For me, its a bowl of cereal, usually grape nuts or cheerios. Sometimes with blueberries. Quick and easy.

Also, weird fact;

I put table cream or half and half in my cereal. My grandmother grew up on a dairy farm on PEI and when they were kids the best cream was always used by her family for cereal or tea. Well, she had 6 kids, who then had 13 more and all of us use cream like weirdos (and drink lots of tea). And no, we are not all obese because of it, everything in moderation. =)

^ I may or may not be eating grape nuts and cream right now.

This all started about 5 minutes ago because I added a link to the EFF story on the post of the Gizmodo article submission about Facebook sharing phone numbers used for 2FA with advertisers, but the more I thought about it in the past 5 minutes since that comment I think it could be more.

There's more information out there and available than ever before. The barrier for for entry on content creation is lower than ever. However this has led to the easy-spread of misinformation. It's not that the right info isn't out there, it's that finding it is harder now.

The idea is to have a site that is essentially a link aggregator. But what makes it different is that if you find a site that talks about the same thing you can tack on the article to the post. Ergo making posts about events, not articles. Bringing sources together and making cross referencing easy.

Hello, I am el fox. Just joined today and kind of lurking trying to figure out where to eventually dive in. What do I need to know about interacting here?

And how about that Elon Musk? I think he might have just flown a little too close to the Sun. At this point I hope he just steps down and takes a less forward facing role in the company and gets himself together. Really rooting for it to work out. Sad to see someone so far off the rails.

It's week 15, and time for another classic record discussion: Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder!

Songs in the Key of Life is the eighteenth album by American recording artist Stevie Wonder, released on September 28, 1976, by Motown Records, through its division Tamla Records. It was the culmination of his "classic period" albums. The album was recorded primarily at Crystal Sound studio in Hollywood, with some sessions recorded at the Record Plant in Hollywood, the Record Plant in Sausalito, and The Hit Factory in New York City. Final mixing was performed at Crystal Sound.

An ambitious double LP with a four-song bonus EP, Songs in the Key of Life became the best-selling and most critically acclaimed album of Wonder's career. In 2003, it was ranked number 57 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 2005, it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress, which deemed it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

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

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

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

I was having a conversation with one of my coworkers who mentioned that her child showed a fascination with scary, Halloween-type stuff starting around age 6. She and her husband had a hard time with whether they should let him enjoy it or limit it. They weren't sure whether to let him read scary books or watch spooky stuff on YouTube, particularly because it's the type of content that can very easily be age-inappropriate--especially for a 6 year old. Nevertheless, it was relatively easy for them to keep it to stuff like Jack-o-Lanterns and black cats since he was so young.

The boy is now older but has retained his interest, and the parents are still struggling with decisions about allowable content, especially because he is starting to age into books and movies that deal with much darker stuff, particularly ideas about death/violence.

I'm not a parent, but I am a teacher, and I have to admit that I'm uncomfortable with some of the stuff my students are exposed to. Over the years I've heard students as young as twelve discuss horror movies like the Saw series or The Human Centipede. I've had middle school students bring books like Gone Girl and 50 Shades of Gray to class. On one hand, I think kids are resilient, and I think a lot of the more difficult or disturbing stuff doesn't quite land for them because they don't really have a context into which to put it yet. I also believe that fictional media is a mostly safe way for us to explore troubling or disturbing ideas.

On the other hand, I think the internet has caused our children to grow up a lot faster than they used to, as they are exposed to mature content (whether intentionally or accidentally) from a very early age. When I was growing up the worst I could do was check out a slightly-risqué book from the school library and hope my parents never found it in my backpack. Now kids are watching violent (often real-world) and pornographic content starting as young as elementary school. Nothing can make your heart sink quite like sixth graders talking excitedly over lunch about a video of a real person getting crushed to death.

What I genuinely don't know is if this has any negative developmental effect. Am I just clutching my pearls here? I'd love to hear some parents talk about how they've handled the decision of what's right for their kids and whether they've had fallout from their kids consuming content that's not appropriate for them.

Let's do something a little more challenging this time.

Given an MxN grid of arbitrary size, and given a random starting place on that grid and a list of points to visit, find the shortest path such that you visit all of them. Path lengths will be computed using taxicab distances rather than strict coordinate distance calculations.

There are no restrictions on expected input this time. Output should be the total distance traveled between points.

Example

Assume that we use the character # to denote a spot on the grid, the character @ to denote your starting point, and the character * to denote a place on the grid that you're required to visit. One such grid may look something like this:

######
######
**####
#*####
#*#*##
#@####
######

In this case, let's say that the bottom-left point on the grid is point (0, 0) and we're starting on point (1, 1). One valid solution would be to move to point (3, 2), then (1, 2), then (1, 3), then (1, 4), and finally (0, 4). The shortest path available is thus 8. Note that it's not enough just to visit the next nearest point on the grid!

Hi all,

I've been trying to transition to an anti-consumption and zero-waste life for a year or two now. Just a disclaimer that I'm using "anti-consumption" and "zero-waste" really loosely here. The changes I've made so far are all pretty small, but I'll like to think, consistent and sustainable (at least for me).

Today, I wanted to specifically talk about my hobbies. I play video games, board games, read, write, paint, and do a variety of crafts (jewelry making, crocheting, sewing, card making and more). As you can imagine, my hobbies have been a very consumption and plastic waste heavy part of my life. I had games I never got to or played only once, shelves of books I never read, paint supplies I never opened, boxes of crafting material I never used and more.

My hobbies were also a very easy part to let go off. I had very limited hours in a day, so acknowledging there was no reason to buy anything in advance was already a huge change. Now, I never get anything I'm not immediately using (even if it's on sale or the last one). I also try to only buy second hand, which is really impossible when you need a specific paint colour or something, so I usually end up just making do or doing without. I also stopped watching YouTube tutorial or product comparison videos because I found they all felt like advertising. (I do still watch YT when I'm looking for something specific, like how to fix a X, just no longer browsed).

...until last night. I don't know why, but I started watching a bunch of watercolouring technique videos. Little history, I went from watercolouring pretty much every day and then sort of just stopped around March this year. Life got busy and I just didn't find the time.

And I couldn't help my notice that consuming these videos, and wandering around art supply shops and buying new paint was a huge motivation for me to paint. I wanted to try new techniques or new products. Browsing let me daydream about what I could do, what I could make. Buying something new gave me a certain excitement to be creative, to get to work.

So now I'm thinking maybe I need to adjust my balance a bit and give myself a treat a bit more than I have. Though the idea of basically buying motivation doesn't sit all that well with me...

So, I'm done babbling, anyone else feel this way? Any tips?

I have a friend at the office, who is very dear to me. I don't have many friends, and I've known this person for over five years. But recently they've become increasingly cynical and sometimes outright toxic. Saying things like "our job doesn't matter", "nobody cares", and "you should stop trying to improve things". The company we work for had incompetent managers for the last couple of years, who were ignoring issues and basically making it up as they go. The management was basically purged, and now there are a lot of new people. So I guess it is my friend's way to cope with the situation. But it feels unhealthy, because recently they started lashing out on people, including new people who have done nothing wrong yet.

I am honestly kind of afraid to bring this issue up to them, because (a) I am afraid to lose them and (b) they will probably respond with something along the lines of "you don't know what I've been through", or "eff off", or plain old silence. I feel like they are hurting, but I don't know how to help.

What should I do? Should I do anything at all?