Winter / Summer Bash 2022

Catija

01:28

4 questions, 4 answers, 4 sites... seems like a cube to me?

Nike Dattani

02:25

@Catija the problem is that it's (4 questions + 4 answers) x 4 sites, which equals 8 posts x 4 sites which is 32 posts, not 4x4x4 = 64 which would be a cube. 32 is not a cube.

(4+4)x4 is not a cube, but (4x4x4) is.

Nike Dattani

03:03

Hi @Anonymous

Anonymous

03:29

Hello!!

Nike Dattani

04:11

@Anonymous enjoying Winter Bash?

InanimateBeing

04:25

@NikeDattani congrats :)

Nike Dattani

@InanimateBeing Thanks, and thanks for all your help and hints!!!

Hey @Panda !!!

InanimateBeing

@SPArcheon were you lost in the... jungle? I spent around 5 mins there, lol. I already got the right answer to the first part but then took a break and closed all tabs. When I returned, I mistakenly put the wrong answer in the URL that took me to the jungle. Was fun though.

@NikeDattani I actually wrote a post on Check in on Sparkles the Unicorn to help everyone get access to hints at least to enjoy the unicorn game. But it was frowned upon by many users so I deleted it. So I guess that is to make users chat here and enjoy and "struggle". After all, it was too many hints, all at once. :)

Nike Dattani

@InanimateBeing I didn't see it!

Anonymous

@NikeDattani Yup, it's my first time getting in on the fun! There's quite a bit to explore!

Nike Dattani

@Anonymous Can't wait for next year!

Anonymous

04:38

Yeah!! I'll hopefully be on time for that!!

InanimateBeing

@Anonymous +1.

InanimateBeing

04:56

So I guess the Chatterbox hat's trigger doesn't work when we chat in mod's private chat, isn't it? or it's a bug?

Nike Dattani

@InanimateBeing Did you post 5 separate blocks of text?

InanimateBeing

@NikeDattani I posted 6 separate blocks of messages on the same day in that room

Nike Dattani

@InanimateBeing was there at least one message from someone else between each of those "blocks"?

InanimateBeing

@NikeDattani Yup

Nike Dattani

@InanimateBeing which site?

InanimateBeing

04:59

@NikeDattani MathSE, mod's private chatroom.

Nike Dattani

@InanimateBeing maybe it's a bug!

You've seen this?

101

Q: Why didn't (or did) I or some other user get a hat although the requirements were (or weren't) fulfilled?

During Winter Bash, users can earn hats. But sometimes it seems that a hat was awarded even though its requirements weren't (yet) met, or vice versa. What could be the reason for this?

InanimateBeing

@Catija could you please look into this it seems like a bug.

@NikeDattani thanks for the post. Read it and well I technically should have got it by now, it's been over couple of days since the trigger. Rest seems fine too.

@NikeDattani did you get rick-rolled while solving the riddle?

Catija

05:26

@InanimateBeing You have the hat on SO, your chat account is parented to SO, that's how the hat works. No bug.

InanimateBeing

@Catija so I can't get Chatterbox hat on MathSE?

Catija

You can if you reparent your chat profile to Math.

Not sure why you have it parented to SO.

InanimateBeing

Wait, it's somehow my fault! I parented it there!!! When on earth I did that?!!
@Catija or anyone else, any guidance on how to do *that*?

Catija

Go to your chat profile, click on "[change]" next to the site your account is parented and change it to the site you wish.

You can't use formatting in multi-line messages.

InanimateBeing

@Catija Oooooh! So that's why it didn't work (but works sometimes!)! Thanks a lot!

Catija

05:31

Sure

InanimateBeing

@Catija Thanks for this too

Catija

It's retroactive, from what I can tell, you don't even need to chat, just change your chat parent, wait 10 minutes, get the hat. I haven't tested it a ton or anything, though.

The site the room is parented to doesn't matter, only the site your chat account is parented to.

InanimateBeing

@Catija this stuff is so funny! LOL XD. Thank you.

