The Nineteenth Byte

Ginger

17:00

maybe I should write up some docs containing what I've learned

mousetail

That's not hard

I imagine less than 1% have even tried to use it

Ginger

fair enough

the vast majority of se users never even visit chat, much less try to make a bot for it

mousetail

The vast majority are bots themselves

thejonymyster

beep boop

mousetail

WE MUST WATCH OUT FOR BOTS FELLOW HUMANS, I TOO HAVE SKIN

Ginger

17:03

@mousetail you know too much :b

@mousetail WOULD YOU LIKE TO COME OVER TO MY HOUSE AND WATCH A VIDEO STORY

mousetail

YES ID LIKE TO ~~DOWNLOAD~~ WATCH ENTERTAINMENT IN IMAGE SEQUENCE FORM

Ginger

(use --- for strikethrough)

@mousetail I CONCUR IMAGE SEQUENCES ARE THE VERY MUCH GOOD BEST

mousetail

HAHA, I JUST PROVED I"M HUMAN. A ROBOT WOULD NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE

EXCEPT ON PURPOSE TO BLEND IN

Ginger

OF COURSE I DID NOT DOUBT YOU AT ALL FOR A MICROSECOND

thejonymyster

CMC: nth fibonacci number but solve it like youre automated

Ginger

17:18

~~walk like an egyptian~~ solve like an automaton

riddle me this: what do these users have in common?
- Sandbox Posts feed
- @Razetime
- @RadvylfPrograms
- @DialFrost

Wezl'

capitalized

Ginger

nvm, I figured it out

sorry for the pings

mathcat

They're all bots

DLosc

@thejonymyster Pip, 47 bytes: ^:aa.("xeeoleoifoaoyofiieeoseeioa"z@?a)R'e_X2Js

4

They're all valid Scrabble words

Ginger

how tf does chat know what users are online

DLosc

17:28

Do you mean the list of users in a room, or something else?

Ginger

user list

it doesn't seem to receive the data from anywhere but it's clearly coming from somewhere

DLosc

When someone who isn't in a room loads that room's page, they join the room. When they click the "leave" link, they leave the room. If they don't leave, they're still in the room.

Ginger

I know but where does the site get that list from

I'm trying to figure it out

DLosc

Oh, you mean the actual code, not just the logic

Ginger

yes

preferably the endpoint

mathcat

17:36

Never try to understand SE's code

Ginger

but I must

mathcat

It's so obfuscated even the obfuscated monster can't read it

@Ginger what're you trying to do?

Ginger

get a list of all of the users in the room

it should be easy

mathcat

huh

Can't you just do a get-request and count the number of elements of class present-user?

Ginger

AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

mathcat

17:40

Somebody call the doctor

DLosc

[rings phone in TARDIS]

thejonymyster

@DLosc woah what is that magic string lol

DLosc

@thejonymyster Take each letter, put the corresponding letter of the alphabet in front of it, and if there's an e in the result, double it. The result will be a legal Scrabble word.

Found with a fair amount of trial and error and Wiktionary

thejonymyster

WOW thats way cooler than what i thought it was

DLosc

... what did you think it was?

thejonymyster

17:49

i thought pip had some sort of scrabble dict builtin or something and like

it was indexing into that somehow for some reason

though i guess thatd also be way worse gfdsg

idk i think that you had a fun approach there :-)

DLosc

Thanks!

thejonymyster

i wonder if theres a shorter string possible with like modular indexing :^)

with an otherwise identical approach

Ginger

okay, I figured it out

and holy hell is it awful

the user list gets prefilled with data contained in an invisible <div> near the top of the document, which is evidently prefilled by the server before it sends the webpage

I hate it

DLosc

@thejonymyster Ooh, good point--I think I can shave at least 2 bytes that way

44 bytes: ^:aa.("ioeoleoifoaoyofiieeosee"z@?a)R'e_X2Js

Ginger

blyat I hate having to parse HTML because the chat devs tried to make this site as optimal as humanly possible

a lot of the methods related to getting lists of users or rooms or what have you just return raw html which is then inserted directly into the page

Radvylf Programs

18:02

@Ginger The current list is included in the HTML when the page is first loaded, and events 3/4 are used for joining and leaving

Ginger

I know, it's awful

Steffan

@thejonymyster nope, it's steffan and seggan

Radvylf Programs

I think thejonymyster was Jo King

Ginger

hey, guess what I just discovered that makes it even worse? the way that the client views messages when logged out is not, as I assumed, with a special websocket - instead it just CONTINOUSLY REQUESTS THE EVENT PAGE OVER AND OVER

WHAT THE HELL

mathcat

@Seggan does Fig have a chatroom?

