Should've mentioned that number in my nomination.

@PhiNotPi Oh come on, everyone has that badge

@Pavel yeah I know

Go Phi!

@micsthepick Me too.

Mego is 2 for me. I can say this as a disinterested frenemy from CR.

that's just because phi is the only one not on CR's secret illuminati blacklist

Doesn't Mego post on CR

Nah, I did a couple programming projects with Phi back in the day.

Were you the person who was working on an Lichess app?

yes

at least it was something chess related

I've been kinda looking for another project to hop onto, since QFT has "ended."

But nothing big is really going on right now other than "PPCGv2".

Yeah, I was.

Except, I never started.

@PhiNotPi Interested in checkers still?

I wrote a checkers AI in F# last year.

Minimax with alpha-beta pruning. It's pretty fast.

Didn't we already do a checkers AI as part of the original ASCII club?

I also wrote a UWP app for it, but I can't publish it because F# doesn't compile to .NET Native.

@PhiNotPi Yeah, but this one is better ;)

The other one would crash at certain points in the end game and was pretty slow.

Yeah I'd be interested in starting a new project.

You can choose. Want to do something with ASP.NET MVC?

I can host it on Azure, and we can use SignalR and set up a DB and all.

SignalR sends notifications to the client. SE is probably using it to push chat messages out, actually.

Or are you the one on Linux? That was Doorknob, right?

@Hosch250 ASP.NET Core m8

The other unrelated project ideas I've been thinking about recently are: (1) making a new programming language, I haven't made anything other than an esolang before. But this is a long task that I might need to do myself. (2) A "distributed" king-of-the-hill competition, wherein we do not rely on a single user to update the official leaderboard.

@Pavel Yep, except you can't get VS on Linux.

So, it makes it a little more difficult to develop.

@Hosch250 I have dualbooted Windows and Linux.

I've got Linux in a VM and I'm running Windows.

@Hosch250 VS Code or Rider are good alternatives. I'd even say Rider is preferable to VS, even on Windows.

@PhiNotPi Ohhh, SignalR would be great for that.

My Linux is an older version of ElementaryOS, which I really need to completely ditch and install a newer version.

@Pavel You have to pay.

VS Code is still good

And I didn't care for it when I installed the trial.

@PhiNotPi Mint 18 here.

@Pavel Yes.

Supper time, but let me know what you choose.

@PhiNotPi Fedora, new software > outdated software

Busy working, so don't have too much time, but...

It's kinda up to you what project we do. The "distributed" KOTH would be the most novel... there being two strategies: (1) host a KOTH on a server, which runs the code and updates the leaderboard automatically. or (2), a cryptographic scheme in which users can compute their own leaderboard locally (even using a stacksnippet), and add their results to the official leaderboard themselves.

But at the same time, there's no guarantee that it'll work out well at all, and we'd still have to come up with the actual KOTH part of it.

@PhiNotPi We could do either.

Let's do that. Sounds like you've been thinking about it for a while.

It's something I pulled out from the back of a drawer: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/22138/…

Also, let's get a room for this.

Anyone interested, just ping me somewhere and I'll give you access.

@Hosch250 Why would a KOTH room be a CR room and not a PPCG room?

Or ping Phi. He's an owner.

@Pavel Absolutely no idea, lol. Probably because CR is my main site?

I was on the Mine page, so...

Do we really only have 3 candidates

what's the point of voting then?

oh I feel silly

Got confused by the 3 votes we get?

yeah

@Dennis Well, if we had less candidates, the election would be cancelled

This.

well I think that failure to get candidates is not a reason to can it; you still should have to run against "leave office vacant"

I feel like this election has been kind of a mess.

I'm just glad Alex A didn't run

He didn't have to. This election was for additional mod spots.

ah

Or at least, so it seems. Illuminati music

What's wrong with Alex?

No comments, 18 hours later. No nominations either.

...

Personally, I think SE is screwed.

You can't run a site like this as a business, and you can't let politics take control the way they have.

If only I had the resources, I'd start a competing site.

It's not a failure yet, but SE has to get their act together quick if they want it to succeed.

we're already trying to do that :P

(ask Mego)

Yours is very specific.

I'd try to compete against the whole SE system.

Especially against SO, but I wouldn't have the content.

Unless I brought specific questions over with appropriate citation, which is probably an option.

I know. I don't have the resources to either host the site or deal with that.