Cody Gray

@NikeDattani Sorry, no. I did not mean to imply that the name was given in that blog post. The blog post was only meant to explain how the name was chosen. I'd seen people who had figured out the name, but were wondering what in the world it means and why it would be the name of a chat system. It was more of a bonus fact, rather than a hint. I thought "for those who have found the name of SE chat" would make that clear.

@Catija Because SO is the best!

@InanimateBeing It actually makes sense, because the hat is being awarded to you, not the room, so the room's owner/parent does not matter, only your account's owner/parent.

Catija

05:48

I didn't make it up by the way, even if no one's heard of it. I'm pretty sure I'd heard it called that prior to working here... I guess it's just more insider-y info than I realized.

Cody Gray

You must have heard it in chat, because there's no trail that I can find on MSE or MSO.

The only other reference that I've been able to find is a tweet by a former staff member.

Catija

There's a link to a blog post one of the former UX people wrote that mentions it. I linked it in the TL.

That was from 2017.

Mithical

medium.com/@horyunsong/…

Catija

Gervasio's called it by this name in The Tavern (MSE)

Cody Gray

I have no idea who Gervasio is

Mithical

05:52

@Catija ...which I just found from looking at a TL message from myself from 2018, unrelated to that.

Catija

You wrote the original message. :P

Mithical

g3rv4 ♦, Montevideo, Uruguay

835 8 18

bug localization status-completed international-sites traducir transifex discussion

Cody Gray

Haha, OK, that name I recognize

Catija

Apparently Jeremy is the one who introduced me to the name in The Tavern.

I was so cute back in 2017

Mithical

👀

Cody Gray

05:57

Has that changed? ;-)

Catija

HAHAHA. The wide-eyed innocence of pestering Shog to make a post into a FAQ but also not wanting it because I wouldn't earn rep from it any more. :P

Mithical

I was very naive in 2017, but I had an excuse ;)

Catija

Yes, you were young. I was already 35. HAHAHA

Cody Gray

If pestering Shog to do something is cute... good news for me!

Catija

I think it's less that I was pestering him and more how... I was very in awe of him at the time.

Mithical

06:01

@Catija indeed, I turned 15 that year

Cody Gray

4 mins ago, by Cody Gray

Has that changed? ;-)

Catija

No. I just don't get to hang out with him every day any more. :(

Cody Gray

Yeah, that sucks.

I got "wide-eyed innocence" and "naive" from believing what Jeremy said.

Catija

I like giving people the benefit of the doubt. Also, I'm pretty sure my middle name was originally "Gullible".

Maybe "trusting" is the better way of putting it.

Cody Gray

Trusting would be a better middle name than Gullible.

Catija

06:08

Probably. :D

Why do I go on vacation for over a week and still feel like I need a vacation?

Mithical

Kids.

Catija

True.

They don't even go back to school tomorrow - they're off another day.

Mithical

Also, whetting your appetite. I was on vacation for a week recently and really didn't want to go back to base. :(

Catija

I wish they were as cute in reality as they are in the pictures I post. :P

Cody Gray

@Catija This happened to me, and I don't even have kids...

Catija

06:12

@Mithical I get the feeling you don't want to go back regardless? Or are you enjoying it somewhat?

Mithical

I have a relatively good position with excellent conditions (I sleep at home every night), but I'm still ready to be done with it and out of the system.

Less than six months to go.

Catija

Sounds like you're on the downhill slope now. :)

InanimateBeing

06:34

@CodyGray yup, it does. Thanks to Catija, I finally got it on MathSE! (Also, just got Henry Lamarr ;) )

Catija

07:06

Hedy. :)

Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor. A film star during Hollywood's golden age, Lamarr has been described as one of the greatest movie actresses of all time.After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her first husband, a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio head Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a movie contract in Hollywood. She became a film...

Cody Gray

That's odd. I can't find anywhere where it says that Hedy Lamarr was a prolific and dedicated reviewer on Stack Exchange sites.

Are you sure you posted the right link?

