jack

Several countries got the number of infected people almost back down to where they started, and are cautiously considering relaxing restrictions. This means they need to *quickly* lock down any areas with a new infection until they've traced and tested any contacts, but hopefully they will be able to do so.

I can't help but wish more countries had been able to jump to that point from the start without having an infection get out of control and need a more serious lockdown first. I guess that's similar to what Taiwan and New Zealand did?

Conversely the number of infected people in the UK has levelled off but not really gone down. And now the government is talking about relaxing restrictions. It seems like even sensible, desirable relaxations, or proposed future relaxations, will overall make people less cautious, which in this situation will make the number of infection go up again. Which will make it take that much longer to get down to a safe level again even if effective measures are found. So any plans or June need to be based on, "when the infection rate goes up, will the government reverse direction and lock down harder again? Or will they go on pretending everything is fine while the situation gets even more out of hand?"

I hope that's wrong. Fiends I trust to be sensible ARE talking about what will happen in June. I agree lockdown can't last forever. But where is it wrong? What will happen instead?

What would I do if I were in charge? My best guesses would be:

* Have regular announcements announcing advice stricter in some ways but less strict in others. E.g. allow people to go to the park with relatives 2m apart, but offer more precise restrictions in other areas to show "we need to take this seriously" not "ok, relax".
* Have different advice for different regions.
* Don't focus on the minutiae of people working from home and mostly not seeing people. Work out what's supposed to happen for the biggest obstacles, companies that need people to work safely, what guidance is there? People with children, don't wish away the problem, offer government support to work part time, or allow people to share childcare within a small, fixed group of families.
* Hand a big check to someone in the NHS and say "sorry we fucked up procurement for treatment and testing. go organise it however you would usually organise it".
* Have a series of milestones for relaxing lockdown. E.g. "infection rate below X", "test and trace infrastructure is working"
* Have a plan for phased return to normal life. Pay attention to the people for whom the current situation is most difficult. Make it transparent. You could just copy France's.
* Stop hinting contradictory things. Decide what the strategy is. Decide what messaging communicates that. Communicate that clearly through all channels, regular announcements, adverts. Force newspapers to communicate it clearly, and not to communicate confusing hints.

What happens after that? I don't have an "after" yet. My best guess is that a sufficiently effective test-and-trace infrastructure will slowly allow normal life to resume with local lockdowns when necessary. Or maybe some other scientific breakthrough. Probably not a vaccine, but maybe quick home tests. Or some research breakthrough in how it spreads and can be prevented. Etc.

I've blogged about this ages ago, but apparently I never made myself understood.

Imagine you have a few characters, probably lovable misfits, a tough one, a hacker, a disguise artist, etc. The GM is adjudicating something simple and in theme, say the hacker needs to bypass an electronic keypad and then the tough one needs to spring through the door and take down half a dozen guards.

Traditional resolution mechanics, used commonly in all of simulationist games, tactical games, and lightweight narrative-focused games, go something like:

* Decide how hard each of those are for a typical human
* Each character gets a bonus for how much better than a typical human they are
* Then you resolve it.

It's important that the players and GM all have a similar idea how difficult these things actually are for the players, or they'll get into an argument about the resolution. But in truth... most of them will have watched a LOT of movies about tough ones who take down rooms full of guards, and never ever seen it in real life. So when you get to the "estimate difficulty" part, it's easier to estimate "for the tough one, taking out six surprised and lightly armed guards is of moderate difficulty" than to estimate "for a typical human, is this challenging? extreme? superhuman? something else?"

I'm considering an alternative, something like:

* Look at the obstacle as described by the GM
* Look at the character's ability
* Adjudicate "OK, for your specific character, that's easy/medium/hard/nigh-impossible", and roll a die that says "you succeed on an easy/medium/hard/impossible" challenge.

