A lot of the time people will by default mark a game being buggy as a negative, and on the one hand I do understand this. But, at the same time, some of my most memorable gaming moments will be stuff like walking entering the wasteland to find an old barrel just spinning violently on the floor. Now, obviously a GAME BREAKING bug will always destroy an experience, but if you look at a civilian floating up a wall in spider-man PS4 and you're too worried about your immersion to find humour in it, I'm sure you're very fun at parties.

I've started following JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Vento Aureo, which is airing as of yesterday. I'm wondering if there's any interest in weekly episode discussion threads such as the ones in ~tv
Doesn't have to be JJBA either, could be another series which is currently airing.

I was watching my favorite weekly space show on YouTube, TMRO, and I learned about Astro Live Experiences (ALE.) They will soon launch two test satellites which will be able to provide a burst of 30-40 man made shooting stars at a prearranged time and place, for a fee.

Japanese company ALE is the first "space entertainment" company of which I am aware. The only event in the same ballpark was New Zealand based RocketLab's Humanity Star which caused a large amount of controversy. ALE's initial technology will allow a 200km radius of earth to see their multi-color shooting star show. According to the interview on TMRO, in the long term, they are planning to allow image rendering and even artificial aurora.

This type of business seems inevitable as we advance into space. I can see some benefits and some downsides to this technology. What do you all think of this?

^{Maybe this topic belongs in ~misc}

hey everyone! found this interesting post on /r/6perks, and i wanted to share it here and see what ideas get shared.

You wake up in a chemist's lab. In front of you is a table with 10 different-coloured pills. You may only choose 3. A warning label notifies you that taking more than 3 will cause instant combustion.

Which do you choose, and why?

🔵 Future Pill 🔵

You can see 10 years into the future or any time sooner, whenever you want. You can see any part of the world.

🔴 Xray Pill 🔴

You gain the ability to see through anything as far as you can normally see. Works at any layer.

🔸 Fly Pill 🔸

You can fly. You start at a slow speed and require time to speed up to a maximum of 100mph (161kph). You are not immune to low oxygen or harsh temperatures.

🌿 Drug Pill 🌿

You gain the ability to automatically be affected by any drug that exists as much as you want, no bad side effects.

❤ Sex Appeal Pill ❤

Anyone you want is instantly attracted to you, you are cured of and immune to STD's. Anyone who you "do" also becomes immune, and son on. Cure the world?

💠 Disease Immune Pill 💠

Gives you the ability to become immune to all harmful diseases.

💰 Money Pill 💰

You don't become rich, nor have infinite money, but it's like you do. Every time you want to do or have something, your bank account/wallet has exactly as much money as you need.

💮 Wish Pill 💮

Gives you the ability to wish for one of two things: any existing object to be teleported in front of you, or for you to be teleported wherever you want. Can only be used once a week. You get a free return ticket if you teleported somewhere. You cannot wish for other pills.

♠️ Death Pill ♠️

Gives you the ability to have any person of your choice killed, with no risk of consequence. Can only be used once every 5 weeks.

🌟 Painproof Pill 🌟

You are tougher than Wolverine after drinking green tea or eating spinach. You can still get hurt but you have Olympian-like physique, the skills of the greatest martial artists in the world, you are twice as fast, and your wounds regenerate very quickly.

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Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 6 - Hated in the Nation

The death of a journalist at the centre of a social media firestorm leads a veteran detective and her tech-savvy apprentice to a chilling discovery.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

Has anyone else seen this show? It came out last October. I just saw it about a month ago, probably a little less. It has got to be one of the best thing I've seen all year. Top 3.

I love the entire theme, the atmosphere, how everything is done. The direction is incredible. And the actors are ridiculously good.

In the show the two main characters will narrate their thoughts as they are happening in the moment. There is brilliant joke where Alyssa is narrating her thoughts and she thinks something along the lines of, "If This were a movie we would probably be American." Because the show is set in Britain and she is thinking to herself, what if this is all a movie.

The show is a dark comedy. And it's just got this incredible motif for lack of a better word. Has anyone else seen it? What are your thoughts? I really like Alyssa's character. Just how she is so empathetic, and she thinks far enough into everything to weigh both sides in a way not a lot of people would do. She basically givea the benefit of the doubt and weighs both sides more than she should.

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Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 5 - Men Against Fire

After his first battle with an elusive enemy, a soldier begins experiencing unfamiliar sensations and strange technical glitches.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

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Adjustment Day is a parody, at least I hope it is, of a United States dystopia. The concept is rather ambitious, but the author rises to the task. The prime conspiracy theory behind the book is that throughout history, civilization has periodically weeded out young men of 18-24 through war and whatever other means available to keep society from returning to the dark ages. Who does this in the U.S? Why, your government, of course.

In this version of the conspiracy, the young men turn the tables. Most of the book is about what happens after Adjustment Day. I've only read Fight Club and Choke by Palahniuk before this. All I can say is the cynicism and nihilism of those two books seems increased tenfold in Adjustment Day. Do you have a conservative conspiracy theory that you think about from time to time? They're all in here. I'd even bet that the author comes up with some you've never heard before.

