I'm running out of ideas, if you have any, please make your own programming challenge.

This challenge is about designing algorithm to solve this problem.

Let's have game field of size x, y (like in chess). There are two wizards, that are standing at [ 0, 0 ] and are teleporting themselves using spells. The goal is to not be the one who teleports them outside of the map. Each spell teleports wizard by at least +1 tile. Given map size and collection of spells, who wins (they do not make any mistakes)?

Here are few examples:

Example 1

x:4,y:5

Spells: { 0, 2 }

Output: false

Description: Wizard A starts, teleporting both of them to 0, 2. Wizard B teleports them to 0, 4. Wizard A has to teleport them to 0,6, which overflows from the map, so he loses the game. Because starting wizard (wizard A) loses, output is false.

Example 2

x:4,y:4

Spells: { 1,1 }

Output: true

Example 3

x:4,y:5

Spells: { 1,1 },{ 3,2 },{ 1,4 },{ 0,2 },{ 6,5 },{ 3,1 }

Output: true

Example 4

x:400,y:400

Spells: {9,2},{15,1},{1,4},{7,20},{3,100},{6,4},{9,0},{7,0},{8,3},{8,44}

Ouput: true

Good luck! I'll comment here my solution in about a day.

Note: This challenge comes from fiks, programming competition by Czech college ČVUT (CTU).

Hi, I need your help to learn pentesting.

I'm programming for several years. I'm really good in C# and can write moderately complex apps in Dart, Python and JavaScript. I'm in highschool and work for software development company as backend developer. But general programming starts to feel so boring...

I've started to watch LiveOverflow on youtube (no link, there is no wifi here and I don't want youtube to drain my data) and it was so interesting - so I tried it. I've tried few CTFs, read many writeups, and now I've discovered CTF hack the box.

When I know what to do, I have no problem googling and researching and later applying my knowledge. But I often discover, that I just don't know what I don't know.

There is one CTF challenge that I haven't completed yet. It's 20 line html page, no javascript, nothing suspicous. No cookies. It has just form with password input, which sends post request to server. Here's the problem - how do I get the flag (the password)? I can bruteforce it, but it clearly isn't the correct way. I know that the php runs on apache, debian. I've tried getting some files, I've tried going up (../), sql injection, nothing works.

And here's the general problem - what am I missing? What to learn? What should I google? I don't want ideas what I'm missing on this one example - Instead I need some sources where I learn generally about vulnerabilities I can exploit. Some blog, some website, something like this.

Could someone here recommend me some sources where I learn about this? How did you start and what things do you generally check when you face something you have to break into?

Thank you

I've enjoyed the challenges of gardening in zone 5 -6 and zone 10 - 11, and am wondering about others' experience.

Climate change, with migrating pests/diseases and more erratic weather, are definitely noticeable trends.

While it's interesting to grow ornamentals and food crops that wouldn't ordinarily be available, it's also disturbing to find falling yields and utter collapses of formerly successful "easy" plants like basil and temperate climate tomato varieties.

There are limits on how much can be accomplished with purely "organic" controls - I've had to experiment with soil ecology (MycoStop for fungal infections, etc.). Allergenic plants are an increasing problem. There are brand new animal pests where I live as well - iguanas, pythons, and other hot-climate reptiles.

I'm curious about others' gardening results, and suggestions for improving adaptability.

Hi everyone! There was no coding challenge last week, so I decided to make one this week. If someone wants to make his own challenge, wait few days and post it. I'm running out of ideas and I'd like to keep these challenges running on Tildes.

Everyone here knows data formats - I'm talking about XML or JSON. The task is to make your own format. The format can be as compact as possible, as human-readable as possible, or something that's really unique. Bonus points for writing encoder/decoder for your data format!

How do you handle long texts? Various unicode characters? Complex objects? Cyclic references? It's up to you if you make it fast and simple, or really complex.

I'm looking forward to your data formats. I'm sure they will beat at least csv. Good luck!

Anything you guys have been having great fun/difficulty with lately? Any riffs/songs you're making? I've been trying to improve on Bass guitar and I learned that RHCP's Torture Me has a really fun bass line. That whole 1-2-2-1 structure is challenging but satisfying as hell to pull off

Hi everyone! In this challenge, we will build simple genetic algorithm.

The goal is to create genetic algorithm that will learn and output predefined text ("Hello World!").

The goal can be achieved with any language and you'll need just simple loops, collection and knowledge how to create and use objects, even beginners can try to complete this challenge.

How?

I'll try to explain it as best as I can. Genetic algorithms are approximation algorithms - they often do not find the best solution, but they can find very good solutions, fast. It's used when traditional algorithms are either way too slow, or they even don't exist. It's used to, for example, design antennas, or wind turbines. We will use it to write "Hello World".

First of all, we define our Entity. It is solution to given problem, it can be list of integers that describe antenna shape, decision tree, or string ("Hello World"). Each entity contains the solution (string solution) and fitness function. Fitness function says, how good our entity is. Our fitness function will return, how similar is entity solution text to "Hello World" string.

But how will the program work? First of all, we will create list of entities List<Entity>. We will make, for example, 1000 entities (randomly generated). Their Entity.solution will be randomized string of length 11 (because "Hello World" is 11 characters long).

Once we have these entities, we will repeat following steps, until the best entity has fitness == 1.0, or 100% similarity to target string.

First of all, we compute fitness function of all entities. Then, we will create empty list of entities of length 1000. Now, we will 1000-times pick two entities (probably weighted based on their fitness) and combine their strings. We will use the string to create new entity and we will add the new entity to the new list of entities.

Now, we delete old entities and replace them with entities we just made.

The last step is mutation - because what if no entity has the "W" character? We will never get our "Hello World". So we will go through every entity and change 5% (or whatever number you want) of characters in their solution to random characters.

We let it run for a while - and it is done!

So to sum up what we did:

entities <- 1000 random entities
while entities.best.fitness < 1:
  for every entity: compute fitness
  newEntities <- empty list
  1000-times:
    choose two entities from "entities", based on their fitness
    combine solutions of these entities and make newEntity
    newEntities.add(newEntity)
  for every entity: mutate // Randomly change parts of their strings

print(entities.best.solution) // Hello World!

Now go and create the best, fastest, and most pointless, genetic algorithm we've ever seen!

Expertise researcher Anders Ericsson on why the popular "ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert" rule mischaracterizes his research:

No, the ten-thousand-hour rule isn't really a rule

Ralf Krampe, Clemens Tesch-Römer, and I published the results from our study of the Berlin violin students in 1993. These findings would go on to become a major part of the scientific literature on expert performers, and over the years a great many other researchers have referred to them. But it was actually not until 2008, with the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, that our results attracted much attention from outside the scientific community. In his discussion of what it takes to become a top performer in a given field, Gladwell offered a catchy phrase: “the ten-thousand-hour rule.” According to this rule, it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a master in most fields. We had indeed mentioned this figure in our report as the average number of hours that the best violinists had spent on solitary practice by the time they were twenty. Gladwell himself estimated that the Beatles had put in about ten thousand hours of practice while playing in Hamburg in the early 1960s and that Bill Gates put in roughly ten thousand hours of programming to develop his skills to a degree that allowed him to found and develop Microsoft. In general, Gladwell suggested, the same thing is true in essentially every field of human endeavor— people don’t become expert at something until they’ve put in about ten thousand hours of practice.

The rule is irresistibly appealing. It’s easy to remember, for one thing. It would’ve been far less effective if those violinists had put in, say, eleven thousand hours of practice by the time they were twenty. And it satisfies the human desire to discover a simple cause-and-effect relationship: just put in ten thousand hours of practice at anything, and you will become a master.

Unfortunately, this rule— which is the only thing that many people today know about the effects of practice— is wrong in several ways. (It is also correct in one important way, which I will get to shortly.) First, there is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours. Gladwell could just as easily have mentioned the average amount of time the best violin students had practiced by the time they were eighteen— approximately seventy-four hundred hours— but he chose to refer to the total practice time they had accumulated by the time they were twenty, because it was a nice round number. And, either way, at eighteen or twenty, these students were nowhere near masters of the violin. They were very good, promising students who were likely headed to the top of their field, but they still had a long way to go when I studied them. Pianists who win international piano competitions tend to do so when they’re around thirty years old, and thus they’ve probably put in about twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand hours of practice by then; ten thousand hours is only halfway down that path.

And the number varies from field to field. Steve Faloon became the very best person in the world at memorizing strings of digits after only about two hundred hours of practice. I don’t know exactly how many hours of practice the best digit memorizers put in today before they get to the top, but it is likely well under ten thousand.

Second, the number of ten thousand hours at age twenty for the best violinists was only an average. Half of the ten violinists in that group hadn’t actually accumulated ten thousand hours at that age. Gladwell misunderstood this fact and incorrectly claimed that all the violinists in that group had accumulated over ten thousand hours.

Third, Gladwell didn’t distinguish between the deliberate practice that the musicians in our study did and any sort of activity that might be labeled “practice.” For example, one of his key examples of the ten-thousand-hour rule was the Beatles’ exhausting schedule of performances in Hamburg between 1960 and 1964. According to Gladwell, they played some twelve hundred times, each performance lasting as much as eight hours, which would have summed up to nearly ten thousand hours. Tune In, an exhaustive 2013 biography of the Beatles by Mark Lewisohn, calls this estimate into question and, after an extensive analysis, suggests that a more accurate total number is about eleven hundred hours of playing. So the Beatles became worldwide successes with far less than ten thousand hours of practice. More importantly, however, performing isn’t the same thing as practice. Yes, the Beatles almost certainly improved as a band after their many hours of playing in Hamburg, particularly because they tended to play the same songs night after night, which gave them the opportunity to get feedback— both from the crowd and themselves— on their performance and find ways to improve it. But an hour of playing in front of a crowd, where the focus is on delivering the best possible performance at the time, is not the same as an hour of focused, goal-driven practice that is designed to address certain weaknesses and make certain improvements— the sort of practice that was the key factor in explaining the abilities of the Berlin student violinists.

A closely related issue is that, as Lewisohn argues, the success of the Beatles was not due to how well they performed other people’s music but rather to their songwriting and creation of their own new music. Thus, if we are to explain the Beatles’ success in terms of practice, we need to identify the activities that allowed John Lennon and Paul McCartney— the group’s two primary songwriters— to develop and improve their skill at writing songs. All of the hours that the Beatles spent playing concerts in Hamburg would have done little, if anything, to help Lennon and McCartney become better songwriters, so we need to look elsewhere to explain the Beatles’ success.

This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a particular goal and generic practice is crucial because not every type of practice leads to the improved ability that we saw in the music students or the ballet dancers. Generally speaking, deliberate practice and related types of practice that are designed to achieve a certain goal consist of individualized training activities— usually done alone— that are devised specifically to improve particular aspects of performance.

The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn’t say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice. But nothing in my study implied this. To show a result like this, I would have needed to put a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin and then see how they turned out. All that our study had shown was that among the students who had become good enough to be admitted to the Berlin music academy, the best students had put in, on average, significantly more hours of solitary practice than the better students, and the better and best students had put in more solitary practice than the music-education students.

The question of whether anyone can become an expert performer in a given field by taking part in enough designed practice is still open, and I will offer some thoughts on this issue in the next chapter. But there was nothing in the original study to suggest that it was so.

Gladwell did get one thing right, and it is worth repeating because it’s crucial: becoming accomplished in any field in which there is a well-established history of people working to become experts requires a tremendous amount of effort exerted over many years. It may not require exactly ten thousand hours, but it will take a lot.

We have seen this in chess and the violin, but research has shown something similar in field after field. Authors and poets have usually been writing for more than a decade before they produce their best work, and it is generally a decade or more between a scientist’s first publication and his or her most important publication— and this is in addition to the years of study before that first published research. A study of musical composers by the psychologist John R. Hayes found that it takes an average of twenty years from the time a person starts studying music until he or she composes a truly excellent piece of music, and it is generally never less than ten years. Gladwell’s ten-thousand-hour rule captures this fundamental truth— that in many areas of human endeavor it takes many, many years of practice to become one of the best in the world— in a forceful, memorable way, and that’s a good thing.

