User talk:Confocal
Removal of "No longer considered important/interesting"
Hello! I've re-edited or reverted a couple of edits you've made recently, in what seems like a campaign to avoid ever saying what's interesting and what isn't. I'm tempted to undo a couple more edits, but I'll think about it for a while first and see if other people want to chime in.
I understand the impulse to be careful not to accidentally make judgments on behalf of the community. But on the other hand -- well, take pure glider generators for example. The community has been pretty much universally uninterested in pure glider generators for about forty years, ever since it became clear that they're ridiculously common, with untold billions of them inside a 10x10 bounding box -- and mostly there's nothing to recommend one of them over another.
It seems to me that the sentence you took out was a very good gentle warning to newcomers to the community, not to get too excited about going out and discovering some new pure glider generators and trying to name them and get them put on the LifeWiki. Dvgrn (talk) 20:24, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
- I think there are seven pages where I did these edits. I did not find any other similar claims by searching for "interesting"/"important". I'm not going to make further similar edits. Here are my thoughts. The part "no longer considered important/interesting" seems problematic in a wiki article (which is supposed to be more objective and more time-independent than an editor's opinion). Would it be better if that sentence was referenced? Would it be an improvement if it was clearly stated since when and why these patterns are no longer considered important/interesting? I do not have answers to these questions. I saw that people here often just make edits without much public discussion (here or on the forums) and I decided to follow WP:FIXIT and remove such claims. The expectation was that if some of these edits happen to not be improvements after all, they will be simply reverted (WP:BRD) or improved further by someone else who will be able to do better. Confocal (talk) 21:38, 8 June 2022 (UTC)
- Sounds good -- I was just a bit worried that those seven edits might be the start of a larger campaign.
- I'm generally in favor of a "bias toward action", as long as there are enough active editors around to review people's work. In my mind there's kind of an exception here, though: when an edit just removes information wholesale, without leaving any sign that it ever existed in the article, it becomes a bit less likely that other readers will notice the problem and fix the damage -- and until they do, there's information missing. I guess maybe there's a "bias toward more information" as well as a "bias toward action" operating here.
- That said, I'm not trying to complain or say that you did anything wrong here -- this kind of discussion is all part of the wiki editing process, and other people may well disagree with my point of view.
- I do think that it would be possible to find forum-post references that make general statements about why these various categories are commonly considered not-interesting. They'll each be written by a particular person -- I've written a bunch of them myself! -- but it's rare that anyone speaks up to contradict one of these community-consensus summaries, so it seems as if there really is a community consensus.
- The fact that these posts keep having to be written ... pretty much explains why it seemed like a good idea to put those "no longer considered interesting" statements into those seven articles. Those are useful pieces of information, and it's better not to remove any of the ways that people can find out that information. Dvgrn (talk) 12:22, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
- It seems interesting to me to know how to deal with these kinds of claims in a reasonable way, so that no knowledge is lost, and existing knowledge is stated clearly. Honestly, saying that something is deemed not interesting or not important sounds to me pretty much like someone's opinion and not an objective knowledge. Of course, it may well reflect some objective knowledge, or at least it may be an attempt to document an existing knowledge - but it sounds like an opinion. It might be better (?) to state only that there was no (known) deep investigation of something, instead of saying that there was no interest in doing so or that it is not important enough to do so. Maybe someone already was sufficiently interested and did a deep investigation of some subclass of pure glider generators - it's just that this knowledge did not yet reach the forums/the wiki? Confocal (talk) 18:11, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
- That's a reasonable point of view, and it somewhat matches my own instincts when I see relatively new but not completely new people on the forums write dismissive responses to posts by "true newbies". It's usually better to avoid saying that something is not interesting.
