Why are the Resistance winning at Ingress?



  • I believe the answer is revealed in this Google+ post.

    To explain (for linkophobes), one of the players set up a private group for the Enlightened. The steps to recruit for the group securely are (understandably) rather involved, as the system is not integrated with any of the game software, so mostly security is handled using various screenshots. It's not a great system, but it's the only one available.

    However, the post is a word for word copy of the 'about' section in the community page, and the post starts with the description of the instructions as 'simple'. Personally I think this is unhelpful and at the same time disrespectful. He could have posted something which boiled down to "Many people are having trouble with this. The following people are missing certain steps. There's more but I don't have time to list them all right now." That would have been useful.

    So, my two WTFs:

    1. Refusing to acknowledge that the instructions are rather involved.
    2. Repeating exactly the same steps and expecting different results, as though that is not the definition of insanity.

    Luckily he seems to have been replaced by somebody communicative and helpful. I'm still annoyed about it though.



  • @Shoreline said:

    Repeating exactly the same steps and expecting different results, as though that is not the definition of insanity.

      It isn't.  Repeating the same steps and expecting different results is often reasonable, because not all processes are deterministic.



  • ♿ (Parody)

    Are you making fun of game players who can't follow instructions? They seem pretty simple to me (although not being familiar with the game, I have no idea what the different screens are). Maybe this needs more context to understand the WTF.



  • What's Ingress? What's the Resistance? What's Google+?

    I understand nothing!



  • BTW this is the very first "simple" instruction:

    @some Google+ user said:

    1) Circle me +Earthshine on G+ so I can reply to you.

    Wat?

    I've USED Google+ and I have no fucking clue what that means. I assume "circle me" means "add me to your circles", but then I'm lost.



  • @Shoreline said:

    I believe the answer is revealed in this Google+ post.

    To explain (for linkophobes), one of the players set up a private group for the Enlightened. The steps to recruit for the group securely are (understandably) rather involved, as the system is not integrated with any of the game software, so mostly security is handled using various screenshots. It's not a great system, but it's the only one available.

    However, the post is a word for word copy of the 'about' section in the community page, and the post starts with the description of the instructions as 'simple'. Personally I think this is unhelpful and at the same time disrespectful. He could have posted something which boiled down to "Many people are having trouble with this. The following people are missing certain steps. There's more but I don't have time to list them all right now." That would have been useful.

    So, my two WTFs:

    1. Refusing to acknowledge that the instructions are rather involved.
    2. Repeating exactly the same steps and expecting different results, as though that is not the definition of insanity.

    Luckily he seems to have been replaced by somebody communicative and helpful. I'm still annoyed about it though.

     

    i have not heard on ingress before and despite some reading up i feel so old and frankly like a blakeyrat *I STILL HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT THIS IS ABOUT*

     


  • Considered Harmful

    @blakeyrat said:

    @some Google+ user said:
    1) Circle me +Earthshine on G+ so I can reply to you.

    I've USED Google+ and I have no fucking clue what that means. I assume "circle me" means "add me to your circles"

    It's one of those places where verbing weirds language even more because there's already a verb "to circle" that means to move around something or draw a circular shape around it. -1 Confusing



  • @Helix said:

    i have not heard on ingress before and despite some reading up i feel so old and frankly like a blakeyrat I STILL HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT THIS IS ABOUT

    I'm guessing Shoreline ain't much better at communication than the guy he's bitching about, heh. He probably writes all the manuals at Snoofle's place.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Helix said:

    i have not heard on ingress before and despite some reading up i feel so old and frankly like a blakeyrat I STILL HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT THIS IS ABOUT

    When I saw the title I thought we were going to get something like a GPL2 vs GPL3 flame war. TRWTF is that would have been more interesting.



  • @Helix said:

    i have not heard on ingress before and despite some reading up i feel so old and frankly like a blakeyrat I STILL HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT THIS IS ABOUT

    Lol. It is an unusual computer game. It's one of those new fangled augmented-reality type things (a bit like orienteering, but with more cyberpunk) with two teams: cowboys and indians... no wait sorry Resistance and Enlightened. There's also some plot. It's potentially MMO, but it's still in closed beta, so it's currently just MO. As I understand it, the idea is to promote G+ and maybe some 3rd-party marketing.

    @DaveK said:

    Repeating the same steps and expecting different results is often reasonable, because not all processes are deterministic.

    Give me an example. If it's running a program, I put it to you that in running the program again, the machine (including the program) is in a different state, and therefore it is not a repeat of the same steps.

    Certainly in this case no new inputs seem to be added (except for the part I'm complaining about).

    @blakeyrat said:

    I'm guessing Shoreline ain't much better at communication than the guy he's bitching about, heh. He probably writes all the manuals at Snoofle's place.

    They paid me money to stop.


  • Considered Harmful

    @Shoreline said:

    They paid me money to stop.

