Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/11

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

"It's too early for Christmas", you may be saying, but you may also be a Scrooge and I won't abide by it. Christmas is just about 2 weeks away and I'm ready to listen to some Christmas music. So what are some of your favorites?

Also any non-Christmas December holiday music can be shared as well! I'm just not aware of any of the others having much music (unless you're into that Adam Sandler song).

edit: I put together a Spotify playlist of everything (so far as of Dec 13 @ 1pm EST) -- https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7FY6Ngmo60so3xzy3xCTY5?si=729f98cd8da34283

edit 2: I've been adding songs as they trickle in. Last updated Dec 20

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Hello everyone.

The other day, Firefox Monitor warned me that my personal e-mail was found on a data leak from Gravatar (belongs to Automattic; WordPress's parent company). Funnily, I don't have any account (and never had) with them, but nevertheless, I tried to log in, and it failed. I tried to recover my password, and it said "no e-mail found". Maybe a false positive from Firefox's side?

Anyway, that situation got me thinking that I should never use my personal email except on super important websites. For example, with Christmas gift buying, I've used my personal e-mail on multiple online websites (I usually try to avoid Amazon) and I shouldn't have done that.

Of course, Firefox recommended their own service Firefox Relay, which it does look interesting. Afterwards, I've searched on HackerNews to see what other people recommended.

These were the recommendations (apart from FF Relay):

• SimpleLogin
• AnonAddy

A few questions:

1. Do you use any of these three services?
2. How happy are you with the service that you use?
3. Is there something better?

I actually like Firefox's implementation because it is actually quite cheap (€12 per year), it is an easier way to support Firefox's development (instead of donation to the Mozilla Corporation) and I trust Firefox more on the security side of things. Nevertheless, the other two services seem more feature complete and I actually do not like that FF Relay "forces" you to use a domain like "alias@mozmail.com" or a custom domain like "alias@mydomain.mozmail.com". My goal would actually be "alias@mydomain.com" for my own contact with other people. On website registrations, @mozmail.com is okay, I guess.

I already have my own domain that I've bought from Namecheap and I think instead of associating an e-mail to my domain, I actually would prefer to use one of these services. The reason is that my website/e-mail domain could be reused if I stop paying. Some websites and/or people could have this e-mail and someone could impersonate me. With an e-mail forwarding service, I can easily and quickly delete/disable/change the alias. I'm not sure if I'm putting too much expectation on a forwarding service, but, I would like to know what do you think. 🙂

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/10

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

okay tildes here to tell suspended to leave their kid alone about discord on the school computer. that was easy advice to give! But how about a real challenge in what-should-i-do-about-the-boy? hold onto your HATS bc I've got a TOUGHIE~!

see I was tutoring this 13yo last year. He was super isolated and he still is. He deals with a range of insecurity and frustration. He leaps to conclusions and struggles with anger at the people around him, especially his mother. I used to spend time with him daily, but then I moved towns and now our contact is limited to chat and video call. We talk throughout the week but we always video call on wednesdays. His mother asked me if we could switch days, because she wants him to go to after school sessions with a math teacher who has noticed his grades falling. When I talked to him about the possibility of swapping so he could attend the afterschool, he told me that he didn't want go to sessions for dumb kids. I said I was flexible regardless so he can't use the time I reserve for him as an excuse not to go -- but I worry that his perception that the sessions are for dumb kids reflects a stigma that will prevent him from asking for help when he needs it.

How do I push back on the idea that getting extra help with school could imply that he is somehow inexcusably deficient? I sense that most of his other teachers are setting the bar even lower for him than they did last year; his take-home assignments are uniformly inane, and he knows it. How would you communicate around why it is important to try and to practice trying when so much of what is expected of him is transparently pointless? My friendship with him has become important, I think, but I worry a lot that I have no chance to guide him toward a better life and this episode has been a keen example.

What are some VR games where the person in the headset can cast to a TV and the people watching can still participate/have fun?

For example, at a get-together over the summer, my friends and I played a hot seat version of I Expect You to Die 2. The person in the headset played the single-player game themselves, but everyone in the audience was able to watch the cast on the TV and help that person by giving them recommendations to try different things and help them solve the puzzles (or just recommend ridiculous stuff to see if the game will allow it). Even though the game is single-player, it worked really well as a communal experience and was a ton of fun for the whole room.