In a satire that is as biting as The Sellout, Palahniuk presents several characters who live through the aftermath of the event, including the originator of it. But instead of nobody talking about it, (like in Fight Club) everybody is talking about this new bizarre movement/social-political revolution. As you go down this rabbit hole of irrational rationalization, it's easy to lose sight of what is going on. Scenes and characters are switched at the beginning of random paragraphs, causing me to back up every few pages.

A good example of Palahniuk's treatment of infrastructure is given by a new form of money that comes out of the movement:

Officially, the order called them Talbotts, but everyone knew them as skins. Rumor was the first batches were refined from, somehow crafted from the stretched and bleached skin taken from targeted persons. People seemed to take a hysterical joy from the idea.
Instead of being backed by gold or the full faith of government or some such, this money was backed by death. The suggestion was always that failure to accept the new currency and honor its face value might result in the rejecter being targeted. Never was this stated, not overtly, but the message was always on television and billboards: Please Report Anyone Failing to Honor the Talbott. The bills held their face value for as long as a season, but faded faster in strong light and fastest in sunlight. A faded bill held less value as the markers along the edges became illegible.

Because the money had a shelf life, people had to work all the time. At the top of the hierarchy were the young men who had put their lives on the line during the Adjustment Day revolution. They would get the money from some source and give it away to their workers and people they knew, spending it all as fast as they could.

If that sounds ridiculous, you haven't even scratched the surface of this world. Chief among the topics are racism and prejudice toward everyone you can imagine. All in all I found the book a little tedious. Palahniuk puts the crazy theories in the mouths of people who voice them so convincingly that it becomes surreal. If you're a fan of the author you might like it. But practically every paragraph seems engineered to be offensive in some way, to someone.

Let's just hope Chuck is making all this stuff up.

Preface

One of the most common questions I see from prospective programmers and computer scientists is "where should I start?". My answer to that is a pretty consistent one: learn how to solve problems effectively. But that's vague and not really all that helpful, so I figured that I should actually tackle this in a little more depth by touching on something more specific.

Specifically, I want to touch on the subject of how to think about complex problems.

The Rationale Behind Learning

Before we can better understand how to effectively solve problems, it's important to consider how it is that we learn. With any subject, the standard approach is to begin with the bare basics. For programming, that's writing a Hello, World! program in the new language you're working with. For foreign languages, you learn basic common words and sentence structure. For math, you learn your basic arithmetic operations like addition and multiplication.

From there, we add on more additional complexity and string together everything we've learned. For a foreign language, this looks like learning about new words, stringing them together in your own sentences, then learning about verb tenses and throwing them into the mix as well. With math, you take your normal number crunching and suddenly throw the concept of order of operations into the mix, then variables and how to solve for them.

As a general rule, we first get comfortable with solving a simple problem and gradually build up toward solving increasingly more difficult ones.

The Missing Piece

Odds are that we've all sat in a math class at one point, and when the teacher asked a student how to solve a problem, they received an immediate "I don't know". You may or may not have been that kid yourself. I have no intention of shaming the kids who struggled (or those who still struggle) with math. Rather, I want to point to what I believe is the fundamental cause of that mental barrier that has frustrated students for generations.

Learning is not simply a matter of adding more complexity to problems. A key part of learning, and one that I don't recall ever having emphasized during my grade school studies, is your ability to break problems down into the steps that you know how to complete and combine the different, simpler skills you've already learned to arrive at a solution. Instead, you were expected to solve many of those complex problems and learn through practice, or through pure rote memorization.

What determined whether or not you could solve those problems was then a question of whether or not you could intuit or memorize how to solve those specific problems, and brand new problems that still made use of the same skill sets but had completely different forms would throw a wrench in that. Those who could solve any of those problems--those who, I would argue, were often mistakenly referred to as "geniuses" or "talented"--were really just those who knew how to break a problem down into simpler pieces.

This isn't a failing on the students, but on the way they've been taught to think about problems.

Reducing Problems

What does it mean to "break down" a problem, though? The few times I recall a teacher ever touching on the subject, "break down the problem" and "use the skills you've already learned" were the kinds of pieces of advice passed around, completely vague and devoid of meaning for anyone who didn't already understand. How can we better grasp this important step?

There's a term in complexity theory known as "reduction". The general idea is that if you have problems A and B, where you already know how to solve B, then if you can transform problem A so that it looks like problem B, then you can use your solution for B to solve at least part of A.

In other words, finding the solution to a more complex problem is just a matter of finding a way to make it look like a problem you already know how to solve.

The advice to "break down" a problem really means to perform this process of "reduction", of transforming your more complicated problem A into your simpler, known problem B.

In Practice

We're still discussing a vague concept, but now that we have more specific language to work with, we can more easily see how it works in practice (a reduction of its own!).

Let's consider a conceptually simple problem: grabbing the k^th largest (or smallest) item from a list. How do we solve this problem? Probably the most obvious and straightforward answer is to sort the list then grab the k^th item, right?

Notice that we gave two high-level descriptions of the steps we need to solve this problem: sorting, then grabbing the appropriate item. We can therefore then state that the problem of "grab the k^th largest/smallest item from a list" can be reduced to the two problems "sort a list" and "grab the k^th item from a list".

