The Nineteenth Byte

Nice!

congrats \o/

A username

Did you know Fanatic's more common than Vox Populi?

That makes sense

Fanatic is the easiest gold badge to get

9:09 PM

It's the only one I have lol

the thing is fanatic is a gold badge so people who want a gold badge will notice it and go for it since it's easy for anyone with consistent access who isn't jewish

vox is just a bronze badge so it's not as likely to be noticed or desired to go after, even though it's really easy to get

@RedwolfPrograms False

You also have Electorate

Oh, forgot about that :p

and yes, religious considerations around the Fanatic badge is actually a thing

I have a solid number of difficult-to-get gold badges on main, and my only gold badge on meta is Fanatic :P

@hyper-neutrino I'm disappointed that the dude who answered yes, doesn't have that badge :P

9:12 PM

I have Electorate, Populist, and Fanatic (plus the code-golf hammer) on main and only Populist on meta :P

still in the process of obtaining Fanatic on MSE, CGCC meta, and SO

@cairdcoinheringaahing huh, curious :p

CMQ: What is your favourite badge to have, for both main and meta?

I assume you mean that I already have, and not the one I would most like to have regardless of current status?

Yes, the badge that you're most proud of achieving

For main, probably synonymizer, or maybe my bronze code golf

also interestingly, convention is a main badge that you only get from participating on meta

for main, probably gold code-golf; i don't see anything else i'd be particularly proud of

maybe Populist, but not as much as ^

9:18 PM

I think Copy Editor on main for me (maybe Socratic, but Copy Editor felt like more high-quality effort) and either Deputy or Research Assistant on meta

i have a surprisingly low amount of moderator task related badges lol

(at least I think)

@cairdcoinheringaahing Legendary

If you can get Legendary on meta, you are literally a god :P

Oh, if it's a badge that I actually have, then the silver code golf badge or the Sportmanship badge

@cairdcoinheringaahing Or Jon Skeet :P

@user so what caird said is correct :p

unsurprisingly, tenacious and unsung hero have never been given out on our site

9:24 PM

Jon Skeet is a level above gods - I worship him despite being an atheist :P

true :P

13 users have Legendary on MSO

wait, I thought it only let you get mortarboard and it didn't count "rep gain" after that

How do you get a rep-related badge on a Meta site? (not including MSE)

Nope. If you get 20 upvotes in a day on meta, you can get Mortarboard, Epic and Legendary

9:26 PM

huh. i thought only mortarboard was available

Interesting

So did I, then Epic (2/50) came up in my badge tracker on meta

wack

The lack of bounties make it much harder, even given the decrease in activity

CMQ - if you could gain any badge through satisfying the condition (not just magically having the badge added, but whatever condition is required was met), which would you pick?

9:28 PM

I don't understand. Are we making up badges such as "Cool username - awarded for having a cool username"?

Either Illuminator or Marshal

no, out of badges that exist

custom badges are planned but not implemented

@cairdcoinheringaahing not sheriff? ;P

Actually, if this was a "one-time thing" kind of thing, probably Stellar Question

Oh, so a badge we choose to work towards?

Every other badge that I don't have I can make efforts towards getting, Stellar Question I have no control over

9:29 PM

Legendary is the best badge ever, isn't it?

well badges like legendary require you to get upvoted so you can work for it but under these conditions you would just magically get upvoted to the cap every day until you hit it

@hyper-neutrino Nah, my plan is to serve as an elected mod for 364 days exactly, then step down :P

@cairdcoinheringaahing lol

is it possible for a site to ungraduate?

No

if not, constable is impossible to get now :p

9:31 PM

So are Beta and Precognative

yeah

@hyper-neutrino No

Interestingly, Windows Phone has graduated :P

windows phone got lucky and got force graduated with a bunch of other sites at the 7-year cutoff

I can't believe they didn't check the activity and face pause before doing it :P

Great Answer would be a nice badge to get

9:33 PM

@cairdcoinheringaahing But...

Yeah, they got fully closed, rather than reverted back to Beta

I think Windows Phone will stay alive so long as there are people to moderate, at least IIRC that's the main condition

We had that "threatened" to us, back in the Community Interest check in Jan 20

Why?