    Unfortunately it's in a secured extranet, but the company who builds enterprisey content management system we work with thinks it's a great idea to produce documentation as in the form of a bajillion very task-specific non-indexed PDFs (and since it's password protected, Google can't get at them either). Technically it's well-documented but finding the right PDF for what you want is a needle-in-a-haystack endeavor. I usually find it's actually faster to dig into the disassembly, but of course the main module is compiled with a commercial obfuscator, so that's a blast.

    Anyway, I was thinking, someone should pay them to stop writing documentation.



  • @Shoreline said:

    @DaveK said:

    Repeating the same steps and expecting different results is often reasonable, because not all processes are deterministic.

    Give me an example.

    Tossing a coin.  Rolling dice.  Dealing cards.  Boiling an egg.  Applying the brakes in your car.  Chatting up a girl in a bar.

    @Shoreline said:

    If it's running a program, I put it to you that in running the program again, the machine (including the program) is in a different state, and therefore it is not a repeat of the same steps.

    So if it's not actually ever possible to repeat the stame steps, the quotation is an irrelevant point about something that can never be done.

    @Shoreline said:

    Certainly in this case no new inputs seem to be added (except for the part I'm complaining about).

    I wasn't specifically referring to the particular case you've raised here, but to the notion that that quote represents a general principle.  In fact, it would be fallacious to attempt to induce a general pattern of behaviour from a single instance of any process.  (See also xkcd #242).



  • @DaveK said:

    Chatting up a girl in a bar.
    That actually is a very deterministic process, although the extent of the injury may vary.

     



  • @DaveK said:

    Tossing a coin

    This is actually deterministic half of the time.



  • @Severity One said:

    @DaveK said:

    Chatting up a girl in a bar.
    That actually is a very deterministic process, although the extent of the injury may vary.

     

    So it's not deterministic.

     



  • @steenbergh said:

    @DaveK said:

    Tossing a coin

    This is actually deterministic half of the time.

     

    So it's not deterministic.

     



  •  The party, I poop it.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Shoreline said:

    Google+ post.
    Is it just my FF22.0 or does the space bar not work for everyone on G+? I'm presuming someone's borked some js somewhere and it's eating the event, but normally it should page-down the screen.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    I understand nothing!
    QOOC for the amusement value.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @some Google+ user said:
    1) Circle me +Earthshine on G+ so I can reply to you.
    I too am lacking context, but to me this sounds like "yo dawg, here's me saying I need to say something to you".

    While on the subject of Google Rotated X: why is it that they insist on sending me emails every fews days, trying to get me to adhere, where all of the suggested contacts are complete strangers? It's not like they don't have access to my contacts; the email is sent to a Gmail account for crysis' sake.And no, it's not (Edit:detected as) spam unlike the ones I get from "Facebook administration".



  • @boomzilla said:

    When I saw the title I thought we were going to get something like a GPL2 vs GPL3 flame war. TRWTF is that would have been more interesting.
     

    When I saw the title I thought it had something to do with american politics, and "Ingress" was his funny way of saying "Congress".


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @arh said:

    When I saw the title I thought it had something to do with american politics, and "Ingress" was his funny way of saying "Congress".

    That didn't occur to me, since no one is winning in Congress.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @arh said:
    When I saw the title I thought it had something to do with american politics, and "Ingress" was his funny way of saying "Congress".

    That didn't occur to me, since no one is winning in Congress.

     

    Well, at least they got the friday off.



  • @Shoreline said:

    1. Repeating exactly the same steps and expecting different results, as though that is not the definition of insanity.

    Autism is doing the exact same thing and expecting the exact same result.



  • @arh said:

    When I saw the title I thought it had something to do with american politics, and "Ingress" was his funny way of saying "Congress".
     

    When I saw the title I thought it had something to do with databases, and "Ingress" was his funny way of spelling Ingres.

     



  • @PJH said:

    @Shoreline said:
    Google+ post.
    Is it just my FF22.0 or does the space bar not work for everyone on G+? I'm presuming someone's borked some js somewhere and it's eating the event, but normally it should page-down the screen.
     

    There's a special place in hell for the creators of websites that override basic browser features.



  • @PJH said:

    @Shoreline said:
    Google+ post.
    Is it just my FF22.0 or does the space bar not work for everyone on G+? I'm presuming someone's borked some js somewhere and it's eating the event, but normally it should page-down the screen.
    Why would the spacebar page down the screen?  Isn't that what the Page Down key is for?



  • @El_Heffe said:

    Why would the spacebar page down the screen? Isn't that what the Page Down key is for?

    ... I just tried it and it does apparently work in Chrome. Although it would never occur to me in a million years that spacebar would do such a thing.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    Why would the spacebar page down the screen? Isn't that what the Page Down key is for?

    ... I just tried it and it does apparently work in Chrome. Although it would never occur to me in a million years that spacebar would do such a thing.

    Speaking of people coming out of cryo storage.



  •  Spacebar has pagedowned since forever. Funny how all of you are only just finding out.