Another horrible election: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/73048/…

Although, TBF, the nomination hasn't started yet.

@Hosch250 Another? Are you implying that this is a terrible election? In that case, I have to disagree :)

@Mr.Xcoder Inactive one.

@Hosch250 I want some more background on the this. A couple years ago it felt like there was an overall optimistic atmosphere regarding the SE network, now it feels like there's not much optimism.

Oh, no, the first bad one was Seasoned Advice.

No activity for 18 hours after the nominations start.

@PhiNotPi Maybe because a couple years ago, they were still fairly responsive to their users?

I don't know, it seems like they are starting a new projects then deleting them (documentation), not fulfilling promises (inlining GitHub links in chat), replacing working tools with incomplete ones (chat app/site or whatever that was about), etc.

They aren't giving sites new designs for years and years and years...

What are their stupid designers doing, anyway? Nothing?

Heck, they tweeted about GitHub links in chat being in the next release almost a year ago now.

I don't think they suddenly stopped releases for this long..

@Hosch250 I forgot about the whole documentation thing. That was pretty big.

Now they are selling more and more and more ads.

Yeah, it feels a lot like they've stopped working on the SE network itself, and pulled back to focus on stackoverflow itself (but at the same time, not really doing SO development either).

I think they fell into the trap of needing more and more instead of just moderating what they have.

I don't really think they have any big plans for the future. They have their SO content built up over years, now to sell ads and have the bare minimum dev team / CM team to keep it from falling apart.

At the same time though, I think documentation project was doomed to fail, because the shear scope of that task is quite incredible.

It was actually going pretty good when they did decide to pull the plug, from a disinterested outsider.

I was watching the C# docs, and they had several really useful articles.

The Rubberduck team (VBE addin) was doing the VBA docs. Those guys probably know more about VBA than the implementation team at MS.

I didn't pay too much attention to the docs while they were a thing because I wasn't really interested in the big languages (VBA, Python, etc.).

The small languages were in there too.

I'm trying to remember if I ever contributed to the docs. If so, probably Perl, but also I might not have met whatever the rep requirements were.

I have way too much free time at work.

Anecdotally, if you want free flags on SO, check this query out: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/759061/free-flags

Imagine if CR teamed up with the PPCGv2 team.

To do what?

To build a competing website.

CR is pretty lukewarm these days. We aren't even sure if we'd have any candidates to run in a mod election.

At least, the chat is lukewarm, and I've found the chat indicates excitement in the site.

You should run for CR mod.

Well, TBH, I could given how much time I have at work. But I'm not a good candidate since I've not been active outside the chat for ages.

> You're the only candidate I actually remember seeing on the site. - Someone's comment.

I was surprised by this.

@DevelopingDeveloper hello

Hello, I am so new to all of these sites I am still taking it in

This is my first election, so I am just trying to get a hang of things

DJ, Mego, and I are the three candidates, feel free to ask us any questions.

(There are 3 candidates for 2 slots.)

What made you want to run for moderator?

@PhiNotPi Where'd you see this? On your nomination?

@DJMcMayhem Questionnaire answers

@DevelopingDeveloper Because I enjoy this site and and am confident that I will do a good job.

@PhiNotPi They've been on this site for 7 years, and they have been very inactive lately, so that explains it

@DevelopingDeveloper I wanted to run for mod ever since the first election two years ago. But I didn't run because i wasn't very active at the time. Now I'm running because I love this site and I really enjoy doing moderation tasks like flagging and reviewing

@DevelopingDeveloper Don't be fooled, they all just want to get their fingers on the nuke button <evil-grin>

I have also been eyeing becoming moderator for a long time. Ran in 2016 (lost b/c they were only taking 4 at the time and we just elected those who had been pro-tem mods).

What are your favorite type of questions to ask/answer/participate in on the site? I know we have the typical code-golf questions, but I have also seen some challenges, such as the rock,paper,scissors,lizard,spock challenge I thought was interesting. I feel we need to bring on some of these different challenges to keep the site active and growing.

@DevelopingDeveloper I really like king-of-the-hill competitions.

RPSLS was an example, but honestly is just the tip of what KOTH competitions can be. One of my favorites ever to work on Red vs Blue Pixel Team Battlebots. (Disclaimer: I believe the stack snippet for that challenge is now broken.)

I was also a big fan of Formic Functions (an ant-colony competition).