#Best sites for Python

[deepak-garhwal]

Increase the level with top websites for Python training in Delhi

If you are a coding enthusiast and want to learn Python programming. Then explore the top websites for the best websites for Python training in Delhi.

[zynetoglobaltechnologies]

Top Custom Web App Development Company Near You

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Zyneto Technologies: A Leading Custom Web Development and Web App Development Company

In the digital age, having a well-designed, high-performing website or web application is crucial to a business’s success. Zyneto Technologies stands out as a trusted web app development company, providing top-tier custom web development services tailored to meet the specific goals of your business. Whether you’re searching for “website developers near me” or partnering with global experts, Zyneto offers scalable, responsive, and feature-rich solutions that are designed to help your business grow.

Why Zyneto Technologies is the Top Custom Web Development Company Near You

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Zyneto Technologies offers web development solutions that cater to both startups and large enterprises. Their custom approach ensures that every project, regardless of scale, receives the attention it deserves. By leveraging modern technologies, frameworks, and best practices in web development, Zyneto delivers solutions that are not only technically advanced but also tailored to meet the specific needs of your business. Whether you’re building a simple website or a complex web app, their team ensures your project is executed efficiently and effectively.

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When searching for "website developers near me" or a top custom web app development company, Zyneto Technologies is the ideal choice. Their combination of global expertise, cutting-edge technology, and focus on user experience ensures that every solution they deliver is designed to meet your business goals. Whether you need a custom website, web application, or enterprise-level solution, Zyneto offers the expertise and dedication to bring your digital vision to life.

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visit - https://zyneto.com/

[mtariqniaz]

The 20 Best Programming Languages to Learn in 2024

In this article, I’ll share the best programming languages in 2024. Choosing the best programming language can be tricky. Plus, when you consider that the Stack Overflow developer survey alone lists more than 40 different programming languages, there’s a lot to choose from! So, if you’re curious about the best programming language to learn, I’m here to help! Perhaps you’re interested in data, and…

[phantomrose96]

Hey not to go all "tumblr is a professional networking site" on you, but how did you get to work for Microsoft??? I'm a recent grad and I'm being eviscerated out here trying to apply for industry jobs & your liveblogging about your job sounds so much less evil than Data Entry IT Job #43461

This place is basically LinkedIn to me.

I'm gonna start by saying I am so so very sorry you're a recent grad in the year 2024... Tech job market is complete ass right now and it is not just you. I started fulltime in 2018, and for 2018-2022 it was completely normal to see a yearly outflow of people hopping to new jobs and a yearly inflow of new hires. Then sometime around late-spring/early-summer of 2022 Wallstreet sneezed the word "recession" and every tech company simultaneously shit themselves.

Tons of layoffs happened, meaning you're competing not just with new grads but with thousands of experienced workers who got shafted by their company. My org squeaked by with a small amount of layoffs (3 people among ~100), but it also means we have not hired anyone new since mid-2022. And where I used to see maybe 4-8 people yearly leave in order to hop to a new job, I think I've seen 1 person do that in the whole last year and a half.

All this to say it's rough and I can't just say "send applications and believe in yourself :)".

I have done interviews though. (I'm not involved in resume screening though, just the interviews of candidates who made it past the screening phase.) So I have at least some relevant advice, as well as second-hand knowledge from other people I know who've had to hop jobs or get hired recently.

If you have friends already in industry who you feel comfortable asking, reach out to them. Most companies have a recommendation process where a current employee fills out a little form that says "yeah I'd recommend such-and-such for this job." These do seem to carry weight, since it's coming from a trusted internal person and isn't just one of the hundreds of cold-call applications they've received.

A lot of tech companies--whether for truly well-intentioned reasons or to just check a checkbox--are on the lookout for increasing employee diversity. If you happen to have anything like, for example, "member of my college Latino society", it's worth including on your resume among your technical skills and technical projects.

I would add "you're probably gonna have to send a lot of applications" as a bullet point but I'm sure you're already doing that. But here it is as a bullet point anyway.

(This is kind of a guess, since it's part of the resume screening) but if you can dedicate some time to getting at least passingly familiar with popular tech/stacks for the positions you're looking into, try doing that in your free time so you can list it on your resume. Even better if you make a project you can point to. Like if you're aiming for webdev, get familiar with React and probably NodeJS. On top of being comfortable in one of the all-purpose languages like C(++) or Java or Python.

If you get to the interview phase - a company that is good to work for WILL care that you're someone who's good to work with. A tech-genius who's a coworker-hating egotistical snob is a nuisance at best and a liability at worst for companies with even a half-decent culture. When I do interviews, "Is this someone who's a good culture fit?" is as important as the technical skills. You'll want to show you'll be a perfectly pleasant, helpful, collaborative coworker. If the company DOESN'T care about that... bullet dodged.

For the technical questions, I care more about the thought process than I do the right answer, especially for entry-level. If you show a capacity for asking good, insightful clarifying questions, an ability to break down the problem, explain your thought process, and backtrack&alter your approach upon realizing something won't work, that's all more important than just being able to spit out a memorized leetcode answer. (I kinda hate leetcode for this reason, and therefore I only ask homebrewed questions, because I don't want the technical portion to hinge at all on whether someone managed to memorize the first 47 pages of leetcode problems). For a new hire, the most important impression you can give me is that you have a technical grasp and that you're capable of learning. Because a new hire isn't going to be an expert in anything, but they're someone who's capable of learning the ropes.

That's everything I have off the top of my head. Good luck anon. I'm very sorry you were born during a specific range of years that made you a new grad in 2024 and I hope it gets better.

[mariacallous]

From 2015.

Excerpted from Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World, by Srdja Popovic. Out now by Spiegel & Grau.

It was early on in our efforts to take down Slobodan Milosevic, and like all novice activists, we had a moment of reckoning. Looking around the room at one of our meetings, we realized that we were a bunch of Serbian kids, and rather than focus on what we had going for us, we began obsessing about everything we didn’t have. We didn’t have an army. We didn’t have a lot of money. We had no access to media, which was virtually all state-run. The dictator, we realized, had both a vision and the means to make it come true; his means involved instilling fear. We had a much better vision, but we thought on that grim evening, no way of turning it into a reality.

It was then that we came up with the smiling barrel.

The idea was really very simple. As we chatted, someone kept talking about how Milosevic only won because he made people afraid, and someone else said that the only thing that could trump fear was laughter. It was one of the wisest things I’ve ever heard. As Monty Python skits have always been up there right with Tolkien for me, I knew very well that humor doesn’t just make you chuckle—it makes you think. We started telling jokes. Within an hour, it seemed to us entirely possible that all we really needed to bring down the regime were a few healthy laughs.  And we were eager to start laughing.

We retrieved an old and battered barrel from a nearby construction site and delivered it to our movement’s “official” designer—my best friend, Duda, a designer—and asked him to draw a realistic portrait of the fearsome leader’s face. Duda was delighted to help. When we came back a day or two later, we had ourselves Milosevic-on-a-barrel, grinning an evil grin, his forehead marked by the barrel’s numerous rust spots. It was a face so comical that even a 2-year-old would have found it amusing. But we weren’t done. We asked Duda to paint a big, pretty sign that read “Smash his face for just a dinar.” That was about two cents at the time, so it was a pretty good deal. Then we took the sign, the barrel, and a baseball bat to Knez Mihailova Street, the main pedestrian boulevard in Belgrade. Right off Republic Square, Knez Mihailova Street is always filled with shoppers and strollers, as this is where everyone comes to check out the latest fashions and meet their friends for drinks in the afternoons. We placed the barrel and the sign smack in the middle of the street—right at the center of all the action—and hastily retreated to, the Russian Emperor, a nearby coffee shop, to watch.

The first few passersby who noticed the barrel and the sign seemed confused, unsure what to make of the brazen display of dissidence right there in the open. The following 10 people who checked it out were more relaxed; some even smiled, and one went as far as picking up the bat and holding it for a few moments before putting it down and quickly walking away. Then, the moment we’d been waiting for: A young man, just a few years younger than us, laughed out loud, searched his pockets, took out a dinar, plopped it into a hole on top of the barrel, picked up the bat, and with a gigantic swing smashed Milosevic in the face. You could hear the solid thud reverberate five blocks in each direction. He must have realized that with the few remaining independent radio and newspapers of Belgrade criticizing the government all the time, one dent in a barrel wasn’t going to land him in prison. To him, the risk of action was acceptably low. And once he took his first crack at Milosevic’s face, others started to realize that they too could get away with it. It was something between peer pressure and a mob mentality. Soon curious bystanders lined up for a turn at bat and took their own swings. People started to stare, then to point, then to laugh. Before long some parents were encouraging their children who were too small for the bat to kick the barrel instead with their tiny legs. Everybody was having fun, and the sound of this barrel being smashed was echoing all the way down to Kalemegdan Park. It didn’t take long for dinars to pour into the barrel and for poor Duda’s artistic masterpiece—the stern and serious mug of Mr. Milosevic—to get beaten into unrecognizability by an enthusiastic and cheerful crowd.

As this was happening, my friends and I were sitting outside at the café, sipping double espressos, smoking Marlboros, and cracking up. It was fun to see all these people blowing off steam with our barrel. But the best part lay ahead.

It came when the police arrived. It took 10 or 15 minutes. A patrol car stopped nearby and two pudgy policemen stepped out and surveyed the scene. This is when I came up with my beloved “Pretend Police” game. I played it for the first time at the café that day. The police’s first instinct, I knew, would be to arrest people. Ordinarily, of course, they’d arrest the demonstration’s organizers, but we were nowhere to be found. That left the officers with only two choices. They could arrest the people lining up to smack the barrel—including waiters from nearby cafés, good-looking girls holding shopping bags, and a bunch of parents with children—or they could confiscate the barrel itself. If they went for the people, they would cause an outrage, as there’s hardly a law on the books prohibiting violence against rusty metal cylinders, and mass arrests of innocent bystanders is the surest way for a regime to radicalize even its previously pacified citizens.

Which left only one viable choice: Arrest the barrel. Within minutes of their arrival, the two rotund officers shooed away the onlookers, positioned themselves on either side of the filthy thing, and hauled it off in their squad car. Another friend of ours, a photographer from a small students’ newspaper, was on hand to shoot this spectacle. The next day, we made sure to disseminate his photographs far and wide. Our stunt ended up on the cover of two opposition newspapers, the type of publicity that you literally couldn’t buy. That picture was truly worth a 1,000 words: It told anyone who so much as glimpsed at it that Milosevic’s feared police really only consisted of a bunch of comically inept dweebs.

Of course, this was just the beginning. Over the next six years, my friends and I built Otpor—Serbian for resistance—a nonviolent social movement that challenged Milosevic’s regime, stripped it of its legitimacy, and led to its downfall. But it began by chipping away at the people’s fear. It began with a joke.

Today my colleagues and I help train nonviolent democratic movements around the world, and the barrel story is one of the first stories we share with aspiring activists. And, without fail, every time people hear about it they say more or less what my Egyptian friends did when we walked them through Republic Square. “It’ll never work back where I’m from.” But I remind my new friends that while humor varies from country to country, the need to laugh is universal. I’ve noticed this as I’ve traveled to meet with activists around the world. People from Western Sahara or Papua New Guinea may not agree with me on what exactly makes something funny—for more on this check out any German “comedy”—but everyone agrees that funny trumps fearsome anytime. Good activists, like good stand-up comedians, just need to practice their craft.   

[a-fox-studies]

hi! i'm shy as hell usually but trying to branch out cuz i saw u reblog that post abt asks. do u have any recs on where to start for a beginner coder (who has virtually no free time)? i feel like the landscape is so vast and overwhelming.

Hiii!! Thanks for the ask!

I think the best thing I've learned throughout my coding journey is that you must first pick a field that interests you. Computer Science is a VAST world, once you pick a field, you must really commit to it. For example, maybe data science interests you. You look up the requirements to be a date scientist. I don't have in-depth knowledge on it, but I do know that you need good knowledge about python and some of its modules like numpy, matplotlib etc. So you start learning the basics, and then move on to the modules. The key is to find what you love, then find what you need in order to pursue it.