If you have a simulationist system, the traditional method is almost necessary. It's also a lot more practical if you have lots of different small bonuses, because adding those to the player's achievement is easier than subtracting them from the difficulty. But outside those situations, in theory, that system has some advantages: the GM doesn't need to model the characters abilities, just how hard the situation is; it means players usually get big numbers or lots of dice which is fun. But I'm not sure I actually believe those.

In practice, in creating a fun experience, the GM probably has a better idea of "I want to provide the players with this much of a challenge" than of "I want the situation to be this challenging in the abstract". Especially if there's modifiers being thrown around, it's easy for a "choose a difficulty, and then the players get bonuses" model to end up with "whoops, the player can just always/never succeed at this".

For instance, the players try to bribe a guard. Everyone expects that to happen in heroic fantasy all the time, so the GM gives it a fairly low difficulty. Now the players want to disguise themselves as laundry attendants to escape the castle. The GM does the same thing. But it turns out there's a mechanic for bribing but not disguise, or vice versa, so the players get a whacking great bonus to one of them and not the other, despite both being what you'd expect from the genre. It means the GM and player's instinctive knowledge of what the characters can do can work against them if the mechanics don't perfectly line up.

But with the new system, appropriate difficulties happen automatically if people forget themselves, but you can still calculate them in detail when you feel the need. The GM can always just assume that as long as the hacker does the hacking and the tough one does the bruising, most challenges will be "medium", but they can throw an "easy" or "hard" in there if they want. And if they DO want to make things more objective they can use a rule-of-thumb of "for every notch above typical human you are, you reduce the difficulty by one level" without wiring it into the rules of the universe.

What are the advantages of that system?

One is, as I said, it's easier to adjudicate difficulty on the fly if everyone has a good idea what the characters can do but not what a normal human can do.

Also, if characters want to work outside their specialities it also works better. Maybe "jumping a gap", anyone can try even if only the athlete can be assumed to succeed, but "picking a lock" you can't do at all unless you know. Most systems force you to pick one or the other of those for all possible tasks (or choose two possible levels, as with DnD's "take 10/take 20" system and restrictions on some skills without training). In this system, the GM can adjudicate on the fly what obviously makes sense in the situation at hand, even if it means some tasks which are medium for the hacker are hard for other characters and some are impossible. Whereas with a traditional resolution, if two different players want to try the same thing, it's easy to have the results break everyone's expectation of what the characters can achieve.

And, it implicitly puts the variance under the GM's command, not only the mean. If one character has a special ability that makes routine something that is usually far out of the reach of other characters, the flavour might still suggest that they some of those tasks are easy and some are hard for them. In a traditional resolution mechanic, you *also* need to make sure those difficulties are out of reach of other characters, except for the times they actually should be able to do it with sufficient effort. With the new system, you can simply assign difficulties for the character with the special ability, and worry about the other characters only if they try something like that.

I'm not sure if there's actually any use for this system, but thinking it through helped me think how abilities and difficulties work.

And I'm still confused by the responses I got when I talked about this before, which were mostly, "If you think that, you should try FUDGE" which I mean, sure, a popular widely used system probably is a lot better than one person's random idea, but it seems so irrelevant, since FUDGE uses exactly the same traditional resolution order as DnD, so I wasn't sure what they were trying to say.

"Oh, it wasn't offensive. It was a joke!"

How the fuck is this a thing? I mean, like, 100% of the blame is on bigoted knobheads who seize on any opportunity to run their mouths off at other people's expense and get away with it. AS WITH TOO MANY OTHER FUCKING THINGS IN SOCIETY! But, like, why is there a loophole here for people to exploit.

Them: Ha ha [racism]
Me: Don't say that. That's horrible.
Them: Oh, it's ok. I wasn't setting out to hurt people for no reason.
Them: I just wanted to hurt people because it's amusing to me that I can.
Me: Oh well, that's ok then NO IT'S NOT THAT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE HOW IS THAT BETTER IN ANY WAY?? SCREW YOU!!