- Maybe the idea that people are trying to get across when they say "not interesting", about things like glider turners or vanish reactions or pure glider generators, is "there are just way too many of these things, it's very easy to find more of them, and so far no one has found a reason why any one of them is more interesting than any of the others". Dvgrn (talk) 19:22, 9 June 2022 (UTC)
Size of LifeViewers
Is there any particular reason you shrunk the LifeViewers in LifeWiki:Spaceship Search Status Page? Gzaytman (talk) 17:56, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- The viewers were too wide to fit the screen, even on my desktop. Probably it becomes worse for readers browsing the wiki from mobile devices. Confocal (talk) 18:02, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- One can barely see anything at this size. Also, what LifeViewers on other pages, e.g., 2-glider collision? Gzaytman (talk) 18:12, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- I think that one is too large as well. I think it is better to avoid wide viewers and wide galleries (as a rule). Sometimes it might be possible to split the pattern into two or more smaller RLEs (an exception is when the pattern is meant to be shown exactly unchanged as a whole). Sometimes the pattern is just too big to expect that it will fit the screen with all details visible. Sometimes it may be better to include a footnote with a reference to an external webpage where the pattern is displayed in a better way than what is possible, given the inherent limitations of wiki. Confocal (talk) 18:19, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
Times template
What is the advantage of Template:Times over typing the Unicode character × directly? HotdogPi (talk) 10:37, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
- The template {{times}} currently uses non-breaking spaces around the "times" sign, which will (hopefully) prevent cases when the string specifying dimensions of something is broken in the middle. Using a template helps to maintain consistency in the future, just in case it turns out later that the formatting should be changed again due to some reasons I cannot predict now. Confocal (talk) 10:46, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
There are no occurrences of this still life in final patterns of collisions in octohash, octo3obj or octo3g databases.
For whichever still lifes apply, can you please add:
- This is the rarest 12-cell still life by itself in the octohash database.
- This is the most common 12-cell still life by itself not in the octohash database.
- This is the rarest 12-cell still life in final patterns of collisions (plus junk) in the octohash database.
- This is the most common 12-cell still life not in final patterns of collisions (plus junk) in the octohash database.
And the same for the other two databases, and possibly also for the 11-cell still lifes. You can omit the cell count if it applies for all still lifes regardless of cell count. I don't know which ones they are, or else I would do it myself. HotdogPi (talk) 12:36, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks for suggestions. I might try something along these lines later on another pass through the pages (which is probably inevitable anyway). Confocal (talk) 12:46, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
Viewer Config
Is there an issue with odd- vs. even-numbered ZOOM settings? I seem to recall you changing one from odd to even and noting it. Book (talk) 23:15, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
Slower patterns
- There was no standard before I came here, but I've typically used half the period, rounding up. You've made several changes slowing things down significantly. I can understand it for patterns like airforce that don't follow a common sequence, but you just reduced newshuttle (p28) from 7 to 3 despite it being a typical pre-pulsar shuttle that doesn't need every generation in detail because it follows a familiar sequence. Why are you slowing a whole bunch of them down? HotdogPi (talk) 13:15, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
- I think many of the oscillators are configured too fast. That results in an animation that is hard to watch and somewhat distracting. E.g. for the newshuttle, compare the two speeds below. I think GPS 7 was too fast. Confocal (talk) 13:22, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
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- I think we need the opinion of someone less experienced. I've seen so many pre-pulsar shuttles that I can follow GPS 7 just fine. HotdogPi (talk) 13:41, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
- Probably this is not related to commonness of a sequence - it's just that very quick animations become distracting, and possibly worse than no animation at all. Confocal (talk) 13:59, 5 November 2022 (UTC)
Catagolue job log retrieval
A minor technical question: how to search for a catagolue job log that contains a certain submitted synthesis? GUYTU6J (talk) 06:52, 12 November 2022 (UTC)
- I think it's not quite "years-old". The Catagolue backup logs seem to be available only to February 2021 (cached copy), which prevents simply doing binary search before that date. Confocal (talk) 07:27, 12 November 2022 (UTC)
Hiding Simulations
Any particular reason you set hideimg to true for the non-totalistic rules? Gzaytman (talk) 01:32, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
- I linked to Template talk:Rule in edit summaries -- earlier I suggested there to hide the random soups, and nobody did reply there yet. Random soups for similarly behaving rules take screen space and increase page lag, without adding much useful or interesting information IMO. Apart from that, a sufficiently interesting rule will always have some specific patterns/reactions that can be shown instead of a randomly generated soup. Confocal (talk) 01:37, 6 May 2023 (UTC)
Bullets instead of standard indents on the Tiki Bar
This seems like a good place to ask:
Would you mind editing your Tiki Bar contributions to remove the nested bullet-point formatting? A few other users seem to be copying it, probably just because it's a nearby example and they're not particularly fluent in markup. That's making a bit of a mess. Consistent standard indents (some number of colons) remain much more common, and they seem preferable from a readability standpoint.
I can't go in and fix these myself, because you've requested
Unrelated: please do not "fix" markup in my replies. Confocal (talk) 22:54, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
-- but once you've cleaned up your bullets, I probably will go and remove all the other bullet indents. I'm reasonably sure that other instances are all unthinking copycat-ism, since it isn't really a likely-looking choice for most people.