Catija

Har har

We wanted to recognize world inventors and scientists and did that through the review hats.

Cody Gray

Ah, a theme!

I was actually wondering if there was some attempt to draw parallels between stuff that the person being honored actually did and the trigger. But I guess not. You just had a list of folks you wanted to honor, and then assigned triggers to them arbitrarily?

Catija

I don't remember there being any attempt to line them up, mostly an attempt to find a diverse group of people.

InanimateBeing

07:22

Oh, ya, sorry, Hedy Lamarr.

Drew Reese

@Catija Ah, that explains why/how I somehow earned the ChatterBox hat a second time from CodeReview from chatting here. Have no idea how my chat got parented there.

Catija

Looks like it was the first SE site you joined but I'm not sure how chat determines chat profile parentage upon creation.

Cody Gray

I'm sure it just tries to find the next-best site after SO.

Drew Reese

Odd. 2y7m on CodeReview, 5y3m on SO. Unless you are saying the first non-SO site I joined?

Stevo

I just got the secret hat introvert unite.

Boots

07:37

@Stevo Me too. All I've done so far is vote.

Cody Gray

Yeah, you get it for doing pretty much any form of participation.

Oooh, fodder for next year's quiz ;-)

Catija

@DrewReese Yes

SPArcheon

08:44

@InanimateBeing correct. And I didn't even tried the other version yet, so for a good 15 minutes I looked at that message thinking THAT was the next quiz.

@CodyGray considering that some questions seems to be reused year after year (and I think there was a similar error with the sites count last year too) it would be very dastardly if someone documented all the questions and their answers and posted them on meta after the event ends...

Cody Gray

@SPArcheon I was hardly proposing that. Merely suggesting a source from which to derive a new trivia question for next-year's quiz.

SPArcheon

@CodyGray I know, I was just saying that we even have an option to force them into having to think of new questions :P

Cody Gray

Oh, haha. I see.

Drew Reese

Hmm, guess I'll be saving my documentation in prep for next year's hat dash.

Cody Gray

Eh, given how hard these questions seem to have been for everyone, even though the answers are easily obtainable, I'm not sure that having the answers in yet another Meta post would make that much difference.

SPArcheon

08:53

@CodyGray well... to be fair, I don't know if you noticed that detail too...

Cody Gray

Sorry, which?

SPArcheon

16 hours ago, by SPArcheon

BTW, @Catija sorry to bother you but I was wondering. Am I wrong or there are more than 10 questions at the end and every users gets random ones?

^ and Catija confirmed my theory soon afterwards.

Drew Reese

I documented more than 10 questions.

Cody Gray

Oh, yeah. I assumed so, but when someone posted that bug report on MSE about one question requiring 3 words (I think it was Drew, who his here with us now), I went back and retook the quiz several times, just to see what the different questions were.

SPArcheon

To put it into context: some users may get harder questions.

Cody Gray

08:54

"harder" Nah.

There's only one question this year that's even somewhat difficult, if you don't have Catija's answers memorized.

SPArcheon

well, there are a few ones that require a query on the data explorer.

and a specific one is quite annoying too since average user would only know how to query a single site at time

Cody Gray

Nope. Definitely none require a query. Although that would be one way of solving them, perhaps a more efficient way if one is comfortable with writing SQL.

SPArcheon

@CodyGray Did they made a blog post specifying how many users in the whole network have more than 1 million unicorn points?

Then I guess I took the hard way.

Funny.

Cody Gray

Well, you can just go through the sites list, looking at the users sorted by rep, and count.

So that doesn't technically require a query, though, like I said, if you're comfortable writing queries, that's probably faster.

Drew Reese

^^^^ That's how I did it and I thought it was the "hard" way.

Cody Gray

08:59

That's the one question I got wrong the first time, because I assumed it was only SO who had any users over 1 million rep, and I knew that number already, off the top of my head, so I put it in. Once I determined that was wrong, I then had to go looking for which other site(s) had users with over 1 million rep.

