Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/4

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

On November 24, 2025, Artist Hayden Clay (reddit user Strawbear) was permanently banned from the r/art subreddit for mentioning their art prints. In addition, all their content-- many years' worth-- was also removed from the subreddit.

r/art has always had extremely strict rules against self-promotion, to the extent of being actively hostile to artists. For example, if you post your art there, you are not allowed to have a link to your website in your reddit user profile, and you may not put a watermark which includes your social media handle. As of December 3, 2025, their official rules stated:

9. DO NOT SPAM. No art sales, no links to social media, stores, or anything spammy.
   DO NOT mention SALES or SOCIAL MEDIA. AT ALL.
   DO NOT MENTION ART SALES. AT ALL.
   DO NOT LINK TO SOCIAL MEDIA. Or talk about your social media, or include any watermark that references your social media.
   DO NOT link to a sales site, or have a link to your sales site in your personal profile, or have a username that refers to a sales site.
   Basically, if your Reddit account exists only to sell your art, DO NOT post here.
   Broken record time: This applies to anything that looks like spam. ANYTHING. For example: product marketing, fundraising, charities, surveys, contests, collaborations, exhibitions, requests for submissions, research projects, business ideas, requests for prints, social media usernames, links to sales pages, website promotions, sneaky usernames, and whatever else we feel is spam.
   If you still think, somehow, your spam doesn't fit this list, DO NOT post here.

Hayden Clay's post prompted plenty of backlash against the r/art mod team. On November 27, Hayden Clay tweeted that the r/art mod team rage-quit, leaving the subreddit locked. CORRECTION: Sorry for my mistake-- the mod team did not rage quit, it was one mod that removed everyone and then pretended like everyone decided to quit. Thanks to @teaearlgraycold and @CannibalisticApple for the correction!

On December 2, the r/art new mod team introduced themselves. They are promising to have updated "non-draconian" rules in the next few days. They understand that artists need to make a living and advertise their work, and want to moderate the subreddit in a way that balances that against spam. They've been unbanning users (including Hayden Clay) and they said that out of 5000+ bans issued in 2025, only 60+ had a valid reason.

UPDATE: As of December 4, r/art has been reopened, with updated rules in place. I think this is much more fair with regards to self-promotion:

5. Advertising / Self-promotion
   Promotion/advertising of products or services (e.g., art materials, software) is not permitted without mod approval.
   Links to personal sites/socials/merch should be in your Reddit profile, and can be mentioned once in your post body and sparingly in comments if asked. Direct links to personal sites/socials/merch should only be shared in our weekly Wednesday megathread.
   Promotion of OnlyFans or other pornographic sites is not permitted.

I remember being new to reddit and thinking about sharing my art in the r/art subreddit, but then I was turned off by their anti-artist rules. I'm pleasantly surprised by this turn of events-- though I wish it had happened earlier. The new mods sound reasonable, and have expressed dismay about the negativity of the previous mods:

Honestly it's pretty insane and a bit depressing seeing the modmails from the old team. Very rude, disrespectful, and extremely harsh to people making simple, innocent mistakes, older people or non-English speaking people misunderstanding little things, etc. Those mods were seriously troubled.

I'm glad that it looks like reddit's most established art subreddit has a better future ahead thanks to the new mods.

I learned French to schoolboy level as a, well, schoolboy. I've remembered quite the remarkable amount I think. Learned The Klingon Language must be 20 years ago, to a point where I could converse with other speakers to some extent, but never the best.

More recently I've become quite interested in historical linguistics, from watching Simon Roper with Old English, and Jackson Crawford. Old English fascinates me as we were never considered clever enough at school to study English properly - that was only for the clever kids.

Because I couldn't find a good Frisian online learning resource, I decided to try my hand at modern German.

Been following Babbel for about 2 months now so super early. I "completed" the first set of lessons and have been doing the vocabulary tests to try and make sure these sink in before progressing, but I find that I regularly only get 2/10, 3/10 on the flashcards.

