Tavern on the Meta

1:01 AM

Morning

@SonictheAnonymousHedgehog \ I'm wondering what's the actual best way to get heard on that

I get the idea that different folks in the company have different ideas - and practically this would be something decided by the ads team, and maybe folks further up

404

1:35 AM

I agree with "Consider running it for 10-20 days longer." Let's just run an ongoing "experiment" to see how this relieves stress levels in the long run. — JL2210 1 hour ago

This. This would bring the duration of the experiment into the optimal window: 6 to 8 weeks.

2:52 AM

Mōrning

Stormblessed

@MetaAndrewT. good morning

3:34 AM

Election for Monero Moderator - Vote to earn a silver badge. Vote for me if you like my campaign speech.

Jokes on you

I don't have the rep to vote ;p

4:21 AM

Monero? What's that? Can eat anot?

4:33 AM

@JourneymanGeek Probably most people here don't, I don't recognize names here from the site. About rep, that's OK; I barely have enough to run, but if no one else did they'd cancel the election and reduce the number of users needed to effect a binding decision (to 3 or less). The site does need a moderator (or two) as two of the moderators seem to be very busy and visit infrequently, while the 3rd is just regular busy and visits more often (than infrequently). It's not good to have flags wait more

than an hour or two (AFAIC).

@Rob true. I barely have 2 1/2 sites I am regular on ;p

I almost have 2 1/2 dozen.

@Rob erf. I was a little more active but the current job kinda leaves me with not as much time and energy

Certainly half a dozen, I'm online a few times a day or more - so I could drop in if needed.

Plus checking at work, and people saying "What's with the social life online - nose to the grindstone, put down your phone". :)

lol

4:39 AM

I find it interesting and useful to be active on so many sites, lets your brain switch gears. I retired ~10 months ago, at 20K, but now I'm passing 30K - more encouraging than plucking away trying to get the first 10K.

Technically I have time. I'm just worn out XD

and yeah, I used to do that

I can appreciate that, that's why I retired - you find other things to do, we are a very tiny speck on the Internet; let's not forget the other places we have to visit, things to do.

@Rob hmm? it's pro-tem election, the first nominee would win as no-contest if there's no other candidate... 🤔

@MetaAndrewT. In order to eat it you first must convert it to physical Bitcoin.

and no, last time they cancelled (but it wasn't pro-tem).

4:56 AM

yeah, pro-tem election allows winning with no-contest, graduated sites cancel election though

OK.

OK.

I should cancel my competition, he's serially downvoting my answers and commenting that he's doing so. I'll write if it's not reversed soon.

competition?

@Rob I'm a bit skeptical of the multiple blockchain sites at this point :/

There's two in the election.

Blockchain is a valid proof. Much like strong cryptography keeps things secret.

5:02 AM

Validating up/downvote with blockchain...

@Rob true but we basically have a bunch of sites for specific implementations of... relatively dubious survivability in some cases

Its a bit like the football clubs of bristol

of which there were two that were not very good, but they didn't want to merge into one mediocre ones ;p

True. The underlying math is good, it's whether you want to pay for virtual currency is the question. You could take the software, change a number, and use it for your own blockchain (then you are the boss).

@Rob eh, entirely in the SE context - whether having N sites for N implimentations makes sense.

The math is probably good, but the ... well...

But if you and your friends get together and create your own team you'll not beat the English football clubs (probably).

Its ruined by folks who're interested in a different kinda math ;p

5:07 AM

Money in their pocket math.

Yup

But I'm thinking of a different kinda math - whether those sites have a reasonable chance of building what they need to actually be viable sites.

I know bitcoin's strongly opposed to everything being merged into them

and they do actually have a reasonable degree of viability

I remember back when folks stood in elections to ensure we had a primary, not an election at all ;p

It's like unregulated Stock. You could start a company, someone could invest in it, you could also sell Stock (shares of the profit, split between investors) - I could come along and offer to pay a little more than others for your Stock, so you'd prefer to sell to me. But that doesn't speak exactly to how good your idea is.

To your last sentence, I'm willing to do the work if elected.

But this is like having a site per stock exchange

over "Money"

If I'm not elected I don't have to work for free - I can't really lose.

psst. You're working for free anyway ;p

Unicorn Meta Zoo: 7: What does leadership look like in our communities?

5:14 AM

Like I said a few inches above, after retiring I'm earning over 1100/month and rarely answering questions.

The sites I'm on aren't the easiest to answer questions.

