robryk @robryk@qoto.org
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
@grrrr_shark I imagines a cat doing moderation tasks. The image was very amusing :)
@grrrr_shark Ah, I see.
I was at least once in a position where I was considering e-mailing an admin of an (non-single-user though) instance asking them to reconsider blocking mine. In the end I decided against doing so, because I find it hard to write things in a way that won't be in practice misinterpreted in such situations (I end up writing things that are literally correct and terse, which sadly end up being read quickly, which causes them to be misread; I feel very bad being verbose because it feels like I'm wasting someone's time then).
@grrrr_shark Some instances show a UI element in the sidebar that gives a link to the administrator's account. Yours doesn't, which might cause people to think it's not yours (or are they e-mailing your admin contact email?).
@grrrr_shark @Optional Flaming spiders? How much do they need to eat to sustain the flames?
o.O
So... remote access is also cut off? I wonder who's been responsible for doing _that_.
If not, I really wonder what kind of sabotage would be made in any way easier by ability to physically access an office.
Hm... that starts to sound like it would be easier to describe everything in terms of "lorefulness" (how well the world is fleshed out) or "backstoryfulness" (not sure how to phrase this) instead of "lore" and "backstory": it's not something you want to divide the story into, or even put things into buckets with such labels, but rather want to talk about total amount of backstory and lore. Every piece of the story contributes somehow to those, but those contributions are very much not independent, and we don't want to try to model these interdependencies, but just talk about stories as wholes.
Does this sound roughly like what you have in mind? If so, do you have maybe a succinct phrasing of the question that defines "backstoryfulness"?
PS. I also really enjoy trying to understand how you think about these things (as you can see I find it hard not to be very reductionist). Thanks, and please do tell me if it starts to be tedious for you.
Heaven's Vault spoilers
@joningold Ah, that depends on when you think she's realized that. It's possible for the player to realize it quite early on, and so (in a world where she really speaks English) she would also have that opportunity. Alas, in a world where the language's different it's moot as you say.
Re mountain vs murder on Aliya's surprise when reaching the Valut. (First, if one has noticed that than the surprise feels somewhat weird, which might be why I don't remember her being surprised at Vault's function.) It doesn't seem similar to a mountain to me (it's explicitly not driving anything: the search for the vault is, while this is a piece of knowledge you don't know you lack until you have it), but I think you mean that it's dissimilar enough from the murder to belong to the kitchen sink category, which I can see (and probably agree with).
I realize that I was very thoughlessly thinking of your ~classification scheme as scheme that puts _pieces of information_ into buckets. I wonder if you think of things that go into backstory, lore, "mountain", ... buckets as pieces of information or something else?
Heaven's Vault spoilers
@joningold This leaves me confused. I thought that this was a major revelation for Aliya, who wanted to find Heaven's Vault (presumably because she expected it to be a vault of ancient writings? at least this is what I assumed was a significant part of her motivation) and then realizes that it's not the kind of thing she was looking for after all. I thought that the only reason this was not an explicit part of gameplay was that the game has no way of knowing when the player has realized that, so it's impossible to do that without running both the risk of spoiling the player _and_ of belaboring the (already) obvious.
Was the intention different?
@joningold So if a character is driven to discover physics (because they observe its effects and are puzzled), physics becomes backstory?
Heaven's Vault spoilers
@joningold Actually, a more concrete and obviously known to you example: what about meaning of the word that is translated as vault in Heaven't Vault?
Well, one might think that meanings of ancient words is not lore, because the game is about discovering them (both from the POV of the player as well as the character). Let's for a moment assume otherwise.
If we think that those meanings _in general_ are lore, then _that one in particular_ might still be backstory by virtue of being basically equivalent to one of the central pieces of mystery in the game: what the Heaven't Vault is.
Is this in any way similar to how you think about the lore/backstory distinction?
@joningold Aside: this might be very literally an edge case (i.e. a case on that fuzzy boundary you're talking about), even if the volume taken by cases of this shape is probably a nontrivial fraction of the total volume of the space of stories. The reason I'm asking about it is that I find it way easier to understand definitions (or things-that-are-intended-to-impart-an-intuitive-definition) when I can see what they do in edge cases and what property puts those edge cases on the edge.