I've started doing whole first lesson set again, and I find them really easy. I'm basically intuiting a lot of the questions from knowledge of English, French and "common sense" I suppose. Is it odd that I can 100% the lessons easily and quickly, but the vocabulary tests just aren't there for me? My listening and speaking seems quite good according to the app.

Is it too early to tell (I think it might be), should I supplement Babbel with something else, like live learning (perhaps eventually, not right now - I think it'd be pointless at such a low level).

Anything else? Interested in anyone's thoughts.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

If you don’t want to see threads in this series, add save point to your personal tag filters.

Ive been playing nonstop for the past two weeks basically, took last week off work so I could play. Lvl 67 as of this morning and I’m a little behind my clan mates who are 80s pushing 90s

Thoughts in general? Thoughts on salvaging nerf this am?

Haven’t played in years and think it sounds neat? It is. Bond up and play, sailing is a meta skill so you can lvl up while you level up but watch out for random crates of alcohol in the sea cause while you get xp from sampling…. Sometimes they tele you to the abyss cause Jagex is pro troll

Hi!

I've decided to move some of my selfhosted things from on-prem (at home ;)) to the cloud, and at the same time I'd like to try and run this in EU, or at least europe. I'd like to get started fairly quickly as this was prompted by one of my home servers halfway dying on me.

The features I'm most interested in are approximately:

• Virtual machines.
• Storage. Cheap long term for backups (similar to S3 Glacier).
• Managed DB, most likely postgresql.
• Serverless jobs (similar to AWS lambda).
• IaaS (I've got a bit of experience with terraform, but it doesn't have to be that).
• Builtin monitoring.
• Git hosting, it's likely that I'll just go with github/gitlab here, but if there's a nice alternative I'm up for it.
• Automated sending of email. I'm using AWS SES atm, and I'm very happy with it.

Some other things:

• I intend to run a combination of services written by others, e.g. nextcloud and software I've written myself.
• I'll most likely be running linux only, but I prefer to select my own flavour where it makes sense.
• I much prefer managing permissions and users in gcp than in aws as I find aws way too complicated for my needs while gcp mostly just makes sense.
• I'd prefer a platform that's being developed and improving over time with big potential for the future.
• This is a hobby project, and some of these requirements may seem a bit contradictory or non-optimal, but that's ok.
• I have some experience running kubernetes (self-hosted), and I'm not a huge fan of the complexity and yaml files, at the same time OpenStack is getting kinda old, and I don't know if I think it's a platform for the future. But from what I see most of the options seems to be built on top of one of those.
• Cheaper is of course better, I don't have a company-sized budget, this is all coming out of my "hobby pocket".
• I live in Sweden, so datacenters geographically close is a plus.

Right now I'm looking at European alternatives to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Scaleway is looking the most promising, but I'm really skimming the top when it comes to info atm.

Hope that makes sense =) I'm interested in all kinds of feedback.

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/3

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

I've got a few albums and songs that feel like they were made just for me, simply because they are obscure.

• Freedom by M-Fuge/Centrifuge - An album produced in the late 90s for a single year's program of Southern Baptist summer camps - one I didn't even attend. It's got some pretty simple but surprisingly well produced praise music. I don't believe in God, but it's a good comforting listen to me.

• They Eat Their Own - The one and only album from the very short lived band of the same name. Full of 90s grungepunk rock. Includes "Like a Drug", which actually was very briefly popular, but the rest of the songs in the album clearly didn't get the same level of attention that that song got. But the roughness is kind of appealing in it's own way.

• The entire discography of Cool Cavemen - Once again, another band that was popular enough to get signed with a record label, and actually released a few albums. They still make the list because as hard as it is to get people to listen to Funk/Rock fusion music, it's even harder to get them to listen to French music, even when their best songs are in English. I almost didn't bring them up because they're still big enough to make it onto Spotify.

I've got tons more I could talk about that are much more obscure, but they're not quite on the same scale and quite a bit more niche. Just take a look at the last album I purchased on Bandcamp.

How about you? What's some music that you like that nobody else in the world seems to be aware of?

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/1

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like jmail, cookies and coming out. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was befuddled.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!