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4 votes
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How does technology improve your quality of life? In what ways does it detract from it?
I think it's safe to say that, in our modern world, everyone has an individual and complex relationship with technology. We're all experiencing the growing pains of uncharted territory, as...
I think it's safe to say that, in our modern world, everyone has an individual and complex relationship with technology. We're all experiencing the growing pains of uncharted territory, as computers, phones, and the internet continually revolutionize experiences from the everyday to the extraordinary. Unfortunately, it can often feel like every step forward also brings regressions, and what's good for some is not always good for others.
I'm interested in hearing about the ways that technology works for you in your life, both the good and the bad. Some guiding questions:
- What's better in your life because of technology? What is worse?
- How does it impact your career, hobbies, and interpersonal relationships?
- Are there tradeoffs you have to make for incorporating or ignoring tech for certain tasks or aspects?
- Are there areas in which you hope for the increased presence of technology?
- Are there areas where you actively keep tech out?
- Do you think that the problems created for us by technology are design flaws in the tech itself, or are they merely a mirror for pre-existing issues at the human level?
I know "technology" as a term is very broad, but I've intentionally left it that way because I want people to self-select the things most important to them, whether that's their computer, the internet, a phone, an online platform, an assistive tech device, etc. Also, don't feel obligated to list out every piece of tech, as it's gotten so prevalent to be almost omnipresent. Instead, just focus on the things that have a significant impact on your day to day life.
22 votes -
California Bill to put health warnings on sugary drinks and soda advances
14 votes -
Community can offer a cure to our technology addictions
5 votes -
If you build it, will they succumb? Houston opens rugby field of dreams.
9 votes -
EU leaders: We won't follow Trump's Huawei ban
12 votes -
Coming of age in cohousing: Growing up communally brings exposure to the world of adults—and lessons in interdependence
7 votes -
Programming Challenge: Text compression
In an effort to make these weekly, I present a new programming challenge. The challenge this week is to compress some text using a prefix code. Prefix codes associate each letter with a given bit...
In an effort to make these weekly, I present a new programming challenge.
The challenge this week is to compress some text using a prefix code. Prefix codes associate each letter with a given bit string, such that no encoded bitstring is the prefix of any other. These bit strings are then concatenated into one long integer which is separated into bytes for ease of reading. These bytes can be represented as hex values as well. The provided prefix encoding is as follows:
char value char value ' ' 11 'e' 101 't' 1001 'o' 10001 'n' 10000 'a' 011 's' 0101 'i' 01001 'r' 01000 'h' 0011 'd' 00101 'l' 001001 '~' 001000 'u' 00011 'c' 000101 'f' 000100 'm' 000011 'p' 0000101 'g' 0000100 'w' 0000011 'b' 0000010 'y' 0000001 'v' 00000001 'j' 000000001 'k' 0000000001 'x' 00000000001 'q' 000000000001 'z' 000000000000 Challenge
Your program should accept a lowercase string (including the ~ character), and should output the formatted compressed bit string in binary and hex. Your final byte should be 0 padded so that it has 8 bits as required. For your convenience, here is the above table in a text file for easy read-in.
Example
Here is an example:
$> tildes ~comp 10010100 10010010 01011010 10111001 00000010 11000100 00110000 10100000 94 92 5A B9 02 C4 30 A0
Bonuses
- Print the data compression ratio for a given compression, assuming the original input was encoded in 8 bit ASCII (one byte per character).
2. Output the ASCII string corresponding to the encoded byte string in addition to the above outputs. - @onyxleopard points out that many bytes won't actually be valid ASCII. Instead, do as they suggested and treat each byte as an ordinal value and print it as if encoded as UTF-8.
- An input prefixed by 'D' should be interpreted as an already compressed string using this encoding, and should be decompressed (by inverting the above procedure).
Previous Challenges (I am aware of prior existing ones, but it is hard to collect them as they were irregular. Thus I list last week's challenge as 'Week 1')
Week 113 votes - Print the data compression ratio for a given compression, assuming the original input was encoded in 8 bit ASCII (one byte per character).
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GOG Galaxy open source?
12 votes -
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Twitter Bans #Resistance-Famous Krassenstein Brothers for Allegedly Operating Fake Accounts
4 votes -
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Hurley Haywood on life as a gay racing champion: 'I didn't have any male role models'
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YouTubers and record labels are fighting, and record labels keep winning
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One Year Off, Every Seven Years: How about this for a demand? You work for six years and you get a whole paid year off to do whatever the hell you want.
18 votes -
A new Star Wars movie based on Knights of the Old Republic is in the works
11 votes -
How do you meet people?
I've been feeling lonely for quite a while now.. Sometimes I strike a conversation with someone seemingly randomly because I wonder who they are, what they're doing here but I always feel like I'm...
I've been feeling lonely for quite a while now..
Sometimes I strike a conversation with someone seemingly randomly because I wonder who they are, what they're doing here but I always feel like I'm doing something wrong, like, I shouldn't be doing this, I feel kind of.. creepy, awkward. I've only been able to do this online because in real life, I just freeze and my mind just races with stress and I just give up and just decided overtime to not attempt that and avoid it.
So well, I'm just left wondering, how? How are you supposed to meet new people?
32 votes -
Fact-checking can’t do much when people’s “dueling facts” are driven by values instead of knowledge
19 votes -
Kenya court upholds ban on gay sex in major setback for activists
7 votes -
Colorado becomes first state in nation to cap price of insulin
11 votes -
Superman II - WTF happened to this movie?
6 votes -
Star Trek: Picard | Teaser
21 votes -
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange charged in eighteen-count superseding indictment
19 votes -
Twelve Foot Ninja - Portrait #1 (2008)
3 votes -
Please don’t theme our apps
9 votes -
How to write about Africa
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Beyond Blue is shaping up to be much more than Blue Planet: The Game
4 votes -
In a town shaped by water, the river is winning
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‘Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle’: A new, sociological investigation of how videogames and gaming fit into contemporary capitalism
6 votes -
The Sims 4 is currently free on Origin
23 votes -
The undercover fascist - A young Englishman got mixed up in a white-supremacist movement. Then he learned of a plot to kill a politician.
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Impossible Foods’ rising empire of almost-meat
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Theresa May has said she will quit as Conservative leader on 7 June, paving the way for a contest to decide a new prime minister
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WebAssembly at eBay: A Real-World Use Case
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Our fury over abortion was dismissed for decades as hysterical
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ISI$ - Joyner Lucas ft Logic (2019)
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The technology of Storytelling: Dolby Labs' Poppy Crum shares a glimpse of the future
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A solution to psychology’s reproducibility problem just failed its first test
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Archiving grief five years after the Isla Vista attacks
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Canadian federal government reveals passenger bill of rights
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Go is Google's language, not ours
15 votes -
McHive, the world’s smallest McDonalds (for bees)
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The MTHFR gene and why anti-vax doctors are ordering 23andMe tests
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