Now, let's say we're given the problem "take this list of competitor times from the race and tell me what the top 10 race times were". What do we know about this problem? We know that we're being given a list, and we know that we need the 10 smallest items from that list. We also know that "10 smallest items" is just shorthand for "the 1st smallest item, the 2nd smallest item, ..., and the 10th smallest item". We can therefore reduce this problem to the previous one we solved by transforming it into "grab the k^th smallest item from a list" and "repeat for values 1-10 for k".

Practical Advice

In the end, my explanation may not have helped much at all in actually grasping the concept of reduction. My intent isn't necessarily to help you understand it immediately, but to provide you a framework for a way of thinking. Even if you do grasp the general concept, you may even wonder how you're supposed to recognize these kinds of reductions out in the wild in non-academic environments. The answer, perhaps annoying, is practice. Much like an appraiser can only become good at discerning details through experience, a programmer or computer scientist can only recognize these patterns through repeated exposure.

In general, if I had to narrow it down to a small list of tips for improving your problem solving skills, this would be it:

• Work on grasping the concept of reduction itself.
• Expose yourself to lots of new problems.
• Don't shy away from difficult problems. Reduce them as much as you can and solve the pieces you're able to. Try to research the pieces you're struggling with. Return to the problem later when you have more experience if you have to, but take a crack at it first.
• Don't accept "I don't know" as an answer in itself. Ask yourself why you don't how to solve a problem. Narrow down which pieces you're able to solve and which pieces you're not.
• Just solve problems. Any problems. Easy ones, hard ones, and anything in between. Solving problems is a skill, and practicing it will make you better at solving problems in general, and better at recognizing the simpler problems inside of more complicated ones.
• Don't just come up with a solution to a problem. Ensure that you understand how each piece of it works and why it works. Copy-pasting from StackOverflow can be a valid tool at your disposal, but doing so mindlessly isn't nearly as valuable as reviewing the solution, being able to determine whether or not it works before ever executing the code, and being able to discard anything unnecessary from it.

Final Thoughts

I'm not an authoritative voice on this subject. I'm not an educator. More than anything, I'm a life-long student and an enthusiast. There's seldom a day when I don't have to research something new in order to solve a problem I'm not familiar with, or remind myself the syntax for a function I've used several times in the past. I don't know anything about teaching others, but I do know plenty about learning, and if there's anything that has stood out to me over the years, it's the fact that I find it easier to learn about something or to solve a problem if I can transform the concept into something that's easier for me to grasp.

Moreover, I'm human and thus prone to mistakes. Call me out on them if you notice them. I'll take any of my mistakes as learning opportunities :)

For anyone who doesn't recognize Patience Phillips, she was Halle Berry's Catwoman in the most terrible superhero film - Catwoman (2004)...that I really enjoyed it. Probably because it wasn't well-received, it's often overlooked when talking about things like "the first female hero on screen" or "the first black hero..." sort of things. And technically, Catwoman's not a superhero.

Spoilers ahead. I'm also going to keep my points to the story and characters themselves. I honestly had no issues with any of the actors.

The good

• The theme and social commentary on make-up, beauty products, self-harm/addiction and image issues woman do face. The added layer of cooperate greed. The idea of what you see in the mirror vs. what others see (and if they're right), alongside what you want to present to the world or to specific people - honestly this movie has probably one of the best takes on "the cost of beauty" that I've seen in a while, and since.
• The scene where Tom thinks he's saving a jumper, but Patience is actually trying to save a cat. This random scene turns out to be a great storytelling scene when brought up again after Tom arrests Patience for murder and she asks him what he first saw the first time they met.
• Laurel is probably the most interesting character in this movie. There's a really well-framed shot of her photos being removed from her company lobby in favour of a younger model. I think it's one of the best scenes in the movie. Laurel is capable, powerful, rich and very accomplished, but somehow her relevance still fades as her beauty does. (I can honestly say I generally can't stand the evil step-mother wrestling with her fading beauty and taking out her bitterness on some young snow white-y girl, but this one worked for me.)
• I loved that Batman wasn't in it (but didn't really like that a love interest still had to be introduced).

The bad

• That she's call Patience Phillips...but honestly this is the warning to divorce this from any Catwoman or female superheros (or anti-heros) you know.
• Patience doesn't earn her "powers" - Selina Kyle (Catwoman in basically all other versions) works obsessively to perfect all her abilities. She's an insanely good cat burglar, not a magic cat.
• Patience doesn't earn or drive her own growth. There is basically no growth as a character. A magic cat ghost could have simply possessed Patience's body and the story would be the same.
• Oversexualization of Catwoman...which I didn't even know could be a thing until this movie. Black leather for a sexy Catwoman - awesome. Whatever the belt thing was - grossly missed the point while trying to copy Pfeiffer's patched up catsuit.
• I'm also not the biggest fan of make-over tropes in general.

The ugly

• The basketball scene - just everything about it.
• The hate that surrounded the movie because Catwoman wasn't blonde (or Michelle Pfeiffer), and that Batman's not in it.
• The physical punch-them-out fight scene between Laurel and Catwoman in the end - just why? This isn't a movie at all about physical strength, and having a "face like marble" isn't a real power. (To be fair, I don't like this showdown in really any superhero movie, with the exception of The Death of Superman.)

