Another week, another challenge!

This time, assume you're given a grid where each . represents an empty space and each # represents a "wall". We'll call any contiguous space of .s a "region". You can also think of a grid with no walls the "base" region. The walls may subdivide the base region into any number of isolated sub-regions of any shape or size.

Write a program that will, given a grid description, compute the total number of isolated regions.

For example, the following grid has 5 isolated regions:

....#....#
....#.###.
....#.#.#.
#...#..#..
.#..#...#.

Whilst I am no fan of reddit's redesign, one of the features I liked about it was the way you could click on a indent line to collapse the child comments at that level. Whilst tildes displays these indent lines, clicking on them does nothing, and you have to scroll up to get to the collapse button. Another possible solution would be to collapse comments under the cursor when a hotkey is pressed, although this could be awkward due to both mouse and keyboard being used.

Designing, coding, moderating, promoting and doing all the business admin on Tildes must be fairly thankless. But without all this effort we'd not be able to enjoy discussions with each other & share all this interesting content. I don't feel that much appreciation is really shown on here (except maybe miss-voting on all Deimos' comments).

But it is a little awkward, spurious thanks all over the place would just be noise. I thought I'd make a topic especially for people to say thanks in. I'm really enjoying Tildes content and discussion. Plus I'm a big believer in the goals of Tildes as laid out in the docs.

So I'd like to say a big thank you to Deimos and other useful contributors! Thanks for making the site we have to use today and dreaming of the hopefully better possible site we'll see in the future.

I'm also hoping to start a discussion on what enthusiastic Tildes users can do to most usefully help make Tildes good now and better in the future.

A list of stuff we can do:

• Obviously posting lots of good content and interesting discussions. Voting honestly and using comment labels judiciously.

• You can donate and currently we can see Tildes Patreon is at $375 a month. Deimos posted some more figures recently.

• We all regularly get invite codes and bringing in more people who can get excited (and maybe also help) is obviously good.

• The issue tracker and bug reports are all public so you can make suggestions, vote or comment on existing ones and perhaps more usefully see if you can work out how to reproduce reported bugs.

• As of a bit over two months ago Tildes is open source. This means you can track down bugs from the issue tracker or even contribute code for new features.

RFC:

So are other people liking Tildes? What is it you like? Are you excited enough to want to help out?

Also is there anything useful users can do I've missed? In these already mentioned areas what's actually most useful to do? Are some things of negative use? Could Deimos change his process to make more use of community help? Is there anything Deimos could delegate that people would be willing to volunteer on? Gitlab Walmart greeter would be cool but is anyone willing to do it?

Apple Music
Spotify
YouTube

Debut EP from new post hardcore outfit Dead American. The band is notable for being fronted by Cove Reber, former front man of Saosin for a time. Reber was fired from the band after two LPs and both he and Saosin went away for a long time. He's back fronting Dead American and arguably has never sounded better. Most notably, his uncleans are much improved, even if he employs them sparingly.

The sound is very much from the heyday of 00s post hardcore. For fans of Finch, Saosin, Circa Survive and early Coheed and Cambria.

Anybody here have a good setup for batch-downloading articles/news from several sites you specify, similar to youtube-dl but for general websites? I'm sure it could be scripted with not too much effort but I'm interested what polished solutions there are.

The idea would be so people with rare internet access could go to a hotspot weekly or something and sync that week's worth of content.

Impact can be in many different areas (carbon emissions, energy use, water, plastics, land use, advocacy etc etc). I just want to know something you're doing that helps the environment. It can be big or small, something you've done for a long time, just started or want to implement soon.

I'll start, about 18 months ago I bought a bike and started cycling again. Most of my shorter journeys are now by bike and I'm looking at cycling to work.

Environmental news is often really bleak, lets hear some positive efforts!

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.

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!

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.

17 weeks in and we have another classic record discussion: Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division!

Unknown Pleasures is the debut studio album by English rock band Joy Division, released on 15 June 1979 by Factory Records. The album was recorded and mixed over three successive weekends at Stockport's Strawberry Studios in April 1979, and was produced by Martin Hannett, who incorporated a number of unconventional production techniques into the group's sound. The cover artwork was designed by artist Peter Saville. It is the only Joy Division album released during lead singer Ian Curtis's lifetime.

Factory Records did not release any singles from Unknown Pleasures, and the album did not chart despite the relative success of the group's non-album debut single "Transmission". It has since received sustained critical acclaim as an influential post-punk album, and has been named as one of the best albums of all time by publications such as NME, AllMusic, Select, and Spin.

Here's the place to discuss your thoughts on the record, your history with it or the artist, and basically talk about whatever you want to that goes along with Unknown Pleasures! Remember that this is intended to be a slow moving thing, feel free to take your time and comment at any point in the week!

If you'd like to stream or buy the album, it can be found on most platforms here.

Don't forget to nominate and vote for next week's obscure record in response to this comment!

If so, what were your previous beliefs, what did they evolve to, and what do you think has caused the change?

I am curious about your general disposition, but it would also be interesting to hear how that applies to specific policies.