
Columbus @ Colorado
Seattle @ Sporting KC
San Jose @ Toronto

there have been quite a few discussions on poetry on here and more than a few people post it from time to time, but i don't think anybody's asked this question recently if at all on this site, so let me be the first to do that.

alternative/bonus question for those of you who can't pick a singular poem: who is your favorite poet in general?

(also just to be clear, non-anglophone poetry/poets are of course welcome for the answer here. don't feel limited or obligated to confine yourself just to english poetry because most of the people here are anglophones)

In an effort to make these weekly, I present a new programming challenge.

The challenge this week is to compress some text using a prefix code. Prefix codes associate each letter with a given bit string, such that no encoded bitstring is the prefix of any other. These bit strings are then concatenated into one long integer which is separated into bytes for ease of reading. These bytes can be represented as hex values as well. The provided prefix encoding is as follows:

Challenge

Your program should accept a lowercase string (including the ~ character), and should output the formatted compressed bit string in binary and hex. Your final byte should be 0 padded so that it has 8 bits as required. For your convenience, here is the above table in a text file for easy read-in.

Example

Here is an example:

$> tildes ~comp
10010100 10010010 01011010 10111001 00000010 11000100 00110000 10100000
94 92 5A B9 02 C4 30 A0

Bonuses

1. Print the data compression ratio for a given compression, assuming the original input was encoded in 8 bit ASCII (one byte per character).
   2. Output the ASCII string corresponding to the encoded byte string in addition to the above outputs.
2. @onyxleopard points out that many bytes won't actually be valid ASCII. Instead, do as they suggested and treat each byte as an ordinal value and print it as if encoded as UTF-8.
3. An input prefixed by 'D' should be interpreted as an already compressed string using this encoding, and should be decompressed (by inverting the above procedure).

Previous Challenges (I am aware of prior existing ones, but it is hard to collect them as they were irregular. Thus I list last week's challenge as 'Week 1')
Week 1

TL;DR: New topic coming Monday. Spans the entire week. Is about your plans, accomplishments, and feelings. Come discuss.

For those who don't know, I decided to start posting these topics after I ran across this comment by @cadadr. I knew that Lobsters, another link aggregation community that I love, ran weekly "What are you doing this weekend?" and "What are you working on this week?" posts and that these did two things:

1. They often got a good deal of participation and broke the mold of an otherwise technology focused community, with interesting results.

2. They provided an excellent opportunity for new users to participate with a low barrier to entry.

So, I started posting the "What are you doing this weekend?" topic as a series because I realized the reasons that idea is successful on Lobsters also make it successful here. On Tildes, it breaks the mold of in-depth discussion with interesting results and provides an opportunity for new or quiet users to participate without much of a barrier to entry. I see it as a way to facilitate community engagement.

I think, so far, the topics have worked out well and I've enjoyed posting them, but I want to extend the time period during which discussion can be held in them. Obviously, there's no rule saying people can't comment on those topics after the weekend is over, but people have communicated to me that they still feel weird about commenting on those topics even on a Sunday, or they feel weird talking about what they did that weekend, rather than what they planned on doing.

So now I've (maybe foolishly) committed myself to the task of solving all of these problems with a replacement to the "Weekend" series of topics with something that runs throughout the week and is a little more free-form. I still want the focus to be on people's plans, goals, and actions throughout the week (including weekends), but I don't want them to feel odd about participating at a certain point or in a certain way. I also want to continue mentioning that it's okay to discuss how they are doing as well, if they don't want to discuss what they are doing.

I've made this topic separate from my last "Weekend" topic so that my ramblings here (and any discussion spawned from it) won't take over that topic.

The main point of this change is to make the window larger. The "Weekend" topics were nice, but they were only dedicated to three days. I want users to feel like they can interact with whatever this new topic will be any time throughout the week, that they can discuss their plans, their accomplishments, or even just how they're feeling. I don't want to say that I want to increase community engagement, but I do want to make it easier for that to happen. So, if the community wants to engage more, they'll have an easier time doing so.

I'm still trying to decide what the title and text of the new topic should be, but whatever it ends up being, it will start being posted on Monday, around 11:00 AM US Central Time.