Facebook has a real name policy and is a prime example of internet-fueled insanity. Why does deanonymization not help Facebook be a more positive place?
To tie it to my own view, I don’t think deanonymization has any effect if the name is meaningless to 99.9% of the community. For every person fired for posts, there are 10000 others who are not.
If companies really wanted to fire people for posts, they would start with firing people for vaguely anti-capital sentiment. Not saying racist things or whatever.
We need to be careful what we ask for. Who is effectively doing the censorship matters. Powerful people are probably not going to be censoring based on 'good morals' - because they themselves do not have good morals.
> Ablation (Latin: ablatio – removal) is the removal or destruction of something from an object by vaporization, chipping, erosive processes, or by other means. Examples of ablative materials[clarification needed] are described below, including spacecraft material for ascent and atmospheric reentry, ice and snow in glaciology, biological tissues in medicine and passive fire protection materials.
The poster is saying that a case can wear out and be replaced without damage to the phone. You can let the case take all the damage, then get a new one. But if you let a phone take all the damage (even if it's a tougher phone), you can't remove that damage.
The obsession with protecting access to lyrics is one of the strangest long-running legal battles to me. I will skip tracks on Spotify sometimes specifically because there are no lyrics available. Easy access to lyrics is practically an advertisement for the music. Why do record companies not want lyrics freely available? In most cases, it means they aren't available at all. How is that a good business decision?
Thoughts by someone who doesn’t make a living by songs?
I’m guessing you’d want to restrict lyrics to encourage more plays of the song by people who are motivated to understand them. Along with the artist’s appreciation of that experience of extracting what you’re fascinated by. Burdensome processes generate love and connection to things.
Not everything is a functional commodity to be used and discarded at whim.
One amusing part of lyrics on Spotify to me is how they don't seem to track which songs are instrumentals or not and use that to skip the message about them not knowing the lyrics. An instrumental will pop up and it will say something like "Sorry, we don't have the lyrics to this one yet".
Interesting, especially that it's a probability rather than a boolean! The line can be blurry sometimes (like in the example I mentioned), so it makes sense that it might not be possible to come up with a consistent way of classifying them that everyone would agree with.
The content industries should have been the ones to invent LLMs, but their head is so stuck in the past and in regressive thinking about how they protect their revenue streams that they're incapable of innovating. Publishing houses should have been the ones to have researchers looking into how to computationally leverage their enormous corpus of data. But instead, they put zero dollars into actual research and development and paid the lawyers instead. And so it leads to attitudes like this.
The only people seeing themselves as "content creators" are people giving social media stuff so their users get something they can doom scroll. Other people see themselves as artists, entertainers, musicians, authors, etc.
> The content industries should have been the ones to invent LLMs
While exclusively-controlled LLMs would be mildly useful to them, the technology existing is dangerous to them, and they already have a surplus supply of content at low cost that they monetize by controlling discovery, gatekeeping, and promotion, so I don't think it makes sense for them to put energy into LLMs even if they had the technical acumen to recognize the possibilities (much the same way that Google, despite leading in developing the underlying technology, had vvery little incentive to productize it since it was disruptive to their established business, until someone else already did and the choice was to compete on that or lose entirely.)
You have to get ahead of the disruption that will destroy you. At least, if you care about longevity of your company. I realize this isn't always the case.
Streaming had to compete with digital music piracy. As a result, Spotify is impossibly cheap compared to buying individual albums or singles in the past. So musicians hardly receive any money from recorded music anymore. Nowadays they basically have only concerts left as a means to earn money.
I'm pretty sure you could even have lyrics with a separate copyright from the composition itself. For example, you can clearly have lyrics without the music and you can have the composition alone in the case that it is performed as an instrumental cover or something.
I know nuance takes the fun out of most online discussions, but there's a qualitative difference between a bunch of college kids downloading mp3's on a torrent site and a $500 billion company who's goal among other things is to become the primary access point to all things digital.
Should young adults be allowed to violate copyright and no one else? The damages caused seem far worse than an LLM being able to reproduce song lyrics.