For a kickstart I'd recommend w3schools — it's a really good site that has so many tutorials on various languages.

I was also a person that had no free time at all to focus on my learning. But then I realised that you must make time if you want to work on something with dedication. So now I devote Sunday afternoons to learning and working on my projects, and I try to stick to it as much as possible, except for when I have uni exams or any submissions lol

Hope this helped!!

[copperbadge]

Amateur Translation Programs

So I had a lot of imaginative and informative responses to my post about looking for an amateur translation program -- something where I could load in a foreign language and it would insert a box where I could add a translation every-other-line. The idea was that this way I could practice translation with more advanced texts, and texts I chose, and thus move away from Duolingo, which at this point is good for drilling and daily practice but not for more advanced learning.

I didn't find precisely what was needed but I did get some inspiration for further explanation, and I also learned that adding the term "glossing" (thank you @thewalrus-said) into my searches helped a great deal in terms of weeding out programs that were either "Let this AI translate for you" or just endless promotional links for Babbel and Duolingo and such. I thought I'd collect up the suggestions and post them here; at the end I'm including my best swing at designing what I wanted, and why it doesn't work yet.

Suggestion one, from many people, was various ways to generate a page that is simply fixed Italian text with space underneath each line to add in a translation. This is pretty simple as a process and there are sites that will do it for you, such as this one that @ame-kage suggested. However, most of these don't allow for movement in the Italian text, and many produce a PDF which you would need to print out in order to write on unless you're willing to open it in Acrobat (and deal with Acrobat). A good solution for some but not what I'm looking for purely because I'm trying to make this super frictionless so that (knowing myself as I do) I will actually do it.

I did find this version interesting, suggested by @drivemetogeek: Have one word doc saved as your "template" doc and set the line spacing as 2.0 or higher. Select your text from source and paste it into the template doc as text-only. Ctrl a, ctrl c to select all and copy, then open a new document and "paste special" as picture. Right click and set the "wrap text" as behind text. Now you have a document where you can, basically, type over the existing text because it's the background of the page. This seems like the most frictionless version, because you could set up a bunch of them ahead of time. If you wanted to move between desktop and mobile, however, you'd need to ensure that the pasted image was fairly narrow so that you don't have to sideways-scroll.

Relatedly, people suggested generating a document that is simply the Italian text with empty space beneath it for typing in of the translation. This can be done either semi-automated, using a macro or a language like Python, or find-and-replace on, say, the stops at the ends of sentences. It basically outputs the same as above but with a more digitally accessible format, without any more effort than above. If you were to do this in Google Sheets you could also fix the column width so that it didn't do anything weird when you opened it on your phone. But it is still very friction-y, and does not allow for easy shifting of the Italian as needed. There's high probability of the translation breaking weirdly across the page. Still a top option in terms of simplicity and access.

@smokeandholograms suggested another variation illustrated here where essentially you're converting the text to a series of tables, with each paragraph a row, and an empty cell next to it for the translation. I might play around more with this one eventually, since I think I could possibly make it a three-column and put the Italian in one, the translation in the next, and the auto-translate to let me know where I might be slipping in the third. (Not that I trust auto-translate but comparing a hand translation to an auto translation can be useful in terms of working out when I've messed up the way a tense or mood is read. I tend to read indirect verbs as automatically imperative because I'm a weirdo.)

@wynjara linked to an add-in for Word specifically designed for translators, known as TransTools; this appears to employ a macro to do the same thing, though it does have a format where you can place the translation next to each sentence directly rather than in a separate cell. The full suite of tools is only $45 which is reasonable for my budget, but for what I need I think I could also just create the macro.

Using LaTeX as a tool specially designed for glossing was an option on offer, but I don't know enough about LaTeX to figure out the pros of this one, which is in itself the major con -- there's a learning curve that I think varies widely by person but for me is unfortunately a wall. It came out of a discussion on Reddit about trying to find something like what I want; also in that discussion is a link to a code generator that allows you to…do something…to the initial language, but it's not entirely clear to me (I'm sure it's clear to people who understand coding) what you would then do with it that would allow it to be output in the way I'm hoping for. Like, I could turn a paragraph of text into HTML, I understand that far, but any Italian I find is already on a website.

Moving more into apps that might work, Redditors on the LaTeX discussion suggested SIL Fieldworks, which is a professional language tech tool. Fieldworks isn't a program I'd previously encountered but much as with the ones I had, it looks like the learning curve is fairly steep and it is definitely overkill generally for what I need, though it might also harbor within it the thing I want. It is free, so I may download and play around with it.

@brightwanderer suggested using note-taking or "whiteboard" apps such as Freeform or Nebo; these are generally a kind of "infinite canvas" in which you can drop objects, text boxes, or handwriting. I don't know that Freeform would be measurably different to just using Word and a macro, since I'd still have to input/format all the text and then be stuck with the same "fixed text" setup -- and it's also iOS only -- but for some folks it might be more helpful. Nebo is a similar infinite-canvas with unfortunately the same issues, though on the plus it's available for Android, which is where most of my mobile property resides.

@bloodbright suggested that I was looking for a CAT tool, a professional translation tool mainly used by translators working in the field. This was a concept I'd encountered, but I hadn't found a good starting place. They suggested Smartcat and OmegaT. Smartcat bills itself as an AI translation platform and is HARD pushing the "don't translate it yourself, hire a translator or let AI do it" angle, so it's difficult to tell what it offers in terms of actual tools for translators, and it's also cagey about pricing, so I can't really evaluate it. OmegaT is free and gives off big "some weirdo homebrewed this in their basement" vibe (which I am here for) but I also recognized it from screengrabs that were the reason I veered away from professional-grade software: it looked too complex. Realistically, the major downside of OmegaT is that I don't think I can put it on my phone. One thing I did find interesting is that once you translate a portion of the text, the original language goes away, though I assume you can turn that off if needed. I do kind of like that because it means my distractable brain is looking at Less Stuff.

So where did I end up?

Well, it looked like I was going to have to try a homebrew myself. I had the idea of trying some of the initial suggestions but in reverse -- designing a document where every other line was a single-cell table fixed to the page. You could paste in the Italian, which would wrap around the cells, and then enter the English in the cells.

You can fix a table in place in Google Docs -- you click on the table, then under Table > Style select Wrap Text, Both Sides, and Fix On Page. Getting the whole page set up is a little labor intensive but once you did that, you could just save it as a template and make a duplicate of it each time. And this actually works….on desktop.

Unfortunately, if you open it in the mobile Docs app, the app can't handle the fixed tables and automatically moves them all to after the text that's been pasted in. I tried redesigning it so that it's a table within a table -- one for the Italian, then within that a series of them for the English -- but when you nest a table in Google Docs, it doesn't let you fix the second table in place. And you are also still dealing with the wrap issue, although you can resize the page and add a large right-hand margin as a kludge of a fix for that.

You can build this same kind of document in Word, so I tried building one in Word and then uploading it to Drive, but when you open the Word file in Docs (or in Microsoft Word for Android), it still strips the fixed positioning -- there's just some functionality missing from both apps that doesn't allow them to handle fixed-position tables.

So, the design is sound, just not the final execution. If I could program an app, I could probably remedy the issues with it -- it's simply a series of text boxes nested inside one another with different formatting. I would imagine that's relatively basic to set up, although given that neither Docs nor Word can handle fixed tables in mobile, perhaps I've stumbled on a much bigger problem that everyone is ignoring because nobody actually needs or wants fixed tables in mobile. :D

Experimentation is ongoing, anyway. I might simply have to resign myself to the fact that my translation study is going to have to be in front of a computer, which might be for the best anyway when I inevitably want to compare my translation to an auto-translate to see where I might have read something wrong.

[archiveyourblog]

How to back up your Tumblr blog

Not sure if all of you heard the news, but Wordpress laid off 16% of its staff, which happened to include senior tumblr staff like cyle. According to 3liza, the amount of staff running tumblr is about 25.

Welp. Will Tumblr finally die? I don't know. It's pretty likely, since this site costs millions to run and to host all this content, but I'll stay till the end. But I backed up my blog, with the help of a post that can't be reblogged rn.

you can reblog this one though.

Quoth butchlinkle: "In your blog settings you have the ability to initiate a blog export, and this will generate a backup for your blog.

Fair warning though, if you’ve been on the platform for a long time this archive is likely to be quite hefty in file size. This blog I have had for 5 years with 22k posts, and the export from tumblr came to be 48GB. My previous blog I made in 2011 and has 95k posts, so needless to say I did not use tumblr’s built in export to back that one up.

If you want more control over exactly what you back up from your blog, I recommend that you use tumblr-utils instead. It allows you to backup specific tags, post types, and to ignore posts that you did not create (reblogs where you’ve added a comment count unfortunately do not count unless you use the older version of the script made with python 2.7).

To use it:

download and install python

create an application on tumblr to get an api key

create a folder where you would like to save your backups and right click to open it in the terminal/command prompt, or type cmd.exe in the address bar from inside that folder

Backing up just my original posts from this blog with this command came to 632MB rather than 48GB, and also gave me the option to save my posts in JSON format which will be useful for converting my posts to a new format for self hosting.

On that note I’m currently looking into figuring out a simple (and ideally free) way of self hosting a static site blog that utilises activitypub, and also converting my old posts to re-host on said blog.

This post series by maho.dev on implementing activitypub with any static site is my primary source of guidance atm if you also want to try figure that out yourself, as well as having an explanation for why you’d even want to do this if you don’t already know

but if tumblr goes down before I get things sorted and write up a post about it then i’ll be reporting back on it via my bsky, mastodon, and toyhouse accounts

if you dont have an account on any of these I’ll also be sharing an update via my personal site’s RSS feed, link of which includes an explanation of what RSS is and some feed readers you can use, I highly recommend checking it out as getting a feed reader is going to be the best way you can stay connected with people if they scatter across the internet!

tldr: download tumblr-utils to backup your blog more efficiently, introduce yourself to RSS and get a feed reader to stay connected with people, consider saving mine so you can find out how to self host your blog later if tumblr goes down."

here's a guide from the notes: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1yBWlk-yEgpSoEh3c9oLhz_kbLtUGqbqzOpCtJsvQgjI/mobilebasic?pli=1#h.u9vj7pezwpcy

Back up those blogs. This was way faster than trying to use Webarchive, and webarchive seems to be only good for saving text, audio, and video, because it saved none of the images. And remember: I did not write this guide, and I do not know a thing about coding or fixing bugs.

[megumi-fm]

👾 this fortnight in megumi.fm

---🎓 a c a d e m i c 🎓---

🔓 Achievement Unlocked: graduate soon?🏆 — the player has cleared most undergrad requirements → completed all classes for undergrad degree → completed three month requirement of internship ⭐ LEVEL UP >> bi in biotechnology — the player has gotten admission into their fav uni for masters 📍 new level completion requirements 🔄 offer letter acceptance tasks [1/3] ▸ accommodation related paperwork ▸ student visa

--- 💻 w o r k 💻---

�� bi-weekly challenge complete! ✅ run binding site alignment against template ✅ run binding site alignment against self ✅ threshold cutoff 📌next week's task: visualization on cytoscape [💬 view all challenges?] ⭐LEVEL UP >> snake charmer 🏆 — the player has achieved intermediate level mastery in python -> completed debugging of all code -> added modules for system arg-parsing -> upload to github with proper readme 3/6 months of remaining internship to unlock achievement —⚗️sorcerer's apprentice

--- 💊 u s e r - s t a t s 💊---

key: ◆ - completed / ◇ - not done 📅 tracking [◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆] 🍶 2L+ water [◆◇◇◇◇◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆] 👟 movement [◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◇◇◇◆◆◆◆] ⭐ LEVEL UP >> amateur compass — the player has learnt choreography of SVT's Left & Right

--- 🎲 recreation 🎲 ---

📺 watched Kung Fu Panda in theatres 🍰 birthday celebrations 📖 read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

——— [1st - 14th Apr; week 15+16/52 || I had the time of my life making this post xD the last couple weeks have been pretty fun, and I'm nearing the end of my degree, I'm anxious and excited for what's to come xD. also this post is very much inspired by the achievement unlocked concept in @zzzzzestforlife's lil animal crossing tag game post they just always have the best post formats and concepts I'm in love ]

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

All Right, Let's Do a Dumb One

LeetCode has a bunch of problems that are at this point almost famous for how laughably unrepresentative they are of work in the coding world. Like, there are points where demonstrating that you can solve one also incidentally demonstrates that you know certain kinds of critical thinking, and those questions are genuinely quite good, but most of the time it's just a Credit Score kind of thing where what you demonstrate is that you spent time practicing on LeetCode, and therefore the site made itself necessary by getting enough business decision-makers to trust it. Anyway.