This is going to seem somewhat harsh... As CMs, we absolutely care and want our sites to flourish and it's been hard that we haven't been able to be as hands-on recently but if a site fails to keep flags handled and two consecutive elections fail, the next step would be to start looking at shutting down the site. The onus of site upkeep is on the community on each site. Your community here is the heart of whether your site continues to exist or not. If that community goes away or stops managing the site's needs, keeping around a husk of a former site that slowly fills with junk is bad. — Catija ♦ Sep 16 '20 at 5:50

It was less a "threat" and more "this will happen if you don't get some mods"

9:36 PM

A site doesn't work well without mods

If y'all are still enjoying the use of the space and having fun doing Code Golfing and other Programming Puzzles, please, take up the torch and help keep the site alive. It looks like the support for this answer says there's a community that wants to keep going and stick around - and that's great! I love seeing things like people's custom languages for Golfing and I was really excited to help get your site theme out - finally! It'd be a shame to give up now. — Catija ♦ Sep 16 '20 at 5:52

(this was under an answer by WW, who did indeed take up the torch and help keep the site alive)

as did you :-)

Between the interest check and this half-threat, this was probably the most unhappy I've been with SE. I could understand the Monica incident, even if I disagreed with what happened. I understood the CoC change, and the license changes. I couldn't understand the CMs, who I thought were very much on our side, trying to force in new moderators and paper over the points raised by the old mods, to the point where they'd threaten to shut down the site

I feel like bringing up what would've happened if our flags kept stacking up and two elections failed was... totally unnecessary. It didn't feel so much informing us of things rather than a threat - we hadn't even had an election; if our first one fell on its face then it would've been appropriate to inform us that "hey, we understand your frustration with SE, but the lack of moderation is causing too many issues and this is going to be a problem".

(the other thing is that most of our site's flags are actually not really a problem - on my first day, Jo King and I cleared about 85 flags together and honestly the site would've been pretty much fine if all of them had stayed unhandled. we weren't accumulating garbage, clutter, spam, offensive content, or anything else like that, it was simply answers that didn't meet the spec slightly and had been forgotten in their 7 years of inactivity, which is like 99% of our flags)

Because the issue was very clearly not that we had no one willing to moderate, but that we had no one willing to replace Mego and Dennis, which is what it felt like they were trying to frame it as. Like WW and HN, I nominated myself because I felt that it was necessary to improve the site, not because I figured "Oh, I can totally replace Dennis, no issue"

@hyper-neutrino Also, spam flags absolutely don't require mods to handle. Aside from "This answer is invalid" flags, we can more or less moderate ourselves, no diamonds needed

We have (exactly) 500 users with VTC powers, and 160+ users who can VTD

9:45 PM

@cairdcoinheringaahing yeah, that too. Of course a high number of flags is usually an indication of a problem but CGCC has always been different and our distribution of flags indicates that most are autogenerated "too many comments" flags and invalid answer flags, nothing really serious even.

Also SO has consistently like 1k+ flags ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@cairdcoinheringaahing I didn't remember. Thank you too for that!

@cairdcoinheringaahing 174 VTD users, 79 20k+ VTD users to be exact

@LuisMendo Thanks :)

@cairdcoinheringaahing Yeah I totally agree with this. TBH the way of this framing came kind of close to convincing me to stay out of it, because I felt that it wouldn't be right to "replace" the previous three mods. In the end I decided I didn't have to respect their framing of it and nominated myself to improve the site not to "fill a hole" as it seemed they wanted to describe it.

Unrelated, but I think it's insane that Dennis is the #28th highest rep scorer this year, despite not posting for over 2 years

Hell, he's gotten more rep this year than both xash and Luis, both of whom post pretty consistently good answers

Unrelated String

wow

9:55 PM

Dennis answers are so amazing. This is one of my favourite ones

(even if that challenge is a popularity contest, which tend to get closed these days)

I remember that challenge being the first challenge on the site I ever saw, then a few days later I submitted a shitty low effect answer :/

I wish I could remember what the first challenge I saw here was

I only remember because my friend who introduced me to the site showed me it during a CS lesson :P

I didn't answer a question (other than my own KotHs) for more than a year and a half after my first challenge lol

@cairdcoinheringaahing *effort - I can write well ಠ_ಠ

10:19 PM

@cairdcoinheringaahing You think that's bad? Here's a cringe poem to make you feel better

@cairdcoinheringaahing Btw what was it?

> Most wouldn’t describe me as a boor

I don't know if you mean boor, or if that's a typo for boar, either could apply :P

Or bore, or Bohr :-)

Both apply, people usually call me a pig :P

@user The answer? This one

I feel like redoing it tbh

> I still think mine is by far the best

10:23 PM

Behold, the hubris of a 15 year old :P

wtf did I just read

Autogenerated story :P

As I said, a shitty low effort answer

Oh lol

I should put in a request for that in lyxal's room :P

@cairdcoinheringaahing Given that I'd probably downvote that if I could, I think imma just delete it :P

How does/did it work btw?