Is it simply "we like college kids" and "we hate OpenAI"? that dictates this?
A young adult who pirates, is also more likely to make purchases in that industry, and has an impact that is limited.
A corporation who pirates, is more likely to pirate en masse everything that they can get their hands on, in an ongoing manner, and throw everything they can at contesting their right to do so in court.
I think the perceived lack-of-value for them is related to how easy it is to write lyrics down, compared to any other aspect of the music. Anyone can do it within the time of the song, usually first try. Any other aspect of the song cant't just be written down from ear (yes, including the sheet music, which isn't nearly expressive enough to reproduce a performance*).
*There are some funny "play from sheet music without knowing the song" type videos out there, with funny results. YouTube/google search is no longe usable, so I can't find any.
3) Some types of data are more ethical to train on than others.
Training on Wikipedia? Cool! Training on pirated copies of books? Not cool! Training on lyrics? IMO that's on the "cool" side of the line, because the "product" is not the words, it's the composition and mastered song.
Very true. Just the other day, another “copyright is bad” post on the front page. Today its copyright is good because otherwise people might get some use of material in LLMs.
Considering this is hacker news, it seems to be such an odd dichotomy. Sometimes it feels like anti-hacker news. The halcyon days of 2010 after long gone. Now we need to apparently be angry at all tech.
LLMs are amazing and I wish they could train on anything and everything. LLMs are the smartphone to the fax machines of Google search.
> Very true. Just the other day, another “copyright is bad” post on the front page. Today its copyright is good because otherwise people might get some use of material in LLMs.
>
> Considering this is hacker news, it seems to be such an odd dichotomy. Sometimes it feels like anti-hacker news. The halcyon days of 2010 after long gone. Now we need to apparently be angry at all tech.
>
> LLMs are amazing and I wish they could train on anything and everything. LLMs are the smartphone to the fax machines of Google search.
Sorry this such a (purposefully?) naive take. In reality the thoughts are much more nuanced. For one open source/free software doesn't exist without copyright. Then there is the whole issue that these companies use vast amount of copyrighted material to train their models, arguing that all this is fair use. But on the other hand they lock their models behind walls, disallow training on them, keep the training methods and data selection secret...
This tends to be what people disagree with. It feels very much different rules for thee and me. Just imagine how outraged Sam Altman would act if someone leaked the code for Gpt5 and all the training scripts.
If we agree that copyright does not apply to llms, then it should also not apply to llms and they should be required to release all their models and the way of training them.
I think that opens several other cans of worms, but in principle I would support a solution that allows using copyrighted materials if it is for the common good (I.e the results are released fully open, means not just weights but everything else).
As a side note i am definitely not strong into IP rights, but I can see the benefits of copyright much more clearly than patents.
My point wasn't supposed to be that copyright is bad (or that it's good), just that the business logic of fighting the sharing of lyrics is incomprehensible to me.
That aside, I think there's a lot more complexity than you're presenting. The issue is who gets to benefit from what work.
As hackers, we build cool things. And our ability to build cool things comes in large part from standing on the shoulders of giants. Free and open sharing of ideas is a powerful force for human progress.
But people also have to eat. Which means even as hackers focused on building cool things, we need to get paid. We need to capture for ourselves some of the economic value of what we produce. There's nothing wrong with wanting to get paid for what you create.
Right now, there is a great deal of hacker output the economic value of which is being captured almost exclusively by LLM vendors. And sure, the LLM is more amazing than whatever code or post or book or lyric it was trained on. And sure, the LLM value comes from the sum of the parts of its source material instead of the value of any individual source. But fundamentally the LLM couldn't exist without the source material, and yet the LLM vendor is the one who gets to eat.
The balance between free and open exchange of ideas and paying value creators a portion of the value they create is not an easy question, and it's not anti-hacker to raise it. There are places where patents and other forms of exclusive rights seem to be criminally mismanaged, stifling progress. But there's also "some random person in Nebraska" who has produced billions of dollars in value and will never see a penny of it. Choosing progress alone as the goal will systematically deprive and ultimately drive away the very people whose contributions are enabling the progress. (And of course choosing "fair" repayment alone as the goal will shut down progress and allow less "fair" players to take over... that's why this isn't easy.)