This is a good example because if I got this as a question during the interview the first thing I'd do is include a disclaimer.

The challenge is to rotate an image 90 degrees. The "image" is represented by a 2D array numbered, so this happens. 123 741 456 -> 852 789 963

Now, the question says they want you to change it in-place, meaning no making a new array and slotting things in. The disclaimer I'd include is: This is a terrible idea. Making a 2D array - even a very large one, such as the kind you'd need to display something hi-def on an IMAX theater screen - is not horribly memory-intensive in the scale of memory that our computers work with today. And working in-place is terribly error-prone, both in initial creation (which someone could theoretically lay at your feet - shouldn't you be good enough to get around that?) AND in maintenance, meaning even if I know I'M hypercompetent at coding and can do it all in-place, I'm metaphorically making a bridge out of hard-to-replace materials and setting that bridge up to fall apart when the maintenance guy doesn't know how to repair it. Not doing it the way they demand you do it for the question would be part of coding best practices.

But what the hell. Let's do it. For the sake of argument.

I'd still be doing a microcosm of the same. You have to record what's in a slot without deleting it.

I'm wondering whether the intent is to run this via breadth-first search, in order to work out which spaces have already been processed? I'm going to go on that assumption.

So in a Rubik's Cube kind of way, I'm going to start from the corners. Because they're the easiest to mathematically transform to each other regardless of size, right? We're supposed to be able to do this whether the square we're rotating is 3x3 or 300x300. For a mercy, it is at least guaranteed to be a square.

We make a (starts off empty) list of processed spaces.

We make a (starts off empty) list of spaces to look at.

for x, y what happens on "rotate" exactly? In terms of corners, for an nxn grid (0, 0) gets moved to (n-1, 0) which gets moved to (n-1, n-1) which gets moved to (0, n-1) which gets moved to (0, 0). Like, in a 4x4 grid (3, 3)'s contents get moved to (0, 3). What about that second space? (1, 0) turns into (3, 1). (2, 0) turns into (3, 2). So for the top row at least, you can reverse the x and y values and invert the number of the y value, and that does it?

...I think this means you want depth-first search, actually. Because you want to be handling the square each time in order to minimize how much info you're holding at a time.

What happens is you make a nested for loop, like

for i in array: for j in list: while (i,j) not in fixed: {Block of code that adds the 4 permutations of (x,y), (-y-1,x), (-x-1,-y-1), (y,-x-1) to a list for processing and then processes them in order, finally adding i,j to fixed when it's done}

The reason this works in Python is that calling for "-1" in a list is the same as saying "length of the list -1." So on a 4x4, calling "-x-1" when x is 0 will loop around the other side of the list to find the 3.

At that point, you're only holding two points of data - the item you've just "picked up" from a given space and then the contents of the space you'll be "putting it down" in. Then you swap it out for what's in the target location.

Again, this would all be a LOT easier to just do by writing to a new list.

At that point, for each space you'd just find the space 90 degrees counterclockwise from it and set that value into the corresponding space.

[remesrobotics]

Nobody knew where the mysterious device that Dr. Harp built into Tokay Woman came from.

It was only a matter of time before it began to exhibit side-effects defying explanation.

Tick tock. Tap tap.

Tokay Woman tapped her claws idly against the side of her helmet in perfect time with the passing of seconds, as she waited for the company truck to pull to a stop.

The gecko bot was set to oversee a demolitions project; something she’d been designed for, but never put to practice at a real work site. To say she was a little antsy was an understatement, but she was looking forward to it all the same. With luck, using her abilities in short, decisive bursts to protect others would be a more fulfilling use of her power than leaving time stopped for hours and hours on end doing nothing but filing a majority of of the labs’ paperwork.

On arrival, her brow furrowed as she hopped out of the vehicle, padded feet barely making sound as they touched simultaneously on the dusty ground. Even from this viewpoint at the perimeter established around the site, the damage was immense. An anti-robot demonstration at a mass production facility had ended in violence, and a large portion of the building was destroyed when a riot vehicle controlled by one of the more belligerent gangs broke out from the line of peaceful protestors and delivered a lethal payload directly into the power plant running the entire south wing of the complex.

Given the sheer amount of damaged heavy equipment and the machinery required to process it all, it was the perfect opportunity to put her time-manipulating Flash Freeze to use. The scale of the operation meant that even a minor accident could have catastrophic consequences, and if she could prevent any of those at all, it would more than validate all the time and money poured into her highly experimental technology... especially for those skeptical of whether or not something so close to Dr. Wily’s mad tinkering would have use in matters more urgent than office work.

The short-statured gecko looked about. Aside from the handful of other Harp Numbers who arrived with her, two large, mechanized scrappers accompanied the caravan of other robots and workers, for processing rubble and scrap too large to move but too mangled to repurpose directly. The scrappers were robots in their own right - designed by a different manufacturer and modeled after giant, three-headed dragons - but given they did not possess any sort of free will, their presence unnerved many of the other self-aware robots present who weren’t owned by the same firm, Tokay included.

As the other Harp Numbers disembarked from a separate and much larger shuttle, Tokay took a small mental survey of who she’d be working with. Of her siblings up to Number 08 - Hatch - only Reach and Nail were absent, as both were much more geared towards building and construction than large-scale demolition. Their skills and abilities were best put to use elsewhere, for efficiency’s sake.

The first out of the massive transport truck behind her was the lightweight and lanky form of Gutter Woman, arcing her back with her arms in the air as she stretched, “Ahh, nothing like the crisp breeze and the smell of sweaty worker bot dudes to wake you up this fine afternoon, huh?” The red snake bot practically sang, flicking her forked tongue.

A biting male voice issued from the truck, “Thank you so much for holding that in until everyone in a mile could hear you, you incorrigible piece of-”

The insult was cut off by a short, deep, “Stop,” as two figures emerged behind Gutter; the diminutive and nearly-spherical Pack Man, held by the huge and imposing Heavy Woman. 

Ignoring her, the horned frog continued to spout, “Completely ignoring the fact that robots can’t even sweat, and you still insist-”

“Pack,” The immense python ‘bot cut him off again with a heavy sigh, “This is the first time in ages we’re assigned to work with another firm. We’re not here to make a bad impression.”

“Don’t go filling me in like I don’t know that already, but if we weren’t, we wouldn’t have brought her,” Pack gestured at Gutter, who simply giggled. That only made Pack angrier, “I’d take Nail sleeping on a bench the whole shift over her running her mouth!”

“Oh come on, if the guys can talk rowdy, so can I,” Gutter lashed the tail attached to the back of her head before running her hand along it, a Search Cutter drone practically materializing in her hand as she did so, “Try not to get so worked up, you might cough up an E-Tank.”

Heavy rolled her eyes as she let Pack down so she could reach into the truck for some large tool boxes; while Pack had almost everything they needed inside the folded space of his internal storage capsules, having other tools immediately handy for both themselves and others was never a bad idea, “Just stay out of trouble. Both of you.” The python looked around, eyes catching the speckled glint of Tokay in her peripheral vision, “Oh, right! You’re with us today!” Heavy smiled, “Ready to go, Tokay?”

Tokay shrugged, though there was a hint of dejection to her nonchalance. Situations like this made her feel like a bit of an outcast to her own siblings, given how often they worked together without her, “I’m good.”

Regardless of now she felt, it looked like they all had everything in order, bickering aside, and it was as good time as any to activate her own, specialized equipment. All she had to do was lift the RFID chip in her right palm to the Flash Freeze unit to let it know it was time.

As Tokay’s hand passed in front of her chest, there was a soft beep and a smooth, otherworldly whirr. The gecko bot’s own core temperature dropped unnaturally, dipping even lower than what her refrigeration pack kept her at to prevent more dramatic fluctuations from destabilizing fine circuits and wiring. She closed her eyes and checked her internal clock to make sure everything was calibrated and running smoothly.

10:40 and 25 seconds

Before any more preparations could be made, the collected Harp Numbers’ attention was drawn by the rough clearing of a human throat.

They turned to see the approach of the site’s foreman; a surly looking middle-aged man in light protective gear. The shoulder of his outfit was emblazoned with an ostentatious “XP” logo. The emblem of Exemplar Production; a large, corporate firm that had recently gone on to buy many of the smaller, independent industrial robot developers for contract work.

That logo was always bad news. The Harp Numbers in particular frowned a bit to see it.

“Save the chit-chat for after the job... or at least during it, after checking in,” the man returned that frown, voice gruff. “I know you lot aren’t our normal crew, but I expected a bit more professionalism than this.”

The accusation stung a bit and it was apparent on everyone’s faces. Gutter’s mask thankfully covered her silent mocking, while Heavy seemed a little more distraught at the thought. Tokay and Pack both scowled deeply, or at least gave off the impression in the frog-bot’s case as he snapped, “We’re already good and ready and waiting for instruction, thank you very much.”

“Less talking, more moving,” the foreman retorted, “Though seeing you’re all mouth maybe that’s all you can do.”

Tokay wanted to bite him.

Before the situation could escalate further as indicated by Pack raising a finger to further respond, he was scooped up by Heavy’s tail, who gave the slightest of bowing nods, trying to play the appeaser, “Apologies, sir. We’ll be on our way.” She adjusted her gait to accommodate the two large toolboxes, one under each arm, and turned to move along, her collar halves sliding closed to form a mask in front of her face.

Tokay, still fully incensed, couldn’t help but notice two siblings had not emerged with the rest, “Slag and Hatch not coming?”

“No,” the foreman gestured over to the rest of the vehicles preparing to move further into the site, “Slag Woman will be taken to Station 2, direct power plant access. It was built to withstand high heat and pressure stress, so hopefully most of the individual pieces are intact enough to reuse.  If anything was too damaged by the explosion to be repaired, it’ll have to be taken apart... and knowing how sturdy the construction of those components are, we’ll need the really big guns to get started on that first while the rest of you sweep up the perimeter and work your way in.”

“Real big guns, huh? They know what’s up, I’ll give them that,” Slag leaned out, waving their antennae-like hair and sounding tiredly sarcastic, with a hint of smugness, “I’ll be sure to leave you something to chew on when you get there.”

Tokay nodded. At least it was a sensible explanation, “And Hatch-?”

The answer arrived in the form of a small frog robot that leapt out of the vehicle, leaping up to perch on her shoulder. An Assist Hopper, which spoke in Hatch’s voice, albeit more mechanical, “I’ll be taken to the midway point. That way I can oversee both sites, and lend a hopping hand where needed. It’ll be more efficient than trying to walk between either.”

“Now,” The foreman narrowed his eyes, trying to break up the conversation with a wave of his hand, “If you don’t mind...”

“Don’t you ‘if you don’t mind’ me,” Tokay hissed back, “You know my job doesn’t start until there’s an accident.” She glanced around, “And from the looks of it, the other teams aren’t in position either. So why don’t you go do your job and go demean them?”

She almost grinned at the man growling in response, trying to ignore his threatening words, “Don’t press your luck. The pretty price tag on your research doesn’t mean you’re exempt from-.”