10:28 PM

Don't delete it, it's part of your history here

@user i gets input, s sorts it, o outputs it. Then q quits. The late in between didn't produce any output

Oh, that part did look kinda sus

@LuisMendo It's really not :P I have earlier answers, and ones that are actually good :P

Ah. But still :-)

Hell, this was my third answer here and I posted that like a week before the other one :P

10:30 PM

On an unrelated note, caird has 696 answers

Which is significant because it's a palindrome, of course

And no other reason, there's nothing else that's interesting about any part of that number :P

Any feedback?

@cairdcoinheringaahing Plus, I just tried running it and it no longer works :/

Exhibiting exactly one is a bit hard :/

That's the interesting bit about it :P

Guess so :/

Could you at least remove the surjectivity bit?

(just a suggestion for making it easier, the challenge is great with it)

I don't really want to make it easier tbh. I have an easier version in the Sandbox, and I'm fine with having a challenge with very few or no answers

10:41 PM

No answers?!

Yeah, I have no problem with zero answers

But what's the point of a challenge that no one answers?

Well, fingers crossed the "no answers" is because no one can answer, not because no one wants to answer

So I was looking through my old documents and apparently, at some point in middle school, I wrote an essay arguing against women's suffrage ಠ_ಠ

I'm against women's suffrage, I don't think anyone should suffer

6

:P

I remember seeing a tumblr post making that joke years ago

10:53 PM

Imagine using tumblr

i don't use tumblr, i just see tumblr posts on instagram :P

> imagine using instagram

@cairdcoinheringaahing funniest thing I've seen all day

I either browse tumblr anonymously, or I use r/tumblr :P

@user nothing wrong with having a tumblr account

ok boomer

10:56 PM

tumblr is like the most anti-boomer site on the internet :P

(I don't actually know if tumblr is a thing no one uses anymore, I'm just saying stuff because)

@cairdcoinheringaahing Yeah, I know nothing about social media :P

@user people definitely still use tumblr

I didn't even know reddit existed til a couple years ago

@lyxal Oh apparently they're still sold, TIL

Wow, that's a log link

@user not funny, didn't laugh

Hang on, let me retrain my joke-generating AI :P

11:05 PM

Oh hey it's a long weekend where I am

Nice

@cairdcoinheringaahing tell the Queen that I appreciate her giving us a public holiday tomorrow for me

It's currently Sunday for you rn, right?

Yee

@lyxal I'll mention you in our weekly brunch :P

Thank you

Hey, look!!

Long-lost friends!

11:09 PM

Hey Avi :P

Oh hey hi @AviFS!

How's things going for you?

Hey @cairdcoinheringaahing & @lyxal, how are you guys?!

Doing well here, just killing the days until uni :P

Pretty ehh, tbh. Just graduated, and haven't been able to set anything up for next year, yet. It'll be a long summer!

That's so exciting! You'll be starting this year, right?

11:11 PM

@AviFS Congrats on graduating tho :P

@AviFS Yeah, end of september

Haha, thanks. Congrats on graduating highschool!

Was just admiring your answer

10

A: Generate this number table

Jelly, 2 bytes »þ Try it online! Outputs an n x n matrix. If the output format is required, 4 bytes This is simply a table of maximums. For each cell \$A_{i,j}\$ in the output, the result is equal to \$\max(i,j)\$. The 4 byte answer has ` to reuse the argument, and G to format the output as a gr...

I was staring at it forever, the max table didn't occur to me

Did you come up with that first or Adám?

Not really much to admire tbh. I just got quick with the FGITW and I remember the max table trick from the related challenge I linked to

@AviFS I think we probably came up with it independantly

Given that he posted less than a minute after me, I doubt he copied it :P

No way! That's crazy, I didn't see the times

Just (2 days ago)

I'd totally seen the L-alphabet problem, I totally forgot

Now I'm definitely less impressed, haha

@AviFS I actually graduated high school last year, I've been on a (unsuccessful) gap year since March 2020 :P

@AviFS Sorry for breaking the spell :/

But still, I was way overcomplicating it. I noticed a different sorta neat property which I was going to exploit

@cairdcoinheringaahing Haha, you should be :p

@cairdcoinheringaahing I couldn't remember if it was this year or last year!

Sorry it was such a lame gap year, did you just work at home?