Any other recommendations for games like this we can try?

Note: we've already played Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
Target Hardware: Oculus Quest 1

Hi folks. I'm posting this in ~creative because I want to see what other artists think of it; the technical side is important too, but artists and art are the focus of this project.

Cryptographic Digital Art Tokens are a concept I've been working on for a while, to provide some of the benefits of crypto tokens without perpetuating the harm they create.

CDATs are not NFTs. They are not designed to facilitate investment, but rather collection. They do not use a blockchain and do not rely on distributed consensus at all. Instead, they use traditional cryptography to validate the ownership of art.

How CDATs Work

Let's say an artist Adam creates a piece of art called One. He decides he wants to sell a CDAT of One, so he creates a CDAT key and publishes his public key on his website, adam.art.

A collector, Beth, decides she wants to buy One. She e-mails Adam and they agree on a price, and exchange keys; once she has paid, Adam sends Beth a CDAT, which he has signed. Beth then cross-signs the CDAT and sends it back to Adam. It ends up looking like this:

=== CDAT DATA ===
Artist: Adam <adam@adam.art>
Collector: Beth <beth@betawork.codes>
Date of Sale: 2021-12-08T19:50:56Z
Title: One, a Digital Story
Work ID: art.adam.one
Cover Hash: e82c294938320bf4fab56970f52e1ddf
Work Hash: 3179c999f1d4fab4bcc8a57bca1c9d8c
Artist Key Fingerprint: c634d0420f825b91
Collector Key Fingerprint: 3b2e3bbf91ec96c2
=== CDAT SIGN ===
Artist Signature: YTtsc2tkamY7bHNramY7bGtqZDtsa2pmYTtsZGt...
Collector Signature: cXdpZXVwcXdpeXR1djtsbmFvdWNuZWN2cHdl...
=== CDAT META ===
Cover URL: https://adam.art/images/one-cover.jpg
Work URL: https://adam.art/art/one.zip
Artist Key URL: https://adam.art/static/cdat.key
Collector Key URL: https://betawork.codes/
=== CDAT OVER ===

In an ideal world, with all the software enablement I want to do, Beth would be able to take this token and put it in a digital gallery or on her website, where the art piece, and her ownership of it, would be proudly displayed for all to see in a user-friendly, beautiful format.

Structure

The CDAT has three sections - DATA, which is signed, META, which is not, and SIGN, which contains the CDAT's cryptographic signatures. Hashes and key fingerprints are in the DATA section, but URLs are in the META section, which means they can be changed later; artists and collectors can re-host their art and keys, so long as the files' hashes or fingerprints remain exactly the same.

Semantics

Because the CDAT is cross-signed, anyone can see that both Adam and Beth have agreed to the sale. Assuming the signatures and keys all check out, Beth can now prove to people that Adam sold her his art, and Adam can prove that Beth bought it.

Implementation

In order for this interaction to work, we technically need only existing technology: you can validate such things with GPG and some manual reordering. Ideally, though, we'd have a few tools:

• A CDAT validation program. This should include a command line program and a GUI (maybe even a mobile app?), and would validate the following information:
  • The given signatures are valid and correct for the given CDAT.
  • The keys used to sign the CDAT match both the given fingerprints and identities.
  • The linked key URLs, if any, in fact point to the indicated keys.
  • The linked art and cover URLs, if any, in fact point to files with the given hashes.
• A CDAT creation program. This should include a command line program and a GUI. It would take as input the relevant keys and names, provide a way to set the date, and ensure that everything relevant is online at the given URLs.
  • This program would be used by both artists (to create CDATs) and collectors (to cross-sign CDATs).
• A CDAT hosting service. Obviously there could be more than one of these, and people could host their CDATs and art on their own machines - that's decentralization, baby! - but it would be very nice to be able to host CDATs, art, and keys for free or a nominal fee.

This would be a great start, but in order to really kick-start the ecosystem, it would be nice to provide some additional enablement software, such as:

• A drop-in HTML embed that uses client-side JavaScript to display and validate CDATs on a website.
• A browser extension which validates CDATs found on arbitrary websites, on the user's request.
• A self-hostable CDAT gallery for artists and collectors which displays who owns what, and which art pieces are still for sale.

