This is just a fun little part of a story I put together a little while ago. Might go somewhere later, but probably not.

The symbols looking like: [^1] are footnote links. (Pandoc's format, a kind of extended Markdown).

Edit: It may be easy to read as rendered html

A leaf was slowly falling towards their face.

It was golden, three-tongued, and burning with fire.

Last one wasn't hyperbole.

Unfortunately.

It was all sort of their fault.

But then, everything always was.

That's why everyone called them Slag.

The trees hadn't always been on fire, but they had been on fire before.

That had been their fault too.

Being the smallest Ork in a tiny Orkin village, reporting to a tiny Orkin warlord who somehow believed he had the brass balls of a god, Slag wasn't exactly well cared for.

Their name was their job. They were an Ork, after all.

The blacksmith beat the metal, made the weapons. Tossed the slag in a pile.

Molten metal twisted and smouldered, and Slag would grab it by the handful, and toss it into a cauldron of water, and when that was full, kick it down the hill into the dumpsite.

When the dumpsite was full, Slag would summon the demon, who would demand some strange price, then vanish with the lot.

The demon's prices weren't helping their standing with the rest of the tribe.

Like today.

Slag craned their neck, looking up at the red fiery, and rather horned creature, "Say again?"

The deep earth-rumbling voice laughed, "I want you to sing! Sing like a girl! Like a tiny little human girl!"

Slag winced, "I am a girl, demon." [^1]

The creature blinked in surprise, "You? Little squelchling?"

Slag shrugged, "I'm a girl. I don't got tits... I ain't pretty. But I am."

The demon winced, "Figure out which god cursed you little girl... After you sing."

Singing? An Ork?

Orkcakes.

The demon would go, and she'd be blamed there was no room in the dump, and then the Orklord would be in her face. Again.

Then threaten to marry her to his son. Again.

She blanched.

The demon laughed, "Last chance, little orkling."

She coughed nervously, and then a squeaking voice emerged, singing a quiet rhyme she'd overheard one day.

Something about stars and diamonds. Humans were weird. [^2]

Unfortunately, her voice was less like a starlet, and more like diamonds scraping across sandglass.

The demon shreiked and disappeared back into their realm.

Without the slag.

She winced, glancing towards the village, "Orkcakes."

A hand like iron clasped her head, "Slag."

She smiled weakly up at her father, and at his one eyes staring out from a bushy grey beard. [^3]

The warrior released her and spoke gruffly, "Was that you singing, again?" [^4]

She blushed, looking down in shame, "The demon's price."

The old man groaned and reached for a whip on the wall, "Please tell me he took the slag."

"I don't lie, father." She answered. [^5]

He winced and glared at the doorway, unravelling the whip, preparing to hit the next person who came in. "Go to you room, Slag."

"It's my honour." She crossed her arms, pretending not to notice that her chest didn't show any bigger, "I want to defend it."

"Now, Slag." He growled through his tusks.

She turned and moped away into her bedroom.

She couldn't fight, all she could do was listen to the glorious blood-curling screams as the emissaries dies. [^6]

Slag picked some metal from beneath her fingernails and flung it into the wall, pinning a fly by one wing. [^7]

It wasn't fair.

She wanted a real fight.

Why did boys get all the fun?

The guts and the murder?

All she got was... Slag.

An axe blade broke through her wall briefly, before being pulled back quickly, followed by a strangled sound.

She rolled her eyes and flopped onto her straw bed, staring at the ceiling tiredly.

Humans made life look so simple.

Find a man, get pregnant, take care of the litter until you died.

Just cooking, singing and cleaning.

She licked the edge of her tusk, yawning. This was going to be another, she must get married because she's useless argument with the Orklord. Which would inevitable lead to my son is too stupid, fat and ugly to possibly get married, and then... Ew.

She didn't want the bastard.

He certainly wanted her though, all drooling and slurping.

She wanted to be a Knight. [^8]

That was it. All of it. Her only dream.

A glorious warrior, protecting the weak, hunting the monsters that pray on people in the dark. [^9]

Her sword would have a name, and glow with power when evil was near. [^10]

She would yell out it's name, and light up the dark.

Then she'd kill the bad guy, cut off his head, and ride home with it, and stake it to her wall. [^11]

[^1]: Really? Wow. Never would have guessed... But orks are always hard to apply gender to.

[^2]: Understatement. What other species looks around themselves in wonder and decides blowing stuff up is the best way to get something out of the ground?

[^3]: Stories on exactly how he lost his eye vary. Most involve a dragon, a bet, and a gallon ale. And perhaps a wet, old sock.

[^4]: Oh gods. She'd tried to sing before? Had birds died?

[^5]: Not strictly true. She did lie, but only about unimportant stuff. Like what she wanted for dinner. Or what job she wished she had. Or who she wanted to marry. Nothing big.

[^6]: It's an Orkin thing. Send some messenger to die when your upset with your opponent, and then turn up when their bloodlust was sated. Good way to not die.

[^7]: She was a practiced hand at this now. Sociopath, or bored teenager? Let the public decide! Blast her in this week's Orks magazine!

[^8]: ... Should someone tell her human knights usually hunt down orks?

[^9]: So... Hungry orks. Seriously. Someone should tell her.

[^10]: So, it would always be lit up. Because you're on Ork, girl.

[^11]: Oh geeze. Are you the hero, or the villain, Slag?