On the other hand, emphasizing what it takes to become one of the best in the world in such competitive fields as music, chess, or academic research leads us to overlook what I believe to be the more important lesson from our study of the violin students. When we say that it takes ten thousand— or however many— hours to become really good at something, we put the focus on the daunting nature of the task. While some may take this as a challenge— as if to say, “All I have to do is spend ten thousand hours working on this, and I’ll be one of the best in the world!”— many will see it as a stop sign: “Why should I even try if it’s going to take me ten thousand hours to get really good?” As Dogbert observed in one Dilbert comic strip, “I would think a willingness to practice the same thing for ten thousand hours is a mental disorder.”

But I see the core message as something else altogether: In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement— think of what two hundred hours of practice brought Steve Faloon— but you have only scratched the surface. You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you.

This puts the ten-thousand-hour rule in a completely different light: The reason that you must put in ten thousand or more hours of practice to become one of the world’s best violinists or chess players or golfers is that the people you are being compared to or competing with have themselves put in ten thousand or more hours of practice. There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement. So, yes, if you wish to become one of the best in the world in one of these highly competitive fields, you will need to put in thousands and thousands of hours of hard, focused work just to have a chance of equaling all of those others who have chosen to put in the same sort of work.

One way to think about this is simply as a reflection of the fact that, to date, we have found no limitations to the improvements that can be made with particular types of practice. As training techniques are improved and new heights of achievement are discovered, people in every area of human endeavor are constantly finding ways to get better, to raise the bar on what was thought to be possible, and there is no sign that this will stop. The horizons of human potential are expanding with each new generation.

-- Ericsson, Anders; Pool, Robert. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (p. 109-114). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

Introduction and motivation

In an effort to get more content on Tildes, I want to try and give an introduction on several 'hot topics' in semiconductor physics at a level understandable to laypeople (high school level physics background). Making physics accessible to laypeople is a much discussed topic at universities. It can be very hard to translate the professional terms into a language understandable by people outside the field. So I will take this opportunity to challenge myself to (hopefully) create an understandable introduction to interesting topics in modern physics. To this end, I will take liberties in explaining things, and not always go for full scientific accuracy, while hopefully still getting the core concepts across. If a more in-depth explanation is wanted, please ask in the comments and I will do my best to answer.

Today's topic

I will start this series with an introduction to spintronics and spin transistors.

What is spintronics?

Spintronics is named in analogy to electronics. In electronics, the flow of current (consisting of electrons) is studied. Each electron has an electric charge, and by pulling at this charge we can move electrons through wires, transistors, creating modern electronics. Spintronics also studies the flow of electrons, but it uses another property of the electrons, spin, to create new kinds of transistors.

What are transistors?

Transistors are small electronic devices that act as an on-off switch for current. We can flip this on-off switch by sending a signal to the transistor, so that the current will flow. Transistors are the basis for all computers and as such are used very widely in modern life.

What is spin?

Spin arises from quantum mechanics. However, for the purpose of explaining spin transistors we can think of an electron's spin as a bar magnet. Each electron can be thought of as a bar magnet that will align itself to a nearby magnetic field. Think of it as a compass (the electron) aligning itself to a fridge magnet when it's held near the compass.

What are spin transistors and how do they work?

Spin transistors are a type of transistor whose on-off switch is created by magnets. We take two bar magnets, whose north poles are pointed in the same way, and put them next to each other, leaving a small gap between them. This gap is filled with a material through which the electrons can move. Now we connect wires to the big bar magnets and let current (electrons!) flow through both magnets, via the gap. When the electrons go through the first magnet, their internal magnets will align themselves to the big bar magnet. However, once they are in the gap the electrons' internal magnets will start rotating and no longer point in the same direction as the big bar magnets. So that when the electrons arrive at the second magnet, they will be repelled just like when you try to push the north poles of two magnets together. This means the current will not flow, and the device is off! So, how do we get it to turn on?

By exposing the gap to an electric field, we can control the amount of rotation the electrons experience (this is called the Rashba effect). If we change the strength of this electric field so that the electrons will make exactly one full rotation while crossing the gap, then by the time they reach the second big bar magnet they will once again be pointing in the right direction. Now the electrons are able to move through the second big bar magnet, and out its other end. So by turning this electric field on, the spin transistor will let current flow, and if we turn the electric field off, no current will flow. We have created an on-off switch using magnets and spin!

That's cool, but why go through the effort of doing this when we have perfectly fine electronics already?

The process of switching between the on and off states of these spin transistors is a lot more energy efficient than with regular transistors. These types of transistors leak a lot less too. Normal transistors will leak, meaning that a small amount of current will go through even when the transistor is off. With spin transistors, this leak is a lot smaller. This once again improves the energy efficiency of these devices. So in short, spin transistors will make your computer more energy efficient. This type of transistor can also be made smaller than normal transistors, which leads to more powerful computers.

Feedback and interest

As I mentioned, I wrote this post as a challenge to myself to explain modern physics to laypeople. Please let me know where I succeeded and where I failed. Also let me know if you like this type of content and if I should continue posting other similar topics in the same format.

I just realized that I completely glossed over this week's programming challenge. For this week, let's do something more flexible: write a program that accepts a file as input--either through a file name/path or through standard input--and perform any form of analysis you want on its contents. That's it!

For instance, you could count the occurrences of each word and find the most common ones, or you could determine the average sentence length, or the average unique words per sentence. You could even perform an analysis on changes in words and sentence structure over time (could be useful for e.g. poetry where metre may play an important role). You can stick with simple numbers or dive right into the grittiest forms of textual analysis currently available. You could output raw text or even a graphical representation. You could even do a bit of everything!

How simple or complex your solution ends up being is completely up to you, but I encourage you to challenge yourself by e.g. learning a new language or about different textual analysis techniques, or by focusing on code quality rather than complexity, or even by taking a completely different approach to the problem than you ordinarily would. There are a lot of learning opportunities available here.

Me and my friend arrive at an arbitrary place, we have access to a network from there. Now, we want to share a file and the network connection is all we have. The challenge: make the file go from my device to my friends device in a pure p2p setting. If you know, for sure, that incoming connections are allowed this is very simple but here i want to explore which solutions exist that do not assume this.

Assumptions:

• Same network altough possibly different access points (one might be wired and the other wireless)
• We have no prior knowledge about the network, incoming traffic might be blocked (outgoing isn't for sure)
• No extra machines can aid in the transaction (no hole punching etc)
• Should work reliably for any kind of device that you have free -- as in freedom -- control over. that is PCs, android phones/tablets and macs. most of Apple's other hardware can be excluded because they don't allow for anything anyway.
• hard mode: We are both digitally illiterate

Goal:

• Send a file, p2p, from one party to another.

Me (MSc cs) and my friend (PhD cs) tried to do this last week. And it appears to be among the hardest problems in CS. I would like to discuss this and hear which solutions you might have for this problem.

Edits:

1. this is not an assignment
2. Added some specifics to the assumption set
3. we're looking for practical solutions here.
4. more specs

Masala chai (commonly and somewhat falsley abbreviated to just “chai”) literally means “spice mix tea” – and this is what this review is about. I got myself a selection of Vahdam’s masala chais and kept notes of each one I tried. Some came in the Chai Tea Sampler and others I either already bought before or were a free sample that came with some other order.

Classical CTC BOP

CTC BOP is usually cheaper than more delicately processed whole leaves. Although the common perception is that it is of lower quality than e.g. FTGFOP or even just FOP or OP for that matter, the fact is that they simply a different method with a different outcome. You can get away with breaking cheaper leaves, though, than whole.

Also bare in mind that while BOP is the most common broken leaf grade, there are several more.

It makes for a stronger brew and a more robust flavour– ideal for breakfast teas. The down-side is that it can coat your tongue. But if you want to recycle it, the second steep will be much lighter.

Original Chai Spiced Black Tea Masala Chai

The quintessential masala chai – the strength of the CTC BOP, paired with the classic mix of spices. A great daily driver and a true classic, but for my personal taste a tiny bit too light on the spice.

Ingredients: CTC BOP black tea, cardamom, clove, cinnamon, black pepper

Double Spice Masala Chai Spiced Black Tea

Same as India’s Original Masala Chai above, but with a bigger amount of spice. Of the two I definitely prefer this one.

Ingredients: CTC BOP black tea, cardamom, clove, cinnamon, black pepper

Fennel Spice Masala Chai Spiced Black Tea

Due to the fennel, the overall taste reminds me a lot of Slovenian cinnamon-honey cookies[^medenjaki], which we traditionally bake for Christmas. The odd bit is the cookies do not include the fennel at all, but most of the other spices in a classic masala chai (minus pepper). I suppose the fennel sways it a bit to the sweet honey-like side.

In short, I really liked the fennel variation – could become firm winter favourite of mine.

Ingredients: CTC BOP black tea, fennel, cardamom, clove, cinnamon, black pepper

[^medenjaki]: The Slovenian name is “medenjaki” and the closest thing the English cuisine has to offer is probably gingerbread.

Saffron Premium Masala Chai Spiced Black Tea

When I saw the package I thought that saffron was more of a marketing gimmick and I would only find a strand or two in the whole 10g package. But no! The saffron’s pungence punches you in the face – in a good way. It felt somewhat weird to put sugar and milk into it, so strong is the aroma.

Personally, I really like it and it does present an interesting savoury twist. It is a taste that some might love and others might hate though.

Ingredients: CTC BOP black tea, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, saffron, almonds

Earl Grey Masala Chai Spiced Black Tea

I am (almost) always game for a nice spin on an Earl Grey. In this case, the standard masala complements the bergamot surprisingly well and in a way where none of the two particularly stand out too much.

The combination works so well that it would feel wrong to call it a spiced-up Earl Grey or a earl-grey’d masala chai. It is a pleasantly lightly spiced, somewhat citrusy and fresh blend that goes well with or without milk.

Ingredients: CTC BOP black tea, bergamot, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, black pepper

Cardamom Chai Masala Chai Spiced Black Tea

Now, this one is interesting because it only has two ingredients – black tea and cardamom. While not as complex in aroma as most others, it is interesting how much freshness and sweetness a quality cardamom pod can carry.

I found it equally enjoyable with milk and sugar or without any of the two.

Ingredients: CTC BOP Assam black tea, cardamom

Sweet Cinnamon Massala Chai Black Tea

Similar to their Cardamom Chai, it is a masala chai with very few ingredients. The cinnamon and cardamom get allong very well and while it lacks the complexity of a full masala/spice mix, it is a very enjoyable blend.

Recommended especially if you like your masala chai not too spicy, but sweet.

Ingredients: CTC BOP Assam black tea, cardamom, cinnamon

Ortodox black

What is described with “orthodox” usually means a whole leaf grade, starting with OP. These are much weaker than CTC, but therefore bring out the more delicate flavours. It is a bigger challenge therefore to make sure spices do not push the flavour of the tea too much into the back-seat.

Because the leaves are whole, as a rule you can get more steeps out of them than of broken leaves.

Assam Spice Masala Chai Spiced Black Tea

The more refined spin on the classic masala chai – with whole leaves of a quality Assam, it brings a smoothness and mellowness that the CTC cannot achieve. Because of that the spices are a bit more pronounced, which in my opinion is not bad at all. The quality of the leaf also results in a much better second steep compared to the CTC.

Most definitely a favourite for me.

Ingredients: FTGFOP1 Assam black tea, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, black pepper

Tulsi Basil Organic Masala Chai Spiced Black Tea

I have not had the pleasure of trying tulsi[^basil] and regarding masala chais, this is a very peculiar blend. The taste of the Assam is quite well hidden behind the huge bunch of herbs. In fact, for some reason it reminds me more of the Slovenian Mountain Tea than of of a masala chai.

In the end, the combination is quite pleasant and uplifting.

What I found fascinating is that it tastes very similar both with milk and sugar, and without any of the two.

Ingredients: organic Assam black tea, tulsi basil, cinnamon, ginger, clove, cardamom, black pepper, long pepper, bay leaves, nutmeg

[^basil]: For more about tulsi – or holy basil, as they call it in some places – see its Wikipedia entry.