“Tick tock,” Tokay’s grin turned a little more vicious than even her mocking tone. The foreman couldn’t formulate a response to the jab and turned on his heel, mumbling something under his breath. There was a slight spark of catharsis in the gecko bot’s circuits, knowing she had at least that much power.

It took a few more minutes to get everything into position to start the clean-up, with each company intermingling with one another under thankfully more understanding human supervision; actual workers who knew what the job entailed. A slew of other generic worker robots - Pickelmans, Metalls, and the like - were also chipped in by the city to aid in the work. It was quite the sight to behold, especially with the giant, three-headed dragon scrappers towering over all of them.

Tokay stood off to the side, out of the way but close enough to leap into action at a moment’s notice, keeping a hawk-like gaze on everything. Her claws scratched at her crossed arms lightly, itching in second intervals, waiting for something to happen. It was definitely interesting to see the design differences in the robots present, seeing at least two other companies had contributed robots to this project. Most of them didn’t sport quite the... recognizable style as the Harp Numbers themselves, but they had a distinct look to them all the same. They weren’t Dr. Light originals, but they were certainly inspired.

One of those worker ‘bots - sporting a massive welding cutter for an arm - passed by with a derisive snort, “Heh... Dr. Harp’s paper-pusher. Working hard or hardly w-”

“Don’t-,” Tokay snapped, momentarily, before puffing a frustrated sigh, “...That joke’s never funny.” An overly forced smirk pulled at the side of her mouth, baring sharp teeth, “Doesn’t help that you all are too good at your jobs, putting me out of one,” the gecko bot attempted to jest in return, but it was clear there was a touch of cynicism and irritation behind her words.

“Hey, look at the bright side,” the welder laughed as he walked on by, barely even looking back as he waved dismissively with his manipulator arm, “you’ll always have your desk job.” 

Tokay’s eyelid twitched, but she said nothing, content to silently imagine how it’d feel to pull that oversized arm off with her teeth-

She shook her head to dismiss the image. There were more important things to focus on... in theory. Truth be told, she wasn’t wrong - if they did their jobs well, she wouldn’t have one. But having insurance was better than having none... right? With no active work to do, Tokay had no way of proving her worth... and with no active work to do, there was little to keep her mind from wandering to the ramifications of her being deemed effectively useless...

A sudden noise cut into those anxious thoughts. The giant dragon scrappers, until that point, had been acting as a final stage in picking apart the structures broken down by other robots and organizing larger pieces into piles, only using their shear-shaped jaws to break down certain chunks of metal to feed into the shredders in their torsos. Suddenly, the yellow one at the perimeter site had turned its attention to parts of the building that had not been broken down yet, and started tearing into it with its own jaws.

The massive machine was normally capable of surprising precision given its bulk and power, but there was something unruly and sloppy to its new movements as it tore into a large section of girder-reinforced wall. The deep groaning of massive plates and beams of metal being tugged apart by three sets of giant jaws drew attention as many of the workers stopped what they were doing and turned their collective gaze upward.

Without warning, the assembly snapped, a poor welding job buckling under the conflicting forces, shearing off and launching a sharp metal beam and turning it into a lethal, three-meter-long javelin.

The flying beam set off Tokay’s sensors, as the eyes on her helmet snapped a shot of the scene, clock-hand pupils swiveling in the direction of the deadly debris and noting that there was a form in its path.

In the blink of an eye, everything around Tokay shifted to a light overlay of cyan, with neon highlights on every contour, like a wireframe. In that moment, she got the full gist of the situation. The beam was headed towards another bot... and it just so happened to be the welder.

She chuckled darkly to herself. It would be so easy to just let time take its course, and allow this accident to happen out of spite. But that wouldn’t help her case, nor prove her worth. So, with subtle regret for her own conscience, she made her move

Tokay knew full well that the nature of her Flash Freeze would not eliminate all the momentum if she let time resume as-is, so she had to be careful about her approach. It took less than a second to calculate every angle and vector, to determine the best possible action to take.

Rushing forward on all fours, she leapt up to the beam. The moment her feet made contact with it, she blinked the Flash Freeze - a quick off and on, within a fraction of a second - to allow her kick to shift the energy of the moving metal just a hair enough before freezing again, allowing her to drop to the ground. She spun, wrapping her tail around the large wrist of the welding cutter robot, and resumed time as she pulled.

Everything lined up perfectly; all the forces resumed and her pull shifted the other bot out of the way just enough for the beam to strike the ground barely millimeters to the left; any less and he would have surely been impaled. The welder gasped, as did several of the other robots present.

Tokay smirked, snapping her fingers as she released her tail’s grip, “Hardly work.”

The welder bot was still a little disoriented from the barely averted catastrophic injury, but scoffed at the jab, “Feh... you got me..”  It looked up at the giant mechanized scrapper, “All the same... What the Hell’s Haikidra-1 doing..?”

As a few other robots from that firm gathered to look on, the welder continued, “That ain’t normal behavior...”

“Hm?” Tokay asked, curiously, “Fill me in... I haven’t worked with either of these before.”

“Right..,” another worker from that line commented, “It’s... supposed to be helping organize rubble into piles by material... and shredding and compacting only steel for repurposing.”

The gathered bots watched on as the large demolition bot continued to grab objects at random, ripping large chunks apart with its shearing jaws and dropping smaller pieces into the shredder basin on the top of its main body chassis, ignoring everything else.

“...Should we do something about that?” Tokay asked, somewhat cynically, “Is that even our job?”

“I’d say so,” came a small and familiar, but overly mechanized voice from down at their feet. They looked down to see an Assist Hopper, just as it leapt up to perch on Tokay’s shoulder, “I’m gathering some data and currently looking for an engineer with wireless access to look into the problem,” Hatch confirmed.

Tokay sighed, “Alright... but in the mean time, what do we do? Nobody can get close to it until then, so nobody can do their job...”

“Leave it to me~” chirped an overly confident voice. Everyone turned incredulously to see Gutter shrug, as she strolled right up to the distracted machine, just in front of its front-end baler doors.

“Gutter!” Hatch yelled through her Hopper, leaping off Tokay’s shoulder to bound over, perching on the snake bot’s head, yelling down, “There’s nothing you can do to help here! Stand by and wait for-”

The red serpent ignored her remote sibling, removing her mask and cupping her hands around her mouth, “OYYY! BONEHEADS!” she called up, indignantly, causing the smaller frog to flail and fall off from the piercing volume, “You’re on steel duty, remember?! You can’t just go chomping shit willy-nilly!!”

Everyone was tense, but the machine didn’t seem to pay her any heed.

“...I don’t think they understand,” mumbled Pack, shooting the lithe serpent a glance of disdain, almost finding her just as mindless as the giant hydra, “Don’t waste your breath, and get your idiot ass back here!”

“Oh PLEASE,” Gutter rolled her eyes and turned around, replacing her mask before putting her hands on her hips, “It’s designed to take orders, maybe it just has to be reminded that-”

Tokay’s motion-sensitive helmet eyes picked up the anomalous movement before anybody else could begin to register that Haikidra-1 had turned its attention downward.

“GUTTER-!” she shouted, hand raising up. Before anyone could respond, the gecko’s vision glazed over with the same glowing blue, highlighted wireframe from before, as the entire world around her stopped in its tracks once more. Without skipping a beat she lunged forward, wrapping her arms around her thin-framed and very lightweight sister.

With a tremendous roar, time resumed and Tokay’s lunging momentum pulled Gutter out of the way just in time, as the shearing jaws of the hydraulic hydra clamped shut with a deafening crunch exactly where she had been less than a second before.

As both Harp Numbers went tumbling, Gutter shouted, shocked, “D-dude-! Did that shithead just try to fucking vore me?!”

“Not... the time... Gutter,” Tokay mumbled, picking herself back up, not even wasting the time to dust herself off, “Hopefully Hatch gets someone quickly...” She whirled to the other robots present, especially Heavy, “Until then, set up a perimeter! Don’t let anyone get into its grab range, just let it chew on anything inanimate until-”

She was cut off by a loud grind and crunch, which diverted the gathered robots’ attentions to Haikidra-1 as it reached down and clamped its hydraulic jaws around a large chunk of concrete, lifting it high into the air. With a sharp bite, the block shattered, leaving behind rebar as the debris flew in every direction, raining down on the robots and other human employees assisting with the project. Any taller robots present had to quickly stand over any smaller workers, machine and otherwise, using themselves as shields against the falling rubble.

That itself drew attention away from the fact that another head had reached down and plucked up a nearby Pickelman - obliviously performing its duties with its one-track-minded programming, toiling away with a pickaxe on the concrete structure - and dropped it unceremoniously into the open-topped shredder on its base. The others looked up from their work at the ungodly noise and scattered, cost-mitigating self-preservation programming kicking in just a little too late. Haikidra-1 continued to grab, rend, and shred whatever was in grabbing range.

“Until what?!” Pack yelled, panic beginning to set in. “Until it remembers it has treads?!”

“...Dammit, we don’t have time-!” Tokay hissed. Then, in a moment of realization, she looked down at her hand, “...But I do.”

Turning to her serpentine sisters, Tokay barked, “Gutter! Give me one of your snakes! I’m going to try and disable as much as I can!”

“Are you crazy all of a sudden?!” Gutter yelled, incredulously.

“Crazy or not, I have a job to do!” Tokay shouted back, “Just give me something to cut some cables with!!”

There was just enough pause to get the snake bot’s doubt through, but with a sigh she reached up to the tail behind her head, extracting another of her own serpentine drones from a hidden compartment. She looked down at the gecko bot, her normally facetious expression turning serious... worried, even, “Be safe...”

Gutter gave the Search Cutter a twist and its mouth opened up, lighting up with a slightly curved energy blade of decent length, with two perpendicular energy blades forming a hilt of sorts, before handing it off to Tokay, who took it in hand and nodded, “I will.”

With that, she turned to Haikidra-1 and ran. Just as the giant demolisher reached down to pluck her up, she lifted a hand, and the world froze blue once again.

Tokay ignored the slight pressure in her chest as she leapt up, dagger at the ready, landing first on the caution stripes in front of the open shredder, then clearing it with another jump to land between the central and left heads. A single large pipe containing multiple cables was bare at the very base, and she targeted that first, slashing into it with the serpentine energy blade, making sure it got every wire and pipe contained within the cylindrical metal casing.

She didn’t bother to unfreeze time to check if that damage was enough, and instead worked her way up, pinpointing the joints with the Search Cutter blade, driving it in with scalpel-like precision and hoping she’d sever anything transmitting a charge or information. She just hoped all three heads worked like limbs running off a central computer rather than individually-controlled personalities.

As she neared the machine’s head, Tokay checked on her internal timing mechanisms and gasped. She was nearly out of energy... already! She was so used to keeping time stopped for literally hours at a time!

Kicking off from Haikidra-1’s neck, the gecko bot backflipped a distance away and landed gracefully on the ground as she allowed time to resume. The dragon reeled with a roar as its left neck went limp, dropping just barely to the side and avoiding its own shredder wheels by sheer chance.

Tokay had no time to dwell on her own situation before being distracted by a strangled yelp, and she turned to see Gutter on her knees, holding the sides of her head, “Gutter!” She ran over to place a hand on her serpentine sister. “What’s wrong-?”

“I... I don’t know-” Gutter sputtered, “You vanished and... reappeared in a second... and I suddenly got... some kinda... fuckin’ blast of garbage encrypted visual data... right between the eyes out of nowhere...” She shook her head, trying to clear the disorientation.

Tokay looked down at the Search Cutter in her hand, and the realization struck. It was still recording while she was functioning within frozen time... and it was still transmitting. She cursed. It was the reason all the devices in her office had to record to their own drives... attempting to transmit any kind of data from within frozen time out of it could brick a system, and she was grateful for Gutter’s own safety that she’d only done so for a few seconds of footage.