For me, I was just browsing a random thread and somebody complained about a reddit-specific thing and then another user linked them to r/tilde with a message implying that Tilde was better about that issue and I checked it out and decided to follow to see how development went with the site. I never actually actively followed news about it, just mostly waited for invites to be handed out so I could see for myself. I like it so far, it feels more communal.

I may be one of the least qualified people here to discuss this topic, but I find two reddit bots pretty useful:

https://www.reddit.com/user/autotldr

https://www.reddit.com/user/alternate-source-bot (this is my recent favorite)

What do you all think features like the two above being integrated into Tildes in some fashion, via bot or otherwise? Are there any other bot behaviors that you like which would have a good impact here, or are bots that produce comments the scourge of Reddit?

^{Sorry if this has been discussed before, if so let me know and I will delete this topic.}

I can see ~news becoming global or US specific and I think geolocational tildes would be useful. I do want to know if there is an appetite for this though - I recognise that there would be work involved in moderating such a news tilde, so there has to be the interest.

Cheers,

Manley

I'm in the midst of an interview process with an employer that insists on an "Introduction to Algorithms"-type test for all of its white-collar workers. Their claim is that it selects for "smart" people. [I'm anxious because my relevant coursework was many years ago, and there's no way I'll have time to master it again before the scheduled test - there's some age bias, noted below.]

Based on review of Glassdoor's comments about this company's interview process and demographics, what they really want is recent college graduates with fresh CIS degrees that they can abuse and use up quickly, giving them no market-relevant skills in the process. The product relies on an obscure, specialized database architecture and elderly front-end code.

However, the company is a market leader in my industry, and I'm interested in working there in a customer-facing technical liaison/project management role because the product is better fitted for task, has better support and customization, and better interoperability than anything else. There's huge R&D reinvestment as well, and the company is just that little bit more ethical in the marketplace than its competitors.

Do you believe that the ability to do sorts and permutations in code genuinely selects for general intelligence, and would you want to work with a population of people who all mastered this subject matter, regardless of their actual job title?

I see there is an issue open to add a saving feature for topics, which is great! I would like to make a suggestion for this feature.

Do you think it would be possible to give users the ability to add their own tags to a saved topic?

A lot of times I search for content related to a project I am working on, and it would be nice if I could tag the topics I find as "project-xyz", as this would allow me find them easily when I come back to reference something. This tag would be useless to anyone else, but having our own personal tags, that only we can see, would be very useful in curating content.

One way this could be done is by having a new section named "Your Tags" that appears under the existing "Tags" one, in the sidebar for a topic. Then on the Saved page, the sidebar could list all your unique tags, and clicking one would filter the topics.

Anyway, just throwing out an idea. I can add a comment to that GitLab issue, if this is a possibility and something people are interested in.

I suck at probability, so I thought I would ask here.

To clarify, given a population of size P, a sample size of K, and an arbitrary number of trials N, how do I compute the probability of having included each member of the population at least once in the experiment?

This problem is difficult to wrap my head around. It seems like it uses a combination of combinatorics and dependent events, which really throws me off.

Edit: This problem isn't the coupon collector's problem (please see some of my responses below). Think of the coupon collector's problem as being a special case of this problem where K = 1. My question is meant to cover an arbitrary K >= 1.

I have recently bought a Nintendo Switch and have been happily playing on and off for a bit.

While it is general knowledge that its eShop is sub-optimally organised, instead of lamenting about it, let us together list and discuss which cheap and well-hidden games we found by chance (or heavy digging) that are surprisingly enjoyable.

To start of, here is the one I found recently:

• SkyPeace (0,99 €) is a typical side-scrolling arcade game – you fly on your rocket-powered surf board and collect coins, while avoiding enemies. The game is quite fast-paced and getting a high score is not that easy. Especially for this amount of money, I think it is a great game to play a level or two during breaks at work.

To clarify, this thread is not about indies in general – there is a very good thread on must-have indies already. Here I am trying to list (and discuss) obscure and hard to find titles, that are still enjoyable.

I find posts that are just links or simple questions without any additional input from the poster to be low-effort and don't tend to garner meaningful discussion. I've noticed that there are a fair amount of those posts on this site although they're definitely the minority. There are some subreddits I follow that have implemented mandatory discussion by the OP as a rule and it really did a lot of good for discussion and thread contribution. Even something as simple as writing why you think the link you're sharing is interesting / important / etc would be enough to kick things off and invite discussion, I think.

What are you guys' thoughts on this?

Do Jedi study warfare and tactics? I know they study dueling, but do they also look at more large-scale battles? I was thinking about the Clone Wars revival today and I was kinda wondering why the Republic entrusted their military power to what were essentially warrior monks. Was it just a case of “there’s literally no one else”?

Fellow LGBTQ+ ~ers, I'm hoping you can give me some direction and pointers in dating advice.

I'm a male in my early 40s who has become single after a dozen years and finally realizing/admitting that I'm gay. This isn't a huge deal (I've always identified as queer/not straight) but it does leave me in a place of total ignorance on how to proceed in meeting gay men and dating them.

I'm not intetested in sex-without-friendship, so Grindr is out. I'm not a fan of social media, so FB is useless to me. Even if there are any gay bars left, I'm not the bar type. My preferred personals site was craigslist... which shows you how out of the loop I am.

Any advice on dating sites and/or alternative ways of meeting people? I'm thinking about getting a bunch of shirts printed with a wittier version of "Introduce me to your gay friends!" and a rainbow necklace or bracelet...

If location matters, I'm a fair distance outside the Seattle area but get there often enough.

Thanks, all!