I'll make clear in my edit that any bullet-wielder who objects to my edit should feel free to tell me about the objection directly -- no need for anyone else to intervene on their behalf, I wouldn't think. Dvgrn (talk) 20:18, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
- Done in this edit. Confocal (talk) 23:42, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
Avoiding 1) implicit assumptions about screen width, and 2) edit wars
I was a little bit worried about this recent edit, for two reasons. Mostly it was the comment about "immediately below the lead text", which makes it fairly clear that you're testing your edits on a device with an unusually narrow screen width, and not thinking about more common widths.
When I look at that edit -- on a laptop with a 1920-pixel-wide screen -- I see three LifeViewers next to each other in the first line of the gallery, with a fourth one below it. The first LifeViewer on the far left looks broken, since it's the only one that mysteriously isn't animated. So it seems worth mentioning that there still isn't a lot of support for making things look good at very narrow screen widths at the expense of making the same things look terrible at wider screen widths.
Luckily your next edit solved that issue quite well: it seems like not such a bad thing to have one LifeViewer with a still image in it, so that it's easy to see what the base pattern looks like. Separating the non-animated one from the others keeps it from looking broken.
That separation does add a lot more empty space on most people's views, higher up in the article such that you have to scroll a bit to see the paragraph under "Variants". I personally don't mind that in this case. If other people's opinions differ, maybe they'll speak up here...! I could imagine that applying the "same rule" to smaller galleries might make things take up an unnecessary amount of vertical space, and you might not see the difference but most other people would.
... That edit was also a continuation of an edit war with Galoomba -- which was probably technically justified in this case, since Galoomba's previous revert had stomped on several other changes you'd made that Galoomba had not mentioned or seemed to notice. But just as a reminder, too many reverts of another user's good-faith edits is just plain bad politics. It causes various kinds of grumpiness and complaints about your impolite behavior, which then spreads around and wastes a lot of time. On the LifeWiki it probably works better to start a polite conversation about the issue first, then revert or (preferably) just make another edit and move forward, only after a consensus has developed.
-- Or if there's no consensus, at least de-escalate by waiting until after you've made a good-faith effort to continue the discussion for a while... days, not hours. If nothing else this will be good documentation that you've thought about the problem much more carefully than anyone else has! Dvgrn (talk) 12:03, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
about your points concerning the gray box on the p24 gliderless LWSS gun
I don't mean to be rude or mean, but i don't see your points as fully valid. While yes the gray box is placed where a reader might not see it, it's not like it would take a detective to find it if the reader is curious enough. as for readers "not understanding what they are", again simple curiosity would clear up any confusion immediately. C28 (talk) 05:45, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
- See Talk:P24 gliderless LWSS gun. Re: category links -- in addition to what I wrote on the talk page, another problem is that there are multiple category links at the bottom, while you want to draw attention to just one (that leads to other gliderless guns). It is unnecessary to require that reader search for the correct category link (possibly even before they knew what they were looking for). Confocal (talk) 05:50, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
Sorry (Big-Θ notation)
I thought it was a typo. -TYCF
13-08-2023
- No need to worry here -- "iff" is a common way to shorten "if and only if", and also commonly misunderstood as a typo. Also, you can sign your comments on the talk page by typing four tildes (~~~~) at the end of the comment. Confocal (talk) 13:51, 13 August 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for telling me that "iff" is a way to shorten "if and only if" and also how to sign my comments. TYCF (talk) 19:41, 14 August 2023 (UTC)
Comment
Where should I respond to other people's comments? TYCF (talk) 08:32, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
- Generally, on the same talk page / forum thread where the comment was left.
If you have further website-related questions, I suggest to ask in Thread for your website-related questions on the forum.
Confocal (talk) 08:48, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
Sorry
Sorry, I was trying to copy a section of your comment in Sorry (Big-Θ notation).TYCF (talk) 14:26, 15 August 2023 (UTC)
Are you sure?
