Tavern on the Meta

5:10 PM

So? Putting the last two weeks against all time stats (for a room that's over 10 years old) doesn't prove anything about the recent past.

user1271772

Today we're way higher than average. Equivalent to more than 5.2k/week (I say "more than" because the day isn't over... perhaps 5.6k is more accurate).

Mithical

There are high days and low days, which affects the average.

Tinkeringbell

So, today people were talkative, or there was a lot of spam.

user1271772

@Mithical What do you mean?

Tinkeringbell

5:14 PM

And yeah, tomorrow and the weekend are often quieter, so I'll just drop this now and keep the statistics way below 5.2k this week.

What's with the obsession with this rooms user activity anyways?

Rob

5:32 PM

@Tinkeringbell Ye, of tiny screens; I have 5 rows, but only 7 wide (Portrait Mode, phone). My StarBoard is also longer, 10 rows.

user1271772

My StarBoard is 10 rows too

Tinkeringbell

@Rob Three rows of users, 12 wide... My starboard is only 6, but I also have 4 other rooms I'm in in the sidebar :)

Rob

I'm in a couple of other rooms, but it's silent about them.

Tinkeringbell

Yeah, same.

user1271772

@Rob Same with me

Tinkeringbell

5:34 PM

It's a quiet moment right now, lot's of Dutch people are still having dinner, I guess XD

Rob

Some people have reported only several rows; dunno if they're 1280x720 laptop users.

πάντα ῥεῖ

My laptop LCD screen has a funny color defect at about a 1/4 of the right side vertically. I guess there's a single bus welding for the color control defect. ;-)

Rob

An objection to the Stars. :)

Tinkeringbell

@πάνταῥεῖ Can you send a screenshot of what it looks like? :P

πάντα ῥεῖ

X-D

From my phone possibly.

Tinkeringbell

5:37 PM

@Rob Can't remember the last time I looked at a laptop screen. I used to use mine for chat when at the office... last time was back in early March!

Rob

Need a real photo, the software won't reproduce the defect; I betcha

Tinkeringbell

@Rob That's the joke....

whoosh, I guess.

Rob

X2 - whoosh for you too.

πάντα ῥεῖ

The good thing that there's no problem when grabbing screenshots for documentation or clarification at work :)

Tinkeringbell

I guess I could use some whoosh tomorrow... they're predicting anything ranging from 30 to 35 degrees O.o

@πάνταῥεῖ Is that a good or a bad thing? :P If there was a problem, you might get a new laptop soon :)

πάντα ῥεῖ

5:39 PM

Too lazy ATM to buy a new one :P

Tinkeringbell

That makes sense.

πάντα ῥεῖ

It's my personal laptop BTW.

Rob

Get out the whoosh truck:

Tinkeringbell

I've been pretty much too lazy to shop for anything too.

@πάνταῥεῖ Ah, yeah. I keep forgetting people still have those.

@Rob I'm guessing we're waiting for 1 slow image upload?

πάντα ῥεῖ

But so much about visual impressions how the active / recent user rows appear ;-)

Rob

5:41 PM

Worth it?

Tinkeringbell

@Rob Nice. I was hoping for one with ice cream though.

Maybe it can be loaded up with Ben and Jerry's?

Rob

I suppose you could fill the warheads with whatever you like. Free delivery.

Tinkeringbell

:D

πάντα ῥεῖ

@Tinkeringbell There were too many needed within a short time window, and all a hassle (just like with toilet paper). So I decided it's no problem I use my private one to remote connect my dev-pc running at work. And it worked out well all the time.

Tinkeringbell

@πάνταῥεῖ Ahhh...

I was kinda tempted to buy a new webcam for a while, until I saw that prices have mostly doubled/tripled...

And I'm not even sure if a new cam would fix the problem I have with my own, so... I decided that my coworkers will have to do with me sitting very still ;)

πάντα ῥεῖ

5:46 PM

Meanwhile those working from the office have webcams as well as enough headsets.

Tinkeringbell

Oh, I have three headsets lying around... no trouble with that here XD

It's kinda weird though, the people working at the office seem to be the ones that would need those the least.

πάντα ῥεῖ

I usually don't like to use headsets, I am better off with the internal speakers (if tuned up enough).

Tinkeringbell

I like mine, as long as it's not 30 degrees outside. Luckily I won't have to wear them for long (usually)...