Like, if you asked people, "can a joke be offensive" or "if someone made fun of you, is that usually ok?" or "if someone threatened you, but then laughed at you for it, would that make it ok?" they'd pretty clearly know the answer. But somehow "no offence, it was a joke" is a thing?

I think the thing is, it's sometimes a thing. Teasing friends is something most (but not all) people do some of the time, of mildly criticising things about their friend, or criticising imaginary things about their friend, with both people knowing it's not actually a criticism, is a way people often do friendship. But because human brains are cobbled together with rules of thumb and primate neurons, people do things without understanding them. So someone who makes fun of their friends (ok) or their friends who don't actually like it but they don't listen (not ok) or people they're don't even pretend to like but are bullying (not ok) or just everyone indiscriminately (no, still not ok) can kind of look the same if you don't turn your brain on for three seconds.

It can be hard to explain what's ok when, if people are used to just learning the code of behaviour for one social situation, and don't have the basic human empathy and decency to think "wait, maybe this was ok for person A and B but NOT for person C who constantly tells me how much it hurts them begs me to stop". But people should understand the difference.

Obviously people tell bigoted jokes because they can get away with it :( But why can they get away with it? Apparently because "it was a joke" is an explanation and implicit apology in one situation, people's brains just randomly imagine it excuses some completely other transgression. Like, just saying something that completely superficially sounds like a reasonable apology, and apparently that helps? Even though it has nothing to do with what they actually said?

Talking about offensive topics

In general, how might people talk about anti-X bigotry? Well, they might just say something bigoted about X people. That's obviously wrong. Or they might be an X person complaining that people say bigoted things about them. There's nothing wrong with that (although it would be better if they didn't have to).

Or someone might be talking ABOUT bigotry without actually SAYING those things. That's not inherently immoral, but you should exercise caution wrt (a) are you inadvertently perpetuating the stereotypes even if you're debunking them? and (b) are you forcing the topic on X people who might not want to relive all that right now. This is where advice like, "if it's YOUR pain it's usually ok to talk about, but if it's SOMEONE ELSE's pain, you should consider them first before jumping in with what you think" comes from.

And, surprise, EXACTLY THE SAME applies to jokes. Is a joke where the main content is "X people have negative characteristic Y"? I mean, that's a joke. It's not not a joke. But it's a joke specifically for people who have bigoted opinions. The problem isn't "it's a joke" or "it's not a joke", the problem is BEING BIGOTED.

Is it a joke, by X people, for X people, about bigotry X people experience? Well, not all X people will want to hear it, so step lightly, but X people generally get a say, and most people have at least some jokes about ways they're badly treated (mildly or seriously).

Is this a joke? Or is it offensive? WTF people? Is a tiger dangerous or is it stripey? Is the moon round, or white? People should stop being bigoted ALL THE TIME. INCLUDING when telling jokes.

When is this genuinely confusing?

Well, ok, I admit, there are SOME situations when you need a cursory knowledge of the topic in question. Like, if you tell a joke about a MILD criticism of someone, or a major criticism intended not to be taken seriously, or a tendency which is in theory neutral but you make a big deal of. Well, take a look. Is the joke only funny if you hate them and think they're worthless? That joke is probably NOT OK. If you described "why the joke is funny", would they mostly say, "yeah, that's me *self deprecating laugh*" without feeling coerced to do so? Then you should check with them, but you've passed the first hurdle to "should I even think this".

An analogy I frequently hear argued about is using an analogy of a household budget for a national economy. Usually, someone advocating cost cutting *implies* that analogy, and then someone opposed jumps in to point it out and say it doesn't apply.

The implication is something like, "we only have so much money, so we need to prioritise". Obviously the biases of the person talking are the obvious priorities, so obvious they don't need to explicitly justify them. Usually first in the queue is "whatever the status quo is, we obviously need to keep funding THAT". Obviously vulnerable people and non-voters get shafted. And worrying from a practical standpoint is, "oh, we can't afford long-term investment, we'll patch it quickly and accumulate infrastructure debt, I'm sure a later government will be happy to patch it up properly after it's been underfunded for decades" BZZZZZZT NO THEY WON'T THEY'LL CUT TAXES LIKE AS NOT BECAUSE THEY'RE JUST AS SHORT SIGHTED AS YOU.