“Damn it... We’re going to have to figure something else out,” Tokay admitted through clenched teeth. She began to hold the snake drone back to its owner, but paused, “Though... I’ll still need this. I just won’t use the Flash Freeze with it in-hand.” She corrects. “...Not that I could... I barely have any energy left in it.”

Taking a few heavy ventilating ‘breaths’, she brought her left hand to her chest... she was so used to using her power in a confined space, among little more than inanimate paperwork and computers... to feel the energy run down so quickly made her realize how little her tech had been tuned towards freezing moving targets of larger size and volatility...

The sound of tires peeling drew attention to a work vehicle pulling up, skidding to a stop as three figures emerged; a human technician with a laptop wired to the back of a humanoid electrical robot with notable antennae and other transmission equipment, as another Assist Hopper trailed both.

“Sorry for the wait,” gasped the human technician as he typed and fiddled with the computer’s touch screen, “We tried to use the central terminal for both shredders to simply shut down Unit 1, but something’s wrong, so we’re going to try to brute force commands wirelessly!”

“This isn’t our field,” the transmission bot admitted, sounding a little unconvinced as the technician continued to type, “But we had no choice, we’re trying to come up with a makeshift solution on the fly here.”

“What I wouldn’t give for that right now,” Hatch’s Hopper muttered, offhandedly, only to catch herself and correct, despite everybody being too preoccupied to notice the slip, “Flying, I mean. We could get more reinforcements here quicker!”

“Alright, the terminal system is up,” the human worker shifted the laptop to his other hand, shaking off the one that was initially bearing the weight, “can you get in?”

The electric bot’s eyes closed for a moment, and opened up, solid white as he raised his hands, hovering them over his temples. After a moment, Haikidra-1 continued to rampage, and the transmission bot’s eyes returned to normal, expression twisting, “Wireless access is blocked entirely!” the transmission bot shouted, sounding more and more panicked, “It should be impossible, but... but not even I can get through!”

If a robot could blanch, Hatch would have done so, indicated by voice alone, “Are you kidding?!”

“I’m not! I can’t get in!” the robot shook his head as the engineer tapped more and more frantically at the laptop, “Whatever’s making it go haywire has completely shut it off to outside interference!”

“Well, there’s still some physical interference to be had! We can’t just let it keep doing that shit!” Gutter shouted, gesturing in a wide arc to the menacing machine, “We need to shut it down completely, the hard way!” She punched her hand into her palm, “Good ol’ percussive measures, right?!”

Amidst the bewildered stares of the other robots and human workers, the Harp Numbers turned to each other with sharp, affirmative nods and a synchronized, “Right!”

Gutter and Tokay leapt into action first, and Haikidra-1’s attention was drawn immediately to the two bite-sized morsels approaching it rather than running away like everything else was. Its treads repositioned the massive construct to face its shredder towards them, and the front of its torso opened up like a mechanical ribcage, expelling a dense bale of crushed concrete, shredded metal, and barely discernible robot parts towards them, forcing them to dodge. With a roar it reached down, attempting to grab whoever was closer as its compactor snapped shut.

Being ready for it this time, Gutter was more than agile enough to dodge out of the way of the lunging jaws. Drawing out all of her remaining Search Cutters, she linked them into a chain formation, spinning them up and launching the string of snakes at Haikidra-1’s cheek fin, latching on like a grappling hook and pulling her light frame atop its head, “Giddy up, scissorface!”

The other active head turned, somehow looking enraged despite the lack of facial articulation, and opened its mouth to pluck off the annoying vermin. But before it could get too close, the last Search Cutter flew up from ground level and latched on to the side of its head, and in the blink of an eye, Tokay was there, pulling the snake free as her clinging pads held fast to the dragon’s smooth metal hide.

The gecko gave a thumbs up to Gutter, “Out of Freeze energy, but we got this!”

The snake bot cackled, “Aw yeah we do!” She turned her attention to the beast beneath her feet, her scanners giving a very clear internal view of the machine’s mechanisms, “Kinda wish Reach was here!” Gutter shouted as she jabbed down with a blade, “She’d have fried this up in a second!”

“Hindsight didn’t plan for third-party superconstructs going haywire!” Tokay shouted in response, looking for her own openings, “Brace yourself, this is gonna be a rough ride!”

Gutter smirked, “I live for the rough rides, you know!”

With the remaining two heads distracted, Heavy Woman tromped over to the left treads of the giant machine with Pack in tow. “Get me two ratchet jacks, Pack!” the python bot bellowed through the noise as she hunkered down, grasping at its wheels with her large hands. Not only using her core lifting ability, she braced onto the ground with the even more powerful tail coil from her head, giving her just enough raw strength to begin tilting the machine. Fortunately, with its heads occupied, it was no longer sending signals to reposition itself.

Pack nodded and reached into his ‘mouth’, extracting one large mechanism - far larger and more sophisticated than what one would expect for use with a car or truck, that seemed far too big to fit in that cavity to begin with - placing it under the treads on one side of his sister and hitting a button on it. He deftly scooted over to Heavy’s other side, pulled out an identical device to place there. With both active, deep clicks and chunks were heard as the pistons extended and the ratchet teeth locked in sequence, filling the space and taking some of the weight off, allowing Heavy to focus on pushing the treads higher rather than using all her energy to keep it barely level.

But even that wasn’t enough. Though Heavy could lift up to 10 tons unaided with moderate effort - a considerable feat even amongst other strength-focused robots - Haikidra-1 weighed at least 80. The jacks were only meant to keep a lifted object up, but did not provide significant upward force. Heavy was only able to barely get the tread a few feet off the ground, core chassis and every mechanical muscle straining and groaning, as she shouted, “Can’t do this myself! Get your asses over here, fellas!!”

The other construction bots - not built on a combination of ex-weaponized Cossack and Wily tech and therefore not nearly as prone to recklessness as the Harp Numbers - stood back warily. It took another hefty dozer bot with forklift features to finally up the mettle, gesturing in a wide arc, “C’mon, we ain’t gotta let the lizards outdo us!”

As he ran - or, rather, hastily plodded - over to Heavy’s side to wedge his own claws under the treads of the hydra, the gap raised more. Though not a fan of the implied competitive nature of the assistance, Heavy couldn’t help but grin that it spurred them all the same, though it was only visible in her eyes, “Attaboys.”

Slowly, more robots were emboldened to take up the job, rushing to the sides of the two large lifters. Even Pack joined, pulling out a compact forklift of his own. By itself, it would have been insignificant, but with so many hands on deck, every little bit counted. Soon, there was enough collected strength to finish what Heavy started. “All right! Heave on three!”

Everyone braced.

“One!

Two!

THREE!”

With a calamitous roar from the gathered workers and the giant machine, everyone put their full strength, and Haikidra-1 tipped over onto its side, heads flailing. Gutter took the momentum to leap, practically skating down the length of the dragon’s neck, dragging a blade behind her for stability before landing at the base and delivering one last slice to the cables there for good measure before disembarking to the safety of solid ground.

Tokay took that cue to get out of dodge herself, leaping off much like she did the first time, and hitting the ground in a controlled roll as the central head tried to flail about, with the other two powered down. In such a compromised position, it couldn’t quite get a full range of motion, and a few other robots from the other lines leapt atop it to subdue the final head, with the welding cutter bot from earlier delivering a final, decisive blow to the power cables at the base.

Haikidra-1 went still and silent, and cheers went up from the gathered workers, both human and robot alike.

The foreman sighed, but the weight of the victory tainted the relief that the danger was averted, “That’s an expensive piece of machinery you all just junked... expect that to come out of your paychecks...”

“Oh, fuck off, imagine how much worse it would have been if they let it run wild..,” Pack retorted, irritated, as he began to put away the tools he contributed.

“Hold your tongue, frog,” the foreman growled. Pack ignored him, rolling his eyes and opening his faux mouth, reaching in, and pulling out his hand flipping the bird. Thankfully, the foreman had turned to assess the damage, and didn’t see the slight.

A few of the robots atop the mechanical beast remained behind while others dispersed. Gutter moved up to scan the damage that had been done, and Tokay approached alongside her, “Is it really that bad? I figured we just cut some cables... seems like an easy fix, once they get in to find out what was wrong with the programming.”

Gutter shrugged, “Seems that way, but you never know with those greedy suits... they’ll do anything to avoid using their own money.”

“Yeah... really wish we weren’t bought out by them,” Tokay sighed. She turned, holding the Search Cutter out, “Here... Thanks for letting me borrow it.”

Gutter beamed, “Not a problem~ Just don’t freeze it, that really sucked, and not in the fun way.”

Tokay chuckled, “Can’t be helped, huh?” She put her hands on her hips, tail lashing behind her, “I should consider maybe getting something for myself... even if not for combat, it still seems really useful to have-”

Without warning, the nearest head’s eyes flickered back online, and it jerked towards Tokay. Her helmet saw the motion before she could register her own movement, but with no more energy to power her Flash Freeze, all she could do was whirl and attempt to leap out of the way as it flung some of the robots standing atop it off to lunge.

It was too late.

The shear assembly clamped down on her tail, its softer materials deforming into the cavity of the upper jaw and wedging in fast. Tokay barely had a chance to cry out as the head jerked upward, pulling her roughly into the air.

“No!” Heavy bellowed, watching in horror as the machine she’d toppled began using its other necks like arms to push itself back into an upright position, “The power cables are severed! It shouldn’t be able to move!”

“...Its fins-!” Hatch shouted through a Hopper. “And the other dark surfaces! Look at the sheen! They’re solar panels! Each individual segment must have emergency power... and whatever’s made it go haywire must have just switched on those backups!”

“Whose the Hell’s bright i-fucking-dea was that?!” Gutter hissed, “TOKAY!!”

“G-Gutter!” Tokay yelled down as she attempted to reach up and grab at her own tail, “Blade! Quickly!!” She regretted handing it back so soon.

Gutter didn’t need to be told twice, and didn’t even waste her time with a retort. She spun up the Search Cutter that had just been returned to her like a sling and flung it up towards her sister, who reached out to grab it. Unfortunately, the demolisher’s head shifted, pulling the gecko bot with it, and the mechanical serpent drone sailed uselessly by.

“Shit-!” Tokay growled as she tried once again to reach for her own tail, though being swung around by it like a rag doll was making it very difficult to do anything as her vision spun. It was so hard to concentrate on anything, even the panicked voices below as Gutter tried to use her little lasso trick again to reach up, but couldn’t as the heads flailed about too unpredictably. Tokay cursed, and desperately tried to dig her fingers into the seams of the flexible armor, hoping her claws were enough to help her pry them apart.

A single voice punched through the din; the deep, commanding shout of Heavy. 

“TOKAY-!!” the giant python bot cried out from below, “LOOK OUT! THE OTHER-”

Tokay’s attention was pulled immediately from the shouting as her helmet’s eyes alerted her of peripheral movement, and she turned just in time to see one of Haikidra-1’s other heads rushing at her, mouth agape.

There was a deafening crunch, and everything when dark. The roar of machinery and the screams of her siblings and the other workers went completely silent.

But that was all that left her. With her primary cognitive circuitry embedded in her back rather than her head, she could still feel.

Everything.

She felt the snapping and sparking as what was left of her head and neck was pulled from her body by the hydraulic shears.

She felt herself dangling high above the ground by her tail.

She felt her tail finally being released, and the sensation of falling... falling...

She felt herself roughly and clumsily hitting smooth but uneven metal.

She felt the metal beneath her begin to shift. She felt the sharp pain in her hand as unseen edges sunk in, and began to drag her under.

[disengaging pain sensors]

It was the least she could do for herself... she didn’t want to even imagine what those sensations would be like otherwise.

Pressure. That’s all it was. Pressure and pulling, pieces coming apart, pressed, extruded through spinning, spiral teeth... for a second, it almost felt like there was a reverse force. Was somebody trying to pull her out? She couldn’t tell... She only hoped they wouldn’t be pulled in with her.

As the realization of her inevitable demise drew itself closer and tighter around her slowly peeling body, all she wanted to do was scream...

scream...