@lau Oooh, I forgot about Dzienniki Gwiazdowe in this context. Thanks, it's a very useful source of framing when trying to think about a neutral-gendered sapient entity.
I'm not sure I see the difference: in both cases (how turbolifts work vs. existence of secret level) the statement of fact remained true, only the knowledge of characters and reader changed. In both examples the knowledge of the reader _does_ change. Do you mean to have the piece of information in the turbolift example the information is ~generally known to the characters? If not, I don't get the concept of the detail moving/not moving.
If yes, then would having the story be partially about characters discovering that detail change things?
@joningold Is it fair to say that in the way you use these words, lore refers to the rules of the world's evolution (i.e. the rules that allow you do predict what will happen if you know ~everything about the current state of the world) and narrative is the description of the particular evolution that's happening during the time period (and spatial area) the piece of fiction describes? (Where we understand "state of the world" at the level of detail/precision that the reader is expected to.)
I'm curious what you'd think about the boundary between lore and backstory in fiction that goes way deeper than usual on the "precision of the world's description" axis (for example, Clockwork Rocket that has the characters discover their world's physics): is it shifted towards putting things that would ordinarily be in lore into backstory or not.
meta
mastodon.technology was defederating the instance I'm on with a stated reason of "they didn't defederate <some other instance>". IMO that is similarly silly. I found it annoying, because me and some people who moved there wanted to be able to talk to each other.
Also, given how mastodon.technology wound down, one might expect admins to often be overwhelmed, which decreases their ability to do things carefully/with focus.
robryk
boosted
#TIL Möbius resistor. Take a double-sided copper tape (with its top insulated from the bottom), and join the tape onto itself as a Möbius strip. Now you get an ideal current-sensing resistor with almost no parasitic inductance. The resistor behaves like two short-circuited microstrip transmission lines with continuous ground planes, with an input port always at the center. An extreme form of the "folding back the wire" technique for making non-inductive wire-wound resistors... Cool idea, but practically it probably isn't too useful... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_resistor #electronics
blocked instances, meta
Sadly, people asked for help in importing the list verbatim on this thread even after you've added the comment :/
@yetzt @evelyn WDYM by public APIs? I thought the only (heuristic) way to tell whether a block exists using server-to-server ActivityPub was to send a message from the potentially-blocked server to the potentially-blocking one and rely on most implementations to claim invalid signature if the block is there (because the most common way of implementing blocking, used a.o. by Mastodon, is to consider signatures from the blocked domain as invalid). Is there an explicit API somewhere for asking about blocks?
re: blocked instances, meta
@yetzt @dangerdyke @arachnomyrmex@eldritch.cafe
I think many people are afraid that a process that uses this as a starting point will have a nontrivial false positive rate, and that might create enough of a positive feedback loop that an instance would ~never get off this list. I don't know either way whether that risk is realistic.
@saltire One thing that I sometimes miss is the ability to send a reply to two threads simultaneously. Without that I am left with replying to one of them and linking to the other, which seems just as bad as quotes.
I enjoy things around information theory (and data compression), complexity theory (and cryptography), read hard scifi, currently work on weird ML (we'll see how it goes), am somewhat literal minded and have approximate knowledge of random things. I like when statements have truth values, and when things can be described simply (which is not exactly the same as shortly) and yet have interesting properties.
I live in the largest city of Switzerland (and yet have cow and sheep pastures and a swimmable lake within a few hundred meters of my place :)). I speak Polish, English, German, and can understand simple Swiss German and French.
If in doubt, please err on the side of being direct with me. I very much appreciate when people tell me that I'm being inaccurate. I think that satisfying people's curiosity is the most important thing I could be doing (and usually enjoy doing it). I am normally terse in my writing and would appreciate requests to verbosify.
I appreciate it if my grammar or style is corrected (in any of the languages I use here).
Joined Nov 2020