And then someone else is like YOU DON'T HAVE A LIMITED AMOUNT OF MONEY YOU DELUDED COCKWOMBLE YOU'RE THE GOVERNMENT YOU CAN LITERALLY PRINT MONEY and then there's an argument about how much the government ever SHOULD print money. Usually Hitler is mentioned. I can understand Germans being twitchy about this, but you can be cautious about the wrong things.

Sometimes they don't actually SAY "deluded cockwomble", they just strongly imply it, or allude to a private eye legal letter which said it[1].

But anyway, there is a legitimate question, SOMETIMES you have to cut back necessary services to keep even more necessary services going. But if you're saving money in ways that are are only going to be more expensive shortly, 'saving' money by skimping on all the maintenance, turfing vulnerable people out of hospitals early, cancelling public transport, etc, but that are going to come back around as things fall down and need to be rebuild, now people need even more care, business steer clear because no-one can get to work, you have to ask, "is this cheaper overall, or only in the short term?" And if it's cheaper in the short term, is it ACTUALLY cheaper? Will you actually have a stronger economy in ten years time if you sabotage it now? Or not? If not, should you borrow money now to cover for this?

What are the counter-arguments to this? Well, with varying degrees of validity in various situations, they include: "government spending is a black hole which is essentially always wasted, so spending as little as possible and hoping people survive somehow is for the best", "the country is bust in the long term, we can't sustain the standard of living we have now, so the sooner we start letting people die of it, the sooner we can start rebuilding" and "I've got mine, lets burn the country to the ground as long as rich people end up on top of the pile". You can probably see which of these I sympathise with and which I don't.

But the thing that bugs me is, most of this is ACTUALLY TRUE OF HOUSEHOLD BUDGETS TOO. Getting deeper into debt is usually bad! But if you can borrow at government-bond rates it's a lot lot more attractive. And to some extent, if you're in a money crunch, you cut everything you CAN cut. But seriously, the car you use to go to work, the children's education, the medical care for the family members who are sick (to the extent that touch wood you have to pay for it yourself), cutting those is not normally "oh good, I'm more fiscally responsible now". It's "doom doom doom doom everything is about to collapse". Cutting YOUR SOURCES OF INCOME is an extreme short-term measure. There may be times when it's necessary. But I hate how people seem to be all smug and "oh, well, obviously" about it. The big things you can cut are (a) letting people die and (b) destroying the very things that make you money. Yes, half the time you DO have to cut those. But for god's sake, don't charge in with a machete chopping away with abandon, be sombre :(

[1] I made all this up. Don't cite me.

I've been at the new job over three months and it's going fairly well.

For a long time, I've felt like, each project goes through phases, of "just getting started and full of ideas" and "wrestling with someone else's code I don't understand" and "filling out features and making something fairly complete" and "dealing with an urgent problem". And they basically ALL caused me to procrastinate. But with very very many varied productivity tricks and techniques, I seem to finally be reaching a point where, in most of those phases, I can just go ahead and do work, without constantly struggling not to freeze up and get nothing done.

The last couple of weeks, I was a bit stuck in a "it doesn't work and I can hopefully fix it but I don't know for sure" loop, and hadn't realised how much it was dragging down my mood. It also seemed to be, I wasn't content if there was *any* major upcoming problem hanging over my life, I had to make progress on *all* of them before I felt at all better. But I eventually did.

Overall, that's really quite good. I still need to test if the improvement is ongoing, but it's an improvement I wasn't sure I'd ever quite reach. Unfortunately, because I'm me, my brain is less excited, as depressed that it took so long, and that afterwards things will not be significantly better.