As Tokay’s hand passed in front of her chest, there was a sharp snap and a bright flash, and the Harp Number let out a strangled scream as her knees buckled under her. Everyone jumped a bit as she collapsed, hands clawing at her surroundings and herself as she writhed on the ground, whimpering, eyes wide.

“Tokay! What’s wrong?!” Gutter rushed towards her sister, leaning down and carefully lifting the smaller but sturdier robot off the ground as she convulsed, “Are you okay??”

“W-w-w-what..?!” Tokay stammered, teeth chattering as she stared down at her intact hands with a disbelieving expression, “H-h-h-how-??!” Her hands shot up to the sides of her head, clutching tightly at her helmet as she trembled, tail lashing about violently.

“Shhh, shhh-!” Gutter tried to calm her, genuinely distressed. She ran her scanners over her sister, once, twice, three times to see if anything was damaged or obviously malfunctioning... but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Slag looked out from the loading vehicle, “What’s going on...?”

“I... I don’t know,” Gutter bit her lip under her mask, “There’s... no obvious internal damage...”

Hatch stepped out of the vehicle and over, eyes giving off a grim expression. An Assist Hopper popped out of her back, crawling over to leap down, examining the gecko bot, “Something must be wrong with her Flash Freeze unit...”

“H-h-how,” Tokay continued to stutter, eyes darting about at all the worried faces around her. She took a few ragged breaths and checked her internal clock.

10:43 and 32 seconds.

“Th-th-that’s i-i-imp-p-possible...” Tokay choked, “H-h-how d-did I go b-b-back-...?”

“What the Hell’s going on here?”

Everyone turned to see the surly foreman standing there, drawn by the commotion and the decided lack of work being performed by the hired robots. He didn’t seem all that pleased, “Someone care to tell me what the hold up is?”

“Tokay’s not well,” Heavy rumbled, “She tried to activate the Flash Freeze and it glitched.”

“...Hmph, figures it’d be the experimental tech,” the foreman rolled his eyes, “Able to stop time, and somehow still going to put us behind schedule.” He reached into his pocket, “I’ll have you sent back to the lab. No use if you’re not going to function properly.”

“N-no-!” Tokay struggled, voice full of foreboding panic, “Y-you can’t-! I need to... I need to stop-! Somebody needs to stop Haikidra-1!”

That gave everybody a pause. Nobody had briefed any of the Harp Numbers on the scrapper’s name prior. The foreman slowly turned to look at the gecko bot, “...Excuse me?”

“Something’s wrong with Haikidra-1!” Tokay yelled, hysterically, “Something’s wrong with its programming! It’s supposed to help organize material and bale steel, but it’s going to start... start demolishing anything it can get its shears on!”

The curt human turned to her, eyes narrowed, “How do you know this?”

“Because-!” she began, looking around at the others. They were just as shocked by her words as she was... did they not see it? Did they not remember like she did?

Did she get sent back into the past alone..?

“I know because... because I saw it!” she admitted, choking on her words, barely believing them herself as they left her teeth, “I saw it, and it killed me!” She gripped her chest, “I... I died... and somehow my... the timepiece... it sent me back here to warn you!”

“Great, and now the experimental tech is delusional,” the foreman sighed heavily, lifting his phone to his ear. After a moment, he spoke to it, “Good morning. This is Foreman Yates of Exemplar, overseeing the factory demolition the Lab’s robots have been assigned to. I would like to speak with Dr. Harp.” There was a pause, presumably as the assistant on the other end forwarded the call. Finally, when she picked up on the other end of the line, he continued, “Doctor. I’m sending the first available transport back with DHN 01, Tokay Woman. She’s malfunctioning and spouting nonsense, and needs to be checked before she becomes a company liability. ...Yes, I understand. But you need to understand that given how much money we’ve poured into that pet project of yours, it’s your job to make sure it’s functioning properly before you send it out for field work. Is that clear? ... Do not make me repeat myself. ...Very well. Good day.” He hung up.

While the call went on, the Harp Numbers gathered around Tokay, who shuddered. They ignored the vitriolic words of the foreman, focusing instead on their distraught sister.

“Please... if nobody else listens to me, you... have to listen to me,” Tokay pleaded with her siblings, “You cannot get near Haikidra-1... I don’t want any of you to... go through what I went through...” She clutched her chest, turning her gaze towards Gutter, “...You, especially, Gutter. You... it went for you first... if I hadn’t been there to...” She shook her head, trying to clear the racing thoughts, “...Don’t give it that chance.”

If anyone could see and feel the deep and genuine pain and fear in Tokay’s eyes, it was Gutter. To everyone’s surprise, the red snake’s expression read trusting and true as she nodded, firmly, hugging her sister close, “...I understand.”

“We haven’t got all day, girls,” the foreman, finished with his call, scolded, tapping on his watchless wrist impatiently. Off to the side, Pack gave an indignant snort.

Tokay growled, just a little, as Gutter set her down and she tried to stand on her own legs... it was so hard. Her mind continually replayed that horrible, phantom memory. She felt every piece of her being pulled apart and crushed, and even if it didn’t hurt, she didn’t feel real.

None of this felt real.

Eventually, one of the other transport trucks pulled around and stopped by the gathered Harp Numbers, “All right, we’re done offloading,” the driver gestured, “Get on, little lady, we’ll get you back to the lab.”

Tokay cast a worried glance back at her linemates. She received mostly knowing and considerate nods of reassurance that they wouldn’t let her warning go to waste.

She stepped into the vehicle, hand on her chest, casting one last guilty look back as the truck pulled away from the ill-fated worksite.

The ride back was as uneventful as the first, but Tokay couldn’t even bring herself to tap the seconds away as she was wont to, mind thoroughly haunted by the events that had never transpired... and the fears of what could transpire in their stead.  Although the trip itself took less time on account of favorable crossings and a lighter load, it felt like it took two, even three times as long to return to the lab.

What was she even going to say? Tokay’s computerized mind swam as the vehicle pulled into the lab’s northeast loading bay, and she felt hazy as she haphazardly stepped out of it, and towards the door, fumbling at the identification pad with her hand, RFID chip granting her access to push her way through, into the main lounge.

While there were a few human assistants present, they were not Tokay’s focus. That was, instead, drawn straight to the two linemates who hadn’t been brought along on the excursion; Reach and Nail. Both were sitting across from one another at one of the smaller, fixed tables, Nail sporting smaller, more utilitarian shoulders than the bulky manufacturing plants they normally wore. The mollusc bot looked about ready to nod off, had the roughly-opened door not snapped them to attention, along with distracting the (technically) eldest Harp Number from whatever conversation she was trying to have that was putting Nail to sleep.

Reach spoke first, voice and expression quizzical, bordering concerned, “Back already, Tokay?” Taking a moment to put down the tablet she was using for visual aid, she slid her seat back and pushed herself up, “Didn’t think you the type to deal in so soon.” With a tilt of her head, the static gecko added, “Flash Freeze acting up?”

Tokay grit her teeth so tightly they could practically be heard even at that distance, and her knees nearly gave out as she stumbled forward, just enough steps for her outreached hand to slam down on the nearest table to hold her up as her other hand gripped the side of her head.

“I... I don’t know-” she hissed lowly, sounding both frightened and frustrated, rousing further worry from her linemates as Reach rushing to her side. Tokay continued, “I don’t know if what just happened really happened, or if I’m just going crazy-!”

“Whoa whoa, calm down,” Nail held up their hands, “If what happened?”

There was no initial response beyond Tokay shaking in place, holding her head, and Reach helped her sister take a seat, placing a hand on her shoulder. Nail, meanwhile, shifted their weight, but instead of standing up to move closer, simply kicked off the fixed table to slide over on the reinforced chair to come to rest aside the geckos in one seemingly lazy but effective motion.

Even without specialized machine sensitivity, it was clear the smaller of the two was under intense stress, and Reach herself could physically feel it; Tokay’s core was running at max capacity, refrigeration unit on full blast trying to keep her internal temperatures stable.

Carefully, Reach placed both hands about her sister’s shoulders and back, turning up her electromagnetic pads just a touch to deliver a gentle, therapeutic current. After a few minutes, Tokay finally relaxed enough to look up. Though the expression in her eyes was grateful, that was not the most pressing matter on her mind, “Did... word not get around..?”

Nail shook their head, “Non, the Doctor has been busy with another project. She has not had the time to tell us what the call was about.”

“...Oh,” Tokay turned her attention downwards, at her hands. She still didn’t feel quite real.

“Come on, Bitey,” Reach swiveled a chair over to sit beside her smaller sister, for now ignoring the faint scoff at the endearment, “You can fill us in just as well. What happened?”

“Oui,” Nail tilted their head, composed but still curious, “We’re family. Tell us everything.”

Tokay bit her lip lightly, shaking her head, only for Reach to give her a light shake. Finally, she sighed, and filled them in, from their arrival, to the designation of roles, to the first accident... Though she wanted to look down at the table while recounting, she couldn’t help but keep her eyes on her siblings, taking into account their expressions. Their concerned faces deepened with a tinge of disbelief as she explained what happened to Haikidra-1, and how they took it down with their collective efforts. It wasn’t a good sign; that was easily the most straightforward part of the experience.

Before she could recount the demolisher reactivating to grab her, she stopped, looking away. It was obviously the defining detail of the entire ordeal, the thing tying everything together, but she didn’t even want to think about it... the prospect of saying it out loud felt so much worse.

“That... cannot be right,” Nail scratched their chin, confirming Tokay’s suspicion of their disbelief, “It has barely been enough time for you to have gone and returned as soon as you arrived at the site.”

Tokay grasped her head in both hands, elbows on the table, “That’s... I...”

Nail shook their head, holding up a hand, “Do not get me wrong, I’m not saying I believe you are lying. Just that you need to finish your story.”

Reach gave her sister a reassuring squeeze on the arm, “You can save it for later, if it’s really that bad. We’ll still be-”

The dam broke. “I DIED!!” Tokay barked, pushing away. The other two Harp Numbers jumped, both at the suddenness of the outburst, and the nature of the revelation. “The damn thing came back and grabbed me and pulled me apart and dropped me into its shredder!” She stood up so quickly the seat fell backwards with a clatter. All noise in the recreation room halted as everyone stared at her.

Her voice lowered, trembling, “I... I died... and suddenly I was back at the start, at the moment I turned on the Flash Freeze... as if nothing had happened...” She brought her hand up to her chest, “Except... except it did...”

Tokay fell to her knees, “I remember... I remember how much it hurt before I turned my sensors off... how terrified I was... to think that... that time was erased for everyone, but left me with those haunting memories of... of my own destruction all the same...”

Everyone was at a loss for words. Reach held out a hand. “...Tokay..,” she whispered, feeling for the honest pain in her sister’s recollection.

Tokay glowered, looking away, “...You don’t believe me, do you?”

Reach wanted to say something, but was cut off before her words could form. “It does seem quite unbelievable,” Nail admitted first, looking grimly thoughtful. However, their demeanor changed with a shrug, “Then again, your power to control time is already well beyond what could be considered believable, so what difference does it make? Why should that make us any less likely to trust you when you sound so serious about it?”

“Nail’s right,” Reach added, trying to sound supportive through the weight of her worry, “Just because we don’t understand what you went through doesn’t mean we can’t be here for you. You did what you could in spite of... truly unbelievable circumstances.”

“Except... I didn’t,” Tokay spat, “That stupid asshole sent me home saying I was a liability... Everyone might be in danger that I could be there averting with what I-”

“You warned the others, did you not?” Nail asked.

Tokay paused, almost incredulous, “Of course I did-”

“Then you did what you could,�� Nail interjected, curtly, leaning back with their hands behind their head, “No use hurting yourself more over it when you hurt enough already.”

Tokay was taken a little aback by that, but could only admit inwardly that Nail, rather fittingly, made a good point.

“Tokay?”