  • Well I can't complain about it not being documented, but in a world where mouse scrollwheels, page down, and clicking on the scroll handle exist I've never bothered to look for yet more ways of scrolling the screen.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    ... I just tried it and it does apparently work in Chrome. Although it would never occur to me in a million years that spacebar would do such a thing.
    It's an old convention. Most mailers and newsreaders (remember those?) will scroll the message with spacebar, then when you get to the end jump to the next unread message (Opera at least also does something similar with webpages - when you get to the end of page and press spacebar, it'll try to go to the next page, if it's linked).

    As for why spacebar does this, it's probably because it's far easier to hit than PgDn, and it was unused anyway.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    but in a world where mouse scrollwheels, page down, and clicking on the scroll handle exist I've never bothered to look for yet more ways of scrolling the screen.
     

    You can get a really tall screen, and construct a paper cutout that you slide across the monitor.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Well I can't complain about it not being documented, but in a world where mouse scrollwheels, page down, and clicking on the scroll handle exist I've never bothered to look for yet more ways of scrolling the screen.
    Scrollwheel, middle-click+drag, page up/down, spacebar, arrow keys, dragging the scrollbar handle, clicking the scrollbar outside the handle... I use all of these, according to the mood of the moment. Clicking the scrollbar buttons not so much, but it too happens sometimes. Most of the time though I either two-finger scroll on the touchpad or use the arrow keys and pgup/pgdn. I'm a big fan of the Home key too.



  • @ender said:

    Most mailers and newsreaders (remember those?) will scroll the message with spacebar, then when you get to the end jump to the next unread message
    Yes, I remember that.  But still, in 2013, it would never occur to me to press the spacebar to scroll the page.  Just because something was done in 1989 doesn't mean it still makes sense today.



  • @dhromed said:

    @PJH said:

    @Shoreline said:
    Google+ post.
    Is it just my FF22.0 or does the space bar not work for everyone on G+? I'm presuming someone's borked some js somewhere and it's eating the event, but normally it should page-down the screen.
     

    There's a special place in hell for the creators of websites that override basic browser features.

    The space bar pages down perfectly inside my Google Chrome browser


  • :belt_onion:

    @Zecc said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Well I can't complain about it not being documented, but in a world where mouse scrollwheels, page down, and clicking on the scroll handle exist I've never bothered to look for yet more ways of scrolling the screen.
    Scrollwheel, middle-click+drag, page up/down, spacebar, arrow keys, dragging the scrollbar handle, clicking the scrollbar outside the handle... I use all of these, according to the mood of the moment. Clicking the scrollbar buttons not so much, but it too happens sometimes. Most of the time though I either two-finger scroll on the touchpad or use the arrow keys and pgup/pgdn. I'm a big fan of the Home key too.

    Such a long list of methods to scroll a page but still my current one isn't mentioned: swiping my tablet's screen from bottom to top with my finger


  • @El_Heffe said:

    But still, in 2013, it would never occur to me to press the spacebar to scroll the page.  Just because something was done in 1989 doesn't mean it still makes sense today.
     

    It's one of those features that would have taken more effort to remove than to leave it in - and you just know as soon as it was deprecated some fossil would scream about breaking backwards compatibility.



  • @Cassidy said:

    @El_Heffe said:
    But still, in 2013, it would never occur to me to press the spacebar to scroll the page.  Just because something was done in 1989 doesn't mean it still makes sense today.
    It's one of those features that would have taken more effort to remove than to leave it in - and you just know as soon as it was deprecated some fossil would scream about breaking backwards compatibility.
    Unfortunatelly, that's true.  Maybe they should just comment it out.

     

     

     



  • @bjolling said:

    @Zecc said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Well I can't complain about it not being documented, but in a world where mouse scrollwheels, page down, and clicking on the scroll handle exist I've never bothered to look for yet more ways of scrolling the screen.
    Scrollwheel, middle-click+drag, page up/down, spacebar, arrow keys, dragging the scrollbar handle, clicking the scrollbar outside the handle... I use all of these, according to the mood of the moment. Clicking the scrollbar buttons not so much, but it too happens sometimes. Most of the time though I either two-finger scroll on the touchpad or use the arrow keys and pgup/pgdn. I'm a big fan of the Home key too.

    Such a long list of methods to scroll a page but still my current one isn't mentioned: swiping my tablet's screen from bottom to top with my finger
    Trying that on my laptop would only result in a smudged screen.
    But I get close with two-finger scrolling on the touchpad. There's nothing like getting hands-on, is there?

     



  • @TheRider said:

    @dhromed said:

    @PJH said:

    @Shoreline said:
    Google+ post.
    Is it just my FF22.0 or does the space bar not work for everyone on G+? I'm presuming someone's borked some js somewhere and it's eating the event, but normally it should page-down the screen.
     

    There's a special place in hell for the creators of websites that override basic browser features.

    The space bar pages down perfectly inside my Google Chrome browser

    "Perfectly" doesn't accurately describe my own (laggy, disjointed) experience.

    I thought Ingress was a database...? Of course, I also thought .COM was an executable file extension. Computer people are astoundingly uncreative with their naming at times.


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