The cheesy

• The crazy cat-lady Patience goes too, and her tossing a cat toy at her
• The sushi eating scene
• The in case of date emergency kit her friends gave her.
• Laurel seeing her cracked beauty in the moment of a showdown fight
• The cat scratches on Tom
• Her best friend hooking up with her doctor
• The comparing signatures on the coffee cups
• Her Marvel-like comic book name

Final thoughts

So yeah...I would recommend this movie, and really hope that when they do make another Catwoman film that it might share some themes. Have you seen this movie? Did you hate it? Who's your favourite Catwoman? What would you like to see in a Catwoman movie?

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Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 4 - San Junipero

In a seaside town in 1987, a shy young woman and an outgoing party girl strike up a powerful bond that seems to defy the laws of space and time.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

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Please rate the episode here!

What band that you like/used to like makes you wish they would go back to what they used to do? Personally, I wish Maroon 5 would put out more stuff like Songs About Jane. They had a really chill, jazz-y, very Jamiroquai-esque sound that I dig the hell out of but now Levine's dedicated to pop music full time.

Hardmode: No Weezer

I've been thinking a lot lately about the future of software and where native apps and the web will reconcile and I had the idea that what if "the next OS" had a OSS federated app store that people and organizations could host themselves, but the system still used the app store model that pull app/program listings from all the installations online? This could apply to mobile or desktop computing, or even any of the other platforms (see windows store system compatibility).

Video pitch: The world’s first open source AI | Mycroft AI | HT Summit 2017

Fast Company article: Can Mycroft’s Privacy-Centric Voice Assistant Take On Alexa And Google?

Kingscrowd review: Top Deal: The Secure Open Source Voice Assistant Of The Future

I'm not a techie by any means, but I stumbled across Mycroft AI some time last year, and I'm keeping half an eye on its progress. If ever I get myself a digital assistant, I think it's likely to be Mycroft. (I also love the name!)

I wondered if anyone else had any thoughts about this.

Maybe I'm just not very well versed in this sort of thing but I couldn't find anything online. I've always been sort of paranoid that a company might not be truthful in their privacy policy. Is there any sort of law to keep them honest or do we just have to take their word on it?

Preface

Over the last couple of years, I've had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of my predecessors and put those lessons into practice. Among those lessons, three have stood out to me in particular:

1. Consistency is king.
2. Try not to be too clever for your own good.
3. Good code takes time.

I know that there are a lot of new and aspiring programmers here (and I'm admittedly far from being a guru myself), so I thought it would be good to touch on these three lessons, what they mean, and why they're so important.

Consistency is King

This is something that I had drilled into my head over nearly two years working on the code base at my previous job. Not by my fellow programmers (who did not exist), nor by my boss, but by the code itself.

Consistency can mean a number of things, but there are two primary points that matter:

1. Syntactic consistency.
2. Architectural consistency.

Syntactic consistency concerns standards in what your code looks like. For example, the choice between snake_case or camelCase or PascalCase for naming; function parameter order; or even something as benign as what kind of indentation and how much of it you use.

Architectural consistency concerns standards in how you structure your code. Making sure that you either use public class properties or getter and setter methods; using multiple booleans or using bitmasks; using or not using objects for encapsulating data to be passed around; validating data within the primary object or relegating that responsibility to a validator class; and other seemingly minor decisions about how you handle certain behavior make a big difference.

The code base I maintained had no such consistency. You could never remember whether the method you needed to call was named using snake_case or camelCase and had to perform several searches just to find it. Worse still, some methods defined to handle Ajax calls were prefixed with ajax while many weren't. Argument ordering seemed to be determined by a coin flip, and indentation seemed to vary between 2-space, 3-space, 4-space, and even 5-space indentation depending on what mood my predecessor was in at the time. You often could not tell where a function's body began and where it ended. Writing code was an exercise both in problem solving and in deciphering ancient religious texts.

Architecturally it was no better. There was no standardization in how data was validated or sanitized, how class members were accessed or modified, how functionality was inherited, whether the functionality was encapsulated in an object method or in a function, or which objects were responsible for which behavior.

That lack of consistency makes introducing or modifying a small feature, a task which should ordinarily be a breeze, an engineering feat of its own. Often you end up implementing that feature, after dancing around the tangled mess of spaghetti, only to find that the functionality that you implemented already existed somewhere else in the code base but was hiding out in a deep, dark corner that you never even knew was there until you had to fix some other broken feature months later and happened to stumble across it.

Consistency means predictability, and predictability means discoverability and, more importantly, easier changes and higher confidence in those changes.

Cleverness is a Fallacy

In any given project, it can be tempting to do something that saves you extra lines of code, or saves on CPU cycles, or just looks awesome and does something nobody would have thought of before. As human beings and especially as craftsmen, we like to leave our mark and take pride in breaking the status quo by taking a novel and interesting approach to a problem. It can make us feel fulfilled in our work, that we've done something unique, a trademark of sorts.

The problem with that is that it directly conflicts with the aforementioned consistency and predictability. What ends up being an engineering wonder to you ends up being an engineering nightmare to someone else. While you're enjoying the houses you build with wall studs arranged in the shape of a spider's web, the home remodelers who come along later aren't even sure if they can change part of the structure without causing the entire wall to collapse, and they're not even sure which walls are load-bearing and which aren't, so they're basically playing Jenga while blindfolded.