SPArcheon

@DrewReese "Wait, did I already counted [insert site here]?"

Cody Gray

Sorting the sites by activity would help in narrowing down the number of sites you ahve to count.

No, you go through them systematically, as they're ordered in the list, so there's no risk of recounting.

SPArcheon

@CodyGray also, why do you assume you have to write the query?

Drew Reese

I made the same assumption as Cody, but went the other way in guessing since it looked like it was only just very recently a few more SO users broached 1M rep. I was thinking maybe it was a caching issue.

Cody Gray

@SPArcheon Oh, I don't, necessarily... although I did assume that you'd have to at least adapt an existing query.

I guess that would depend on how early you took the quiz. :-)

SPArcheon

09:03

Guess what, for some really mysterious reasons, if you go to the data explorer and sort the queries by date, you will find a lot of copies of a "Find all users above given reputation" have been created recently :P

Cody Gray

Haha, yup

I haven't gotten in the habit of using Data Explorer very much.

Pretty much everything I'd want or need to know can be retrieved using magic mod powers, like searching deleted posts. And I'm not really one to care about such stats as unicorn points.

SPArcheon

09:53

so... I have been "working" on a deliberate troll to a certain question...

once I manage to get a decent enough result...

Cody Gray

You will lock Sparkles the Unicorn inside of a castle?

SPArcheon

@CodyGray someone asked for a picture, so I will just stable diffusion it :P

Cody Gray

Wow, never heard of that service. Interesting.

Hmm. The results I get aren't nearly as impressive as the example image in the Wikipedia article.

SPArcheon

@CodyGray really depends on the sample you are using. Furthermore, there are some models that have been finetuned to specific art styles or characters.

If you use the base Stable Diffusion model to try to make anime style art, it is pretty bad.

Yet, if you use a specifically trained model you can get results like this one...

Cody Gray

I just used stablediffusionweb.com

SPArcheon

10:09

gets even more ridiculous good if you use img-to-img.

^ this one is an actual plastic action figure turned in a picture.

Lunartist

11:12

Q. How many active network sites are there as of December 2022?
=>
I summed all sites from https://stackexchange.com/sites#newest but the answer is wrong. Where should I look for more?

Cody Gray

That's not wrong... you must have miscounted.

@SPArcheon Well, yeah, I suppose, but creating anime-style images wasn't what I was trying because I'm not particularly interested in that.

SPArcheon

@CodyGray That was just an example. There are models that have been finetuned to very specific artists, movies or topics.

Cody Gray

I see. I was just thinking real-world images.

Like the Wikipedia example, which is an astronaut riding a horse. Why not, say, a duck eating a banana?

SPArcheon

For example there is a model trained on Avatar pictures.

Cody Gray

Blue people?

Lunartist

11:26

almost there!

yay me!

and thank you Cody!

SPArcheon

@CodyGray yep basically

Cody Gray

I guess that's a documentary about SE moderators.

Lunartist

huh I have joined ME but winter bash keeps saying that I have no MSE user...

Cody Gray

@Lunartist For telling you that you couldn't count? Anytime. :-p

Lunartist

what site is MSE? I thought it was Meta

Cody Gray

11:37

Meta Stack Exchange, yes.

Lunartist

Can I bug you a little more Cody?

I can't get my hat. If I use normal browser it says I'm no MSE user.
If I use private mode, it says page not found.

Cody Gray

Hm, well, you do have an MSE account, so I don't know what the issue might be.

Did you create the MSE account after signing in to the Winter Bash site or taking the quiz?

That's the only thing I can think of...

Lunartist

I'm guessing I shouldn't use private mode and clear cache in the normal browser.

thank you cody see you next year?

Cody Gray

Yeah, I doubt private mode is useful. The whole point is not remaining private.

Private mode would likely work if you were logged in to SE within your private-browsing session, but I don't really see the point in doing so, since at that point, you're explicitly becoming not-private.

