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Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

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Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#231

Post by embedding-shape »

amiga386 wrote: post #218

I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages. This article is literally the first time I've heard of Odin (the language), and I only clicked it because I thought it was about the Norse god, not some invented language. There are various bounds for notability in Wikipedia, and no matter how much of a fan of the new thing you are, you are encouraged to root around for sources. H…

> I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages.

I wouldn't say I'm terminally-online, but I do program, passing interest in neolanguages. I've heard about Odin, because I also do 3D VFX and simulations, particularly fire and fluid simulations, and JangaFX kind of infamously hit the 3D simulation scene with EmberGen which kind of did what many thought was short of impossible, making fire/smoke simulations a hell of a lot better and faster by running it all on the GPU. I upgraded to a $10K GPU more or less so I could do bigger scenes faster in EmberGen.

Only once I was inside the JangaFX/EmberGen community did I find out about Odin, which is the base of their entire product line, something like 4-5 products by now. Generally I don't care much about Algol/C-like languages like Odin and the rest, but because it's used in EmberGen and lots (all?) of JangaFX products, I've ended up using it a lot for better or worse.

> If you want to be in Wikipedia, don't put your effort into fighting AfD, first put your effort into making your thing actually popular and notable.

If building a world-class (almost revolutionary) product with your own programming language doesn't count as "making your thing notable", maybe it's time to revisit what notable means? JangaFX/EmberGen been covered A LOT in its niche, but because it's a niche, somehow that doesn't seem to count for Wikipedia as "notable".

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#232

Post by movpasd »

I despise the "what's true is true" attitude exhibited by Casey and Bill in these tweets. I find it to be an instant flag of unreliability. The smartest human alive is still a human. We have a stake in every conversation, we bring our baggage and our allegiances.

So often, this attitude is couched as a desire for truth and objectivity. Do you know what somebody does when they _actually_ love the truth? They work hard to find it, they examine their own assumptions, they try to build systems that extract truth from an unbelievably complex world of unreliable narrators. And most importantly, they are curious: for example, curious about how other communities operate and what they can learn from them.

It is the hypocrisy that I find unbearable. The language of truth and objectivity wielded to win arguments which are fundamentally emotional in nature. There is nothing wrong with being frustrated that a community dear and significant to you, clearly notable, seems to be overlooked by a figure of (informational) authority. Let's take that frustration and work together to improve our truth-seeking institutions.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#233

Post by embedding-shape »

movpasd wrote: post #232

I despise the "what's true is true" attitude exhibited by Casey and Bill in these tweets. I find it to be an instant flag of unreliability. The smartest human alive is still a human. We have a stake in every conversation, we bring our baggage and our allegiances. So often, this attitude is couched as a desire for truth and objectivity. Do you know what somebody does when they _actually_ love the truth? They work hard…

Nothing here is about "truth" or "objectivity", it's about Wikipedia's subjective view of what counts as "notable" or not. Seems like a really strange confusion here, as you're giving some meta-perspective on the discussion while seeming to miss the entire point of the discussion you're trying to provide a new perspective to?

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#234

Post by cygx »

embedding-shape wrote: post #231
amiga386 wrote: post #218

I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages. This article is literally the first time I've heard of Odin (the language), and I only clicked it because I thought it was about the Norse god, not some invented language. There are various bounds for notability in Wikipedia, and no matter how much of a fan of the new thing you are, you are encouraged to root around for sources. H…

> I am a terminally-online person, and I do program. I am not interested in neolanguages. I wouldn't say I'm terminally-online, but I do program, passing interest in neolanguages. I've heard about Odin, because I also do 3D VFX and simulations, particularly fire and fluid simulations, and JangaFX kind of infamously hit the 3D simulation scene with EmberGen which kind of did what many thought was short of impossible,…

As I understand it, the Wikipedia model is that anyone may contribute, but the information has to be collected from sources that conform to certain formal criteria. There are no such sources for Odin.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#235

Post by FullGarden_S »

woodruffw wrote: post #32
jibal wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odin is extremely well known to every human being who keeps up on programming language development, along with Zig, Nim, D, Jai, V, Crystal, Carbon, and others. "programming topics" isn't relevant.

I keep up with PL development, and I am only vaguely aware of Odin (and same for Jai and V). (But this isn’t the point: lots of programmers know about relatively obscure thing, but that does not itself make them notable. Notability is a well-defined property on Wikipedia.)

You make it sound like you're confusing popularity with notability.

Unlike Jai and V, Odin has been in commercial use(JangaFX) for years now with several high performance computing products written entirely in Odin and the customers of JangaFX includes several AAA video game and VFX corporations. A lot of programmers not knowing or the language not being mainstream does not mean that its non-existent.

The Notability of Wikipedia is just the involved admin's opinionated bias. As simple as that. Its always been like that and it'll probably always be like that as Wikipedia seems like it isn't are capable of operating while changing that.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#236

Post by Rochus »

I find it strange that they deleted the article. The topic is relevant and of sufficient interest. I think there is a deeper bureaucratic pattern behind it. In every once-useful organization, there comes a point where the rules stop being instruments and become relics: nobody asks whether they still serve the original purpose, because the bureaucracy now exists mainly to defend its own procedures. That is basically Parkinson territory, and also the classic drift into cargo cult administration.

The result is predictable: genuinely useful things get removed, while irrelevant but procedurally compliant nonsense survives. Lenz’s “die Freuden der Pflicht” comes to mind, the self-satisfied worship of duty detached from reason or outcome. And in modern internet terms, that is just another form of enshittification: the institution keeps its forms, its process, and its moral self-image, while the actual value quietly rots away.

That said, with the advent of systems like Perplexity I barely ever go to Wikipedia anymore. And nowadays I spend more money to archive.org than Wikipedia.

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#237

Post by [deleted] »

stymaar wrote: post #181
lvoudour wrote: post #127

I have never been a wikipedia contributor (let alone a mod), but their points seem fair. Maybe not fair for the particular case, but fair for the general case. People who ridicule wikipedia policies should at least acknowledge that the modern internet is a very low trust society with millions of bad actors trying to push their agenda at the expense of others. And now with AI bots running amok the headache increases t…

Also, how are we supposed to know that JangaFX is a real company, and its CEO a real person? Creating fake companies and persona is not particularly high effort today, if that's all it takes for a pet project to be featured on Wikipedia, it's going to end up full of crap real quick.

[deleted]

Re: Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

#240

Post by countWSS »

womble2 wrote: post #230
countWSS wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know why you get downvoted, but this is how AI-based projects win over time: they don't randomly decide to delete valuable data. Grokipedia might be trash in terms of its quality, but at least it it doesn't have omnipresent moral busybodies loitering in to "purify" it from knowledge.

Of what use is an encyclopedia with "trash quality"?

Ok, suppose you have a "trash/low quality" article and "this article has been deleted", the article with some info will win over the audience as they search for it. Like "Worse is Better", the quality will improve over time and the "deleted article" will stay at 0 recognition. An average internet user will not complain about the Wikipedia article, they just switch to Grokipedia and whatever AI-generated content it has, since they now have it.
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