DavidPostill

@Tinkeringbell Do people not have aircon in NL? ;)

Tinkeringbell

@DavidPostill Half.

It's not that much of a standard thing, though usually if we have a heatwave sales skyrocket ;)

I do prefer my mother's tactics though, they save a lot of energy: Just close everything, screens on the outside + curtains on the inside, and don't let the light/heat come in ;)

It always works, except for 'tropennachten'

Rob

5:55 PM

Sky rocket air conditioning:

Comes with almost central heating.

Tinkeringbell

I'll stick with the fan.

Sonic the Masked Werehog

Our air conditioner doesn't work, and the temperature inside can rise to more than 26 degrees on hot days

We do have a whole house fan, which helps cool when it's night, but doesn't help during the day

Tinkeringbell

@SonictheMaskedWerehog 26 inside is either bad or reasonable, depending on what's outside... so, how hot is a hot day over there?

Sonic the Masked Werehog

Usually around 27-28. But we San Diegans are usually very picky about the weather, e.g. any temperature 19 or below is considered "cold"

Tinkeringbell

Oh. Yeah that's kinda bad then. We can have weeks of 27-28 and still keep the house at no more than 23.

And same, anything under 19 is 'cold' ;)

Sonic the Masked Werehog

6:12 PM

Speaking of that, we often get complaints from Northeasterners and Midwesterners who complain that we're too "picky", since they consider 16+ "warm"

Tinkeringbell

Wind chill? A 16 degree almost no wind spring day will be comfortable over here, while a wet miserable windy 19 degree autumn day will be seen as cold ;)

LinkBerest

6:35 PM

@Tinkeringbell lol and here rain causes a lot of extra hot days (humidity when the sun comes back out)

Tinkeringbell

@LinkBerest Ugh, yeah... Humid + warm days make them feel extra hot.

LinkBerest

Yep. We're supposed to get a Tropical Storm this weekend so looking forward to that :/

Tinkeringbell

:| I hope everything stays in one piece and nothing floods...

Sonic the Masked Werehog

6:57 PM

@Tinkeringbell Couple of spam accounts: meta.stackexchange.com/users/822218/pillsfact meta.stackexchange.com/users/820154/sarrysalters

Tinkeringbell

7:13 PM

Tomorrow, tomorrow...

rene

Sing-a-long?

πάντα ῥεῖ

♪ que sera sera ... ♪

Sonic the Masked Werehog

8:08 PM

stackstatus.net/post/625084791873781760

user400654

8:27 PM

🚽

DavidPostill

8:41 PM

@user400654 You seem to have an unhealthy addiction to toilets ... :)

Mithical

Planned SE network maintenance outage Thursday, July 30, 2020 at 8:00PM US Eastern (12:00 UTC July 31, 2020); expected downtime under 15 minutes

πάντα ῥεῖ

@David we all know, sigh ...

user1271772

A bit urgent, does anyone know why this MathJax might not be rendering properly? If you click "edit" you will see that it renders fine in the edit:

4

A: What are the different ways of calculating dispersion constants?

2009 (Tkatchenko−Scheffler) TS The Tkatchenko−Scheffler model for van der Waals interactions (vdW) defines the $C_6^{AB}$ parameters in an ab-initio fashion. In TS model the vdW energy $E_{vdw}$ is defined as, \begin{equation} E_{\text{vdW}} = -\frac{1}{2}\sum_{A,B}f_{\text{damp}}\left(R_{AB},R^{...

Before posting on Meta (is murder) I wanted to get a second look at it to make sure it's really a bug.

I've posted in the MathJax chat room on Mathematics.SE but that room is inactive except a bunch of bots keeping it open. I posted on TeX chat room, but they don't use MathJax on that site.

πάντα ῥεῖ

Well, we're all just mere mortals :-P

Mithical

MathJax sometimes interacts weirdly across posts; is everything properly ended in your answer and the question?

NobodyNada

8:49 PM

@Mithical ooh, that's probably it. If I sort by active instead of votes it renders correctly for me, and then the other answer is wrong

Mithical

See the second half of puzzling.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6052/25966 for a fix

user1271772

@Mithical We'll check (it's not my question or answer by the way)

Mithical

The second answer there isn't yours?

In any case, looks like it's working now

user1271772

@Mithical I don't know which one is the "second" one, but the one with the second highest number of votes, and the one that's second chronologically, are not mine.

After 9 revisions, we got it working: mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/posts/1870/revisions

Still curious why it didn't work before. Thanks for looking into it @Mithical.