@Lunartist Why do you have to wait until next year? :-)

James Risner

12:06

@Catija I used that trick a couple days ago: every 10 mins changing parent to get the auto chatterbox on new site for 22 sites.

@SPArcheon I documented all the questions I answered. So I can contribute to that.

@SPArcheon I opened sites user page until I concluded no more would be 1 million + ;-) so manually not data explorer- but I’d love a link to your “all site” checking query?

SPArcheon

12:33

@JamesRisner here - all the work already done by a potassium rich user.

Cody Gray

Nice :-)

I meant the pun in reference to the user name, not the script, in case that wasn't clear.

James Risner

12:54

@SPArcheon thanks

Ginger

13:24

How do I find the most popular tag on SO this year? Asking for a friend, who isn't me :b

it's not javascript

eyyy got Defender!

that was annoying :p

Cody Gray

I guess you figured out the most popular tag, then.

Hopefully in a way that is more effective than simply guessing all the tags. :-)

Ginger

nah, I restarted the quiz until I didn't get that question anymore :b

wide brain

I still don't know what it is...

annoyingly, I'm still in 2nd place on the CGSE leaderboard because lyxal got some review-related hat and we don't get enough reviews for me to get it too

darn you lyxal

Cody Gray

@Ginger Haha, lame.

Ginger

@CodyGray Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

ah well, at least I'll get 2nd

I'm coming for 1st next year!

SPArcheon

13:46

@Ginger Secure. Contain. Protect?

also.... for some reason I though of this, wonder why...

Cody Gray

Python programmers

U12-Forward

@Ginger I think I'm 3rd

Ah I'm 4th

Ginger

14:03

@SPArcheon wrong foundation

SPArcheon

14:42

@Ginger I was kinda disappointed that Goat Sim 3 didn't reference the Endless Ikea - lost opportunity since there is indeed an Ikea in the game.

That said... it has P.T. so...

James Risner

@CodyGray I think there was a blog post this year or last that said the tag? I didn’t guess, I thought I remembered?

Cody Gray

Maybe? I don't read the blog.

There are other places you can go to read ill-informed nonsense, many of which are far more entertaining.

Ginger

@CodyGray ~~like TNB~~

InanimateBeing

16:13

Can I get "Over 9000!" hat by editing a previous question with a score of 2+ ? (Or some other "creative" way?)

Cody Gray

@InanimateBeing No. You have to ask the question. Editing it wouldn't count.

Slate

@SPArcheon Quite curious if you're the first person to find this...

Cody Gray

@InanimateBeing You could propose giving site mods the ability to remove hats for rule-violations and otherwise earning hats in a fraudulent way. I'd upvote that. :-)

SPArcheon

@Slate do I win a Sparkle(s) plush?

Slate

I'll have my people talk to your people.

SPArcheon

16:26

to be fair, I wrote Sparkle(s) on purpose, since I already have a Sparkle plush.

Cody Gray

YOU STOLE SPARKLES??!

SPArcheon

Only problem, it is not the one from your game.

Cody Gray

There are more of them?

SPArcheon

@CodyGray I was talking about the other Sparkle.

Because they actually choose a somehow odd name for their unicorn.

Mithical

@SPArcheon ...I don't know what I expected, but it probably should have been that.

Cody Gray

16:31

You expected something Sparkly?

SPArcheon

@Mithical fun fact: it is kinda proven that I am not even the only one on Stack that own that plush.

Cody Gray

It has very big eyes.

Catija

Not even sure where the name originated... The one the mods sent around was called "Lady Stackicorn".

Cody Gray

Damn. Catija's awake, and I haven't slept yet.

Catija

I've been awake since 7:30...

SPArcheon

16:41

@Catija I still find this very suspect.

Catija

16:54

Way before my time. :P

Mithical

SPArcheon

@Mithical I have a vague memory of balpha having a Sunset Shimmer avatar on SO. But maybe it was BoltClock instead.

SPArcheon

17:16

@CodyGray she is waiting for you to fall asleep before running the hat removal script :P

Transcript for

Winter / Summer Bash 2022