They have a building per stock exchange, we have one Internet URL (and fewer boxes/buildings) for each of over 175 sites.

Hard to analogize the three.

Got to go, thanks for the chat.

Feeds

6:33 AM

posted on September 03, 2019

Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a podcast by members of the Stack Exchange community team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Participants We are talking about aspects of leadership in our communities. Links Abby’s definition of a leader reminds me of the Potter Stewart test. Joel’s book is Smart and Gets Things Done. We set up a Team just for out moderators…

hm. They mention appointing pro tem mods D:

moderating pro-tem appointments D:

Why is this one marked 7 when the interview with nicolas is already #7

@JourneymanGeek hm?

@Magisch I'm listening to it already

;p

why the D:

6:45 AM

we don't appoint pro tem mods now no?

Its outdated XD

afaik they do not anymore

Yes

hence D:

Also, really good podcast so far.

Mithrandir

7:07 AM

Recorded in... March. That was a while ago.

Feeds

this calculator implements the simple throwing distance estimation model from the how to throw things chapter of the book how to

@Feeds huh?

image is wrong

7:27 AM

@rene the xkcd rss feed has no image

strange

7:54 AM

boingboing.net/2019/09/03/man-arrested-for-buying-plane.html

That happens a lot, though its typically teenage girls trying to get a glimpse of korean popstars

Also the jewel is outside the secure area

the domain name... ugh, I hate myself :(

@MetaAndrewT. facedesk?

hairpalm

8:09 AM

sigh ... The joys of helpdesks. I can't even understand half of what they're trying to tell me :(

John Dvorak

@Tinkeringbell vote to close -> unclear

@JohnDvorak Wish I could :P I could just drop the call though XD

John Dvorak

You don't even need two extra people willing to nod their heads in your direction.

@JohnDvorak Or 4 ;)

a task that took 2 hours to fully implement I'm now stuck at optimising

because someone is unaware of the limitations of PHP

8:14 AM

@Tinkeringbell my job is pivoting that way....

honestly - its a horrible job dealing with users and the good ones probably move on somewhere better

@JourneymanGeek Sorry to hear that. It's frustrating just because you often don't even clearly understand each other... This company is having people that don't have English as their native language call other people that also don't speak English as their native language, and expects that to work to fix pretty hard problems :/

@Tinkeringbell and lots of users overexpect or do silly things

and outsourcing anything techie to me is a tragidy of our age ;p

We rely on it, then we leave maintaining it to the lowest bidder

@JourneymanGeek Well... I actually have three problems I need help with, and I just got a ticket for only one :/

@Tinkeringbell one email or three? ;p

@JourneymanGeek Nah, just a number and a 'we'll call you back'. I called because I can't access my e-mail any more, apparently.

8:18 AM

._.

@Tinkeringbell you did get paid last month?

.—.

I would be worried ;)

@rene Yes :P

lol

twitch

8:20 AM

@rene Sent my manager an e-mail saying exactly that. Do I still exist? Do I still work for you? :P

wait, but your email dosen't work

hey! That is my humor!

@JourneymanGeek Client e-mail works... company e-mail doesn't.

@rene naw, emails cause me much pain last week

our helpdesk email suddenly needed to download again and its about 3gb

and people were pissed off that cases were not created and I was complaining stuff was broken

Isn't that like 3 minutes in Singapore?

8:21 AM

@M.A.R. we have a terrible unusably slow mobile dongle

and I end up using my own (admittedly free) connection

(there's a new phone company with a free and very generous trial ;p)

@rene a real or pseudonym name is not required for information to be PII. If I have enough data points to know if it is you, the individual officially known as rene, then it is PII, even if I do not have that official name and your alias is only 492304923 or any other ID in my system. The key crux is that the information could be reasonably used to personally identify you and distinguish you against others. It's the uniqueness that makes it PII, not a name. Same reason what SE has about me being PII, despite them not having my full name anywhere. — Magisch 32 mins ago

Even then, it affects my ability to get things done

Hey, how'd you know my real name @Magisch? Paranoid look

@rene XD well, in this case... my phone has had 'no service' since I turned it back on, and I seem to no longer have any form of remote access (not via browser or company laptop VPN)... I guess being worried is kinda right :P

o0

8:23 AM

@Tinkeringbell Increasingly more like a horror movie

@Tinkeringbell contractor blues ><

Did you also see weirdly posing gothic teens? Probably a bit grumpy and ugly.