Please let me know if this idea is interesting to you, and ask any questions/leave comments!

This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.

Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.

If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

Today's problem description: https://adventofcode.com/2021/day/9

Please post your solutions in your own top-level comment. Here's a template you can copy-paste into your comment to format it nicely, with the code collapsed by default inside an expandable section with syntax highlighting (you can replace python with any of the "short names" listed in this page of supported languages):

<details>
<summary>Part 1</summary>

```python
Your code here.
```

</details>

(This is basically me blogging. I have a blog but I haven't posted in a decade, so I figure I might as well write here.)

We live in a weird times when people often question basic premises of economics. Some populists and/or scam artists promote cryptocurrencies, meme stocks, and other unorthodox investments. It's easy to make fun of. Meanwhile there has always been a populist distrust of banks (particularly in US history) and distrust has increased since the 2008 financial crisis.

A lot of populist distrust isn't based on any deep knowledge of how finance works, but rather a deep-seated feeling that someone must be getting away with something. And yes, someone probably is getting away with something, but that doesn't mean you need to believe every crank theory that becomes popular on Reddit.

That being said, I'd like to tell you about my slightly unorthodox way to think about money and banking. It comes to the same thing in the end (banks still work the same way) but it seems like a useful framework.

I'm going to set up a hypothetical example. There is a casino where gamblers use plastic chips to gamble, and there a cashiers' window where they can buy chips to gamble with when they arrive and turn them in for cash when they leave. So here is the question: are these plastic chips money?

From a gambler's point of view, when they want to know how much money they have, they count their chips. These chips behave as essentially as money for them, and I claim that they actually are a kind of money, at least within the casino. Though this is unlikely, you could even imagine a nearby store that accepts chips for purchases and goes later to the casino to cash them in. When the store counts its money, it would be reasonable to include any chips that it didn't turn in yet. You could think of it as "cash" or (in a more orthodox way) as a "cash equivalent" but this is a matter of accounting definitions; the chips serve the same purpose in the system.

When the casino counts its money, it never counts its own chips as cash. If they ask "how much cash does the casino have" then that's just the cash that the teller has behind the window. If they ask about the casino's financial assets more generally, if the chip is held by the cashier, it doesn't get counted at all; it's just worthless. All the chips that they gave out to gamblers are subtracted because the casino will lose cash when the gambler turns in chips before they leave.

So the status of a plastic chip depends on who's asking and how they're counting. The chip hasn't physically changed, but its status depends both on its location and your point of view. Weird, huh?

If someone says "this plastic chip is money," what kind of statement is this? Is it subjective? There are reasons why gamblers might disagree on the value of a chip. Let's say that, while the casino is closed, one gambler trusts that the casino will always honor its debts, but another has come to believe that they're a scam and they're never going to reopen, and your chips are worthless.

You might think of this as a prediction. Saying that "this chip is money" is a prediction that the teller will give you cash when you go to the window and other gamblers will treat it like it's worth money, and maybe the nearby store will too.

Such a prediction can depend on time. For example, maybe the chips could have an expiration date where the teller won't accept chips after that. So, from a gambler's perspective, the chip is money before the expiration date and no longer money after that. Or, more subjectively, a gambler might think that the casino will open tomorrow but be gone by next week.

So we see that statements about money aren't timeless, that they depend on your point of view, that they can be matters of opinion, but they are statements people will eventually be right or wrong about. In this way they are like promises and other predictions about the future. Nobody knows what the future will bring, but there are some promises we trust over others.

Okay, now we can look at bank deposits. What does the number in your account in the bank's computer actually do? For you and almost everyone else, bank deposits are money. (For example, they are officially part of M1.) But to the bank, they are a liability, because you can withdraw money from your account. From a bank's point of view, a deposit in any other bank is money, but the deposits in their own bank are not.

So a key point here is that banks create money, but only for other people. They can never create money for themselves, and they won't create money for other people for free, because they will pay later. How much later? Well, that's a prediction.

For the same reason, the teller in the casino won't just give you a chip, and the casino will have strict security to make sure nobody steals the chips. Sure, the casino owner could take a chip to a nearby store and buy something, but this is a form of buying on credit. This turns a plastic chip that's valueless for them into money for the store owner, but the casino will pay for it later.