Darjeeling Spice Masala Chai Spiced Black Tea

As expected, the Darjeeling version is much lighter and works well also without milk, or even sugar. Still, a tiny cloud of milk does give it that extra smoothness and mellowness. It is not over-spiced, and the balance is quite well. The taste of cloves (and perhaps pepper) are just slightly more pronounced, but as a change that is quite fun. It goes very well with the muscatel of the Darjeeling.

Ingredients: SFTGFOP1 Darjeeling black tea, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, black pepper

Oolong

Maharani Chai Spiced Oolong Tea

Despite the fancy abbreviation, IMHO the oolong tea itself in this blend is not one you would pay high prices as a stand-alone tea. Still, I found the combination interesting. If nothing else, it is interesting to have a masala chai that can be drank just as well without milk and sugar as with them.

Personally, I found the spice a bit to strong in this blend for the subtle tea it was combined with. I actually found the second steep much more enjoyable.

Ingredients: SFTGFOP1 Oolong tea, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, black pepper

Green

Kashmiri Kahwa Masala Chai Spiced Green Tea

A very enjoyable and refreshing blend, which I enjoyed without milk or sugar. The saffron is not as heavy as in the Saffron Premium Masala Chai, but goes really well with the almonds and the rest of the spices.

When I first heard of Kashmiri Kahwa, I saw a recipe that included rose buds, so in the future I might try adding a few.

Ingredients: FTGFOP1 green tea, cardamom, cinnamon, saffron, almonds

Green Tea Chai

As is to be expected, the green variety of the Darjeeling masala chai is even lighter than its black Darjeeling counterpart. The spice is well-balanced, with cinnamon and cloves perhaps being just a bit more accentuated. This effect is increased when adding milk.

It goes pretty well without milk or sugar and can be steeped multiple times. Adding either or both works fine as well though.

Quite an enjoyable tea, but personally, in this direction, I prefer either the Kashmiri Kahwa or the “normal” Darjeeling Spice masala chais.

Ingredients: FTGFOP1 darjeeling green tea, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, black pepper

Glossary:

• BOP]: Broken Orange Pekoe
• FOP: Flowery Orange Pekoe
• OP: Orange Pekoe
• CTC: Crush, Tear, Curl
• FTGFOP: Finest Tippy Golder Flowery Orange Pekoe
• FTGFOP1: Finest Tippy Golder Flowery Orange Pekoe (1st grade)
• SFTGFOP1: Superior Finest Tippy Golder Flowery Orange Pekoe (1st grade)

It's that time of week again! For this week's programming challenge, I thought I would focus on data structures.

Goal: Construct a binary tree data structure. It may handle any data type you choose, but you must handle sorting correctly. You must also provide a print function that prints each value in the tree on a new line, and the values must be printed in strictly increasing order.

If you're unfamiliar with this data structure, it's a structure that starts with a single "root" node, and this root can have a left child, right child, both, or neither. Each of these child nodes is exactly the same as the root node, except the root has no parent. This branching structure is why it's called a tree. Furthermore, left descendants always have values smaller than the parent, and right descendants always have larger values.

We've been having a smattering of art, poetry, and photo participation posts, such as this, and this, and this, and this.

We seem to have enough ~tilders to have a schedule of sorts, but not enough to have each activity every week. How about we rotate weekly activities for a while and see how it goes? I'm thinking we have enough interest for a series of visual/craft based threads and a series of writing based threads. For example:

July 3-9th Photography (subject exploration or technique)
July 10-16th What are you making now?/Speedart
July 17-23rd Photography (topic or equipment)
July 24-30th What are you making now?/Media challenge

July 3-9th Freestyle Writing (up to a thousand words)
July 10-16th Themed Drabbles
July 17-23rd Poetry format challenge
July 24-30th It was a dark and stormy night

Please note that these are suggestions and not an arbitrary bid to codify content or become TEH LEADER. I just think it would be fun to have an activity to look forward to every week. We could even just sign up for hosting a week's topic, and whoever is in charge of the week picks the activity.

What does everyone think?

Markov Chains are a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. By analyzing a document in some way and producing a model it’s possible to use this model to generate sentences.

For example, let’s consider this quote:

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.

Let’s start with a seed of be, which there is only one of in this text and it’s following word is who. Thus, a 100% chance of the next state being who. From who, there are several next states: you, mind, and matter. Since there are 3 options to choose from, the next state has a 1/3 probability of each. It’s important that if there were for example two instances of who you then you would have a 2/4 probability of next state. Generate a random number and choose the next state, perhaps mind and continue until reaching a full stop. The string of states we reached is then printed and we have a complete sentence (albeit almost certainly gibberish).

Note: if we were in the state mind, our next two options would be . or don’t, in which if we hit . we would end the generation. (or not, up to you how you handle this!)

To take it a step further, you could also consider choosing the number of words to consider a state. For example, two words instead of one: those who has two possible next states: who matter or who mind. By using much longer strings of words for our states we can get more natural text but will need much more volume to get unique sentences.

This programming challenge is for you to create a Markov Chain and Text Generator in your language of choice. The input being a source document of anything you like (fun things include your favourite book, a famous person’s tweets, datasets of reddit / tildes comments), and possibly a seed. The output being a sentence generated using the Markov Chain.

Bonus points for:

• Try it a bunch of times on different sources and tell us the best generated sentences
• Using longer strings of words for the state, or even having it be variable based on input
• Not requiring a seed as an input, instead implementing that into your Markov Chain (careful as infinite loops can occur without considering the seed)
• Implement saving the Markov Chain itself, as it can take very long to generate with huge documents
• Particularly Fast, efficient, short or unique methods

Good luck!

P.S A great place to find many large plain text documents for you to play with is Project Gutenberg.

It's been over a week since the last programming challenge and the previous one was a bit more difficult, so let's do something easier and more accessible to newer programmers in particular. Write a function that takes two strings as input and returns true if they're anagrams of each other, or false if they're not.

Extra credit tasks:

• Don't consider the strings anagrams if they're the same barring punctuation.
• Write an efficient implementation (in terms of time and/or space complexity).
• Minimize your use of built-in functions and methods to bare essentials.
• Write the worst--but still working--implementation that you can conceive of.

I've been feeling SO HAPPY this Monday, so I'm hoping y'all will be able to ease my light existential dread. That dread is based on cultural conflicts in the US and elsewhere, where people seem to want to have things their way or the highway and no resolution is in sight.

"Culture war" is a term that assumes at least two sides fighting out their differences in an effectively zero-sum atmosphere; one side wins, one side loses. It would apply tons of different questions, a couple which we've discussed here in ~talk already. I see a "Culture War" as any conflict of opinion focused on cultural values, rights, mores, etc., in which the participants feel there must be a clear winner and a clear loser to the conflict. Abortion, discrimination/affirmative action (of any kind to any group), and gun control/rights are the three big culture-war issues that I think currently divide Americans.

Escalating an issue to culture war status means that issue will likely not be resolved for decades. While other issues ebb and flow, the culture war issues persist largely unchanged. I think the main reason for the doggedness of these issues is there is no possible way to deescalate them. The participants want too badly to be right to hear many reasons for seeing things differently, and almost any act to persuade has "complete capitulation" in mind as the primary goal of the rhetorician. The result is that no one hears or respects the people who disagree with them.

I have very little reason to be optimistic about any of these issues being resolved in my lifetime. Too many people use these cultural issues to identify themselves. Too many people use these issues to identify "others," or people who don't belong in their group. The room for open discussion on any of these issues is nil unless the discussion is held at the horns by a determined and skilled moderator.

My challenge to you, if you choose to accept it: find me a realistic path toward deescalating a culture war once it has begun. Historical examples would be much appreciated, if possible.

Edit: Someone told me privately that I went too academic, so I've adjusted the wording to be easier on the mind. Mondays all around, y'all.

This problem is based on the Project Euler problem here.

Goal: Given some input describing a triangle of numbers, find the path starting from the top-most row of the triangle and ending at the bottom-most row of the triangle that contains the largest sum of all of the numbers along the path. You may only move downward and you must select an adjacent position to move to. Efficiency is not a requirement for completion.

Constraints:

• The first line of input for a triangle will be a single integer telling you how many rows the triangle will have.
• Each following line of input will be the next row of the number triangle, starting at the first row.
• For each line describing the number triangle, the individual numbers will be separated by a single space.

Note: The constraints above are to keep hard-coded triangles out of submitted solutions while also ensuring that all languages can equally handle this problem without annoying workarounds for lower-level languages. The consistency also makes it easier for beginners to review and understand someone else's code, and makes it easier to receive help if you get stuck. They're not necessarily required, but are highly encouraged.

Example input:

4
1
3 2
4 5 6
7 8 9 10

Corresponding triangle:

   1
  3 2
 4 5 6
7 8 9 10

Expected result: 19 (1 + 2 + 6 + 10)

Extra Credit: As noted on the Project Euler page, you can solve this using a brute force method, but it's incredibly inefficient. Specifically, a brute force solution would be O(2ⁿ) time (exponential). There exists a solution that can be solved in O(n²) time (quadratic). Find this solution.

I'm looking for something challenging to read that is sort of on the fringe of philosophy and makes some interesting arguments. I would like to read classical philosophy but the girl I'm reading it with just finished a philosophy major and doesn't want to, so I guess I'm looking for something a little "softer".

I try (and fail) to play regularly on lichess under the username dear_sirs. I also have an account under the same name on chess.com.

Feel free to drop usernames in the comments below, or send me a challenge for a correspondence game--I would love to play you!

For our first photo challenge, any equipment goes! Please participate regardless of skill level or experience. :) Be it an old Polaroid, a point and click, a phone cam, or a professional kit, capture those photons and post them here!

Our subject this week: between three to 10 images exploring a pastime of yours. For example:

Reading? Pics of stacks of books, libraries, e-readers, pages of text, people absorbed in the printed word...

Running? Your shoes! Legs blurring by, your favorite route scenery, your muscle rub cream, brand of sock you like...

As long as you can connect it in some way to your activity, it's fair game. Let's clean our lenses and get going!

One thing I ended up realizing is that for e.g. code challenges in ~comp, there could be threads with a lot of code blocks that could easily take up a ton of screen real-estate. Something like the following isn't so bad:

/*
    This is a short multi-line example that doesn't
    take up much screen real-estate at all.
*/

But, what if the average comment for a particular topic has several of these with 100 lines or more? This could make navigating the comments really cumbersome as the number of comments grows. In the case of code challenges, lengthy code snippets could be very common, and collapsing the comment threads may not be the desirable course of action--in collapsing the thread for navigational convenience, you lose the ability to view and contribute to discussions. Hosting the code elsewhere risks links expiring or becoming lost or broken, and it feels like a clunky workaround to try to avoid inconveniencing other users.

With that in mind, what are your thoughts on having these code blocks display in a collapsed state by default with only a preview of the code block showing? Is there any support for this idea? If so, should this be implemented as part of Tildes itself or as a client-side extension of some sort? Are there any concerns about this?

(If there's general support for the idea, but opposition toward adding it to the Tildes code base, I may get off my lazy ass and try to hack something together.)

Over on ~creative, the idea of a regular photo challenge came up, which I think is a great idea and I'm looking forward to having a go at. But I'm notoriously bad at remembering to keep track of stuff like that.

What might be useful to help solve that problem would be the ability to subscribe with notifications. So I can get a notification - perhaps in 'unread', perhaps in a separate area - when a post is made with the tag creative.photochallenge.annouce or in the group ~creative.photochallenge, meaning I don't forget about that week's challenge announcement.

This could be useful for other things you want to keep track of: music.newreleases or hobbies.geocaching or whatever particular thing you're slightly more interested in than just being subscribed to it.

Background: Bitwise operators are operators that perform conditional operations at the binary level. These operators are bitwise AND &, bitwise OR |, bitwise XOR ^, and bitwise NOT ~, not to be confused with their logical operator counterparts, i.e. &&, ||, !=, and ! respectively.

