There are two kinds of “how-to”.

1. How to do something - that’s what this is. Simple, straightforward, accomplishes its goal.

2. How to understand something - explaining how and why this works and how you could generalize what this is doing to related projects.

However, even if you are interested in the second choice, this is still useful! Your next step is just to look into the libraries that the rembg package uses.

Not too much to tell really. I run a couple of hobby websites that get 10’s to 100’s of visitors per month. I have an unnecessary postgres server that keeps a bunch of datasets I’ve built up over the years for the rare instances where I want to query. I have a couple VMs that just run my web scraping scripts.

In general - they are easier for me to rent and setup than teardown!

When I learned about repl.it bounties my fantasy was something like “Do programming problems get VM credits” and it seemed ideal - but underwhelming in reality.

It’s a shame - cause it seems like it could be a neat system. Plus, I would like a way to reduce the cost of all my virtual machines.

I suppose that must be what’s happening. I wonder about how good the output is from these jobs. I’m almost curious enough to post something there myself just to see what the other side is like.

Please do!

I’ve been trying Spotify out for podcasts to replace Google podcasts. I had a mental block at first, thinking of Spotify as anything other than a “music” app, but, now that I’ve broken that block - I like it.

Regarding courses though - I’m not so sure. I think projects, homework, and interaction (e.g. with fellow students and instructors) are a big part of learning. I’ll definitely check it out, and I hope Spotify delivers something good, but I’m a bit skeptical at the moment.

I think this is a good question and answer in the sense that it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of the student - exactly what you hope an exam would do! (Except for how this seems to combine javascript’s .length and python’s print statement - maybe there is a language like this though - or ‘print’ was a javascript function defined elsewhere).

This reminds me once of when I was a TA in a computer science course in the computer lab. Students were working on a “connect 4” game - drop a token in a column, try to connect 4. A student asked me, while writing the drop function, if he would have to write code to ensure that the token “fell” to bottom of the board, or if the computer would understand what it was trying to do. Excellent question! Because the question connects to a huge misunderstanding that the answer has a chance to correct.

Neat! I love Conway’s Game of Life. Something very zen watching it and thinking about it. I was surprised to see Conway say that he’s not really a fan of the Game of Life himself.

One concept I would add is that the machine hosting the dead man’s switch should have a booby trap.

Suppose your enemies know about the dead man’s switch. (And they probably should know as it would encourage them not to murder you.) They want to disable it, so they abduct and torture you for the details. You must be able to give them details that will plausibly allow them to disable the DMS - so that they stop torturing you, while secretly triggering your backup.

I imagine this as the VM running the DMS has a process that runs on login. The process silently runs, sleeps for an hour, and then sends a message to a second VM, configured from a totally different account. That second VM will wait a month (long enough for your enemies to stop torturing you and assume they’ve won - or for you to disable in the case of an accidental trigger) and then post your information on various socials. When you login to the DMS machine you have an hour to kill the process or a month to kill the second machine if you forgot to do so.

I would also say that you can pay for your VMs in advance using bitcoin or monero (njalla accepts both!). Pay in advance for 10 years from separate wallets, configure your DMS and backup, and let them go!