Sounds like it was never about copyright as a principle, only symbolic politics (ie. copyrights benefit megacorps? copyright needs to be weaker! copyright hurts megacorps? copyright needs to be stronger!)
It's a good decision because it must be an incredible minority of people who only listen to music when the lyrics can be displayed. I'd imagine most people aren't even looking at the music playing app while listening to music. Regardless, they are copyrighted and they get license fees from parties that do license them and they make money that way. Likely much more money than they would make from the streams they are losing from you.
I think it depends on the music. Most people will have a greatly improved experience when listening to opera if they have access to (translated) lyrics. Even if you know the language of an opera, it can be extremely difficult for a lot of people to understand the lyrics due to all the ornamentation.
I think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them. But these days with generative AI, they can take lyrics and just make a new song with them, and you can probably see why artists and record companies would want to stop that.
Plus, from TFA,
"GEMA hoped discussions could now take place with OpenAI on how copyright holders can be remunerated."
> I think having the lyrics reproducible in text form isn't the problem. Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them.
Reproducing lyrics in text form is, in fact, a problem, independent of AI. The music industry has historically been aggressively litigious in going after websites which post unlicensed song lyrics[0]. There are many arcane and bizarre copyright rules around lyrics. e.g. If you've ever watched a TV show with subtitles where there's a musical number but none of the lyrics are subtitled, you might think it was just laziness, but it's more likely the subtitlers didn't have permission to translate&subtitle the lyrics. And many songs on Spotify which you'd assume would have lyrics available, just don't, because they don't have the rights to publish them.
I'm not one of the downvoters, but it may be this: "Many sites have been doing that for decades and as far as I know record companies haven't gone after them."
Record companies have in fact, for decades, been going after sites for showing lyrics. If you play guitar, for example, it's almost impossible to find chords/tabs that include the lyrics because sites get shut down for doing that.
Hmm, alright. I actually do play guitar and used to find chords/tabs with lyrics easily. I haven't been doing that for maybe 10-15 years. Anyway, maybe those sites were paying for a license and I just never considered it
> Had a couple of drive-by downvotes... Is it that stupid an opinion?
While I do not agree with your take, FWIW I found your comment substantive and constructive.
You seem to be making two points that are both controversial:
The first is that generative AI makes the availability of lyrics more problematic, given new kinds of reuse and transformation it enables. The second is that AI companies owe something (legally or morally) to lyric rights holders, and that it is better to have some mechanism for compensation, even if the details are not ideal.
I personally do not believe that AI training is meaningfully different from traditional data analysis, which has long been accepted and rarely problematized.
While I understand that reproducing original lyrics raises copyright issues, this should only be a concern in terms of reproduction, not analysis. Example: Even if you do no data analysis at all and your random character generator publishes the lyrics of a famous Beatles song (or other forbidden numbers) by sheer coincidence, it would still be a copyright issue.
I also do not believe in selective compensation schemes driven by legal events. If a legitimate mechanism for rights holders cannot be constructed in general, it is poor policy craftsmanship to privilege the music industry specifically.
Doing so relieves the pressure to find a universal solution once powerful stakeholders are satisfied. While this might be seen as setting a useful precedent by small-scale creators, I doubt it will help them.
It's like saying that movie studios haven't gone after Netflix over movies, so what's the issue with hosting pirated movies on your own site. The reason movie studios don't go after Netflix is that they have a license to show it.
Maybe, but it's also possible to get an AI to produce a song with the exact same lyrics. And a human copying lyrics would also be a copyright issue in any case.
But anyway it seems I misinterpreted the issue and record companies have always been against reproduction of lyrics whether an AI or human is doing it
Likely because you're a "luddite" which in the current atmosphere of HN and other tech spaces, mean you have a problem with a "research institution" which has a separate for-profit enterprise face that it wears when it feels like it having free and open access to the collected works of humanity so it can create a plagiarism machine that it can then charge for people to access.
I don't respect this opinion but it is unfortunately infesting tech spaces right now.