The code base I maintained had a few such gems, with what looked like load-bearing walls but were actually made of papier-mâché and were only decorative in nature, and the occasional spider's web wall studs. One spider's web comes to mind in particular. It's been a while since I've worked on that piece of code, so I can't recall what exactly it did, but two query-constructing pieces of logic had overlapping query structure with the difference being the operators and data. Rather than being smart and allowing those two constructs to be different, however, my predecessor decided to be clever and the query construction was abstracted into a separate method so that the same general query structure could be used in other places (note: it never was, and was only ever used in those two instances). It was abstracted so that all original context was lost and no comments existed to explain any of it. On top of that, the method was being called from the most critical piece of the system which, unfortunately, was already a convoluted mess and desperately required a rewrite and thus required me to understand what the hell that method was even doing (incidentally, I fell in love with whiteboards as a result).

When you feel like you're being clever, you should always stop what you're doing and make sure that what you're doing isn't actually a really terrible idea. Cleverness doesn't exist. Knowledge and intelligence do. Write intelligent code, not clever code.

Good Code Takes Time

Bad code more often than not is the result of impatience. We don't like to plan out the solution before we get to writing code. We like to use variables like x and temp in order to quickly achieve functional correctness of our code because stopping to think about how to name them is just additional overhead getting in the way. We don't like to scrap our bad work if we can salvage it in some way instead, because then we have to start from scratch and that's daunting. We continually work against ourselves and gradually increase our mental overhead because we try to decrease our mental overhead. As a result we find ourselves too exhausted by the end of our initial implementations to concern ourselves with fixing obvious problems. Obviously bad but functional code is preferable because we just want the task to be done and over with.

The more you get exposed to bad code and the more you try to avoid pushing that hell onto yourself and your successors, the more you realize that you need to spend less time coding and more time researching and planning. Whereas you may have been spending upwards of 50% of your time coding previously, suddenly you find yourself spending as little as 10% of your time writing any code at all.

Professionals from just about any field can tell you that you can either do something right or you can do it twice. You might recognize this most easily in the age-old piece of woodworking wisdom, "measure twice, cut once". The same is true of code, and doing something right means planning how to do it right in the first place before you've even started on the job.

Putting into Practice

I've been fortunate over the last couple of months to be able to start on a brand new project and architect it in a way that I see fit. Changes which would ordinarily take days or weeks in the old code base now take me half a day at most, and a matter of minutes at best. I remember where to find a piece of code that I need because I'm consistent and predictable about where I place things; I don't struggle to tell where something begins and where it ends because I'm consistent about structure; I don't continually hate myself when I need to make changes to my code because I don't do anything wildly out of the ordinary; and most importantly, I take my time to figure out what it is that I need to do and how I want to do it before I've written a single line of code.

When I needed to add a web portal interface for uploading a media asset to associate with a database object, the initial implementation took me a week, due to the need for planning, adding the interface, and supporting and debugging the asset management. When I needed to extended that interface to allow for uploading the same kinds of assets for a completely different object type, it took me only half an hour, with most of that time being dedicated toward updating a Vue.js component to accept configuration via props rather than working for only the single hard-coded object type. If I need to add a case for any additional object type, it will take me only five minutes.

That initial week of work for the web interface provided me with cost savings that would not have been feasible otherwise, and that initial week of work would have taken as many as three weeks had I not structured the API to be as consistent as it is now. Every initial lag in implementation is offset heavily by the long-term cost savings of writing good code.

Technical Debt

Technical debt is the cost of your code over time. The messier and worse your code gets, the more it costs you to try to change, and those costs only build up. Even good code can accumulate technical debt if the needs for your software have changed and its current architecture isn't compatible with those changes.

No project is without technical debt. Even my own code, that I've been painstakingly working on for the last couple of months, has technical debt. Odds are a programmer far more experienced than I am will come along and want to scrap everything I've done, and will do a far better job rewriting it.

That's okay, though. In fact, a certain amount of technical debt is good. If we try to never write any bad code whatsoever, then we could never possibly get to writing any code at all, because there are far too many unknowns for a new project.

What's important is knowing when to pay down on that technical debt, which could mean anything from paying it up front (i.e. through planning ahead of time) to paying it down when it starts to get too expensive (e.g. refactoring a complicated section of code when changes become sufficiently difficult). That's not something you can learn through a StackOverflow post or a college lecture, and certainly not from some unknown stranger on some relatively unknown website in a long, informal blog-like post.

Final Thoughts

I'm far from being a great programmer. There's a lot that I don't know and I still have quite a bit to learn. I love programming, though, and more than that I enjoy sharing the lessons I've learned with others. Especially the ones that I wish I'd learned back in college.

Please feel free to share your own experiences, learned lessons, and (if you have it) feedback here. I'd love to read up on some other thoughts on this subject!

Needless to say I'm very excited and would definitely talk about it if others want to. That being said, r/BojackHorseman is still going strong so another thread over here may be redundant. Let's vote on this.

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Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 3 - Shut Up and Dance

After a virus infects his laptop, a teen faces a daunting choice: carry out orders delivered by text message, or risk having intimate secrets exposed.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

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Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 2 - Playtest

An American traveler short on cash signs up to test a revolutionary new gaming system, only to discover the thrills are a little too real.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

I saw an AskReddit thread on this recently and I thought us Tilders (is that what we're calling ourselves?) could do our own. The spooky season is approaching and I thought this might be something fun to do.