A new voice drew everyone’s attention to the door, where the receptionist from the lobby leaned in, looking apologetic, “Umm... Dr. Harp paged the front desk to, um... have me tell you to... uh, meet her in the diagnostic lab...”

Tokay looked more than a little upset to not be fetched by her creator in person given the gravity of the situation, and her expression was returned by a wince from the newer hire, “She needed to get it ready... she’s... been really busy all day... I’m sorry...”

“It’s fine, I get it,” Tokay muttered. She didn’t begrudge either Dr. Harp or this young woman, but she also couldn’t quite help her appearance, intimidating as it was despite her small stature, or the dour mood that only served to amplify it, “I’ll be up in a moment.” The receptionist nodded, stuttering a quick thanks before retreating through the door to her desk.

“You gonna be okay?” Reach asked, feeling a little guilty.

“Doesn’t look like I have much of a choice,” Tokay shrugged, with mild sarcasm, which mellowed out to a more genuine tone, “but thank you.”  She turned to look at Nail, “Both of you. It... means a lot to me... really, it does.”

“Pas de quoi,” Nail waved a hand casually, “We are family, don’t you forget.”

Tokay managed to pull a weak smile as she made her way to the elevator, “I won’t.”

---

“Nothing appears to be amiss...”

Dr. Harp sighed as she pushed herself away from the diagnostic display, pressing two fingers and a thumb against the bridge of her nose, pushing up her glasses in the process, “Which is even more suspicious, seeing as I can’t access or even find these memories you claim to have in your records...”

She turned her chair around to look at Tokay, who was reclined in a pod. While she wasn’t scheduled for a full maintenance checkup, the need to access her Flash Freeze had the small-statured gecko stripped down to bare internals from the waist up, with various tubes and cables connected all over the place in a seemingly haphazard fashion. This wasn’t anything new, but from the look on Tokay’s face, that didn’t make it any less exhausting.

“I don’t know what to say, Doctor..,” she muttered, sounding defeated, “But it’s there... I can recall it this very moment. More vividly than I’d like to, no less...”

Shaking her head, the doctor stood up, walked over, and began to carefully remove and roll up the cables, “I want to believe you... I really do. The only explanation is that it’s somehow encrypted in the timepiece itself, and only you have access to it due to the dust in your IC chip.” She looked back over at the screen for a moment, then back to the work at hand, “Regardless, if what you’re telling me is true... that somehow the device sent you back in time upon destruction, and that the only evidence is your word-”

“I know, I know,” Tokay sounded frustrated as she reached up to assist with some of the easier cables now that she knew it was okay to do so, being more than familiar with the process, “It’s... not exactly something that can be tested.” She frowned, “Not without having me-”

“Which is exactly what I don’t want to do,” Dr. Harp cut in, with an almost scolding tone, “Yes, it’d be nearly impossible to verify without a conscious system integrated in with the equipment, but I don’t want to subject a conscious system - especially a free-willed one - to repeated intentional destruction just to gather insubstantial, anecdotal evidence.”

The eccentric scientist continued, as she removed the last cables and helped her creation pull her bodysuit back up over her exposed frame, “My only guess is that the timepiece has some sort of self-preservation mechanism tied to its ability to manipulate time... there’s still so much we don’t know about it, that we can’t fully access without more insight into what we do know.”

“Almost sounds like you shouldn’t have been messing with it in the first place, Doctor..,” Tokay muttered, sounding almost resentful, though her expression read pained and conflicted as she looked down, hand raised to her chest to feel its strange, alien hum through her suit.

Dr. Harp raised a finger, opening her mouth to respond, when the console sprang to life with the blare of an incoming call redirected to the lab by the receptionist. She muttered, not sounding very pleased with the interruption, “It’s the work site... I guess we should take this.”

She pressed the button to answer, and followed it up by putting the communication over the speaker, so that Tokay could listen in on the situation she’d just been sent home from, “Dr. Harp here.”

“Good afternoon, Doctor,” came a serious, but young, voice. Surprisingly, though it was the foreman’s line, it was clearly not the foreman, “I’m calling on behalf of Exemplar with an update on the situation regarding the robots you’ve sent to assist with the demolition.”

“I had a feeling,” Dr. Harp tried to keep a professional tone on her voice, though the only ‘feeling’ she actually had was a deep sense of sarcasm, “Does it have anything to do with the warnings given to you by Tokay Woman before you sent her back to the lab?” She asked, a small amount of impatient bite sneaking into her voice, “Because I found nothing wrong, so it sounds like she really should have been allowed to do her job.”

“About that,” the voice on the other end of the line cleared their throat, “...Yes. It has everything to do with her warning. In fact, her warning about Haikidra-1 going rogue was so accurate, that we might have to conduct an investigation into how she knew in such a specific capacity.” The voice took on a warning tone, “The evidence so far implies tampering, but there were no external signs.”

“I’m pretty sure she told you, and it sounded like you didn’t believe she had some sort of... I don’t know... powers related to time manipulation by an experimental device that, despite having more than enough research funding and documentation behind it, is still not fully understood?.” Dr. Harp shot back, “Are you trying to imply that one of my robots - who has no reason nor motive, and has had more time and money invested into development and testing than the entire workforce at that site combined - was involved with some sort of sabotage that would jeopardize her standing with the company, or possibly her entire existence?”

There was an awkward silence. Tokay winced and turned her head away looking a little resentful, but also lightly guilty.  Eventually, the standstill was broken by a soft throat clear from the other end of the line, “No, and I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ll relay your concerns.”

“You’d better,” Dr. Harp scoffed, starting to lose a bit of her feigned professional demeanor in the face of direct accusations leveled at her creations, “Now, was that all you called to tell me, or do you actually have an update? Did anybody get hurt?”

Another pause. The voice got grave, “...Unfortunately, yes. Even with the prediction allowing for appropriate mobilization-”

“Cut to the chase,” Dr. Harp snapped, impatiently.

The voice on the other end sighed, “Slag Woman broke from orders and stationed herself by Haikidra-1 instead of 2 because of Tokay Woman’s story.  When 1 began to act up, as she said it would, Slag was able to mitigate some of the more... catastrophic damages it could have incurred, by jamming up its shredder housing with molten metal.”

Tokay’s soft, fidgeting ticks silenced as she looked over, expression worried. Dr. Harp nodded apprehensively, even though the gesture would not carry over the audio-only line, “And?”

The caller continued “Unfortunately... Unit 1 decided to throw a whole tractor at her afterwards. She’d used up most of her metal stores clogging it up, and couldn’t defend herself.” 

Dr. Harp tensed up, and even Tokay could be heard uttering a horrified, ‘oh no...’ in the back. Even if neither got picked up by the communications line, the voice continued, with an attempted tone of reassurance, “Don’t worry... she’s okay... moderate damage at worst.”

“But...”

Dr. Harp and her creation waited for the other shoe to drop.

“...A few other robots outside of your line were damaged beyond repair... and in the chaos brought about by the disbelief in your robot’s wild claims coming true, a few human injuries and two casualties were also recorded,” the voice confirmed, darkly, “Including Foreman Yates.”

So that’s why they were so salty that they’d open the call with an accusation. Dr. Harp furrowed her brow, taking off her glasses for just a moment to rub her eyes before putting them back on, “I see...”

She turned to Tokay, whose expression would have been unreadable to anybody else. But Dr. Harp, who knew her mechanical ‘daughters’ better than anyone, could see that while the gecko bot looked devastated to hear that humans were hurt and killed, she was also trying to suppress an almost smug grin.

“...Is that all?”

“That is all,” the caller confirmed, “Haikidra-1 is currently being disassembled. We will send a message with any findings when we make them.”

Dr. Harp seemed antsy to end the call, “All right. Can’t wait to hear it. Have a good day.”

The caller hung up without returning the admittedly sarcastic well-wish.

As soon as the line went dead, Dr. Harp turned to Tokay, “That’s not okay.”

Tokay looked at her creator, puzzled, “What’s not okay?”

Dr. Harp’s expression was grave, “...You shouldn’t be happy he died. You’re already under scrutiny.”

Tokay groaned, “Ok, look, I’m not happy he died,” she rolled her eyes, “It’s just... fitting comeuppance, you know? If he wasn’t such a damn idiot and let me do my job, he wouldn’t be dead now. It’s poetic.”

“It’s a red flag,” Dr. Harp let out a seething, exasperated sigh, “You’re on thin ice enough as it is.”

“Ha ha,” Tokay laughed in faux sarcasm, “Freezing joke.”

“...That wasn’t on purpose,” Dr. Harp shot back, though the delayed smile could be seen forcing its way to her cheeks.

“Of course it wasn’t,” the gecko bot leaned back, finally allowing herself a more genuine grin, “Shitty puns are just your natural response. Your resting state.”

“Oh please,” Harp shot back, “Like it’s that bad. You don’t need me to tell you yours.”

“Certainly not, considering you programmed me,” Tokay stuck out her tongue.

“Fine, fine, I concede,” the doctor mock-surrendered, “Anyway, is there anything else I should know before we wrap this up and wait for that site update?”

Tokay leaned forward a bit to peer at the monitors full of data. She’d already verbally recounted everything that couldn’t be extracted as memory recordings, “I don’t think so... Just that I think I could use some tuning tests for Freeze time under higher strain.” She tapped her knuckles on her chest, “I’m so used to going for hours in a damn office, it was kinda shitty running it down so quickly when I needed it the most... especially if it was meant for accident prevention.”

“Accident prevention rarely involves active combat with aggressive giant robots,” Dr. Harp corrected, “But I’ll look into it for sure. Maybe see if Dr. Cossack had any more of Wily’s notes I hadn’t already implemented to the best of my ability.”

“Love to be reminded that I’ve got a bit of Flash Man in me,” Tokay rolled her eyes, “Except I’d rather not be.”

“Don’t let Gutter hear that,” Dr. Harp responded, deadpan.

Tokay choked out a soft “Oh god-” as she covered her mouth with her hand.

The computer beeped suddenly, and Dr. Harp turned to see that a text message had been left, rather than a call. Whatever was found, it apparently didn’t warrant much more. She stepped over, sitting in the chair to read over it, and letting Tokay recover from her own embarrassment. The message was fairly short, with several attached images.

“...They found an unidentified chip inside Haikidra-1’s central processor,” Dr. Harp read off the note, summarizing as she went, eyes narrowing, “They’re suspecting Dr. Wily - of course they would - though the make doesn’t look like his, given he’s pretty proud and blatant with his branding... and the motive doesn’t make sense,��� she sighed, “It’ll be sent to Dr. Light to determine for sure...”

“It could very well be an inside job by more AR activists,” Tokay held up a hand, offering the suggestion, “We can’t rule anything out. They have hands everywhere... like in the riot truck that caused the explosion in the first place.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” Dr. Harp stood up, walking over to the pod to finish making some adjustments. “It’s just easy to blame Wily, even though he’s been pretty quiet of late.”

“Chipping a giant dragon machine does seem like something he’d do,” the gecko bot scratched the back of her head, “But given how... robot-centric he is, I feel like he’d rather take control to unite robots under his banner, against humans, rather than have them wantonly destroy one another for humans.”

“Mm-hm,” Dr. Harp nodded as she fiddled with the pod mechanisms. There was enough bitterness in her face and voice to show she wasn’t quite willing to forgive the mad scientist for what he took from her, but she tried her best to let as little of it show as possible, “How does the timepiece feel?”

“...Cold..,” the Tokay sighed, “...as usual,” she shrugged, “Why?”

Before Tokay could say anything more, Dr. Harp reached out and wrapped her arms around the smaller robot, gently.

"I know a lot of things you experience are alien and hard to explain..,” the doctor’s voice was level and gentle, “...but if anything strange happens - no matter how unbelievable - as a result of your power... I want you to tell me.” The doctor pulled away, but kept her hands on her creation’s shoulders, eye to hourglass-shaped eye, “I need you to tell me. Even if you don't think I'll believe you.”