11:16 PM

@cairdcoinheringaahing imagine having a gap year

haha, this year was basically a gap year for me too, tbh

@AviFS I managed to get in a month of living and skiing in Austria in January before they fully locked down due to covid and I went home, but aside from that I've mainly just been working (some at home, some at a store) and lazing around :P

just bc there was like nothing to do

@cairdcoinheringaahing No way, that's way cool! I can't believe they locked down in January, really?

@AviFS I've written something like that in APL many many times.

I was studying abroad, and we didn't get recalled until March/April

(No one from my California uni returned before then. And no one I knew at the UK school I was at went home until then either)

11:19 PM

@AviFS They had basically reopened the ski resorts around christmas (had to wear FFP2 masks on lifts, most bars were outdoors only/closed), but basically a bunch of tourists saw that they were open in Feb, showed up and didn't follow covid guidelines, so they cracked down on all foreigners being there, regardless of when you arrived

@Adám Hi Adám, you must heard your name!

It's been ages

My friends had been there since October and they got sent home with me :/

I tend to lurk and read along here. Esp. since am a RO now.

@Adám Just a quick note while you're here, this was the lame pattern I thought I might exploit

Until I saw what you did

@AviFS You're no longer in Edinburgh then?

11:20 PM

You can take a running sum and mod it, and it the sequence has this pattern:

4 4⍴5|+\ 1 1 1 1 3 0 1 1 4 0 0 1 5 0 0 0

5 5⍴6|+\1 1 1 1 1 3 0 1 1 1 4 0 0 1 1 5 0 0 0 1 6 0 0 0 0

But how would you generate that long vector?

Not really that interesting, but that was my initial thought fwiw

Neil

@cairdcoinheringaahing Populist; Nice Answer

Welcome to TNB @astroide!

Was still thinking about that, haha

It's not very clean, but I thought the sequence might be interesting, and I thought it was reasonably so in the end. Can you see the pattern?

1 1 1 1 1
3 0 1 1 1
4 0 0 1 1
5 0 0 0 1
6 0 0 0 0

11:23 PM

Use Ctrl+K for monospace

Thanks!

Imo, ∘.⌈ is pretty obvious if you think about it:

      ∘.,⍨⍳4
┌───┬───┬───┬───┐
│1 1│1 2│1 3│1 4│
├───┼───┼───┼───┤
│2 1│2 2│2 3│2 4│
├───┼───┼───┼───┤
│3 1│3 2│3 3│3 4│
├───┼───┼───┼───┤
│4 1│4 2│4 3│4 4│
└───┴───┴───┴───┘

It totally is. But you have to think about it, haha

As you said.

And I guess I thought differently

@cairdcoinheringaahing No. I think my profile is lying, eek

Unacceptable :P

Serious contender?

11:27 PM

What do you mean?

@cairdcoinheringaahing Wow, I see. I hadn't even heard of it back then! You're a part of history, haha

Just a silly attempt at a joke.

Interesting that code-golf, despite making up 85% of all questions here, has no synonym tags.

How could it?

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

@Adám Silly is just what you want for a joke

Warning: I'm going to be rude & advertise my sandbox post

1

A Cat’s Game to Claim For every move in Tic Tac Toe, there should be at least one way to draw that includes that move. Or so it seems; prove me wrong! Challenge: Given a turn and a square, print a draw with that move. Any input/output is accepted. But here is the convention I’ll use in the exampl...

@AviFS Absolutely not rude, in fact acceptable and normal behaviour :)

11:31 PM

@cairdcoinheringaahing "cracked down"? Oh how I wish there had been just a tiny bit of enforcement here in London. I became so desperate that I asked if I could "borrow" a police officer so we could go hand out some fines together. I guaranteed we'd catch no less than 1 offender per minute for as long as they'd want. Nothing helped. Eventually, I gave up on telling the police and various authorities., and just holed my family up.

@cairdcoinheringaahing ~~normal~~ advisable

@Adám Oh yeah, they meant business. I got visited by the police three times where they basically told me to leave the first time, and the other two were checking that 1) I was leaving and 2) I had left (last time my landlady let me know they'd visited). They basically refused to give me the document required to live there, even though I was eligible, because the mayor had said that they weren't giving them to any non-austrians

@Adám I've completely given up on trying to keep other people sensible while here. Aside from asking them to back away in lines, I just try to keep my distance when I have to go outside and I wear a mask basically the entire time

Here, it became the norm for businesses to plaster over their store front windows. Apparently, passing law enforcement officers couldn't guess why that could be…

When non-essential stores where ordered shut, they, overnight, all began selling cereals and soap…

@Adám You'd have liked India last year. For a (short-ish) while, the police fined or beat up anyone who left their homes. They went too far, though, and that stopped. After that, it seems the rules got a little too lax...