Ginger

18:14

I have no words

thejonymyster

@Ginger lmao what

i barely know anything and i know thats terrible

Ginger

it's awful

mathcat

^^'

thejonymyster

if anything, making frequent repeated requests is just bad manners :-)

Radvylf Programs

@Ginger I KNOW RIGHT

Ginger

18:15

how the HELL is this site so stable when they're doing SHIT LIKE THAT?!

tempted to ask Catija to ask the devs "what the fuck were you thinking" /j

hyper-neutrino

local programmer discovers the horrors of SE chat

mathcat

@Ginger Okay now I need to see the code

Radvylf Programs

i think WebSockets didn't exist yet when chat was made

Ginger

@mathcat you don't want to, it's literally a SINGLE EIGHT THOUSAND LINE MINIFED JS FILE

DLosc

@hyper-neutrino I mean, Jeff Atwood's blog is literally called Coding Horror. It makes sense.

Ginger

18:17

lmao

hyper-neutrino

ngl i think chat should get a full rework but it doesn't seem high priority

even though with comments being supposedly "only temporarily sticky notes" chat is literally the only place to talk about stuff and a lot of things on SE depend on chat

Radvylf Programs

Support first started showing up in 2012

Ginger

it desperately needs one but will never get it because the devs are too busy screwing around with the main UI and pissing off the community

thejonymyster

@Ginger #golfer grindset

mathcat

@Ginger @CodeGolfers sus

Ginger

18:19

hey @Catija are there any plans for a chat rework at all?

Wezl'

I wish sites that use minified js hired actual code golfers more :P

mathcat

Practical code golf

Ginger

at least code golf is comprehensibly minified, the chat script is full of syntax that makes no sense at all and a strange mix of single-letter function names and detailed ones

thejonymyster

chat should be programmed in jelly

Ginger

ಠ_ಠ

Wezl'

18:21

automation took over our jobs only [I don't know how much time but decades at the most] after they became plausible :P

Radvylf Programs

@Ginger I believe the detailed ones are left unchanged since they're accessible in window

Ginger

oh, right :p

DLosc

@Ginger And to think, I was going to complain about the legacy code I'm digging into at work, because it's all 8.3 filenames like tzcswrpr.cpp

thejonymyster

@Ginger jokes aside imagine how horrifying thatd be to bust open the chat's code to see how to interface with it and its like. 8k lines of jelly + a little bit of js to interface with the browser

Ginger

> lines of jelly

thejonymyster

18:22

Yes Lines

Ginger

._.

thejonymyster

cause im a crazy mf

Radvylf Programs

Imagine how terrifying it would be if you walk in on someone coding and they're writing minified JS

mathcat

ugh

thejonymyster

"im the guy who minifies your js when you click minify"

6

Radvylf Programs

18:23

They don't have line wrapping enabled on their editor either, they just have 20 single-line text editor windows open, tens of thousands of characters each

thejonymyster

"hate scrolling" -the k guy (source)

Wezl'

I have great respect for the people who actually do this e.g. js13k, but sadly it's never or rarely an actual job

Steffan

@mathcat yes chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/137204/fig

Ginger

I'd make a joke about writing assembly but people still do that

Wezl'

was writing js earlier today, one of my friends asked whether it was assembly lol

Ginger

18:24

> Arthur showed us how he had arranged his source code in five files so that he could edit any one of them without scrolling. “Hate scrolling,” he mumbled.

mathcat

yeah I know someone who writes x64 assembly

Ginger

oh yeah? I write x128 assembly with nothing but ~~a magnetized needle and a steady hand~~

mathcat

I even went to a 15min assembly crash course because I had nothing to do

Ginger

@Wezl' well at least they knew what assembly was and didn't just go "aRe YoU hACkInG iNtO thE maInFRaME"

Wezl'

@Wezl' axly was making the backend of a compiler so the answer is... sort of with a big asterisk

@Ginger yeah that's just everyone else

thejonymyster

18:27

it sucks that most people dont understand programming

theres little things that i wanna show people that nobody i know personally would appreciate

mathcat

Once I wanted to automate a google doodle and my friends were like "aRe You haCking GoOgle"

Ginger

it sucks even more that the people who don't ask stupid ass questions like that, which they clearly know are stupid

thejonymyster

like "look how i formatted my js lol it looks like a shopping list"

@mathcat automate a google doodle?