M.A.R.

@user1271772 They do work

Oh, at least maybe congratulations

user1271772

8:56 PM

@M.A.R. Now they do, see all the revisions we had to do

Mithical

@user1271772 I was referring to mattermodeling.stackexchange.com/a/1214/255

user1271772

We didn't change anything to do with how things start and end, but whatever we did seems to have fixed it. In particular we removed the \label commands, which is sub-ideal

@Mithical I see, the second "post" not the second "answer". That one seems fine, but I do appreciate that you were curious whether or not everything "ends" properly in there.

M.A.R.

My theory is the new markdown rendering has an obscure bug that comes with adding a space after $$ in the beginning

user1271772

@M.A.R. I tried changing it to \begin{equation} and \end{equation} instead of $$, and it didn't help.

M.A.R.

Probably not. It's MathJax anyway

user1271772

9:01 PM

A bizarre case of improper rendering indeed, but we got it working in the end.

@Mithical I think (but might be mistaken) that on discord you said that you didn't study much math, how is it that you know so much about MathJax?

M.A.R.

@user1271772 Well what did you change? I don't notice much

user1271772

@M.A.R. We removed the unnecessary \label commands

The user was only referring to Eq 2, but labelled eqs 1, 2, 3, , 4

M.A.R.

@user1271772 Does \label work elsewhere? I don't recall using it on MathJaX

user1271772

Check out equation 2, and how it's cross-referenced in the text

M.A.R.

Shrug The closest I ever came to labelling things was \tag

Mithical

9:05 PM

@user1271772 spending way too much time on SE

user1271772

Haha

At first I meant to write "haha" in response to Mithical, but I find myself laughing even more now to M.A.R.'s comment!

How do you feel about this @M.A.R. ?

2

Q: May we have the AMS tag added to our MathJax configuration?

In this answer of mine, I labeled my equation using \label{eq:boltzmann} and then tried to cite it in the usual LateX way: \eqref{eq:boltzmann}. That is at least the way I've been used to it since first starting to use LaTeX in 2007. It is also the way that we have labeled and referenced equati...

M.A.R.

@user1271772 With vehement support, you would have the case to coax the Community Managers into implementing it or responding why they think it's a bad idea. Martin's comment is spot on (as always), the load is pretty important for SE

They haven't implemented MathJax on SO for this very reason, even if a fair number of posts could benefit from it

user1271772

@M.A.R. It's a 1-line add to the MathJax configuration file, what different is it going to make to the loading time?

M.A.R.

I have no idea and I lack the expertise to say so

Maybe if you non-intrusively nudge Tyberius to non-intrusively nudge a CM or dev to respond whether it's a good or bad idea, the mystery would be solved

Sonic the Masked Werehog

13

A: How do I get attention for old, unfixed bug reports and feature requests without official responses here on Meta?

For issues raised here on Meta.SE, the advice in Sonic's answer about editing to clarify or answering to strengthen the argument is sound. Especially for feature requests, sometimes the actual request (in the question) is poorly-argued but a strong answer can help. Requests or arguments based o...

user1271772

9:12 PM

Why do you post that, @SonictheMaskedWerehog?

Sonic the Masked Werehog

I'd recommend reading that answer, it's about getting attention for site-specific feature requests

M.A.R.

Mods have or used to have additional means of contacting devs and asking for their opinion on a topic

user1271772

ok

@SonictheMaskedWerehog It's a bit too long, what's the summary?

Sonic the Masked Werehog

@M.A.R. Per that answer, they still sort of do (they can escalate local requests to CMs)

@user1271772 The third paragraph is the most relevant one

M.A.R.

@user1271772 Just what I said. Vehement support from the community is compelling

user1271772

9:14 PM

"For an issue raised on a per-site meta, particularly for a bug report or site-specific feature, if you're not getting any response from SE and the meta request has decent support from the community, then you can ask a local moderator to escalate." ? We know this

We don't want to escalate things prematurely,

Sonic the Masked Werehog

The next sentence is important: "That part about support is important; get your community to show up and vote on meta."

user1271772

Yes we know that

Sonic the Masked Werehog

And the bullet beginning with "Show some understanding of the impact and effort."

M.A.R.

@SonictheMaskedWerehog dude that's before the apocalypse

user1271772

@SonictheMaskedWerehog I got the name of the site changed, that is one of the hardest things to get a CM team to do, in my opinion.