Specifically, these operations take the binary values of the left- and right-hand terms and perform the conditional operation on each matching bit position between both values.

For instance, 3 | 4 takes the binary value 010 from 2 and 100 from 4. From left to right, we compare 0 || 1, 1 || 0, and 0 || 0 to get 110 as the resulting binary. This produces the integer value 6.

Goal: Your challenge is to implement one or more of these bitwise operators without using the native operators provided to you by your language of choice. Logical operators are allowed, however. These operators should work on integer values. These operators will likely take on the form of a function or method that accepts two arguments.

Bonus challenges:

• Implement all of the operators.
• Don't use any native binary conversion utilities.
• Whether or not you implement all operators, write your code in such a way that allows for good code reusability.
• For statically typed languages, handle integers of different types (e.g. int vs. uint).

Edit: Minor correction for the sake of accuracy, courtesy of @teaearlgraycold.

Pretty standard:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.

The twist: come up with the most creative or unusual way to solve this in your language of choice.

I know I am VERY late to the game on this one, but so far this game has eaten up 20+ hours in 3 days. For anyone who doesn't know, it's an open world action adventure (?) game set in the 31st century. Robotic animals roam the world, and you play an 18 year old girl that hunts them, utilizing bows, spears, slings, ans traps. It has a very primitive feel to it, so you can only assume this is either an alternate universe or a post apocalyptic earth.

While I've already had most of the plot spoiled for me, I'm enjoying all the little bits of lore I'm finding. I csnt wait to see how the plot plays out (as I said, it was spoiled, but only broad strokes, like knowing Vader is Luke's dad.) It's HARD sci-fi in a VIDEO GAME, not something shallow that's been done to death or that's too predictable.

I am severely overleveled, but combat is still fresh and challenging (playing on hard for my first play through.). There are so many different ways to approach situations, I can always change things around and try a different Tactic. I've had so much fun just going around farming and questing that I've ignored the main story for the most part.

The way the game handles its lore is phenomenal. I can't go into details without spoilers (just go read the wiki if you want to I suppose) but I'll save everything happens for a reason,and beautifully so.

Its not without its cons, however. As great as the combat is, a lot of the more difficult parts (so far) can be avoided by going out of bounds where enemies can't reach you (say a cliff or up a rock face, which if you can't climb, some careful jumping will take care of for you.)

It feels like some other games. I'm a big fan of open world, so its in the same family of MGSV, Farcry, and Shadow of Mordor, down to the map markers, collectibles, and inventory wheel. But hey, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Author's note: I posted this a couple days ago in @Kat's WIP thread, but I felt it was a little too tough of an ask to put there. This is probably going to take a more serious time commitment to review than the average submission, so I want to make sure everyone knows what they're getting into (such as through that nifty word count that will appear in the thread title). To that end, let me lay out some context so you're more grounded as to what this is, where I came from, and how serious I am about it.

For starters, I wrote this as part of a complete manuscript (about 63k words total) over a couple months late last year on a challenge from a friend. Liking the direction it was going, I then spent much of the early part of this year fixing and tweaking and revising because it turned out I liked it so much I decided to plan out three more independent stories set after this one.

So what is this? This is a first-person science fiction story of a test subject within an ongoing science experiment. It is set in not-too-distant future, 60-80 years give or take--I didn't want to be too specific for World Building Reasons. The nature of that experiment is unknown to the subject. I need to work on my blurbs.

What type of feedback am I looking for? Any you're comfortable giving, and I've got a very thick skin (many calluses from toxic league of legends players, I'd joke if it weren't true). This is the fourth-or-so draft and I could use fresh eyes on the little things. I also highly value emotional feedback, like what something is making you feel, whether you found something upsetting or funny or confusing. This is an unreliable narrator, so there should bit of each. Endgame-wise, I am probably going to look to publish this somewhere somehow, but I want to make sure that I'm not barking up the wrong tree before putting too much more energy into this.

If this isn't a great format for this sort of work (and I get it. This text is twelve pages on a good day), I am open to suggestions on how it might be easier to consume and respond. I've used my markdown wizardry to mimic the format of my word doc, which I'm not planning on uploading directly. So please forgive weird formatting things like inconsistent italics. I tried to catch them all, but it's like playing a game of whack a mole over here.

Editor's note: The following text came to us within encrypted song files in specific order. We were also provided an executable file that decrypted the text so that we could publish it. The relationship between these songs and the narrative is often not clear. To allow readers the opportunity to judge any potential relationship for themselves, we have titled each bit of text with the correct song file it was encrypted within. The order was preserved.

Prologue

"Yesterday”.FLAC

I'm not breathing. I'm dead. Is this hell? Heaven? I’m in a white room with Adam and Eve in white robes as the gatekeepers. Why is the room tilted? It’s not a hospital; it’s far too dirty. Will I recognize anyone? Am I dressed for heaven? The grime makes me think maybe this hell. That’s the breaks then, huh. But why would demons be in lab coats? And what are those tops? Is that a scarf? Indoors?

Oh shit, they're staring at me.

Hi. Am I dead? Did I say that? Can I speak? I can’t breathe.

They looked at each other. Did I say anything? Maybe I'm not dead. But I'm not breathing. I’m not just not breathing, but I can’t breathe. I don't feel like I can move. Why can’t I breathe?

Holy shit, I don't have any legs. My arms aren't mine. They're someone else's. Some hairy darker bastard too. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. What the fuck is happening?

You're not dead, but you did die. That has all the clarity of a Taoist monk. I think the woman said it. She stepped forward a little bit and tilted her head to the side with some mouth flapping to match the words. Did I really hear it? How can I not be dead? Whatever happened in America froze you. Like, we talking cryogenics frozen? Disney movie Frozen? The Iceman cometh frozen? Even frozen people should be able to breathe, right? They needed to replace my arms? What was wrong with my old arms if I was frozen to death? You’re in a new body. Those arms are yours now.

Yeah, the woman has to have said some of that. She started leaning in during the mouth-flapping like she was talking to a child. Now she’s straight as a country boy at church. I’m going to have to track her specifically. This is tedious.

Asian woman. If you can hear this: sorry, I’m new here.

“My name is Nadia, not ‘Asian woman.’ Can you tell us your name?” She glanced back to the man before looking back at me, with her hands clasped like she was pleading. Do I need to be pleaded with? She put her hands back to her sides. Where am I?

“You’re in Istanbul.” That’s not Nadia. Her mouth didn’t flap. I think it’s a voice, and I think it’s the man’s, but I couldn’t see him flap. Nadia was blocking the view. I think she’s like two feet away or something. Just out of arm's reach, but close enough that I can’t see the man anymore. Now she’s backed away. Why does she do that? The timing is weird.

So I'm in Istanbul. My legs are gone. My arms are fake and way super hairy. I'm not breathing, but I'm not dead, though I did die. I felt my eyes roll. I guess you two did something to me then.

“Well,” This is the other voice. Now that Nadia has backed away I can see the man’s mouth flapping, but he’s barely doing anything else. Not even a simple hand-gesture. I thought he was just wallpaper. Breathing wallpaper. Or is it mine? Maybe mine is the mouth that’s flapping.

“The frozen you died, but your brain was intact and incredibly well-preserved by whatever happened. We transferred the data that your brain contained into an android unit we designed for this purpose, and here you are." Yep, not mine. It’s got to be the dude, especially because he did a weird, body-length bobblehead bounce the entire time that voice was happening. Wait--

“You designed an android not to have any legs?” I heard that one. That’s me. Okay, I'm getting better at this. That explains the breathing, I think. It at least explains the arms. I'm not dead, but I'm also not alive. This is fun. I'm having fun. “So what did you do to me and how the fuck did I get to Istanbul?”

Whatever script these two had, I'm sure I've deviated from it. They're spending a lot more time looking at each other in silence than mouth-flapping. Okay. Fake-breath. What didn't I notice? The recorder is a little black thing on a little spot at the bottom of the mirror. Oh, I'm laid on this weird chair thing that has me positioned to look across the room. That’s why everything at an angle, I guess. Well, let’s just get off of that. I can just lean against this wall. It’s drywall, but that’s fine so long as I’m not throwing myself at it. I’ll have to lean because my ass is rounded with holes where legs should be. If I imagined legs there, I’d probably look like I have a nice ass.

The room looks like a room you use to interrogate someone mixed with a kid’s idea of wall-design. The wall behind me and to my left are drywall, looks like. The opposite wall with the door and the wall to my right with a mirror are concrete. Not even brick, like just solid concrete. I didn’t even realize that was still code. If this is a hospital, I’m reporting a lot of code violations. This place looks like a pigsty, one that not even the hired help cleans up. Though, that might just be those concrete walls. I’m especially complaining about the lack of legs.

"We felt it was a safety risk to give you legs." Safety risk? Safety for whom? I can’t breathe. Who is this guy anyway? "I'm Mehmet."

"Wait, how did you hear that? Have I been saying everything?" I'd rather have a little privacy at some points, you know?

"Well, you haven't exactly been silent." Huh. That's going to be a problem.

"You should be able to create a subroutine for the thoughts you want to save without speaking." Nadia to the rescue, but how would I do--oh, I see. That's new.

Let's restart this, then.

"Mr. Roboto".FLAC

Goooooooooood morning, subconscious! WELCOME TO THE FUTURE! Cue audience applause and cheers. I'm your host, Mr. Android! As you know, we’ve been off the air for a while. There’s a lot to catch up on. That’s why we’re bringing in two special guests to help reintroduce us to the anxiety of life: Mehmet and Nadia! We got a great show for you tonight, so stay tuned because you have no choice anyway.

Before the break, Mehmet, you were saying that you felt it was a safety risk to give us legs?

"That's right, Mr. Android. The design team and I thought that if you had legs, you'd be likely to use them.”

You’re damn right. Cue audience laughter. What’s wrong with using legs?

“If you had that mobility, we don’t know what you’d use it for. You could do anything a normal person could do, even walk right on out of this building.”

I presume you wouldn’t like it if I walked out right now. What if I just wanted a coffee from our proud sponsor: BB's Coffee™?

"First, don’t drink coffee. Don’t drink anything. That mouth wasn’t designed for drinking."

We’ll see about that. Cue audience laughter.

“Second, we need you not to walk out because we’re trying to monitor you to make sure you’re safe, as well as try to figure out what happened around your death.”

We'll have to come back to that, Mehmet. First, tell us a little bit about yourself.

"Sure. I was born and raised here in Turkey, but my grandparents were studying tornadoes in Oklahoma when everything went down."

Your grandparents? How long ago are we talking about here?

“It’s been a bit more than a half-century.”

Alright, what is ‘everything’ and how did it impact your grandma?

"Well, whatever happened to kill you. No one is really sure what caused the incident to happen. The best we could make of it at the time is that there was a large eruption near America's capital, and after that almost the entire east coast was some form of an infected mess. People who didn't die immediately had their immune systems too compromised to handle any other serious illness. That killed most of them within a few years." A moment of silence fell on the stage.

How bad was the devastation?

"Most of the coast was gone. Flights were stopped by the US almost immediately, so people in those areas were stranded. One flight got out to Montreal and it wiped out nearly a quarter of the city’s population. Cities along in the infected area lost an average of 75% of their population within a couple weeks.”

How far did it get?

“Atlanta was the northernmost city along the coast to weather the outbreak. A well-timed storm system kept the illness from spreading further west than it did. The mountains usually marked the furthest west it got. People who flew from those areas in the moments before the quarantine were tracked down and quarantined forcibly.”

Did anyone come to help?

“Sure, if a vulture helps a corpse.” Cue audience laughter. Audience might not laugh. “No one dared try to go near the infected areas, but Mexico declared a relief effort. That really was an attempt to annex most of the west and Great Plains under what it considered its historic claim to the land. The locals did not see things the same way. It turned into a classic occupation situation. They were resisted.”

So Texas is the new Palestine? Or would Crimea be a better analogy? What did your grandparents do?

“It was something like that. My grandparents just wanted to keep studying meteorology. There really wasn't a place in the United States safe enough to do that anymore. They applied for refugee status in Turkey and moved here. From there, they had a typical immigrant story. They earned enough money to start a restaurant and set their children up with a good education to be successful in Turkish society." Cue audience awe and applause.