There's been a slow shift. It used to be, if I had a little bit of time, I could never just, do something small (washing up, or code tidying, or replying to some emails). I could only ever do things when I made it so I *had* to. But as things improved, that resistance melted away, and "how intimidating tasks seemed" shrunk back to something related to how much work they actually were. Which I guess is where many people were all along.

Doing month-by-month goals or projects was definitely good, I think I want to keep that up. Sometimes they've been a specific project, like learning rust. Other times they've been just "catch up on these paperwork/chores". But having that structure helps a lot letting me see progress. And knowing a project is self-contained, I can see how much I can do, and then *stop* and force myself to re-evaluate my goal, not get stuck in a dragging-on project for ever.

I haven't done anything very spectacular this year, but I've learned about rust (and contributed!) and learned about writing an android app. And started a new job. And am confident that if I try to work on a project in a language I already know it would have gone a lot faster.

It feels like, given the slightest pressure to do things a particular way, even in my imagination, my brain immediately collapses into thinking "i have to do things that way" and it's really hard to *notice* how I'm stuck let alone dig myself out again. And that applies not only to specifics, "colleague refused to listen to idea, so can I ever consider that idea again in the future in any way?" but to meta-skills. It always feels like I *have* to fix everything by sheer force of will, not by, well, techniques that work, because that's what people expect of me. But it's not true, no-one does think that, but it *feels* like they do.

So... no-one else have an opinion on rules interpretation in http://jack.dreamwidth.org/1032556.html ?

I thought the answer was so obvious, but apparently not?

I like the principle of duck typing.

Roast it if it looks sufficiently duck-like. Don't worry about whether it's officially a duck, just if it has the relevant features for roasting.

However, I don't understand the attachment to getting 3/4 of the way through the basting, stuffing and roasting project before suddenly discovering that you're trying to crisp a small piece of vaguely duck-shaped ornamental stonemasonry.

I agree with (often) only testing for the *relevant* features of duck-ness. But it seems like the best time to test for those relevant features is "as soon as possible", not "shut your eyes, and charge ahead until you fail". Is there a good reason for "fail fast, except for syntax errors, those we should wait to crash until we're actually trying to execute them"?

I've been working on my non-vegetarian metaphors, how did I do? :)

"Sorry to see you go. We'd love to hear your reasons."

I THINK YOU ARE FACTUALLY MISTAKEN ABOUT THAT. But if it helps you:

(1) You have bugged me every ten minutes since the free trial expired to upgrade to the paid version. On windows 10, that makes an annoying "BOOONG" sound. Now I hate you with a firey passion and want to see all your works laid bare and low.

(1a) I clicked "Because there were too many notifications" SEVERAL times, but apparently there is only an option to toggle it on or off, the checkbox does not have a ternary option for "very" to express my EXTREME EMPHASIS in this matter.

(2) No, I did not already BUY other security software. I already have other security software FOR FREE because your program came pre-installed in windows 8+. In general, I feel the collation of more and more functionality into the operating system, while convenient, may stifle competition in a fashion long-term undesirable. But in this case, your entire business model being crushed by the microsoft juggernaut fills my heart with a warm glow of karmic satisfaction.

There, now. Do you feel more satisfied?

Dear people who start a kickstarter project, I am really not an expert at this, so if you have expert advice you probably know better than me already. But as someone who occasionally sees links to cool-looking kickstarters, I can tell you what seems good to me.

On the front page, try to have some sort of prominent summary, ideally two sentences, saying WHAT IT IS and WHY IT'S COOL. Um, maybe that's supposed to be obvious. But seriously, "We have an awesome webcomic, we made an rpg boardgame of it" or "we made an isometric computer game with detailed wizard duels" or "I wrote about about vampires living in london" or "here's a gadget that makes your bike sound like a horse", all of those make me think "oh, cool, can I see more". Even if I've never heard of it before. And many other pitches would make me think "good luck, but not for me".