Dr. Harp finally let Tokay go, shaking her head and looking almost sad, “You're... like a daughter to me, and I love you... so I want to be there for you if anything happens because of this burden I've given you... and if it becomes too much for you,” she added, with clear, pained hesitation for all the effort that had been invested, “...I can remove it, if it's what you truly want."

“...No,” came the soft, but surprising response from Tokay. “I’m sorry for saying what I did about it... but the fact of the matter is...”

As creator and creation pulled away, Tokay placed a hand on her chest, “...The timepiece is as much a part of me as any other critical component, and...“ She sighed, “I can’t... imagine not having it. Losing it. I know the corporation sees it as little more than an overly convenient tool, but to me... it feels like my... entire purpose. My entire identity. Without it, I... wouldn’t be... me.”

Another sigh, and the gecko bot leaned back, “So... I guess... I’ll endure the uncertainties.”

Dr. Harp’s sad frown slowly faded into an equally sad smile, “If that’s what you want.”

Silence took over the room, punctuated by small whirs and beeps of machinery as the scientist cleaned up her work space, and Tokay looked up at the ceiling, lost in thought.

“...Hey, Doctor?”

“Yeah?”

“I have a... small... design suggestion... regarding my tail...”

[zynetoglobaltechnologies]

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[loser-female]

Hi! You mentioned there are online tutorials/sites for learning Comp Sci and OSINT - any recommendations? Thanks!

Hi! You got lucky that today is the day I check my inbox lol. So. For comp-sci: - CS50X from Harvard is a public avaiable course on youtube I'd 100% recommend. These are the undedited (so far) lectures of 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LPJfIKxwWc&list=PLhQjrBD2T381WAHyx1pq-sBfykqMBI7V4&ab_channel=CS50

This gives you all the basics you need to understand how coding and pcs in general works. (I had comp sci in my university course)

- Freecodecamp is a website full of FREE tutorials on several programming language. Advice: learn python. You will understand later on.

- The rest really depends on what you actually want to learn and why - each programming language has its own purpose and application. OSINT: -There is this full course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwA6MmbeGNo&t=205s&ab_channel=TheCyberMentor (But you can find more on youtube.) - Bellingcat's resources: https://www.bellingcat.com/category/resources/ -IntelTecniques: https://inteltechniques.com/ - Osint Newesletter: https://osintnewsletter.com/

But here is the catcher: if you plan to do osint it heavily depends on where you live. I'm in Europe, so it means I'm under GDPR, therefore I must abid to stricter regulations than a US OSINT analyst. A lot of data that might be considered public domain in the US(big one: conviction records) are not in europe, and you won't be able to access it unless you are a registered private investigator at least (but in my case it's rare that I go after people, that's not a part of any task I might encounter at work). Not only that, but a lot of the avaiable tools are designed to work only with specific countries in mind for various reasons and there is a big bias on US-based investigations. If youre' not in the US I recommend you reach out to your local OSINT or cybersecurity professionals association, they usually have resources and specific information, a lot of times for free. Also keep in mind: OSINT has a lot of different applications and it depends on what you're doing with it. Journalists might work more with satellites and images (a thing I know nothing about), debunkers will definitely understand social media more, if you do business intelligence you will look more at news sites, trademarks and deposits and so on to reach your conclusion. You did your course... Now what? I recommend getting on CTFs, like tracelabs that I've linked above, but there many of them (osint dojo for example) or Kase Scenarios. These are safe environments to practice on (except for tracelabs since it deal with actual cases of missing people and it can lead to... not so good leads, allow me to leave it there) You should also understand how intelligence (as the discipline) works. There are several resources, but my favourite is definitely Psychology of Intelligence Analysis. It's a series of declassified training documents from CIA analyst Richard Bauer, that was based on Daniel Kahneman (yes, the "thinking fast and slow" author, and I also do recommend this book) research on euristics. Intelligence is fundamental because OSINT might be helpful to gather the data, but the data then needs to be processed, analysed and you also need to get a conclusion from that analysis. Studying intelligence will help you avoid a lot of pitfalls that happens when you do an investigation, such as not understanding when you know enough, if you're being a victim of your own bias, if you're missing something or if you're going with the right approach. But I have to admit that the best of training I've received so far is from my local OSINT association because I've been able to train with people that work(ed) in the military, get their advice and have a deep understand of the work itself (and the reason why I have decided to actually make cyber threat intelligence my job, even if I work for a private company and I have no interest in working for the government). And yes ethics is a big thing for the OSINT community.

I hope this is helpful enough!

[friendsim2]

I don't know if this comes under trade secret or whatever (if it does im so sorry for intruding!!) but how did you get the phone system to work? Are you using Ren'Py or a different engine?

(game's developer responding!)

No trade secrets at all - all the code for the game is actually open source (MIT license and CC 4.0 Attribution, depending on which part you mean) so you can use it however as long as you credit the source! It's not necessarily written to be picked up by other people (it's often hacky and not documented), but anyone is welcome to pick at it.

Not sure if you mean "phone system" as in the Chittr stuff or the TechniColor Heart stuff. It's all running in RenPy (the whole game is), but the Chittr system is a lot jankier than the phone stuff done for TechniColor Heart. There's a lot of Python code helping to drive the back-end of everything, although the actual interface/UI aspects are handled by the RenPy engine's screen language, mostly.

At its heart, both systems are a combination of a list of items visible within the phone (text posts, etc.) and a set of RenPy screens to iterate through those and display them, allow interactivity, etc. The TH phone system uses a system of custom Python classes, whereas the Chittr system uses a set of dictionaries since it was written a few years ago and I wasn't as well-versed in how Python does class stuff (my professional experience was mostly in C#, VB.NET, etc.).

The Technicolor Heart version uses one master screen for the phone interface and then a set of subscreens for the various individual components (dating site, messages, shop, etc.) with their own UI and calls to important classes. If you unpack the script files (using something like RPA extract), you can find the TH stuff in volume12/vol12_datingsim_phone.rpy and the Chittr stuff mostly in chittr.rpy in the base game directory. Be warned in advance that the Chittr portion is bad and has some really jacked-up code to fix bugs that required going back and retroactively adjusting some stuff.

There's some elements of the UI that interact with the phone system in other areas, like the game's quick menus, to do things like displaying message notifications. If you poke around, you should see what I mean.

If you're looking for a general way to do a phone interface, I'd strongly suggest looking at the TechniColor Heart variant - that's by the far the cleanest, best-coded iteration of that concept.

[civilotterneer]

Hi y'all!

I'm always down for asks! Though I make no promises to have all the answers. I'm pretty sociable so feel free to interact!

I don't really intend to frequently post NSFW, but if I do, I'll always community tag cover it. Please see Tags of Note below for more details on what you may want to mute..

I've also got an alt where I do most of my reblogs so this page can stay clean: @civilotterneerredlines

I've also got a Bluesky that I mainly just repost some of my art on: @civilotterneer.bsky.social

I am doing my best to keep my FurAffinity account updated, but it's also the main place I'll store Not-Safe-For-Tumblr art:

https://www.furaffinity.net/user/civilotterneer/

Master list of my larger projects can be found at the end of this blurb.

Wanna know more?

Master List:

Laundry Day - Funny lewd comic about CIv doing laundry

The Search for Civ - Civ has gone missing, how will Lye find him?

Civ Plays: Baldur's Gate 3

Tags of Note:

#Civil Otterneer - I use this to tag all posts I make.

#uncivilotterneer - horny posting, and NSFW. This blanket terms all directly lewd posts, but may not catch stuff considered only 'spicy' as per the speedo tag below.

#speedo - posts where characters are shirtless or wearing very little, like a Speedo, typically not with sexual intent, but stuff may be a bit spicy.

#Civ or #Civ OC: Civ - Civ! My main fursona and primary character

#Lye or #Civ OC: Lye- Civ's friend and housemate, a cat necromancer (The Nekomancer, lol)

#Livic or #Civ OC: Livic - Civ's devilish copy and roommate, a devilish otter

#Civ OC: Xaphar: Xaph - Civ's old friend and romantic interest, a blue dragon

#The Otterneer-verse: Lore and malarkey about the world Civ and his friends live in

#The Reality Room - comics involving Civ and a magical virtual reality device

#ask - posts with asks from people

Fun facts:

I am a practicing civil engineer-in-training. I originally got a degree in environmental engineering, but civil speaks to me more now (they're very similar degrees so it's in fact possible to switch post-college). I'm focusing my work in wastewater and water treatment, with a healthy amount of site grading and water/sewer pipe networks for the city.

I swim just about every day I can, which is pretty close to daily. Thus my fursona's an otter to reflect that. Plus I'm just a silly little guy sometimes.

Ich lerne Deutsch, aber Ich bin nicht sehr gut.

I enjoy tabletop games a ton. Big fan of DND/Starfinder and I'm currently running a Starfinder campaign. I also play a bit of MTG, but more often I play Star Wars Armada, which I paint and homebrew for.

I have 2 3D printers, one FDM and one Resin. I'm typically printing game pieces for Armada, which a roommate and I are currently using to make a Star Trek, UNSC, and Covenant faction for the game. I also 3D print mini's for DND, and my roommate group paints them. The FDM is the favorite child, though its older so maybe that's unfair. (I'd like to note that she's now in her rebellious stage and tends to malfunction more now. The resin's now the grade A student)

I've got two pets: one's my mutt Lady (she's a rez mutt with mixed aussie, german shep, sheep dog, herder, and about every other breed on the rez), the other's my snake Striker (lesser morph ball python).

Base model originally by https://x.com/GalileoGB?t=A570ht3M6JPpeOog-Rn3Kg&s=09

[sincerely-sofie]

Check-in for 01/28/24

It's been a while since I did one of these. Time to remedy that!

I've been doing well in my assignments, but due to some registration issues at the start of the semester I was unable to sign up for any web development or programming classes :< It's nice to take a break, but I'm really worried about getting stagnant in those skills, and maybe even losing what I've learned over time.

This is where a couple of new projects come in: A blorbo database and a tool for drawing pokemon from memory. These things are going to keep me avoid stagnancy and help me develop my web dev and Python programming skills, and I'm real excited to talk about them.

First up, let's talk about that tool for drawing pokemon from memory. I love drawing pokemon from memory, but it's a bit of a struggle to find tools online that work well for a solo experience when you're doing this challenge alone. So I made a program in PyGame to solve this problem, and I've actually already completed it! It was a great learning experience when it came to getting a taste of APIs, and PokeAPI really helped me do all the heavy lifting with it. I also ended up using ChatGPT to help me understand how to phrase my questions and the things I needed to research. This is the end result:

If you click "Get Random Pokemon", the program will provide a pokemon's name. The point of it is to draw the pokemon as best as you remember it, and then click "Show Pokemon Image" to see how you did. You will then have the option to get a new random pokemon, which clears the image from the window.

There's a lot of stuff I don't understand about how the program works--- APIs evade my understanding, and Tkinter is a dark art beyond my comprehension. But I was able to make a program that solved a genuine problem for me for the first time, and that's super exciting to me!

Now, for web development--- long story short, I'm making a website dedicated to cataloguing my OCs that's very much inspired by tumblr user @snekkerdoodles's personal site on neocities, which I regularly stare at in an effort to motivate myself to make cool things like it (everyone reading this should check his page out IMMEDIATELY and tell him how cool it is). Here's the screenshots of the WIP I'm chipping away at right now:

I don't have much to say about it, as the interesting stuff will really be the content of the pages, and I still have yet to finish the template page I'll be filling with my OCs' information. However, I can say that I'm very upset with the lack of proper teaching that took place in the first (and currently only) college web dev class I've taken. I spent an entire semester doing my own research to learn everything they were supposed to be teaching us. I'm still very peeved about that.

To summarize this very rambling post I'm too sleepy to edit properly, I'm making a digital blorbo encyclopedia, and I finished making a little desktop app thingy, which means I need to summon a new programming project. I'm tempted to make it a video game... maybe I should turn back to that visual novel idea I had ages ago and boot up RenPy!