Ginger

~~well, that's why you have us~~

mathcat

^^^^^^ so true

Wezl'

18:28

javascript:(()=>{let s=document.createElement('style'); s.innerText = `*{color: #1f1%20!important;%20background-color:%20black%20!important;%20font-family:%20monospace%20!important;}`;document.body.appendChild(s)})()

Ginger

^^

mathcat

@thejonymyster yeah some peperoni game (I was bored lol)

Wezl'

^^

thejonymyster

i never considered doing that

Ginger

@mathcat ~~why are they your friends then~~

thejonymyster

18:29

that makes me wanna automate the one dj doodle. i bet you could do funky stuff with it :-)

Radvylf Programs

Y'know what I hate
When people just insert a blank space between every line of their code
Like, there's a feature you might be looking for:

2

thejonymyster

@thejonymyster or like, put in my own samples :D

mathcat

@RadvylfPrograms people learning python:

Ginger

here at tnb we will always listen to your story about the cool thing you did in JS yesterday or the latest annoying bug in some library or whatever you want to talk about because we had to endure the same crap you did (and maybe still do)

@RadvylfPrograms ~~people learning whitespace:~~

Catija

@Ginger right now we're really focused on getting the core of the site really functional, which means addressing tech debt, modernization of the code base and shipping processes, making certain that mods, curators and new users can be successful on the site. While people understand the value of chat, making improvements isn't seen to be as urgent as the other things.

Radvylf Programs

18:31

Yeah gotta have modern cod :D

Ginger

@Catija is it not functional already

Catija

So... maybe someday but it's not on the current calendar.

Ginger

and also I'd argue that chat is in fact very important:

13 mins ago, by hyper-neutrino

even though with comments being supposedly "only temporarily sticky notes" chat is literally the only place to talk about stuff and a lot of things on SE depend on chat

Wezl'

@Catija crowdsourcing from CGCC when :P

Radvylf Programs

@Ginger "very important" is still relative though

Catija

18:32

I probably use chat more than anyone else in the company... so you're preaching to the choir there.

Ginger

well of course it's not important to them because they use slack or smth and not chat

mathcat

~~github~~

Ginger

chat: held together by all sorts of awful hacks, hasn't been updated for years
main: works pretty well, looks nice, frequent updates

Radvylf Programs

> frequent updates

Isn't this what you're arguing against?

Catija

But the core of the site is the Q&A. To be clear, I'm trying to wedge it in wherever I can. Collectives would be way better with integrated chat, which would be a business reason to give it an upgrade... (as an example)... and others agree... there's just only so many things we can do at once.

Wezl'

18:34

@Ginger ~~wait that's the solution, just fork slack to replace SE Chat~~

Catija

Ewwwwww. Slack is awful.

Ginger

@Catija well yes, many more people use main than chat I guess

@Catija so yall use discord??? :p

Radvylf Programs

@Ginger Chat also works pretty well, and doesn't look too offensively bad. Sure it's outdated in all sorts of fun ways, and it can be weird in some situations, but it works

mathcat

@Ginger no, github

Ginger

@Catija so do yall have any estimates on when chat will get some improvements or no? that's what I want to know really

@RadvylfPrograms I think your idea of fun is pretty different from my idea of fun d:

Catija

18:35

@Ginger I wish. No.

Ginger

lol

~~sounds like you should ask about that~~

Catija

@Ginger No clue. If it's not on the schedule for the next year, it's all kinda nebulous.

mathcat

~~but discord is 13+~~

2

Ginger

@Catija thought so

ah well, ~~I'm sure it will happen eventually~~

thanks for answering my questions

Catija

Sure :)

Seggan

19:26

Fig

Room for the Fig golfing language. github.com/Seggan/Fig fig.f...

mathcat

thanks

Sandbox Posts

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Introduction Raku's sequence operator is very flexible. Given two integers, it counts up or down as appropriate. 1 ... 5 => (1, 2, 3, 4, 5); 5 ... 1 => (5, 4, 3, 2, 1). It does the same thing for strings. 'a' ... 'e' => ('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e'); 'z' ... 'v' => ('z', 'y', 'x', 'w', 'v'). It ca...

