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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Sure. You have to solve it from inside out:

    • not()…See comment below for this one, I was tricked is a base function that negates what’s inside (turning True to False and vice versa) giving it no parameter returns “True” (because no parameter counts as False)
    • str(x) turns x into a string, in this case it turns the boolean True into the text string ‘True’
    • min(x) returns the minimal element of an iterable. In this case the character ‘T’ because capital letters come before non-capital letters, otherwise it would return ‘e’ (I’m not entirely sure if it uses unicode, ascii or something else to compare characters, but usually capitals have a lower value than non-capitals and otherwise in alphabetical order ascending)
    • ord(x) returns the unicode number of x, in this case turning ‘T’ into the integer 84
    • range(x) creates an iterable from 0 to x (non-inclusive), in this case you can think of it as the list [0, 1, 2, …82, 83] (it’s technically an object of type range but details…)
    • sum(x) sums up all elements of a list, summing all numbers between 0 and 84 (non-inclusive) is 3486
    • chr(x) is the inverse of ord(x) and returns the character at position x, which, you guessed it, is ‘ඞ’ at position 3486.

    The huge coincidental part is that ඞ lies at a position that can be reached by a cumulative sum of integers between 0 and a given integer. From there on it’s only a question of finding a way to feed that integer into chr(sum(range(x)))






  • When were talking about teaching kids the alphabet we need to train both individual and applied letters

    This is only slightly related but I once met a young (USAmerican) adult who thought the stripy horse animal’s name was pronounced zed-bra in British English and it was really hard to convince her otherwise. In her mind zebra was strongly connected to Z-bra, so of course if someone was to pronounce the letter “zed” it would turn into “zed-bra” and not just into “zeh-bra”.







  • It’s even simpler. A strictly increasing series will always have element n be higher than the average between any element<n and element n.

    Or in other words, if the number of calls is increasing every day, it will always be above average no matter the window used. If you use slightly larger windows you can even have some local decreases and have it still be true, as long as the overall trend is increasing (which you’ve demonstrated the extreme case of).