Fascinating stuff. Nadia, it's your turn. Tell us a little about yourself.

"Well, I'm from Saudi Arabia. My parents were in California until about a decade before I was born. My mother was German-American, from Oregon. My dad was second generation Chinese-American, Californian born.”

California was impacted by the incident?

“Indirectly. After the incident, California tried to maintain some semblance of normalcy, but there were too many other nations that wanted to claim California for it to keep that dream alive for long. Russia, Canada, Japan, China, and Mexico each fought the other and the Californian government as they tried to claim it for their own.”

So they were the prettiest gal at the ball. Cue audience laughter. How did they deal with that sort of peer pressure?

“California had to start a mandatory draft program to keep up with the military needs of the new environment. Every citizen was theoretically part of the military’s reserves. After a few decades of near constant skirmishing at sea and especially in the north where most of the invading forces fought, California was out of resources and friends and collapsed after a military coup. Turns out if you can’t pay the active service personnel, you can’t keep a country.”

Intense. How do your parents fit into that?

“My parents saw the writing on the wall and applied for visas to work and live in Saudi Arabia a few years before the government collapsed. Saudi Arabia’s requirement for immigrants were twofold: it has to be a family and the man has to be educated, so here I am." Cue audience applause.

That's wild. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are refuges for the educated for more than two generations. How much more than a half century are we even talking here? I feel like a Twinkie from a time capsule. Cue audience laughter.

“It’s been about 60 years.”

You heard right, subconscious. We've been dead and 'incredibly well-preserved' for about 60 years. Everyone you knew is probably dead. Everything you know doesn’t matter. Your parents are statistically 99.99% certain to be dead even if they did survive and were outside the zone impacted. You're a man out of time. Are you even really a man anymore? Oh well, at least you don't have to put up with that breathing nonsense anymore, right? That sure was a drag*.*

Tune in next time for an interview with Toto. What is the matter with Kansas? Find out what Dorothy's breath smelled like as we ask Toto about his upcoming tell-all biography: Help, I'm A Dog And My Owner Takes Me On Tornado Rides.

"Clint Eastwood".FLAC

Oh good. There's a way to combine these tracking subroutines with living in the present. Now I don’t have to live in mortal fear of every errant thought becoming vocalized.

"Thanks, Nadia. That was very helpful." I’m a bit surprised about how my voice sounds. It’s tinny and higher pitched than my voice. Almost nasally too, but that doesn’t make any sense. There’s no nasal cavity for this voice to work through, right? There is no booming echo that I’m used to feeling when I talk. I have a strange confidence that I hear my words exactly as they sound, with no perspectival shift involved as the one saying them. No sense in telling them about that. I don’t even know for sure what we’ve been talking about.

I can tell that they've started to ease up. Nadia’s doing less of that leaning-to-the-children thing and Mehmet’s shoulders aren’t as far back as it’s humanly possible to bend them. He almost looks relaxed now. The bobblehead days might be behind us. Still, I think their increased comfort is more because I was off in that other subroutine most of that time. It feels like coming out of a blackout. Damn I'm going to miss alcohol.

"You're welcome, but a lot has happened in 60 years that we should get you caught up on." Oh, we've moved on. I thought I was just making all that up. I guess not. Weird. She’s hovering near the recorder like she turned it on recently. Or maybe turned it off? That wouldn’t make any sense though.

"You know what, Nadia. I think that's a lot to soak in. Unless there are more subroutines that help me process stuff like world events or that give me some newspaper articles or stuff from the past 60 years or something, I think I'm okay moving on from that for now. It's more interesting to me to talk about why you've revived me and what it is you're hoping to get here."

"Are you sure? I made a presentation for you outlining the biggest trends and current ongoing conflicts around the world." This woman is a nerd. I like it, but damn. Calm down. I hope she didn’t make any spreadsheets. For her sake.

Speaking of calming down, I should probably take a moment myself. Let’s see. The room isn’t nearly as white as I thought. I should have been either dead or in a hospital. This place doesn’t make sense. These people don’t make any sense. They’re not in any lab uniforms I’ve seen. They look rather like they’re about to go clubbing.

Nadia is average height. She looks like she's in her late twenties or early thirties. Her look matches a mix of her parents’ heritage: half Chinese-American and half German-American. I wonder what part of China. Brown hair, brown eyes, olive skin. Now that I think about it, I’m not actually sure what about her face strikes me as especially Asian. Maybe high cheek bones are what do it. Small noses really don’t mean much to me. It’s just a holistic thing, I guess. She could easily be mistaken for just about any ethnicity. She’s wearing jeans and no burka, so hurray for Saudi progressivism. I bet she might even be allowed to drive! She’s wearing a traditional white lab coat, but it’s open and I can see a black flowy thing that is tucked into the front of the jeans. She is joyously well-prepared to talk about shit that’s in her wheelhouse. Then again, I do seem to be these people's lab rat and I know these two are just the ambassadors of a much larger team of scientists. Preparing for this moment is probably their job.

Mehmet is probably in his thirties or forties. I can never tell age with men. Once you're over 26, you could be as old as 45 before I notice. He's maybe about six feet tall or six one--although this is Istanbul, so height is probably in centimeters here. What even would that be in centimeters, 181 cm? Anyway, he’s also wearing the open, white lab coat. Under it is a blue and gray checkered button down shirt with his jeans, and this tiny yellow argyle scarf. It isn’t long enough to protect your neck from winter, so it’s weird. Boots are yellowish. He's got sandy brown hair and ocean blue eyes. They look radioactive. They have to be fake. Eyes aren’t that blue. He also doesn’t have much of a tan. For a Turkish boy that’s awkward as fuck, but I guess his grandparents are from Oklahoma so maybe he's just a traditional, melanin-challenged, white American type. He didn't say anything about his other set of grandparents, but that's not related to what they want from me. Maybe Germans. Turks and Germans always had a close relationship going. Probably best to assume that Germans are part of an experiment like this anyway. They’re always getting into shady shit. Viva la Nuremberg.

"I'm sure, Nadia. But we can go over your presentation later. Or maybe there's some way for me to watch it on my own time, or something. I don't know. You designed this thing." I hope there isn't. Call me old fashioned, but I don't like people messing with my thoughts.

"Oh there is. Yeah, I'll upload it later." Great. Thanks, Nadia.

"To your question about purpose, we revived you because we don't know what happened 60 years ago,” Mehmet, as usual and fitting the German thesis, is stiff and blunt with his delivery. He doesn’t make hand gestures as he talks, which I never realized someone could accomplish. He barely moves. Makes me wonder who’s the real robot here, you know? “It was an important historical moment. We want to understand what happened to put it into a broader context of how the world changed since the fall of Imperial Era America." I'll let that label slide. Too many things to focus on to let a naming convention derail things.

"So you're hoping I can fill you in on the details."

"Exactly, at least what you know," he says.

"It would be a lot easier to put things into context if I had some idea of what context to put them into. Aren’t there like relevant stories or movies or something you can show me? Or anything that makes me feel a little less like a lab rat?" Mehmet winced, and Nadia glanced at him again. It’s especially noticeable because Nadia is almost always closer to me than Mehmet, so she has to turn around to look at him. Something makes them uncomfortable about me. Am I deemed unnatural? Is this entire experiment sacrilegious? Wouldn't be the first time for either. I goddamn hope there are some ethical qualms here.

While I was searching for an answer for their perpetual discomfort, Nadia chimed in. "We have a list of topics that we agreed as a team to discuss. I hope you'd understand if we took your suggestion to the team before agreeing to it? If we give you too much context we might skew your presentation. It’s just something we’d need to carefully plan out with the team."

"Sure, of course. Makes sense to me." Why are you even asking me though? I don’t have any power in this exchange, physical or emotional. Hell, you've even made sure I can't run at you. Oh shit, they’re about to leave.

“Hey, before you head out, is there a way I can be positioned so I can see that mirror over there? I’d like to see myself. I don’t even know if I make facial expressions.”

Nadia responded much faster than either of them have been up until now, “Oh you make facial expressions alright.” Fuck. She’s chuckling under her breath too. What have I been doing? If there were any blood in this husk, it’d all be in my cheeks right now. I used to cosplay as a tomato when I’d get the least bit worked up. I have that feeling right now.

Mehmet moved in closer to the table I’m on for the first time. Unlike Nadia, who often looks to him, he doesn’t look to her before grabbing a side of the table. He looks to her after though, and gives her a nod. I can’t tell if that’s workplace hierarchy or respect or just a man in the workplace or what. "Yeah. We can move you. Could you get away from that wall?" Without responding, I slid away from the wall as he suggested. Made sense if they were moving the table with me on it.

“Hang tight,” Nadia said, but she didn’t need to. I had already grabbed onto the edges of the table. Mehmet and Nadia lifted the table a couple inches and walked it slowly to the wall that was to my left. I’m not under any illusions about what this mirror is. It’s a one-way with a team watching on the other side. There’s no way it isn’t. The wall the mirror sits in looks like they broke through it just to put the mirror in; it’s got all sorts of chips and cracks like somebody actually chiseled the hole out. The important thing here is that I can see myself now.

They certainly had an eye for detail. My face has a bigger, more squished nose than I'm used to. It’s all olive, which of course I imagined from the arms, but to see it brings a new depth to this place. Is this actually me now? The dark brown eyes are new, though they are probably contacts anyway. I bet they look red when the light catches them. That’ll be a test for later. They should be light-brown things that would look yellow in the light. They’re not. I can’t believe I miss them assuring me I’m going to be blind by the time I’m 50. Eyebrows are just as thick--like caterpillars resting on a face. They didn't bother with hair on the top, but that's understandable. Hair is hard and they put all their hair energies in the arms and eyebrows. For some reason they put on a light stubble all along my jawline. Why would they want to show I could grow a beard? That was never true before. I'm not really crushed it still isn't true now. They replaced all my freckles with a simple mole just under my left eye. They thought to put on a mole? Can androids even get skin cancer? It looks like real skin, except it doesn't play as much. They must have made me to look like the most stereotypically handsome, bald man in society, with a mole to make it all seem real. I'm okay with that. This body looks good. I’d date me. Now let's see those pearly whites. Holy shit, nevermind. This mouth is fucked. The teeth are perfect, but everything within it is this wiry abomination that probably didn't get enough design time.

I realize now that I'm too busy gawking to think much about how this all must look to the people behind the mirror. Of course, this was after sticking my wire cage pretending to be a tongue out at them. Nadia and Mehmet are near the door now, watching me look at myself.

I put on my best smile for them. Got to show a good game face, right? "Thanks. I was just dying to marvel at my own newfound good looks." Both Nadia and Mehmet smiled back, but it was Mehmet’s reaction I was after. It wasn’t a very big one, but it’s good enough for me. Hopefully that means he can react to a bad pun, but he could have just been smiling because I smiled. That’s a thing with meatbags. Though that smile didn’t move up an inch. It was one of those horizontal smiles that you give when you just want to be polite. This guy must have taken a martial arts class in self-expression because he does not react more than he has to.

I want to ask them what the endgame here is. If they're just going to turn me off again after bringing me back from the dead to have a good chat, then that's kind of a bad thing for me. If they're planning on keeping me around, it's not clear what use I can be outside of this experiment. Maybe they want to have proof that they can bring people back from the dead and put them into androids? A new technology that gives people (who can afford it, or are deemed worth it) immortality and further leads to the singularity and domination of all humanity by robot people. It doesn't seem like there's any way out of this mess that can be good for me. God damn I need legs.

They’re still here, watching and waiting. I might as well voice some of my appreciation for this body. "I have some hairy arms here. Oh, and I feel these washboard abs. I'm guessing that design choice was you, Nadia?" I felt myself wink. We're back. Breathing crisis resolved. “Were there some legs in the works for this project too? Are they a hairy match for these arms?" And what are the hair trends in porn these days? Is everyone hairy? I can’t ask them that. Incidentally, and unrelated: this mirror shows that this body can, in fact, blush. Not as red as I’m used to, but the cheeks do change color slightly. How did they do that?