Ginger

20:05

@RadvylfPrograms FINALLY got GingerBot working as NPSP

Sandbox Posts

20:25

0

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Zottffssent up to n Fork of Zottffssentettffssen Given a positive integer n, output the first letter of each number represented as an English word, up to n. Rules output the first letter of every number inclusively from 0 to n Examples [In]: 5 [Out]: zottff [In]: 44 [Out]: zottffssentettffsse...

thejonymyster

@Ginger last one didnt onebox in sandbox room :?

Ginger

dunno, it does that sometimes

thejonymyster

rage :-)

Ginger

I didn't even know you could make a smiley face that passive-aggressive

Unrelated String

:^)

Ginger

20:29

why is your nose bent

brand new sentence!

thejonymyster

@Ginger definitely not :P

@Ginger lmao yea that came off wrong but its really funny looking

Ginger

Do we have consensus yet on this?

mathcat

20:45

Just found out about print(chr(7))

Ginger

?????

mathcat

try it out

Ginger

it's blank

Radvylf Programs

@mathcat chr(7) is just \a isn't it?

mathcat

no, it's a Bell character

Radvylf Programs

20:48

Yeah isn't that what \a is

0x07, an ASCII BEL character

mathcat

oh right

graffe

21:47

Hmm… my question has just been incorrectly closed as a dupe I believe

A good example is

print(23236.12,digits=1)
23236

Feeds

22:10

0

Q: My question was reopened. I don't think it's clear. What should I do?

A couple of minutes ago this question of mine was reopened. I initially closed it as unclear because after seeing the answers I feel that what is and isn't acceptable as an IO format is unclear. Specifically I don't know what qualifies as "reasonable" when it comes to string representations of l...

lyxal

22:34

@Razetime no

No it doesn't

As the name suggests, it's for hosting python

Radvylf Programs

lol

@graffe Not sure if that makes it different enough to not be a dupe

Aiden Chow

@graffe I feel like that’s not different enough to not be a dupe. For example, I’m pretty sure if I remove the max(0, other stuff) part in my desmos answer and just leave the “other stuff” part it would be a valid answer to the n sig figs challenge. So it seem like it would be a pretty trivial change from ur challenge to the n sig figs one for most langs

Radvylf Programs

22:52

CSS should have scoping (I'm sure a preprocessor has this but):

#box {
    width: 100%;

    div {
        color: #666666;
    }
}

Or I guess nesting would be a better term

But having to do #box div and #box div p and #box div p span and stuff is super annoying

caird coinheringaahing

@Feeds This actually brings up a more general question: what's the appropriate course of action if a moderator's decision is overturned by the regular users' votes, while the moderator disagrees with that?

emanresu A

Pretty much every CSS preprocessor has that

Radvylf Programs

@cairdcoinheringaahing I'd think the users would take priority

emanresu A

^

Radvylf Programs

Since mods are intended to be exception handlers, I think it'd make sense if normal users' (who have the proper privs) opinions on stuff had roughly equal weight

caird coinheringaahing

22:56

@RadvylfPrograms Personally, I disagree. I'd prefer for the mod to take things to meta (like WW has :P) to discuss the differing opinions and come to a "correct" course of action

Radvylf Programs

Oh well yeah meta's probably the best option. But in theory :p

caird coinheringaahing

Clearly the proper course of action is for the moderator to become CEO of SE and decide unilaterally what to do :P

lyxal

@Feeds I noticed that the suggestion of deletion is not really available because the challenge has a positive score

Shall we go fix that? :p

caird coinheringaahing

It has answers with a positive score, that's what's preventing deletion. Don't go mass downvoting the answers :P

Radvylf Programs

23:52

Look at this neat little color widget thing I made:

emanresu A

noice

Radvylf Programs

I'm constantly googling for rgb to hsl or hsl to rgb or hex to rgb or whatever while doing stuff, and now I don't need to

Fun fact: In CSS color 4, the commas in rgb(x, y, z) are considered legacy, as is rgba/hsla

You're supposed to do rgb(x y z), and rgb(x y z / a%) if you want alpha

emanresu A

hmm

Fig

Transcript for