But I seem to see so many kickstarters that say "here is a brand new BRANDNAME which is exciting and ADJECTIVE and lets you experience ADJECTIVE and ADVERBITY and here's a video for more information". That's fine. Unless you want me to give you money, in which case it has the disadvantage that all that coy non-information doesn't make me think "Yes, THIS random twitter link is the one I must track down the backstory for" it makes me think "why was I here again? *back* "

I'm assured, videos are great for persuading people. But I assume that only applies if people watch them?

To me, a video is saying "Dear technocrats, busy people, people with full-time jobs, people with children, people with smartphones, people under 25 with short attention spans, people with disabilities, methodical people and googlebot, get out of here, we don't want your money or your interest." Fine, you can sell to whoever you want to sell to, but that's excluding a LOT of desirable market shares...

Contrary to popular rumour, my love for mechanistic magic systems isn't all-consuming. I love stories where people exploit the system, stories about ideas -- old school science fiction about the possibilities of technology that hadn't been realised; everything by Greg Egan and Ted Chiang; HPMOR; much of the magic and plots in Brandon Sanderson's books. Ender's Game.

But I also love stories which work as stories. And I love the one good idea that suddenly works, even, or maybe especially, in magic systems which are more magical and less mechanistic.

But I think a lot of the fun of the story is lost when the reader doesn't have the knowledge to know what matters and what doesn't. Most stories have some things which are supposed to not be known to the reader, at least in theory. And most have some things which ARE supposed to be known to the reader.

A story where the hero is rushing to prevent something, and the audience know it won't work the way she intended, or don't know if it will work the way she intends, is told in a different way to a story where audience know what she's trying would work, but don't know whether she will be able to achieve it.

But if you screw up your worldbuilding, your audience won't know which. It's supposed to be obvious because "that's what the physics says" or "because they discussed that on p87" or "that's just how this sort of story works"? OK, fine, if that's ALWAYS right. If your book is ALWAYS consistent with the physics, and has examples to show it, then fine. If not, your audience doesn't know to trust you and probably won't. Likewise, they discussed it -- are the characters usually right about this sort of thing, or are they USUALLY undermined by some deus ex machina?

It's not important to be consistent with the real world, it's important to be consistent with your audience's expecations. Which in many ways is a lot harder. Being "slightly more consistent with the real world than your audience expects from similar books" is a good way of doing that, but not the only way.

To steal an example from John Scalzi, if the climax of you film involves a character dying in a tragic way by falling into lava, that's a bad moment to suddenly introduce a whole bunch of new rules no-one saw until now. I think even Scalzi would lose his suspension of disbelief if the character fell into lava and turned into purple mosquitos. But to everyone who's spend 5 minutes thinking about the density of rock, "falling into lava and sinking" is just as ridiculous. And yes, most people don't know that, so the story is fine for them. But Scalzi's point was that the moment of "suspension of disbelief" is arbitrary and varies between people. And my point is, that's sort of true, but more, that moment is determined by the consistency and trust the film has built up to that point, and the genre conventions of previous similar films.

Sometimes that's really unfair, because you want your book to be judged without those expecations. But there's not much you can do about it, except work to undo them or accept people familiar with them won't get your book as much.

This is why I keep caring about films which blatantly break worldbuilding they've previous established. If there's skyscrapers in your fictional Washington DC, that's stupidly untrue but doesn't break your story -- it's not realistic, but everyone will understand it's the sort of thing you get in cities. But if a tiny seaside village has lots of random skyscrapers, people will expect it to be a plot point because it's the opposite of what they expect.

In fact, I love magical magic systems. In some ways they're easier because they can do anything. But in many ways they're harder, because what's possible has to be determined by "what feels like it would be possible" which can be personal and hard to establish -- it needs a combination of shared expectation, and subtle world-building that doesn't invite people to pick at it.

But this is why I hate it if people say you shouldn't care about this sort of plot hole. I'm not saying you should care. But if you accidentally know that (for instance) different websites are run by different computers and no single program can alter them all, it's really hard to enjoy a plot based on the opposite assumption, because you literally don't know what's going to be possible and what isn't...