vogon

the evil "Website Boy"

member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist

zip's bf

no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good


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bluesky
if bluesky has a million haters I am one of them, if bluesky has one hater that's me, if bluesky has no haters then I am no more on the earth (more details: https://cohost.org/vogon/post/1845751-bonus-pure-speculati)
irl
seattle, WA

vogon
@vogon

is that the memes everyone remembers from the WIPP "Expert Judgement" Technical Report are messages which the Report explicitly says they believe can be conveyed non-linguistically and should ideally be expressed holistically through the design of the site

(in reference to https://cohost.org/tessesseff/post/355500-hashtags-i-would-lik)


vogon
@vogon

I was mostly joking about this being a foundational principle of this website but now that I'm thinking about it the WIPP Expert Judgment report did really solidify in my brain a lot of my beliefs about architecture and the design of sociotechnical systems


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in reply to @vogon's post:

some of my favorite little design touches from the Expert Judgment report include (iirc, these are just things I remember from the last time I read it):

  • message steles incorporating empty space so that people in the future can engrave fresh, unweathered copies of the message on them in whatever languages are in current use;
  • Level IV messages being stored in a vault with a door plugged by a stone that is wider on the inside than the outside, so unless you dismantle the vault entirely there's no good way to remove the door plug and reuse it for anything else, which would leave the vault open to weathering by the elements;
  • "salting the earth" by mixing the backfill over the site with little ferrous metal pucks in sufficient density to ruin the day of anyone drilling for oil or water, and also throw up a wildly anomalous geomagnetic signal if anyone still has geomagnetic sensors in the future

I feel like if that first bullet point worked, then the site is already seeing tons more traffic than it would like to. And practically speaking, you can't leave enough space for millions of years of continuous language development. Would be a fun thought experiment to figure out what's the minimum viable number of inscriptions for something to be legible to someone through all of recorded history in various areas, but even that's only really possible in hindsight. (and Attic Greek is cheating! jk)

Point 3 is fantastic though. "guys what's with the creepy field of monoliths that always throws off this compass I just invented, look it's just spinning around, the world itself is twisted there..."

edit: what's the verdict on mildly inhospitable architecture? like, steps that occasionally aren't quite the right height to trip people up, other ways to just gently hint "hey this place doesn't like human life, you probably shouldn't be here"