"The legs were in development because we didn't make the final risk assessments until after the base android design was tested and showed that the legs performed far better than expectations." Dang, Mehmet. That sort of response really goes beyond what I'd think the team would want you to say. I hope you don't get iced for that. I'm starting to like your blunt, no nonsense style.

"Cool.” I nodded to make it seem like I was deeply offended. “Are there any questions you wanted to get into right away or did you want to talk with your team before moving forward?"

"I … ” Nadia held that like she was interjecting on a conversation she wasn’t in. “I think it's probably best if we talk to the team first and give you some time to get adjusted. I'll also add that video to a list you can access internally while you wait. You already have access to some music, both contemporary hits for you and more modern tunes. There are also some other things that we put together." Nadia smiled gently as though she had done me some great service, but I’d prefer to find my own way thank you. They can’t know what I like or don’t like. They don’t know me. What happened to the internet? Can't I just access that or would that be way too much of a security risk? Fuck. They're gone.

Well, might as well get a better look at this thing resembling a tongue.

For the uninitiated, Surströmming is an infamous heavily fermented herring.

Below is my experience with it. Happy to answer any questions :)

Preparations

I “smuggled” (more on this below) it from Sweden a few months ago and yesterday evening my brother, a brave (or naïve) soul of a schoolmate of his, and I (not to mention our dog) opened it up near the river. We chose the riverside and the night time strategically, of course.

As was advised to us by a friend, we also took a bucket of water with us. Not – as some may wrongly assume – to vomit into, but to open the tin under water. Due to the fermentation continuing in the tin, it builds up pressure and when you open the tin, it inevitably and violently discharges the bile water. The best way to avoid it spraying your clothes is to open it under water.

The tasting

Since this was an impromptu action, – other than the bucket – we came only half-prepared. As condiments we brought only a little bread, a shallot and three pickled gherkins.

The hint with the bucket was greatly appreciated, as the opening of the tin was the most vile part of the whole experience. So if you plan to try it, do get a bucket! It stopped not only the bile spraying us, but also diluted most of the putrid smell that was caught in the tin.

Once opened and aired, the contents of the tin were actually quite recognisable. Fish fillets swimming in brine. The brine was already brownish and a tiny bit gelatinous, but darkness helped us get past that.

As for the taste and texture, if you ever had pickled herrings before – it’s like that on steroids, married with anchovies. Very soft, but still recognisable as fish, extremely salty, and with acidity that is very similar to that of good sauerkraut.

Washing the fish in the pickle jar helped take the edge of – both in sense of smell and saltiness. The onion as well as the pickles were a great idea, bread was a must!

In summary, it is definitely an acquired taste, but I can very much see how this was a staple in the past and how it can still be used in cuisine. As a condiment, I think it could work well even in a modern dish.

We did go grab a beer afterwards to wash it down though.

P.S. Our dog was very enthusiastic about it the whole time and somewhat sullen that he didn’t get any.

The smuggling

Well, I didn’t actually smuggle it, per se, but it took me ¾ of an hour to get it cleared at the airport and in the end the actual carrier still didn’t know about what I was carrying in my checked luggage. The airport, security, two information desks and the main ground stewardess responsible for my flight were all in on it though. And in my defence, the actual carrier does not have a policy against Surströmming on board (most probably because they haven’t thought about it yet).

As for acquiring this rotten fish in the first place, I saw it in a shop in Malmö and took the least deformed tin (along with other local specialities). When I came to the cash register with grin like a madman in a sweetshop, I asked the friendly young clerk if she has any suggestion how to prepare it, and she replied that she never had it and knows barely anyone of her generation who did, apart from perhaps as a challenge.

For the leaders of Tildes, please remember to grow slowly. Your initial policies will somewhat determine the demographic of your early members, and future policy will determine changes in the demographic until a larger demographic and your growing body of policies are in a tug-of-war for the direction of this undertaking.

This means if you act to appease, say, green martian chess players, the site will eventually attract more and push your growth that way. This applies to gamers, trolls, yammerheads(like me), or any class of people you care to name. I only say this because right now I sense a narrow demographic of current members.

Right now, you the leaders have a great amount of control over direction. My hope is for a wider demographic, while retaining a direction that discourages trolling, pedantry, and general instability. A daunting challenge. I respect your initiative and resolve in making a true non-commercial community, one that I hope points the way out of the advertising driven system of funding. Good luck and thank you again.

End of brown-nosing post. /s

                                                              Book Plot: Spoilers

The book opens by introducing the gunslinger, Roland Deschain, who is on a journey to find the Man in Black. As he ventures across the desert with his mule, he meets a farmer who goes by the name of Brown with his crow, Zoltan. The gunslinger begins to tell of the time he spent in the town of Tull. When Roland first comes to Tull, he missed the Man in Black possibly by a week. It is later revealed to Roland by the barmaid, Alice, that during his stay the Man in Black brought a dead weed eater by the name of Nort back to life. Roland makes Sylvia reveal to him that she is pregnant with the Man in Black's child (more importantly the child of the Crimson King). Roland uses his gun and rips the unborn monstrosity out of Sylvia. Outraged, Sylvia convinces the entire town of Tull that Roland is the spawn of the devil. Roland guns down the entire town of Tull: men, women, children, and even his lover, Alice. The story refocuses on Roland at the dwelling of Brown. Roland goes to sleep and wakes up to Brown telling him that his mule died of heat exhaustion and wonders if he can eat it. Roland leaves on foot to continue his pursuit of the Man in Black.

As his journey continues, Roland happens upon a way station and sees someone there in the distance. Roland believes this to be the Man in Black, but finds out it is a young boy by the name of Jake Chambers. Roland is near death when he arrives at the way station and Jake brings him jerky and water from an atomic slug water pump. Jake tells Roland that the Man in Black passed by a few days before. The way Jake talks reveals that he is not from Roland's world. Roland asks Jake about where he came from, but Jake cannot remember anything. Roland proceeds to hypnotize Jake and learn about where he came from.

Jake reveals to Roland that he is from New York and was on his way to school when a man dressed like a priest snuck up on him and pushed him into the street. Roland believes this man to be the Man in Black. Jake is then hit by a car and dies, but not before the priest approaches him and blesses him.

As they prepare to leave, Roland goes down to the cellar and encounters a demon speaking to him from a hole in the wall. After their palaver, Roland reaches into the hole and pulls out a jawbone. They then depart from the way station, and eventually make their way out of the desert into somewhat more welcoming lands. Roland awakes in the middle of the night to find Jake gone. Roland tracks down Jake and finds him about to be taken by the Oracle of the mountains. Roland uses the jawbone to lure the Oracle away from Jake. He then gives Jake the jawbone to concentrate on while he is gone and couples with the oracle himself in order to learn of his fate and path to the Dark Tower. Once Roland returns, Jake discards the jawbone. Come morning, they continue their trek to the mountains.

Along the trek Roland tells Jake a bit about his past. He tells of Hax, the cook, who was hanged for being an aid to the enemy. Hax was to poison the town of Farson/Taunton. Roland and his friend Cuthbert overhear the plot and alert their fathers of the traitor. Hax is hanged and the boys are allowed to watch with permission from their fathers.

Roland also reveals how he became a gunslinger at the age of 14. As he is walking home, his father's advisor Marten Broadcloak calls Roland to see his mother, Gabrielle, in Marten's bed covering her shame. Angry, Roland charges off to challenge Cort so he may receive his guns. He defeats Cort with the use of his hawk, David.

Roland and Jake soon come to the mountains and enter a series of tunnels under the mountains riding on a mine cart. On their journey, they are attacked by a group of Slow Mutants. Roland battles the Slow Mutants and they move along without the mine cart. They eventually come upon the exit from the tunnels. Jake trips and is left dangling from the tracks. As Roland tries to help him, the Man in Black appears and tells Roland that if he saves the boy then he will never catch him. Roland decides to let Jake fall; Jake knows this and spouts, "Go then. There are other worlds than these." Jake then falls to his death as Roland goes to talk with the Man in Black.

They meet in a golgotha and palaver. The Man in Black reads Roland's fate from Tarot cards. Roland's fate includes The Sailor, The Prisoner, The Lady of Shadows, death, life (which the Man in Black burns), and the Tower at the center of everything. The Man in Black tells Roland he is only a pawn for Roland's true enemy who now controls the Tower itself. The Man in Black tries to convince Roland to give up on his quest by creating a representation of the universe and showing him how insignificant he is. Roland refuses and is forced into sleep. When he awakens, ten years have passed and there is a skeleton next to him, which he believes to be the Man in Black. Roland departs from the Golgotha and sits at the edge of the Western Sea contemplating the next step in his quest for the Dark Tower.

I recently took up gardening. It's a lot more complicated and requires a lot more planning than I initially expected. So far I've found it to be rather meditative, sitting and pulling up weeds, watering and such. I'm still not sure whether it's a thing I am "good" at but it's exciting to see something you've planned and nurtured grow! Tell me what you all do for fun/relaxation or to challenge yourself outside of your work.

Disclaimer: I'm a novice and this is a half baked idea

Recap

The Caesar cipher is fairly straight forward as it just shifts letters along by a set amount. This means that it's quite easy to brute force. There's only 25 offsets, after all. Try to decode this to see what i mean:

Plqfh 3 foryhv ri jduolf, dqg frpelqh lq d vpdoo erzo zlwk pdbrqqdlvh, dqfkrylhv, 2 wdeohvsrrqv ri wkh Sduphvdq fkhhvh, Zrufhvwhuvkluh vdxfh, pxvwdug dqg ohprq mxlfh. Vhdvrq wr wdvwh zlwk vdow dqg eodfn shsshu. Uhiuljhudwh xqwlo uhdgb wr xvh. Khdw rlo lq d odujh iublqj sdq ryhu phglxp khdw. Fxw wkh uhpdlqlqj 3 foryhv ri jduolf lqwr txduwhuv, dqg dgg wr krw rlo. Frrn dqg vwlu xqwlo eurzq, dqg wkhq uhpryh jduolf iurp sdq. Dgg euhdg fxehv wr wkh krw rlo. Frrn, wxuqlqj iuhtxhqwob, xqwlo oljkwob eurzqhg. Uhpryh euhdg fxehv iurp rlo, dqg vhdvrq zlwk vdow dqg shsshu. Sodfh ohwwxfh lq d odujh erzo. Wrvv zlwk guhvvlqj, uhpdlqlqj Sduphvdq fkhhvh, dqg vhdvrqhg euhdg fxehv.
bonus points for a program that takes the above text and outputs the shift I used without any human input

My dumb idea (didn't work, my bad. They're in normal Caeser cipher now)

I like the simplicity of the shifting characters but having it always be in one direction, and always being the same offset makes it easy to notice the pattern and decode.

If we have the shift value determined by the length of the current word, and the direction of it dependent on if it's a vowel or a consonant.
a pirate is nothing without his ship becomes
b jolgnk kq gvmapgz ppmavbm elp odml so we still have a visibly Caesar-y cipher, but we'll know it's not a true Caesar cipher.
The offset changes for every word and then is applied based on each letter in the word. If it's a vowel, then the encoded value is shifted upwards but if not, it slides down.

For the purposes of the below tomfoolery; prime numbers are consonants and the rest are vowels.