Old stories are always being updated for lots of reasons, ranging from trying to appeal to new audiences to correcting toxic depictions to fitting better to the current social or political climate and more. There's nothing new there. However, one thing I find a bit odd lately, as in the last five years or so, is that a lot of this modernization is actually done pretty poorly in main stream media. We see more forced diversity, queerbaiting, and generally bad storytelling. Not totally sure how I'll do this yet, but I'm thinking of posting stories that stand out to me for better or for worst, starting with a classic.

There will be spoilers for both movies.

Cinderella (2015)

This is one I honestly didn't think worked at all. To be fair, I believe Disney's goal was just to sell a beautiful movie, and not a good story. This whole movie was gorgeous. It was also really boring, which I honestly believe is the greatest sin in storytelling.

Cinderella herself is "smarter" in this movie than the old classic cartoon. She's well read and has some agency, which honestly makes her more a damsel than the original cartoon for me. In the cartoon, she was an abused child that had no where to go. Her being trapped made sense. In the new one, she's sort of a fighter...who doesn't fight. I didn't get it.

Another issue is that Cinderella was really the only character they modified, which is why the story is still shallow.

Ever After (1998)

This is honestly one of the best modernization of the fairy tale I've ever seen. What worked for me, is that they fleshed out all their characters. Danielle, Henry, the stepmother, stepsisters, everyone! This makes for a much richer story, where characters themselves can be modernized, but still fit the time of the period piece. It's not about dropping a fourth wave feminist into an aged story, but about adding the dimensions that would have still existed then. Danielle is strong, well read, and obedient. Her servitude is not without reason. She's seeking a "mother", and her relationship with her stepmother is more than simply being a slave. The audience is shown the moments of kindness Danielle seeks from her stepmother.

My quick two-cents. I also find it interesting that Ever After came out over 15 years before Cinderella.

So what are you thoughts? Any good fairy tale adaptations you can mention?

It's Monday again, and that means it's time for Movie Monday, a thread where anyone and everyone is welcome to post a movie review about films that they've seen recently, or just liked or disliked in the past.

If you're wanting to post a review, I'd suggest reading trough Movie Monday: week 1 to read through the rules and what to write, but for the most part I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible.

The two rules that I do have are: So far, the only rules are:

All top level comments should be reviews. (if you have any questions or suggestions on how to do things differently, either send me a private message or post in the discussion thread I linked up above)

No spoilers in top level comments. Ideally any spoilers should be in children comments (with sufficient warning) if you wish to write a review with spoilers, make another comment below your top level comment and write the spoilers there. Anyone who doesn't want to know any spoilers should un-expand the comments at the top before they start reading comments. Hopefully this should allow discussion of both the film and the review without forcing people to see spoilers.

But other than that, happy Movie watching and have a great Monday :)

If the cookies never stop being produced, then it is logical to assume that, if unchecked, uneaten cookies will eventually choke the earth, leaving us uninhabitable. What is your plan, and how long do you think we'll last in this cookie apocalypse?

As for some general rules, the machine is impossible to break, and it can inexplicably produce cookies infinitely without having to refill on ingredients.

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Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 1 - Nosedive

A woman desperate to boost her social media score hits the jackpot when she's invited to a swanky wedding. But the trip doesn't go as planned.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

Previous episode | Index thread | Next episode

Black Mirror Season 2 Special - White Christmas

Three interconnected tales of technology run amok during the Christmas season are told by two men at a remote outpost in a frozen wilderness.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

Sorry (again) for being a bit late with this thread!

Any Fantasy Football players on Tildes? Post your team here with your league rules and let's rate and discuss each other's teams!

Side thought: Are there enough NFL fans here to warrant a Tildes league? That might be fun. There's enough time to draft before the season starts if enough people are interested.

From start to finish I found the show totally engrossing, tense, and mysterious. It was excellently shot and written, and the twists in episodes 7 and 8 were hard hitting, even if you had an idea that they were possible as early as episode 4 or 5. Plus, those post creditn scenes were haunting. What did you guys think?

I'm currently reading the book so please, no spoilers for the novel! TV show discussion only

One of my favorite topics in Psychology is personality and there happens to be a very good Five Factor test that is free to the public domain with all 3,000+ items available for download. Some notes about the IPIP NEO-PI:

Purpose of this On-Line Inventory

• The primary purpose of this on line inventory is to educate the public about the five factor model of personality.
• More specifically, the report explains the likely consequences of one's standing on five broad personality domains.
• These broad domains cover normal differences in personality that should be obvious to people who know you well.
• Secondarily, this inventory estimates your standing on the 5 broad domains and 30 subdomains of personality.
• The inventory does not reveal hidden, secret information about you nor does it assess serious psychological disorders.
• The report is designed to be objective, not pleasing or flattering.
• Measurement error, misunderstandings, carelessness, and mischievous responding can invalidate the report.
• If knowledgeable acquaintances disagree with the test results, then the results are wrong.

Link to the questionnaire:
https://www.personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/

More about the International Personality Item Pool:

https://ipip.ori.org/

It's often the case that in academic and self-teaching environments, you don't really have the opportunity to grasp and fully understand situations in which a problem has multiple valid solutions and what the implications are in choosing among them. Among those considerations are two in particular: runtime efficiency and maintainability. When these subjects are discussed, the example solutions are often comical at best, or the problems themselves too complex to fully grasp the situation at hand. Sometimes the problems are also so simple as to be completely worthless, e.g. comparing bubble sort to bogo sort.