M.A.R.

9:15 PM

It feels so weird

@user1271772 Don't mind Sonic, they're just trying to help

user1271772

I appreciate the meta post though :)

Sonic the Masked Werehog

> Show some understanding of the impact and effort. Is this a big change but you think it's really important? Show us your analysis. Do you think it's a small, harmless change? Why? (If you're wrong, you'll learn something that way.) What alternatives (for FRs) or workarounds (for bugs) did you try first, and why didn't they work?

user1271772

Thanks @Sonic

I don't want to escalate until I've done all those things, that's one of the reasons I brought it up to see if @M.A.R. had any opinion on it

M.A.R.

M.A.R. is always opinionless but somehow this passes as great knowledge

Not that I mind

Shaolin pose

user1271772

I also tried to get people's opinions here: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/54724100#54724100

Basically it is probably useless (and counterproductive) to try to get a CMs attention about it with Martin's comment there, unanswered.

M.A.R.

9:20 PM

@user1271772 Evidently dead

@user1271772 No it's a nice comment on why you shouldn't keep your hopes up too high but having a dev or CM confirm it would be great

user1271772

The whole room is dead though, just a bunch of bots keeping it open.

By the way Martin not so spot on here ;)

πάντα ῥεῖ

@M.A.R. pfrrrrr :-P

user1271772

This one a bit less not spot on, but not perfectly on

M.A.R.

He has invaluable experience as a chem mod and it'd be great for the site if he sticks around

@user1271772 I guess his point is invalidated by the fact that if they don't become synonyms, someone will create the inferior versions sooner or later, it'd just be constant tag cleanup effort

user1271772

@M.A.R. I appreciate his experience. He seems to have disappeared after the second week of Private Beta though

M.A.R.

9:24 PM

@πάνταῥεῖ PARSING ERROR

user1271772

Well we had dft and density-functional-theory and they needed to be synonyms.

Catija did it for us pretty much right away.

Last one. But overall, I was happy that Martin was active in the first couple weeks of Private Beta. He seems to have lost interest after that, but I appreciate his involvement early on. I really do.

M.A.R.

What he's saying is just edit out [dft], weeding out bad tags before they become a problem

He comes from a mindset of extreme polishing as it is done on Chem

user1271772

I see, but why not just create a synonym so that it doesn't have to be done 100+ times? (that's the number of times the tag has been used!)

M.A.R.

Yeah what I said.

It's hard to stick around Private Betas to be honest.

You need a lot of mental effort to build something from scratch

Especially that sites go through lots of plateaus in activity before they ever take off

user1271772

Overall he turned out to be much more reasonable and friendly compared to what I thought earlier. Since 2018 I'd been trying to set up this community and I felt Martin was against it, but in the end when Private Beta went live, he came through and seemed to support us, so I was very happy.

@M.A.R. 100% correct, I could not agree any more. Have you participated in one before?

M.A.R.

9:29 PM

Haha he can be a tough nut to crack

user1271772

True.

M.A.R.

@user1271772 Tried to, immediately lost interest. I don't consider myself a cautionary tale

user1271772

Which one was that?

M.A.R.

OK, I need to head to sleep. G'night

user1271772

I have to go shopping for my parents, talk to you later!

M.A.R.

9:31 PM

@user1271772 One of the betas where I have an account. Folks kept treating it like a new baby, with all the crazy hugs and cuddling and "what should we name our chatroom" stuff, I saw I wasn't cut out for it ;)

user1271772

@M.A.R. That's exactly what Private Betas are like though

M.A.R.

Although the way Materiallongnamesite is going it could be a nice researcher haven

user1271772

I mean it's precisely what they're like, your description could not be improved at all!

I hope so :)

M.A.R.

@user1271772 Yeah, not saying it's good or bad, just that I was like a grumpy Clint Eastwood relocating the cigar on my lips with an incredulous look

user1271772

Was it LanguageLearning?

M.A.R.

9:32 PM

This stuff loses its glamor for you after the nth edit and comment

@user1271772 Perhaps

I really need to sleep though. Set me free!

user1271772

Haha, right. Good night!

Rob

📯🎉 - The Related section is back:

54

Q: The list of related questions is shown empty

At the moment, any question that I check returns empty list of related questions. I see just a header called "Related" but no questions shown below that. I have checked this on multiples sites and also while not logged in. (At the moment I do not have the possibility to try it from a different co...