A Valley Without Wind 1 and 2 Steam Key:
B qjsbuf jt opuijoh xjuipvu ijt tijq
FWR0H-GQM7B-5344H

Aces Wild: Manic Brawling Action:
C rktcvg ku pqvjkpi ykvjqwv jku ujkr
K5R0H-29NPM-A3OTE

Age of Empires Legacy Bundle:
D sludwh lv qrwklqj zlwkrxw klv vkls
69PQW-UY3H7-7SQWT

AI War + 4 DLC packs & Tidalis Steam Key:
E tmvexi mw rsxlmrk amxlsyx lmw wlmt
KO99D-73JZ2-XNIK3

AI War: Vengeance Steam Key:
F unwfyj nx stymnsl bnymtzy mnx xmnu
7M2I8-I99N9-6E9F2

Alan Wake Collector's Edition Steam Key:
G voxgzk oy tuznotm coznuaz noy ynov
6ZNJ5-BIVFN-6ZSDZ

Alan Wake's American Nightmare Steam Key:
H wpyhal pz uvaopun dpaovba opz zopw
7RERD-4ACYN-TCDQ2

Amnesia: Dark Descent Steam Key:
I xqzibm qa vwbpqvo eqbpwcb pqa apqx
VGEO8-OU48X-MU7BL

Anachronox:
J yrajcn rb wxcqrwp frcqxdc qrb bqry
3589L-YGF9V-NKGW0

Anodyne:
K zsbkdo sc xydrsxq gsdryed rsc crsz
9HW7H-7Z73Z-6302D

Anomaly Defenders:
L atclep td yzestyr hteszfe std dsta
ICPIB-M63TI-9Y96V

Anomaly Korea:
M budmfq ue zaftuzs iuftagf tue etub
QMPZ2-JUK8B-JRK3V

Anomaly Korea:
N cvengr vf abguvat jvgubhg uvf fuvc
30R9T-C02AA-7DQLG

Anomaly Warzone Earth:
O dwfohs wg bchvwbu kwhvcih vwg gvwd
38UM9-Z26PH-Q4VAU

Anomaly Warzone Earth Mobile Campaign:
P exgpit xh cdiwxcv lxiwdji wxh hwxe
54TYN-AU26Q-5AGGY

Aquaria Steam key:
Q fyhqju yi dejxydw myjxekj xyi ixyf
3853A-YSB4J-6243A

Awesomenauts:
R gzirkv zj efkyzex nzkyflk yzj jyzg
DH9T5-BWOQC-KB6TB

Awesomenauts:
S hajslw ak fglzafy oalzgml zak kzah
RNRJ0-CPT4O-S9UHE

Awesomenauts Cluck Costume:
T ibktmx bl ghmabgz pbmahnm abl labi
VOWWW-QTR3Q-EAS9J

These are encoded using a Caeser shift. The line under the title is a fixed phrase (a pirate is nothing without his ship) for aid in the bonus points

I can post my code if it turns out to be unsolvable (like a bug https://trinket.io/python/dabf2b61f9), but if not; I can also keep going from letters A to Y (sans U) over the weeks with my humble bundle reserves (plaintext or not). I've had these keys for far too long and I'm never going to actually use them, but I also noticed a surge of keys being donated here so figured I might as well change it up.

Have fun

The point of this thread is to post your code for solving the task. Other will comment with feedback and new ideas. Post what language (and version, if relevant) your code is written in.
Have fun!

Task description

Your task is to make a caesar cipher that takes a word and an integer as arguments.
An article explaining what the cipher does.

Input description

A word followed by a space and an integer.

Output description

The ciphered word.

Sample onput

A 1
Caesar 5
Tildes 25

Sample output

B
Hfjxfw
Shkcdr

Bonus 1

Make the cipher work backwards.

Sample input

B 1
Hfjxfw 5
Shkcdr 25

Sample output

A
Caesar
Tildes

Bonus 2

Make the cipher handle special characters.

Sample onput

A_ 1
Cae?sar 5
Til!des 25

Sample output

B
Hfj?xfw
Shk!cdr

This is a very hard puzzle. There is a solution that guarantees 100% chance of escape.

You and your friend are incarcerated. Your jailer offers a challenge. If you complete the challenge you are both free to go. Otherwise you are condemned to die. Here are the rules:

-The jailer will take you into a private cell. In the cell will be a chessboard and a jar containing 64 coins.

-The jailer will take the coins, one-by-one, and place a coin on each square on the board. He will place the coins randomly on the board. Some coins will be heads, and some tails (or maybe they will be all heads, or all tails; you have no idea. It's all at the jailer's whim. He may elect to look and choose to make a pattern himself, he may toss them placing them the way they land, he might look at them as he places them, he might not …). If you attempt to interfere with the placing of the coins, it is instant death for you. If you attempt to coerce, suggest, or persuade the jailer in any way, instant death. All you can do it watch.

-Once all the coins have been laid out, the jailer will point to one of the squares on the board and say: “This one!” He is indicating the magic square. This square is the key to your freedom.

-The jailer will then allow you to turn over one coin on the board. Just one. A single coin, but it can be any coin, you have full choice. If the coin you select is a head, it will flip to a tail. If it is a tail it will flip to a head. This is the only change you are allowed to make to the jailers initial layout.

-You will then be lead out of the room. If you attempt to leave other messages behind, or clues for your friend … yes, you guessed it, instant death!

-The jailer will then bring your friend into the room.

-Your friend will look at the board (no touching allowed), then examine the board of coins and decide which location he thinks is the magic square.

-He gets one chance only (no feedback). Based on the configuration of the coins he will point to one square and say: “This one!”

-If he guesses correctly, you are both pardoned, and instantly set free. If he guesses incorrectly, you are both executed.

-The jailer explains all these rules, to both you and your friend, beforehand and then gives you time to confer with each other to devise a strategy for which coin to flip.

What is your strategy? How do you escape?

Original source and answer: http://datagenetics.com/blog/december12014/index.html

On the heels of President Trump pulling out of talks with North Korea over nuclear disarmament in the Korean peninsula, the United States' pending withdrawal from the Paris agreement (coming soon! ... the day after the next presidential election), and the United States' unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, combined with ongoing Russian and Iranian leadership in resolving the Syrian civil war and Chinese leadership in talks with North Korea, we seem to be heading toward an ambiguous point in international geopolitics.

So this question is simple and nasty: Is the United States on its way to losing its status as the unquestioned dominant world power in the international order?

If it is on its way off the top of the food chain, who will challenge it? Are we returning to a cold war-style era or are the lines shifting and different? If the United States is not on its way to losing its dominant status, how might it maintain its footing in a world that seems increasingly disillusioned with it?

I love drawing and painting. But sometimes I am attacked by inertia or my self confidence deserts me. Or sometimes I want to scribble without worrying about the end result. Thus, SPEEDPAINT.

You grab whatever materials are around and race to get as much done as possible. I use a one hour time limit. You can copy a reference or make it up from your head. Technique is helpful but not required. This is a digital speed paint from a photo. I think I did it in mspaint. This is construction paper and crayola crayon.

If we occasionally had a thread for a speed art challenge, would anyone be interested? Not to compete against each other, but compete against yourself and show support for others willing to try.

(0) Background

This is coming off a discussion in today's thread on forming new groups around whether or not to add a group for politics. I expressed there that, given my moderator experience on /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, I opposed making such a group given how Tildes currently stands.

(1) Political discussion is nearly always garbage.

I don't think anyone needs reminding of this, but political discussion almost uniformly fails to achieve anything positive in almost any social media platform. Your uncle's facebook rants? Garbage. Political sniping on Twitter? Garbage. The endless repetitive point scoring and outrage fest on most political subreddits? Garbage.

So, we have to ask, why is this content garbage?

(2) People want to be heard, but nobody wants to hear.

I do not think political discussion is garbage because of bad faith trolling. That certainly exists and does not help, but usually it's not hard to ID the trolls, and excepting egregious stuff like doxxing or threats, to ignore obvious bad faith absurdity.

The much bigger issue is that what people want to do is to be heard and validated in their political views. This is not merely that they want to proselytize or to win converts, but that they're seeking validation and a sense of rightness or righteousness in their statements.

This desire is toxic to a neutral forum, because invariably on any divisive issue, you will not merely be heard and validated, but will be challenged and denigrated. Indeed, often the challenges and denigrations themselves are the same performance in reverse. Members of each team trying to dunk on the other and earn validation for how hard they owned the other side.

(3) To overcome this, a successful political forum must have a purpose other than mere commentary.

On /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, we have been able to build forums which have large amounts of productive and non-hostile political discussion. The key to this is that neither forum allows for being heard, or general discussion, as its reason for being.

On /r/ChangeMyView we limit posts to views people genuinely hold, and are open to changing (CMV rule B). This requires that OPs cannot come to troll or soapbox. It is by far the most frequently used rule of ours in terms of removing submissions, almost always on the soapboxing side.

On /r/NeutralPolitics, we limit posts to neutrally framed questions about political subjects, which can be answered with facts. By doing this, we narrow the scope of discussion away from soliciting feelings (which is an invitation to people posting just to be heard) and towards bringing forth factual information, where people might learn something.

I don't know what purpose a political forum on Tildes might have, but to succeed it must have a clear purpose, and that purpose must be one which excludes people posting merely to be heard.

(4) In addition to a purpose beyond being heard, a political forum must have extreme civility rules.

Both CMV and NP have extremely similar rules in this regard, and they are absolutely crucial to the success of the fora.

In general, any comment or post which in any way denigrates another user should be removed. This is an extremely broad civility rule that is well past what most subreddits do. Calling another user a liar, or accusing them of bad faith posting is banned on both CMV and NP for example, even when such accusations are true.

The prohibition on what even may be seen as justified rudeness is I think the key to a civility rule. It immediately removes from the moderation process any discretion around the substance of the politics, and makes it a neutral rule which can be applied evenly to all parties.

It is also necessary because nothing productive ever happens after bad faith is accused. Almost uniformly, once someone is rude, if there is a response back to them, the response will be rude in kind, usually more severely. People love to try to get the last word in, and a clear, objective rule banning "they started it" spats is also an important component. CMV's wiki has a really good overview of how we enforce this rule there.

(5) Conclusion/TL;DR

I don't know exactly what political content should exist on Tildes. I do know that a general politics group will not work, and that rather a politics channel should be focused on a discrete purpose other than just discussion.

I would almost certainly ban link posts from any politics group, since inherently they're going to act as just headlines for people to pontificate on, without guiding discussion towards a particular goal. I would also obviously enforce civility, and have much stricter moderation of it than I might on a non-politics forum.

Edited for formatting

Welcome to the /r/ListenToThis Best Of 2017!

Here there are no scores, no judgments, and no opinions - just obscure music shared by redditors, collected and arranged for you over the course of several months by our dedicated mod team. This list is meant to complement other best of lists on the internet, many of which are linked in the sticky comment below for further discovery.

Set #1 includes everything - the best of the best tracks and a corresponding all-inclusive album playlist.
The other sets are the same content, broken up into genre groups so you can listen according to your tastes. There is a sampler (1 track per album) and a full-album (every track from every album) playlist for each group. We’ve also included a listing of the albums by set in this post as not everything is available on Spotify, Tidal, etc. We tried to prefer an artist’s Bandcamp or Soundcloud, but if nothing else was available, you may see Youtube, Spotify, and iTunes links. The final count this year is 226 artists out of more than a thousand submissions.

What did we miss? Share your favorites in the comments… and happy listening..