As such, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss practical but conceptually simple problems and the implications of the different solutions that are available. Conceptual simplicity is an absolute requirement because we want these problems to be accessible to a wider variety of readers. Problems don't necessarily need to be code-related (you could e.g. discuss something related to server administration). Bonus points for problems that include solutions with an efficiency/maintainability trade-off!

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Black Mirror Season 2 Episode 3 - The Waldo Moment

A failed comedian who voices a popular cartoon bear named Waldo finds himself mixing in politics when TV executives want Waldo to run for office.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

Sorry (again) for being a bit late with this thread!

So since I'm a terrible person and all that I totally forgot to make this post last week so I've decided to wait a week and actually post on a Monday. For those of you that don't know what Movie Monday is, here is the post I made about it.

Basically I'd like to make a weekly post where myself and other users post comments on what movies they've watched recently and whether or not they recommend it etc. There's no specific format set out for the reviews, so feel free to write one any way you like, whether it's just a few sentences or a whole essay, we'll figure out what works best as we go along.

So far, the only rules are:

1. All top level comments should be reviews. (if you have any questions or suggestions on how to do things differently, either send me a private message or post in the discussion thread I linked up above)

2. No spoilers in top level comments. Ideally any spoilers should be in children comments (with sufficient warning) if you wish to write a review with spoilers, make another comment below your top level comment and write the spoilers there. Anyone who doesn't want to know any spoilers should un-expand the comments at the top before they start reading comments. Hopefully this should allow discussion of both the film and the review without forcing people to see spoilers.

I know the second rule is a tiny bit confusing, but like I said this is a learning process and we'll see what happens. Anyway have fun and happy film watching!

Previous episode | Index thread | Next episode

Black Mirror Season 2 Episode 2 - White Bear

Victoria wakes up and cannot remember anything about her life. Everyone she encounters refuses to communicate with her.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Please rate the episode here!

Anyone seen this? I heard about this movie on NPR and decided to check it out. Wow! It's a great, well told story that pulls a lot of discreet threads together. As an aside from the main story of a black cop infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan it also references racist media of yesteryear like Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation. There are several moments that wink at Donald Trump's talking points and policies. There was a lot of reaction from the predominantly black crowd I was in, the connection was certainly noticed.

And the end! Wow. Almost had me in tears, really brought me back to a year ago when I saw the Vice News on Charlottesville. I was in a theater in Richmond, VA about an hour from Charlottesville. You could have heard a pin drop right when the movie ended. I've never seen so many people get gut punched like that all at once. The timing of this movie was absolutely well thought out.

I recall recently seeing an article posted that was related to euthanasia, and I started thinking about the subject. I see both potential pros and potential cons associated with it. For example, there's the concern about family members or authority pressuring an ill person to opt for doctor-assisted suicide to ease financial burdens, for instance. There's also the benefit, on the other hand, of allowing someone who is terminally ill or guaranteed to live the rest of their life in excruciating pain the option to go out on their own terms. With proper oversight and ethical considerations, it generally seems to be an all-around ideal to provide an "opt-out" for those who would only continue to suffer and would rather not prolong it, as a merciful alternative to forcing them to live it out.

But then there are some trickier questions.

As a disclaimer, I spent nearly a couple of decades struggling through depression and have been surrounded (and still am surrounded) by people who struggle with their own mental illnesses. Because of this, I'm perfectly aware of the stigma and subpar treatment of mental illness in general. With that in mind, I completely recognize that there are certain conditions which are, at this time, completely untreatable and result in peoples' quality of life deteriorating to the point that they become perpetually miserable, particularly with certain neurodegenerative diseases.

Thus, the question occurred to me: wouldn't such a condition be the mental health equivalent of a terminal illness? Would it not be unethical to force someone to continue living under conditions in which their quality of life will only diminish? Shouldn't someone who has such a condition, and is either of sound enough mind or with a written statement of their wishes from a time when they were of sound enough mind, be able to make the same decision about whether or not to opt to go out on their own terms?

And yet, as reasonable as it sounds, for some reason the thought of it feels wrong.

Is there something fundamentally more wrong about euthanasia for mental health vs. euthanasia for physical health? Is it just a culturally-learned ideal?

More importantly, what makes euthanasia acceptable in some cases and not others? Which cases do you think exemplify the divide? Is there something more fundamental that we can latch onto? Is there a clear line we can draw? Is psychology itself just too young a field for us to be drawing that ethical line?

I'm genuinely not sure how to feel about this subject. I would be interested in hearing some other thoughts on the subject. The questions above don't necessarily have to be answered, but I thought they could be good priming points.

I've been thinking about this lately and I always go back to feeling so ignorant for doing things like using the word gay to mean something bad or negative when I was younger. And it gets me to thinking about if things like that are discussed or if people even think that far into it. Which got me to thinking about what other aspects aren't being discussed or acknowledged widely enough.

while its not the best star wars movie, it isn't the abomination that people make it out to be. its legitimately fun to watch and comfy with all its bad CGI.