Yes, but this is not one of those words that is slightly changing in its meaning. Instead, it is flipping the meaning altogether. This misuse sabotages core boolean constructs of the language. Imagine if we lose the word "drop" to this trend. What then will we use to actually mean "drop"? Will they go after "delete" next to pretend to be cooler? Is nothing sacred?
No, nothing is sacred. I'll note the "literally" case in GP is arguably even more of a flip than drop.
The only way for a human language to stay the same is for people to stop speaking it, i.e. Latin - France has trouble keeping French the same, and English is the polar opposite with no ruling body and a history of katamari damacy-ing words from every other language.
Words can mean multiple things, and if there's enough of a gap a new word or usage will rise to fill its place.
Delete works, of course, and I think the opposite to "new feature just dropped" in tech circles is "killed" or "killed off", as in killedbygoogle.com
Boolean constructs are sacred. This includes words like "yes", "no", "true", and "false". Without these holding on to their meaning, the language, the culture, and civilization will fall apart. "Dropped" is very close to them. "Delete" works for now, but give it a century, and we could lose it too because the click-generating hipsters are always on the lookout for new words to exploit.
Boolean constructs certainly aren't sacred, and we have a million synonyms for both yes and no should the need arise.
Civilization will certainly not fall apart if language changes again, as it has for the entire history of spoken language - notably, Old English would be unintelligible to most of us now and civilization is working just fine. I just learned looking this up that Early English had a 4-form system consisting of yea/nae/yes/no ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#The_Early_English_f... ), which is fascinating, and we appear to be doing just fine without yea and nae nowadays.
Anyway, I'll note that release and drop are near-synonyms if you're talking about a physical object, so their similar use for features etc isn't wild at all, and is well established in culture (drop an album, etc), so I don't think this is nearly as big a change (like yes->no would be) as you think.
There is no universe in which release and drop are near synonyms. They're used as such only by dorks, click optimizers, and SEO scammers.
There also is no inhabited universe in which the words yes and no can survive being flipped in their meaning, because an attempt at such a flip will result in total collapse, in a universe without life.
"Yeah, yeah." in a sarcastic tone of voice means "no". Also see the opposite meanings of "yeah, nah" and "nah, yeah" in Midwestern US English. Or the Japanese who will say "yes" out of politeness while meaning "no" which you should be able to intuit from context. Etc.
But no, nothing is sacred. Not only that, from a historical perspective, the current pace of language change is shockingly slow because of the impact of media. It would not be at all unusual for a word like drop to move entirely to a new metaphorical meaning causing other words to have to fill in the gap. In German, you "let fall" something. Even if anything was sacred, "drop" would be far, far from sacred. It is very easy to replace.
(The closest thing to sacred is words for familiar, every day objects and people. "Mama" is pretty nearly universal, for example. But even so, we literally don't even know where the word "dog" came from, so no, nothing is sacred.)
There are many many examples if you search (or even better, read the book!), but here are a few:
"silly" originally meant something more like "blessed"
"fear" meant "danger", referring to a thing feared, not the feeling
"nice" meant "foolish" and literally comes from roots mean "not knowing"
This kind of change in meaning is very, very normal. This is just how language works. I really think you will enjoy the book. The author is very easy to read and covers a ton of linguistic ground.
Tried it out. The categories require way too much trivia / pop culture knowledge for me to be interested. I can look at the items and know right away that I just don't know and no amount of thinking will get me there.
This really isn't a word game; it's a trivia game, and if you like trivia and know pop culture, I can imagine it would be fun. But I don't like trivia or know pop culture, so it was just random guessing and experiencing the insanely aggressive negative feedback for being wrong over and over (would definitely tone that down).
Sorry, but not for me. Best of luck with finding your target users! Nice design work and name.
Great point! Definitely more trivia than language. Working on adding some positive feedback to counterbalance the playful devil character. Thanks for trying it out!
The problem with social media is that it encourages influencers broadcasting to followers over friends mutually interacting and winning over contributing (Great post here about ordinary / competitive conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43080290)
So fix these problems.