@M.A.R. Yeah... and the only thing helpdesk told me was to try and synchronize my 2fa soft token, which I'd already tried this morning before calling. Then I got a 'huh, weird' and a 'I'll put you on hold' and a 'I made you a ticket, someone will call back' ....

And amateur scratching graffiti on the wall with bloo . . . ketchup

@M.A.R. you'd like to know would you...

8:27 AM

and giant spiders?

Mithrandir

@Magisch As if you're one to talk, F...

@Mithrandir dirty looks Knowing via charcoal doesn't count

Also @Mithrandir that beta sites post is still featured... so your theory didn't work either?

Mithrandir

Welp. Guess it's borked.

That is the fun of theory. When it comes to practice, you get tricked in so many ways ....

8:36 AM

Wow... reading all of these since my last message...

@rene the secret to getting how things work is to realise no one actually knows? ;p

8:49 AM

@Tinkeringbell last time I knew, it's "30 days + 1 week" o_O

@MetaAndrewT. Oh.. so anytime now? :P

so... 6-8 weeks?

@MetaAndrewT. that batch job might run once a week, at 01:00 UTC on Saturday? So it is removed at the first saturday after 30 days?

Happy ~~Hour~~ Day...

@rene That'll be the next tested theory then ;)

9:09 AM

@Tinkeringbell I tried some querying to support my educated guess: data.stackexchange.com/meta.stackexchange/query/1099502

@rene That doesn't look like a very consistent time stamp?

No, the day is spot on. Why the batch runtime is all over the place is a mystery

@rene I did say time stamp... not date :P

Sort by creationdate though, and it just looks like something was rescheduled.

Also... why are you only getting 17 results? Sure there have been more featured tags removed over the years?!

IIRC they have some "queue" they enlist posts in that needs to be batch processed later on. It looks like that batch that does the work ran on either 13:00 or around 0:00

@Tinkeringbell manually removed featured tags (as in by a mod/staff) is not included

@rene Really strange to see only 17.

Still :P

9:18 AM

if you re-run it is now 25

still low, yeah

and it is only MSE

Yeah but that's... I'd have expected MSE to have a lot more featured posts that actually stayed up long enough to have their featured tag removed by community ;)

I'm still getting only 17.

are you running this one: data.stackexchange.com/meta.stackexchange/query/1099502 ?

@rene No, apparently I just reran the old one ;)

Otherwise we would have blamed caching

Well, you said to re-run. Not to refresh the page :P

9:30 AM

Yeah, I'm not the best when it comes to instructing users.

Don't worry. I seem to be getting worse at it too. Just got the 'wrong' kind of response to a comment on IPS for the second time this week :/

Now the question is probably even worse off than before I left my comment.

Needs lots of emoji's to convey intent ...

I don't think it was a lack of emoji's :P I probably just wasn't clear enough somehow.

I'm vague by default ....

9:47 AM

We all have bad days.

And sometimes bad users

can't reach em all

I've been having bad days in a row then :P

11:18 AM

So... who wants to hear an embarassing story? :P

Who dosen't ?

Apparently my 2fa soft token didn't work... because the date/time on my !@#$% Iphone was stuck on August 4th, 7 pm. And I didn't freaking notice.

OH

Well, that's one problem solved. It still says it has no service though.

I don't know why that wasn't the first troubleshooting step this morning though! That's something that's so easy to check...

Apparently this also fixes about everything: my phone has service again, yay!

Why are Iphones not more like Android? Never had these kinds of problems with my android...

11:42 AM

IPhone is only meant to look good. Android is only meant to work good. You pick.

Final outcome of my mad scramble for optimization

average performance gain across all cases: 79%

most extreme at 99.5%

least performance gain at 12%

nice

The original script would take a folder, zip it by program, copy it to a temporary directory, unzip it by program, generate a watermark stamp for each file, rotate the image, stamp it, blur it, rotate it back, and then zip all the images, again by program, and offer the archive as download

I always keep a few Thread.Sleep(1000); // make lower to increase performance. in to impress in the future ...

now it caches the stamps by dimensions used, does the whol unzip -> copy -> stamp -> rotate -> blur thing in one console command, and rezips it using linux 7zip which is several times faster

and processes in batches to avert running afoul of the php timeout for larger file sets

11:47 AM

@rene I don't get to pick :(

@Magisch is that for a website?

It's an ERP system web app feature that offers a full folder of saved images as downloads and watermarks them before

we have a sort of bootleg lab management system going on

wow