-- the /r/ListenToThis hipster facista

Set 1 - The Full Smash

Best Tracks on Spotify & All Albums on Spotify

And, on the other services:

• Best Tracks on Tidal & All Albums on Tidal

• Best Tracks on Google

• Best Tracks on Deezer & All Albums on Deezer

• Best Tracks on Youtube

• Spotify profile with listing of all playlists

• Google music profile with listing of all playlists

• Youtube profile with listing of all playlists

Set 2 - Pop, Indie & Related

Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

Google Sampler & Google Albums

Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/suckitnewtabs)

• Kacey Johansing - The Hiding
• Walker Lukens - Tell It To The Judge
• MY BABY - Prehistoric Rhythm
• Phum Viphurit - Manchild
• Jonti - Tokorats
• Whitehorse - Panther In The Dollhouse
• HOTT MT - Au (Alternate Universe)
• Surf Dads - All Day Breakfast
• Skyway Man - Seen Comin' From A Mighty Eye
• Heaters - Matterhorn
• Girls Who Care - Light Sleeper
• SCALLER - Senses
• Psychedelic Porn Crumpets - High Visceral {Part 2}
• Elise Trouw - Unraveling
• Sunglasses Kid - Graduation
• Meatbodies - Alice
• The Marías - Superclean Vol. I
• Kelley Stoltz - Que Aura
• Jane Weaver - Modern Kosmology
• Kelly Dance - Wild Grass
• Starcadian - Midnight Signals
• Caleb Hawley - Love, Drugs, & Decisions
• The Mysterons - Meandering

Set 3 - Progressive & Related

Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

Google Sampler & Google Albums

Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/BlueRoseImmortal)

Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

• Bent Knee - Land Animal
• Arch Echo - Arch Echo
• Arcane Roots - Melancholia Hymns
• Blumen - Mångata
• ichika - forn
• Chinese Football - Here Comes A New Challenger!!!
• Milco - Nerima
• I/O - Anyone, Anywhere
• Perihelion Ship - To Paint A Bird Of Fire
• Lör - In Forgotten Sleep
• Waclaw Zimpel, Kuba Ziolek - Zimpel/Ziolek
• The Physics House Band - Mercury Fountain
• Amplifier - Trippin' With Dr. Faustus
• Wobbler - From Silence To Somewhere
• Smalltape - The Ocean
• Pregnant Whale Pain - Blank
• Kettlespider - Kettlespider
• gP. - Destroy, So As To Build
• Dora The Destroyer - Dependent Secondary
• Glowbug - Fantasma Del Tropico
• O.R.k. - Soul Of An Octopus
• Aiming For Enrike - Las Napalmas
• Soup - Remedies
• Bader Nana - Devlover
• James Holden & The Animal Spirits - The Animal Spirits
• Grün - Manyana

Set 4 - Hip-Hop, Trip-Hop & Instrumentals

Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

Google Sampler & Google Albums

Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

• Awon & Dephlow (prod. Phoniks) - Sleep Is The Cousin Of Death
• Otis Junior & Dr.Dundiff - Hemispheres
• Figub Brazlevic - 4x4 Palestine Jeep Beats
• Deca - The Way Through
• Sweeps - tomorrow
• mister T. - The Return Of The Classic
• Sidewalk Chalk - An Orchid Is Born
• Has-Lo - The Paul Tape
• TheColorGrey - REBELATION
• Hex One - Words Worth A Thousand Pictures
• mtbrd - Smoovies
• Sampa The Great - Birds And The BEE9
• Dirty Art Club - Basement Seance
• Vanilla - Moonlight
• ETOAS - End Times Of A Sunshine
• Insight The Truncator & Damu The Fudgemunk - Ears Hear Spears
• Damu The Fudgemunk - Vignettes
• Damu The Fudgemunk - The Reflecting Sea (Welcome to a New Philosophy)
• elijah who - gentle boy
• Declaime - Young Spirit
• Abstract Orchestra - Dilla
• Stik Figa - Central Standard Time
• Mykele Deville - Peace, Fam
• Uncommon Nasa - Written At Night
• Armand Hammer - ROME

Set 5 - Punk & Related

Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

Google Sampler & Google Albums

Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

• ISS - Endless Pussyfooting (bandcamp exclusive)
• Onsind - We Wilt, We Bloom (bandcamp exclusive)
• IDLES - Brutalism
• The Dopamines - Tales Of Interest
• SINGLE MOTHERS - Our Pleasure
• Milk Teeth - Go Away EP
• Charly Bliss - Guppy
• UV-TV - Glass
• Scarboro - Here Comes The Hangover
• Hard Girls - Floating Now
• Just Say Nay - Logistical Nightmares
• Perspective, a lovely hand to hold - What Not To Do
• football, etc. - Corner
• Silver Shadows - Cold Plastic
• The World - FIRST WORLD RECORD
• Parlor Walls - Opposites
• Agent blå - Agent blå
• Telethon - The Grand Spontanean
• Ganglions - Thirsty
• pigeon pit - treehouse
• Harley Poe - Lost And Losing It

Set 6 - Electronic & Related

Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

Google Sampler & Google Albums

Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

• Primate - Simulated Reality
• Fearofdark - Exit Plan
• Lav & Purl - A State Of Becoming
• Prequell - The Future Comes Before
• Hades Of Spades - Dysphoria
• Edamame - Bask
• JASSS - Weightless
• Nym - Lilac Chaser
• Kelly Lee Owens - Kelly Lee Owens
• Laurence Guy - Saw You For The First Time
• Dysphemic - Zeus
• Sally Dige - Holding On
• Basement Freaks - Freedom
• Zoogma - A Future In Blue
• TIANCI - Too Alien For Earth
• Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement - Ambient Black Magic
• Octo Octa - Where Are We Going?
• Anomalie - Métropole

Set 7 - Metal

Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

Google Sampler & Google Albums

Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/BlueRoseImmortal)

• Elder - Reflections Of A Floating World
• Dool - Here Now, There Then
• Yellow Eyes - Immersion Trench Reverie
• Archspire - Relentless Mutation
• Below - Upon A Pale Horse
• Mesarthim - The Great Filter / Type III
• Power Trip - Nightmare Logic
• The Hirsch Effekt - ESKAPIST
• Zeal & Ardor - Devil Is Fine
• Satan's Hallow Band - Satan's Hallow
• Xanthochroid - Of Erthe and Axen Act II
• Unleash The Archers - Apex
• Walpyrgus - Walpyrgus Nights
• Violet Cold - Anomie
• Havukruunu - Kelle Surut Soi
• The Ruins Of Beverast - Exuvia
• Mutoid Man - War Moans
• Voyager - Ghost Mile
• In The Company Of Serpents - Ain-Soph Aur
• Worry - A Celebration Of Suffering

Set 8 - Jazz, Soul, Funk & Related

Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

Google Sampler & Google Albums

Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

• MonoNeon - A Place Called Fantasy
• Ill Considered - Ill Considered
• The Comet Is Coming - Death To The Planet
• The Heliocentrics - A World Of Masks
• Don Bryant - Don't Give Up On Love
• Five Alarm Funk - SWEAT
• Tony Allen - A Tribute To Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers
• Wildflower - Wildflower
• Alfa Mist - Antiphon
• The Babe Rainbow - The Babe Rainbow
• Charnett Moffett - Music From Our Soul
• Nicole Mitchell - Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds
• Orlando le Fleming & Romantic Funk - Romantic Funk
• Collocutor - The Search
• Soil & "PIMP" Sessions - Music from and Inspired by Hello Harinezumi
• Yazz Ahmed - La Saboteuse
• Binker & Moses – Journey To The Mountain Of Forever
• Nubya Garcia - Nubya's 5ive
• Jaimie Branch - Fly Or Die
• Melanie De Biasio - Lilies
• Richard Spaven - The Self
• Kalu & The Electric Joint - Time Undone
• Voodoo Visionary - Off The Ground
• Sr. Langosta - El Experimento Caribeño
• Ambrose Akinmusire - A Rift in Decorum: Live at the Village Vanguard
• Skinshape - Live & Love
• Braxton Cook - Somewhere In Between
• Mammal Hands - Shadow Work
• Chuck Johnson - Balsams
• Joey Defrancesco & The People - Project Freedom
• Superfluous Motor - Idiosyncrasies
• The Necks - Unfold
• Johnny Sketch & The Dirty Notes - Sketch
• Nate Smith - KINFOLK: Postcards From Everywhere
• Cameron Graves - Planetary Prince
• Jungle Fire - Jambu
• Baast - Bazzar

Set 9 - Afrobeat, World & Classical

Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

Google Sampler & Google Albums

Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

• Stinger - Hard Proof
• Luis Peixoto - Assimétrico
• Antibalas - Where The Gods Are In Peace
• The Seven Ups - Drinking Water
• The Scorpios - The Scorpios
• Ajate - Abrada
• Trio Da Kali & Kronos Quartet
• Danish String Quartet - Last Leaf
• Hear In Now - Not Living In Fear
• Tamikrest - Kidal
• Anouar Brahem - Blue Maqams
• Sebastião Antunes & Quadrilha - Singular
• Oumou Sangaré - Mogoya
• Ifriqiyya Electrique - Rûwâhîne
• ROSALÍA - Los Ángeles
• Songhoy Blues - Résistance
• Awa Poulo - Poulo Warali
• Jenna Moynihan & Mairi Chaimbeul - One Two
• Battle Of Santiago - La Migra
• Jeremy Danneman - Honey Wine
• Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band – Adiós Señor Pussycat
• Aldina Duarte - Quando Se Ama Loucamente
• Juniore - Ouh là là
• Isabella Bretz - Canções para Abreviar Distâncias
• Jenny Scheinman - Here On Earth
• Daymé Arocena - Cubafonía
• The Homesick - Youth Hunt
• Mondo Grosso - ???????????
• Blue Rose Code - The Water Of Leith
• Moses Hightower - Fjallaloft
• Litku Klemetti - Juna Kainuuseen
• Various Artists - Sweet As Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa

Set 10 - Americana & Related

Spotify Sampler & Spotify Albums

Google Sampler & Google Albums

Deezer Sampler & Deezer Albums

Tidal Sampler & Tidal Albums

Apple Music Sampler (thanks /u/firewire_9000)

Youtube Sampler & Youtube Albums

• The Texas Gentlemen - TX Jelly
• Billy Strings - Turmoil & Tinfoil
• Kate Rhudy - Rock N' Roll Ain't For Me
• Norah Jane Struthers & The Party Line
• Courtney Marie Andrews - Honest Life
• Nicole Atkins - Goodnight Rhonda Lee
• Sherman Holmes - The Sherman Holmes Project: The Richmond Sessions
• Viper Central - The Spirit Of God And Madness
• Twisted Pine - Twisted Pine
• The Dawn Brothers - Stayin' Out Late
• Kitchen Dwellers - Ghost In The Bottle
• Bad Manion - Good Afternoon
• Trout Steak Revival - Spirit To The Sea
• The Trongone Band - Keys To The House
• The Railsplitters - Jump In
• My Terrible Friend - I Tried To Be Kind
• Sallie Ford - Soul Sick
• Lilly Hiatt - Trinity Lane
• EmiSunshine - Ragged Dreams
• Derek Hoke - Bring The Flood
• The Sons of the Palomino - Sons of the Palomino
• Thorpe Jenson - Odessa
• Pam Taylor - Steal Your Heart
• Samantha Fish - Belle of the West
• Jim Byrnes - Long Hot Summer Days
• Angaleena Presley - Wrangled
• Chuck Prophet - Bobby Fuller Died For Your Sins
• Natalie Hemby - Puxico
• Marty Stuart - Way Out West
• Whiskey Shivers - Some Part Of Something
• Sarah Shook & The Disarmers - Sidelong
• Split Lip Rayfield - On My Way

Disclaimer: The Spotify playlists are the masters. They were auto-replicated to all of the other services, and there will be some missing albums on those services. The Youtube playlists may also get a bit wonky. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources needed to fix every hiccup or keep track of what’s missing on every service. Apple music doesn’t provide an easy import mechanism either, though if someone wants to create Apple lists, we’ll link them here. Also, Google Music and Youtube simply can’t handle the All Albums playlist, so they are omitted.

Links to Other Best Of Lists

• NPR's Top 50 Albums
• NPR's Top 100 Songs
• AOTY's Master List for 2017
• Rate Your Music's Top Albums of 2017
• Metacritic's Best Albums of 2017
• Pitchfork's Best Albums of 2017
• Pitchfork's Best Songs of 2017
• The Quietus' Best Albums of 2017
• The A.V. Club’s 20 Best Albums of 2017
• Amoeba Music’s 50 Best Albums of 2017
• Wire’s Top Releases 2017
• Fact Mag’s Top 50 of 2017
• XLR8R's Best of 2017: Releases
• XLR8R's Best of 2017: Albums
• XLR8R's Best of 2017: Tracks
• Complex’s Top 50 Albums of 2017
• Spin’s 50 Best Albums of 2017
• Fader’s 101 Best Songs of 2017
• The Guardian’s Best Albums of 2017
• Bleeps Albums Of The Year For 2017
• TheNeedleDrop’s Top 50 Albums of 2017
• NOISEY’s 100 Best Albums of 2017
• BestEverAlbum’s Best Albums of 2017
• Sputnikmusic's Best Albums of 2017
• SputnikMusic's Staff Top50 of 2017
• Resident Advisor's Best Albums of 2017
• Resident Advisor's Staff Picks of 2017

Please share other noteworthy lists you've found online in the replies to this comment.