1. No followers. Mutual connections only. Put a strict limit of 1000 connections in place to enforce this. No one actually has a mutual connection with more than 1000 people. This only hurts people trying to gain an audience. Heck, make it so if you haven't read someone else's posts in a year, they stop seeing yours. Do whatever it takes to prevent one-to-many connections.
2. No public content. No one wants the whole world to read their conversations with their friends. The only reason you would want that is if you want to build an audience.
3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.
4. No newsfeed. Don't reward people for never shutting up. Maybe a chronological list of *friends* by most recent update and click into that to see all their updates.
5. No algorithm. Give people tools to find what they want to see; don't try to decide for them.
6. No re-post, no share, no forward, etc. Content lives in one place only, the account of the person who posted it, and it is only visible to who they said it should be visible to.
>3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.
I agree with most of these, but I'm iffy on this one. "No one tracks a score with their friends" is not really true, it makes people feel good to see encouragement and feedback from their friends. There's no reason that encouragement has to be restricted to text comments and messages. Without feedback, you're essentially just screaming into the void knowing someone could be listening.
If the things I'm posting could get feedback but don't, that tells me that the things I'm saying aren't really hitting with any of my friends. That's a valuable thing to know, whether or not you choose to act on it.
Facebook in the early years was for the most part exactly like what you are suggesting, but with likes, and I at least remember it being a pretty enjoyable place for a few years there (I joined at the very end of 2006).
"Hitting" with any of your friends is precisely the type of interaction I want to suppress. The way you know if what you say to your friends in real life is interesting to them is if they engage with it. If your feedback mechanism is anything other than the other side of a mutually interesting conversation, you probably aren't having ordinary conversation with friends. What real life feedback mechanisms most closely resembles likes? Applause. Who applauds? An audience.
Friends *can* give non-verbal cues in real life that they are interested (nodding, laughing, etc.), but likes are very much not like those non-verbal cues. Non-verbal cues only work in a very small group. There is no non-verbal cue that works to show interest in the context of "any of your friends" in real life. Emoji reactions in the context of a back-and-forth chat could work as non-verbal cues, but again, those are very different from drive-by likes with no additional engagement.
In this hypothetical social network, if you post something and no one responds to it or engages with it in any way verbally, you would be encouraged to do the same thing you would do in real life if you kept trying to talk about something in a group of friends and no one engaged with it verbally... find something else to talk about (or find a different group for that topic).
The goal is very much to mirror the experience of talking to your friends, but facilitated in a way that makes it more asynchronous and scalable (within the limit of your actual real life connections).
There are a lot of people in my life I would love to stay better connected with, but maintaining a direct chat can be difficult (what to say) and it doesn't always make sense to put people in group chats because the group might only make sense to me (people I used to work with that I actually like, for example). If I could post about what's going on in my life, what I'm working on, what I'm into right now, etc. and have my real-life friends opt-in to an actual conversation about that... well then it's much easier to stay in touch. I have no interest in knowing how many of my friends "like" what I'm sharing. If we aren't mutually talking to each other, we aren't engaging as friends no matter how much they may like it. They're just my audience if they have nothing to say back.
Sorry I didn't have time to make this shorter. My goal isn't to convince anyone of anything, just to share a perspective that might be interesting to you, OP or anyone else building something "social". You might sum it all up with the question: What if social media tried to be as much like real life friendship and as little like "influencing" as possible?
> I have no interest in knowing how many of my friends "like" what I'm sharing.
I'm right there with you, but I know a lot of people who very much do want to know how many of their friends "like" their selfies and other posts, and how that compares to how many "likes" their friends are getting. I think they're more common on social media than we are.
I'd be glad to use the system you describe; I just wonder if it would ever draw more than a niche audience without those features that many people seem to find essential to whatever they're getting out of the experience.
> I'm right there with you, but I know a lot of people who very much do want to know how many of their friends "like" their selfies and other posts, and how that compares to how many "likes" their friends are getting. I think they're more common on social media than we are.
