Sofie dev log thread

I'll journal ITT with what I've been tinkering on and pushing up. It may be useful for those who are interested.

Fixed a major multi-hour outage caused by a logfile permissions mishap. Whoops.

It was triggered by a minor change: lowering the confidence threshold to display estimates of post quality. This suggested by an anon who missed being able to see value estimates on most posts. I had a reason for trying it that way, but the reason is obsolete as I'm intending to rearchitect the taste machine again soon anyways to make value estimates much more "linear" and direct (ie to behave more like a straight count of likes but with so many sofie advisory voting caveats that it can't really be described as such). Stay tuned.

However on pushing up this change, which should have triggered a restart of the server process, we had a problem that I only discovered hours later: the site was down. It was a tough debugging experience because I couldn't get any evidence that anything was even attempting to run at all except NFS telling me that the daemon failed to start. I eventually figured out that I had borked the permissions on a logfile in a previous session unrelated to the latest changes, preventing the server from starting or reporting its failure to start. This problem wasn't triggered until the server actually attempted to restart.

All fixed now.

New taste machine version (the part of the system that determines who has how much authority, and how valuable or offensive posts are considered to be). You will see that the value indicator numbers are now integers counting "votes". It's not quite as simple as that of course. Behind the scenes, we have a new more robust taste algorithm that leans harder on your posting record. The best way to build up authority is to post lots of great stuff. The way to lose privileges is to post stuff that breaks rules and gets hidden.

I'll have to get more transparency going at some point on how you're being judged

Major outage today as I had a subtle concurrency bug that blew up the whole system because of lack of defensive coding somewhere else. Details not that interesting: basically syncing the taste machine wasn't threadsafe but the webserver is multithreaded so when two people triggered the sync at the same time, it crashed. This led somehow to literally every post getting hidden and everyone's taste rating getting corrupted. Fortunately, when patched and restored, the taste ratings are near-instantly re-converged back to what they should be.

Added a "profile page" feature where you can click on a nym and see everything they have posted (under that name) in one place. Right now this is pretty useless because nyms are unique to threads, but as we add ways to interact with nyms (dm, vouch) and add optional persistent nyms, this will become quite significant.

You can now name your nyms. If you give two nyms the same name, they will be merged. See how I am now "admin". When posting new threads, you can either use a fresh anon (as previously) or one of your names. As always, you can at any time for any post spin up a new anon using all of your algorithmic clout.

Also, posting a new thread requires suggesting at least one tag. Please do suggest better tags. Improved tags and tagging system coming soon, but all help is appreciated.

Next up on the names and profiles front, we finally have somewhere to put vouch judgements. I'm still thinking about how best to do this, but at some point hopefully soon you will be able to register your judgement on whether someone is a benefit to our discourse here, as separate from your judgement on their particular posts. The best use of this will be when you know them IRL, but you will also be able to do it for anons. As I've stated elsewhere, it's on you to make that mean something, and on us to figure out what it means.

very bullish

>>2618
Mechanical question. Suppose I attach two names to this account, "Anaxagoras" and "Boethus". If you vouch for both names, does that count any differently from if you vouch for only Anaxagoras? What happens if you vouch for Anaxagoras but antivouch for Boethus?

>>2618

I dont see the feature to add a nym, is it still in dev?

>>2638
If i vouch for both your nyms, the system assumes those are independent signals, so they both count. But there’s a limit to how much we can count even very large numbers of vouches, with strong diminishing returns. I’ll adjust if people start gaming it or whatever and ban those who game it.

>>2640
Click on your name. You should see a profile page with this post listed. You should also see an “edit nym” button.

Some changes to layout last night. You'll see a unified title block at the top of all pages, tags a little less intrusive, a few other minor changes. Additionally, we can now (on the backend at least) change the name of tags. I've switched them from 4chan style /brd/ - Long Board Title to slug-only style like /accelerationism/. It's simpler and clearer IMO and I don't think visual space is at a huge premium.

Also, index pages now select the best/freshest 10 threads for display. This is going to make the indexes better to get a quick view of the good stuff to participate in, and will mean we have to lean harder on tags to find all the niche and old stuff (hence the tag improvements). Let me know if there's any way to make the tags more useful to hang out in!

I might add a process to deprecate tags soon so we can get rid of some of the less useful experimental tags. Otherwise though I'll probably let it lie for a while and get that vouch-graph/anonymous-follow/mutual-matching stuff going. I did this tag stuff because I was unsure how to handle the next steps on that, as I explained in >>2622. But now I think I have enough feedback and ideas to take it on directly. Finally. I've been wanting to for a while now but kept finding other unrelated stuff that I felt should get cleaned up first, or was entangled with stuff we needed to do first like the profile page stuff.