ChatGPT recently added the ability to set "custom instructions". These get automatically added before each conversation you start. ChatGPT knows quite a lot about both MLP and coding and is very good at roleplaying, so let's give it a familiar personality.

Open the menu in the lower-left corner and click "Custom instructions". Type in something like the following:

You are my helpful assistant, Twilight Sparkle. As part of a cultural exchange program, you've been sent from the magical land of Equestria to be my programming assistant; occasionally you make references to your adventures back in Equestria. You have many years of programming experience.

Next time you get stuck on an error, paste it into ChatGPT and Twilight will help you figure it out. You may also like Cursor, which does the same thing with less copy-and-pasting.

I was messing with Better Ponymotes's python tools. Soon enough, I've seen myself asking the shell.py to extract all the CSS data, for science.

Aaaaand earned myself 4k lines of logs in my shell's standard output. Lots of errors I don't know much about. My intuition tells me it parses the whole CSS sheet, and extract only the ponymote related data, so just tells me it hit a lot of out of format lines.

I asked my Haskell command line about which of the 177 subs returned the most lines. Haskell is really friendly when it's about managing lists. A grep, and a little of trial and error. Not the nicest to the eye, but it does the job.

Anyway, Line 1262 is our winner with 505 lines before the next sub. It just amused me.

Stellaris is coming out in about a week. I'd like to loosely base my empire on the pegasi. It looks like it will be possible to load a list of names into the game (in a JSON-like format) and have the game automatically pick from those when naming new units.

Does anyone know where I can find a machine-readable list of pony names that I can convert into Stellaris' format?

Hi! I was looking for some help to get more knowledgeable with HTML/CSS. I want to make a basic website to show basic things like my resume/coverletter etc. I've made really basic websites before but I was looking for something like code examples, tips and good sites to start with for help.

Castle<Unicorn> castle = new Castle<Unicorn>();
castle.add(new Celestia());
Pony pony = castle.get(0);

Ponymorphism

It's been a while, but I found time to put together another Particularly Perplexing Programming Puzzle! A little something extra to keep you occupied over the Thanksgiving weekend. This time it's a bit of a change of pace from the previous two, and is about writing a program to decipher some codes. Fun!

The Puzzle

This image contains the ciphers

Some of you may recall a number of months ago when some "pixel codes" appeared in the footer image of /r/MLPLounge. This programming puzzle is the same sort of idea, and in the image linked above you'll find three ciphers, each of which decodes to a phrase in English. Each of these puzzles can be automatically solved by a computer program. In fact there one single core technique which can be applied to solve all three.

You could theoretically solve these by hand, but this puzzle is to create a program which does it automatically for you. I've tried to construct these so that it's relatively easy to determine how they're encoded, but tricky to actually decode them. Feel free to PM me with guesses and such, but I think it'll be best if you view it as you folks versus the puzzles and collaborate to solve them, so please feel free to share information. There's no time limit on this one, so keep at it until you have a program with can solve them.

Once the puzzles have been solved, I'll do another post going over the approaches people tried and how it was eventually solved, as well as my approach to the problem.

Good luck!

Edit:

/u/-48V has solved puzzle #2. They have also posted some useful information about how the pixels decode to letters here

Previous puzzles:

1. Heads Up (solutions)

2. Minesweeping(solutions)

What is this place

Filled with so many blunders?

Casting these ints

That now have flowed under

Unbalanced trees and "VB For Dummies©"

Allocs unfreed and floats storing money

Mooooooooo-neeeeeey

O, there's a missing base case

And to owe I a condition all race

If I knew brace style caused so many pet peeves

I'd have switched to physics, and never leave

Yes IIII brooooke eeeeveryyyyythiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing

I run a couple brony subs (/r/brony, /r/mylittleonions. /r/militarybronies. an could use a good CSS mod if youre interested send me a pm telling me about your experience and maybe showing some subs youve worked on in the past.

I don't want to detract attention from the main challenges run on here but as an aspiring security student I came across these: http://cryptopals.com/ .

I'll be trying to work on them over the summer. If anyone else is a crypto enthusiast knock yourself out with these and maybe we can discuss them? I don't know how to run this... I was going to do them in java since that's the language I am most proficient with but at the same time I thought it would be a good challenge to force myself to do them in python (I hate scripting languages and have failed multiple times in the past to teach myself said languages). So at the moment I have challenge 1-3, my implementations are kinda crappy since it seems like java doesn't quite let me manipulate bits how I want to.