Just to be clear about something though: this sort of person existed long before social media, would still exist without social media, and will continue to exist long after the current evolutions of social media
People are already moving towards the group chat model over the town square model, I read some articles on this recently that I can't find right now but it talks about the growth of Discord and the gradual decline of Facebook and Instagram. So I think people are already getting tired of such a like system.
I'll be honest, it sounds like you're trying to control my relationships with my friends and it sounds totally toxic.
I like the 1000 mutual connections only limit - that seems enough to get the job done. But "likes" are the online equivalent of the little "uh huh" sounds and head nods we make during real-life conversations to make the speaker feel heard and understood. This is normal healthy human interaction.
My proposition is that likes are very different from the non-verbal responses you describe.
Non-verbal responses can only happen in 1) an existing conversation with 2) a small group.
Likes often happen 1) in place of conversation and 2) within a large group.
A like could be given drive-by by any of your 1000 connections at any with no other engagement. That is nothing like "uh huh" and head nods. In fact, if someone outside your small group conversation interjects an "uh huh" randomly while walking past, it's a bit rude.
Yeah, if you don't give people some way to "like" things, you'll just get lots of comments that are nothing but heart emojis and such. It'd be like when AOL users discovered Usenet and there were lots of "Me too!" posts because they wanted to agree but didn't have anything to add.
As much as I love shilling IRC, Discord & Zulip have the right ideas with emoji reactions. It allows one to signal acknowledgement without spamming the chat. Frankly, Discord's recent decision to make reactions trigger push notifications was terrible.
> I agree with most of these, but I'm iffy on this one. "No one tracks a score with their friends" is not really true, it makes people feel good to see encouragement and feedback from their friends. There's no reason that encouragement has to be restricted to text comments and messages. Without feedback, you're essentially just screaming into the void knowing someone could be listening.
Good :D Let's revalue meaningful nuanced interactions over meaningless single bit signals. Even an emoji response rather than a like makes for better connection.
#4 & 5 finally address the slow poster problem. While chronological by friend does put those who never shut up first, it also means they get exactly one (1) entry in the feed.
I concur mostly, with one exception: I truly enjoyed the 'events' feed in Facebook, to be able to see what was happening and which concerts etc friends of mine were interested in that I could potentially join in on, so I would exclude that from the 'no public content' rule.
I like the sound of this. However, it seems dangerously close to living life without social media at all. What would make this a better experience than just having someone's phone number or adding them to a group chat?
What do I say to my cousin that I see a few times a year but would like to maintain a connection with? Do I just randomly send them pictures of my food and posts about what I've been up to? Do I send an occasional random banality like "how's the weather"? Neither of these seem like good strategies.
But if I could see the occasional (low frequency) update on things in their life or interesting to them... I could maybe see an opportunity to reach out for a real conversation about something of mutual interest.
Imagine you're suddenly teleported to a party with a hundred people you know and like but aren't super close to. How do you join a conversation? I mean, if it was people you were really close to, you'd just go up and talk to someone. That's group chat / SMS. But if it's more aquaintence level... one of two things probably happens: You overhear something that you're interested in and connect on that, or you randomly drop in various conversations at a surface level until something clicks.
That's what I'm after. Conversation that naturally flows from a spark. You don't need that with your closest friends, but you don't need a social network to keep up with your closest friends either. I imagine social networking as the tool to provide ongoing sparks for real direct interactive conversations on an occasional but ongoing basis with people you aren't close enough to to just call/text.
> What do I say to my cousin that I see a few times a year but would like to maintain a connection with? Do I just randomly send them pictures of my food and posts about what I've been up to? Do I send an occasional random banality like "how's the weather"? Neither of these seem like good strategies.
"hey cousin, it's been a while! i was just thinking of you the other day, how've you been? what's new? miss you, hope to talk to you soon!"
People interacted with their cousins a few times per year prior to the internet and social media. So, it’s not good/bad strategy but instead can I do this if I’d like to?
Yes. You can. I still do many of these low frequency hellos/whatever they are via texts and sometimes calls. No from seeing something in social but instead from elsewhere. Example: look through old photos!