I saw a message in my talk page saying that I violated the rules in the B35/S23 page. I did not find anything new in B35/S23, yet alone document it, and the name "Grounded Life" was not suggested by me but by MeIsScammer. I do not know why you sent this to me, can you explain? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Haycat2009 (talk • contribs) 12:08, 10 September 2023
Somewhat related: I feel like I was a bit premature with OCA:Grounded Life/List of common objects. While the page should still exist, should it be renamed to the rulestring? HotdogPi (talk) 12:20, 10 September 2023 (UTC)
Line of three
On the page for line of three , you removed the ruleinfo section with this comment " I don't think the ruleinfo section makes sense in this case. For example the shown pattern works in the rule where everything is a still life https://catagolue.hatsya.com/object/xs11_0g0s252z121/bs012345678 " but I don't really understand as it is the same as blinker and therefore will behave the same in the same rules as blinker so the ruleinfo section which was from the page for blinker should be right. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TYCF (talk • contribs) 15:53, 11 September 2023
- The only reason why a separate dedicated page line of three might be warranted, is because "line of three" is not, in fact, "the same as blinker". A blinker is a period-2 oscillator; line of three is currently defined as a still life component. These are two different things.
The rulespace information for an oscillator is computed relatively easily (by looking in which rules the oscillator evolves in the exact same way). In contrast, I doubt it is useful to attempt finding rulespace info for a still life component -- as such, it is not supposed to be evolved on its own. Confocal (talk) 16:01, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
Sorry , I forgot to sign my comment. TYCF (talk) 16:15, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
Are you spying on all of my edits?
Recently I only noticed that you edit pages which I have. Are you spying on every edit that I make and editing the pages that I edit? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Haycat2009 (talk • contribs) 14:55, 16 September 2023
- I just look at Special:RecentChanges which shows all recently changed pages, regardless of who made the edit. Confocal (talk) 15:03, 16 September 2023 (UTC)
Sorry for removing the tags
Thanks for the reminder! I will add them back. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Haycat2009 (talk • contribs) 10:23, 20 September 2023
Adding false information and trying to retain it.
Recently I noticed that you are adding false information to the sqrt replicator rule page and trolling users who try to correct it. Can you tell me what you gain from concealing true information for "Historical reasons"? The rule name is not something that I want to touch on, but pray tell why are you adding false information? (Namesake lograhamic replicator - but it's growth rate is Sqrt(T)) And you better not say that this is for fun or to troll other users - that is vandalism and it is not allowed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Haycat2009 (talk • contribs) 15:12, 21 October 2023
- The rule is named "Logarithmic replicator rule" and the pattern is named "logarithmic replicator". Your edit adds a newly invented terminology, removing documentation of existing terminology in use, and adding [mis]information without any links that could help to verify it. If you really want to call something "vandalism", it is your edit that better fits the description, considering your edit summaries and edit warring. Confocal (talk) 15:24, 21 October 2023 (UTC)
Confocal, you are just annoying!
Confocal, you are just annoying! Unname4798 (talk) 07:22, 22 October 2023 (UTC)
An apology
Sorry for any trouble that I have caused you. In future, I will 1. Never refer to anyone by a rude name, 2. Assume good faith and 3. Stop undoing your edits. Can you forgive me? Haycat2009 (talk) 05:42, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
- Just to clarify: do you retract your message above describing me in a few ways which implied I'm here for something else than trying to contribute something?
Even though LifeWiki is not Wikipedia (for one thing, it is much smaller in comparison), I think the Wikipedia essay WP:HERE is relevant. I'm here to try to improve or contribute something where I think I can.
Regarding various disagreements on content of wiki pages, I don't think there is currently a single effective way to resolve them (there are relatively few active members, different people are active at different time, etc.) Maybe a new "LifeWiki Discussion" forum could help, if it gets implemented. Confocal (talk) 14:35, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
- Sure! Can I remove that massage from your talk though? Haycat2009 (talk) 07:52, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
- Since this was posted, you did undo my edits at least seven times, including reverts without any explanation whatsoever. That is not counting cases where you undid edits by others without explaining (it does not really matter whether it is my edit or someone else's edit). LifeWiki is neither a battleground nor a social network. It does not really matter whether or not I forgive you (I'm just a random wiki editor) and I cannot teach you here how to live. What I can do however, is to remember what another editor did in past, and to make conclusions for myself about what I can reasonably expect from them in future. Confocal (talk) 09:05, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
Your edit in block fuse
Why you do this? Why the HWSS blinker fuse isn’t delete? Spaceship (talk)
- See LifeWiki:Notability. There are very many trivial "fuses" that could be made, where a spaceship that could survive by itself moves and deletes stationary objects (see Fly-by deletion). These are not notable enough to collect them on a LifeWiki page. Likewise, adjustable fuses made of multiple components which can be rearranged to result in different speeds are not individually notable. Confocal (talk) 09:44, 5 December 2023 (UTC)