Favorite star wars movies in order: IV, V, Solo, VII, I, VIII, VI, Rogue One, III, II

To summarize, I am annoyed that there are two different standard for 4-pole audio connectors. For those curious I mean this.

You have OMTP and CTIA, the difference is they swap the mic and ground pins. This is irritating because Apple vs Android use them differently. This becomes especially annoying when you want a feature like an inline mic mute switch (one designed for CTIA for example will disconnect the ground pin on OMTP instead of mic)

This has been an ongoing frustration for me for a while. I really enjoy a good pair of headphones because I use Discord and I work from home which necessitates using headphones for extended periods of time to listen to music, take calls, chat on discord.

I just want there to be a device that does OMTP/CTIA swapping AND include the ability to physically mute the mic. Like this but with something that will break the mic pin. Im currently designing something in fritzing that will allow both direction switching as well as selective muting.

/rant

Has anyone else had any similar experience or frustration with this problem?

This idea came to me last night when I was reading the post over on ~movies asking a similar question. I'm an avid user of ~music and I like to participate in the weekly "what have you been listening to" threads along with the Listening Club when possible, and I was wondering if something similar could be applied to another media group, and since I love anime and manga, my first thought was this one.

Basically my questions here are:

Would a weekly "what have you been reading/watching" thread be something you would participate in?

Secondly:

Would you prefer it be something more casual-based, or would you prefer it to be people writing reviews for things they've been viewing?

I think that one of the ways to spur more interest in media groups is weekly/monthly/whatever interval discussion threads and I'd also just personally like to see what other people here are thinking of the things they're currently watching or reading.

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Black Mirror Season 1 Episode 3 - The Entire History of You

In the near future, everyone has access to a memory implant that records everything humans do, see and hear.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

This is the last episode of season 1. I hope everyone is enjoying it so far!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Index thread | Next episode

Black Mirror Season 1 Episode 1 - The National Anthem

Prime Minister Michael Callow faces a shocking dilemma when Princess Susannah, a much-loved member of the Royal Family, is kidnapped.

Black Mirror Netflix link

Warning: this thread contains spoilers about this episode! If you haven't seen it yet, please watch it and come back to this thread later.

You can talk about past episodes, but please don't discuss future episodes in this thread!

If you don't know what to say, here are some questions to get the discussion started:

• How does the title relate to the episode itself?
• Are there any similarities between real life events and the episode?
• Are there any references or easter eggs in the episode, such as references to past episodes?

Since the moderator community here is quite large, I figure we would have quite alot of interesting perspectives over here in Tildes. Feel free to chip in even if you're not a moderator, or god forbid, moderate such subs as T_D. Having a range of perspectives is, as always, the most valuable aspect of any discussion.

Here are some baseline questions to get you started:-

• Did your subreddit take strict measures to maintain quality ala r/AskHistorians, or was it a karmic free-for-all like r/aww?

• Do you think the model was an appropriate fit for your sub? Was it successful?

• What were the challenges faced in trying to maintain a certain quality standard (or not maintaining one at all)?

• Will any of the lessons learnt on Reddit be applicable here in Tildes?

Lately, there's been talk about new priviledges users could gain, either by requesting them (and being judged as fit) or discussing if everyone should gain a new ability like editing titles

The problem with new priviledges is of course that they can be abused by malicious users. One of the overall goals of Tildes is to trust users, but punish abuse, however I don't see this working with a large userbase. Even if this site grows slowly and the community remains mostly small or perhaps invite only, eventually we will reach a tipping point where the mods, if you want to call them that, won't be able to effectively manage the userbase. I feel like if we locked certain abilities (like editing titles, even within a time limit) behind tiers or levels users could achieve with certain actions, we could manage to keep low-effort trolls out and use it a sort of tutorial, where after certain actions for a new user (like writing their first comment or receiving their first vote) a window could pop up, informing them that they now have gained a new ability like voting, simultaniously explaining what the goal with the actual votes is.

I understand that this would gamify the system, but it would stop new users from abusing the system and lock those more dangerous abilities behind things they needed to do, ideally things that require a time investment so they'd feel less inclined to abuse the tools they've been granted (because they'd value their account more due to said time investment). It would also automate some things for the masses, which would make moderating easier.

An example:

A new user joins the site, at first, he can only vote. After casting his first vote, a message pops up, telling him that he can now post comments. Maybe there's a link to the rules and code of conduct there, maybe just a little tidbit about how stuff works on Tildes. Things that require more trust in the user are locked behind more difficult milestones, maybe editing titles is locked behind writing a hundred comments or receiving a hundred votes, maybe both.

What are your thoughts on this?

Have there been any musicians you didn't think much of at first, but upon closer inspection, really surprised you? I've recently listened to Barenaked Ladies' album Maroon and it's a surprisingly introspective and melancholy record, but with upbeat sounds. Off The Hook and Conventioneers are fantastic songs that I've heard nothing about

Hi,

It would be nice for the OP to be able to tag everyone that answered a post to give some solution to some problem that didn't had a solution (something like a post "my computer does not turn on, what can i do?" and no one finds the solution, then the OP finds the solution and tags every one that replied to let them know what the solution was [this is a super dumb example, but you got the point :) ]).

Problem is that this may be abused, maybe limiting use of one/two calls for everyone on one post?

EDIT: added "on one post"