True, my bad. I guess I was thinking of it though in the context of a recommendation to connect based on a mutual connection, whereby you could easily come up with a list of 1000 people who I don't know but that one of my friends does, since the context was a social media platform and that's a common feature
Re. #4/5: I want a chronological feed of my friends' posts, no algorithm. If I feel my friend is posting too much garbage, then I want to be able to "unfollow" them but still be "friends". I want to see what's going on in my friends' lives, not read or see politics/animals/etc.
Avid go player with some basic familiarity with other classic abstract strategy games here.
There are some interesting ideas here but it feels like it's lacking a driving force pushing the game forward. It seems like the players can just keep rearranging their pieces in their own area refusing to engage and risk capture. Retreat seems to often be a sensible strategy.
Perhaps this is most similar to chess but in chess if your opponent just moves back and forth you can easily line up an unstoppable attack while they are messing around. It's unclear here how to avoid the situation where the opponents just dance around each other making sure they never get captured.
Could also compare to Stratego where there just isn't anywhere to retreat to, forcing players to engage.
Other abstracts like go and Othello are always adding pieces to the board so there's no way to stall or slow play the game.
Thank you for the feedback! I was thinking about the force forward mechanic and as it exists in mentioned game. In Pressure stepping back is defensive until reaching the edge of the board. The biggest problem with the current design I have with endgame when it's balanced to 1 token left on each side. This could be a draw, because it's in most of the cases is not possible to lead to surrounding the leftover token. With 2 to 1 left still (depending on a board setup) it's possible to dance around to avoid capture.
Do you have some proposal that would work in this game?
Whoa. This is really cool. I've thought a lot about markup / configuration languages. Aside from types (won't get into typed/typeless here) there are basically just a few possible structures: lists, maps, tables (lists of maps with same keys), and trees (xml-like with nested nodes of particular types) are the ones I think about.
Most existing formats are really bad for at least one of these. Tables in JSON have tons of repetition. XML doesn't have a clear and obvious way to do maps. Almost anything other than XML is awkward at best for node trees.
Confetti seems to cover maps, trees, and non-nested lists really well, which isn't a combination any other format I'm aware of covers as well.
Nested lists and tables seem like they would be more awkward, though from what I can tell "-" is a legal argument, so you could do:
nestedlist {
- { - 1 ; - 2 }
- {
- { - a ; - b }
- { - c ; - d }
}
}
To get something like [[1, 2], [[a, b], [c, d]]]. Of course you could also name the items (item { item 1 ; item 2 }), but either way this is certainly more awkward than a nested list in JSON or YAML.
I think a table could be done like JSON/HTML with repeated keys, but maybe also like:
table name age favorite-color {
row Bob 87 red
row "Someone else" 106 "bright neon green"
}
This is actually pretty nice.
In any event, I love seeing more exploration of configuration languages, so thanks for sharing this!
My number 1 request is a parser on the documentation page that shows parse tree and converts to JSON or other formats so you can play with it.
Also worth mentioning... even if you're trying to do "ordinary conversation" on the internet, someone is going to come in and steer it to competitive.
I think that captures what keeps me off social media.
I enjoy a good ordinary conversation with my friends and aquaintences, but social media won't let you have that. Every post, no matter how unserious and innocuous, is a valid target for competition or outright abuse/taunting/mocking/shaming/threatening, which I suppose Aristotle didn't encounter often enough to put on his list.
Pedantic and wrong. What was your point here? Sign languages per your own link are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. That's gestures in common speech in all cases unless you are operating with the most specific and unhelpful definition of gestures.
Sign language is way more than just gesturing. I did not see read that link from the above post, regardless, gestures are fundamentally a semiotic expression of meaning with the body rather than speech.
Like sounds, one can create a basic Piercian sign, and build onto that sign.
I believe that sign language has the unfortunate implication of being composed exclusively of gesturing. The word “sign” is confusing as well, especially when “sign” signifies (pun intended) a set of commonly understood meanings in linguistics. Body language, gestures, manual expressions all are just parts that come together and become more than the total of sum parts.
I see spoken and sign languages as two different tools that can do similar job with different features and weaknesses. Like python vs go vs JavaScript.