@cairdcoinheringaahing Oh no way! Advisable even? I thought I remembered a rule of waiting 48hrs, but I couldn't find it

When schools where ordered to arrange remote learning for all but vulnerable children (which included those that for technical reasons couldn't attend remote lessons) my children's school stayed open because they considered all their students as vulnerable by fact of the school refusing to arrange remote classes, thereby rendering all the kids vulnerable due to unavailability of remote studies!

11:40 PM

Oh wow, that's just irresponsible

@AviFS So long as it isn't immediately after the bot posts it (when you first post into the Sandbox), and you wait a reasonable amount of time so you aren't spammy, we encourage users to continually ask for feedback here. Although most users just do [Any feedback?](link to post) to save space over "oneboxing" it (just posting the link, and it gets expanded)

@user As opposed to CGCC, it seems the UK has no implicit prohibition against standard loopholes :-)

There's a room if you want to help review sandbox posts yourself btw

@Adám What loopholes! It's so far as to be nearly comedic

@Adám Honestly, the world would be a lot better if everyone played by CGCC's rules. The CoC, for one, would help solve a lot of problems :P

11:42 PM

@cairdcoinheringaahing Oh good point, thanks! I'll do the link next time

@AviFS Technically legal, the best form of legal :-/

@Adám "Implement basic health and safety measures" "Ok, how about if I outsource the answer to another country, they can do it instead"

Hahaha, that's pretty good

@cairdcoinheringaahing How about outsourcing to self? When I reported it to the local school board, I was told that since it was a private school, I'd have to take it up with school management; they'd investigate, and if they found that the school had done something wrong, they would take it to the school board.

What!? That's ridiculous

11:44 PM

Ugh, I hate the UK private school system

Needless to say, the people in charge ~~did a thorough investigation and~~ concluded everything was A-OK.

4

Aren't private schools still the responsibility of school boards to some extent?

Luckily for me, our school district kept schools open only for kids who couldn't take virtual lessons, and kept delaying meetings on when to open schools again. It was fun seeing the reactions of parents who wanted to send their kids to school and force everyone else's kids to do so too :P

@AviFS Sure, iff the school's own board forwards an issue.

Yeah, I meant without the iff, haha

11:46 PM

@user That's the same as my school, no? (Only, ALL kids were deemed vulnerable.)

That's like if the FDA inspected restaurants only when they asked

@Adám The other way, though - the school board was basically keeping kids from coming to school

@AviFS Or FAA letting Boeing inspect itself…

@AviFS Or if restaurants inspected themselves before notifying the FDA

@user The one time one of the classes was sent home for 14 days because a kid had COVID-19, they, 11 days later, announced that the class would resume the next day. When I called the manager Tuesday morning, he said that it was fine because the sick kid's last day was Thursday 2 weeks earlier. I pointed out that most weeks have 7 and not 6 days, so he said, "oh, in that case, there's indeed no school today". 30 mins later, I had my wife call the office to ask if there was school today…

Answer: "Yes, of course… [brief pause], wait, who's calling?"

11:51 PM

This has a bit of a Chelm feel, haha

Which would be comical if it wasn't a literal matter of life and death.

Not sure how they thought your kid wouldn't find out all their friends were in school and they weren't!

Seems like I'm one of the only ones here whose school was reasonable in its response, which is surprising given that I'm in the US

My school has generally handled well tbh. They sent all year 13s home in March, we didn't do our A-levels and we just... left. Everyone else moved to online lessons for a year, and my sister has just sat her GCSEs in a relatively safe manner

@AviFS They had nothing to worry about. I repeatedly called the police on children that had been abroad and didn't quarantine. Nothing ever happened.

11:55 PM

This sounds really infuriating. Did you guys make it through reasonably alright?

I once asked the school who I should speak to about such breaches. "The COVID coordinator." OK, who's that? "Mr, so-and-so". Uh, oh, he's the father of the breaching child!

Ouch. Serious corruption levels achieved

Very corruption, so COVID. Wow.

@AviFS From Jan 1, I switched to home-schooling. Since then, we've barely been outside our home.

@cairdcoinheringaahing Yeah, I wish my school had been less safe! It's been quite the online & isolated year

@Adám Lessons taught entirely in APL I assume? :P

11:58 PM

@cairdcoinheringaahing No, only one APL lesson a week.