@El'endiaStarman So, I work at Microsoft, and we believe in dogfooding, and I can say that it's far from perfect

Many a time we have turned it off due to inappropriate, funny, or plain distracting captions

@NathanMerrill So, not that different from Google, eh? :)

Microphone/sound quality matters a lot, for one.

I chuckled repeatedly at the comments.

^ I really liked this one. Hey, should we add GMTK to the feeds for this room?

I think they've been pretty well received in the past. Can I get a second vote?

@PhiNotPi That was pretty neat. Though I kinda chuckled/rolled my eyes at "you can make YBCO in your home" and then goes on to list a bunch of equipment that most people don't have.

@NathanMerrill aye

Honestly, I should probably add some feeds to ppcg-gaming room haha

@NathanMerrill thirded:)

I wanted to subscribe when I noticed I already had.

Could we also add Tom Scott?

@Feeds Huh, @NathanMerrill did you mean to add it as a ticker feed as opposed to a message feed?

@DJMcMayhem Tom Scott posts at least once a week and not all of his videos are shared or discussed in here, so probably not as useful.

oh woops

There we go. :)

IIRC, we had him around for a while, and then we removed him. I may be remembering wrong though

We should get him to join this room:)

Oh, on that note: Given the current state of meta and site decline, I'm realizing that chat may not be around forever. I like the people in this chat, so I'm thinking we have a backup plan. Any suggestions/thoughts?

What do you mean by "meta and site decline"?

@NathanMerrill I would suggest discord, but also the question is a bit concerning

I'm not making predictions here :)

But for example, one day, the front page of SO was totally different.

I get why they do it: they are making the site more profitable. Chat hasn't ever been a top priority feature in the SE world, so I can't guarantee it sticks around forever

I haven't heard any whispers it's going away, but just in case :)

Ah yeah, there's certainly been a lot of drama lately.

Yeah, it seems like a lot of people recently are just throwing in the towel on meta

Meanwhile, community managers are trying super hard to keep SO the company and SE the community/mods from splitting further apart.

There do seem to be a couple encouraging signs in the last couple weeks or so though.

Right. Like I said, I'm not trying to predict the future or chat or SO/SE in general. I could see chat being around beyond my lifetime

Here's a random programming thought I've been contemplating. What would be the most efficient way to find the smallest arithmetic sequence of k primes? (Yes, inspired by flawr's CMC) At first it seemed simple, but then I realized that there are two different variables to adjust, (the starting prime and the interval) so I wouldn't know the best order to look in

wouldn't you triangulate?

How so?

Imagine you have a 2D grid. The vertical axis is the primes, and the horizontal axis is the interval

You start with the prime 2, and the interval 2

that's position (0,0)

that doesn't work, so you go to prime 3, and interval 2

So search on the diagonals

yeah

that's the better term

that's the typical way you search across multiple dimensions. There may be more efficient ways based on the specific problem at hand, though

Yeah, I suspect so too

I also wonder if you might want a different "angle" of the diagonals. (like maybe you'd want to search larger intervals sooner than larger starting primes)

oooh...that seems like a fun programming problem: Given a negative slope, move a line left/upwards from (0,0). Return all of the integer points it crosses in the order they are crossed. If a line crosses multiple points at the same time, order them however you'd like.

Why negative slope and left/up from (0,0)?

because we only care about points with positive indicies

oh wait, it's right/up?

Yeah, right/up

Yeah +x/+y is right/up.

Did you come from a mirror universe or something? :P

Actually, another improvement. If you're diagonally iterating through all pairs (a, b), rather than checking the integers a and b, check the a'th prime and the distance between the a'th prime and the a+b'th prime.

And if said distance is smaller than the k you're looking for, you can rule it out (I think)

Only downside to that is that you'll end up checking really big intervals before big primes (which may or may not be a problem)

The goal ultimately would be to find the an + b sequence of k primes that minimizes b + n(k - 1)

@DJMcMayhem messenger pigeons? :)

Ooh, even better! :P

they surely can carry sd cards, so sending videos shouldn't be a problem