[veilrap]

I love the "lore" that this sort of bug creates, especially in these sorts of large scale multiplayer environments.

Players claiming to be cursed, and the curse was real!

A very different sort of event that it reminds me of is the old World of Warcraft plague: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

[shadowgovt]

One of my favorite things in gaming is when lore develops from bugs.

When they added the ability for Kerbals to be killed in Kerbal Space Program, they tripped over a bug where the first Kerbal in the game's engine, Jebediah (the one who dated back to the original introduction of astronauts at all, where only one existed), could not be killed. Because of some of the game logic having gone unmodified from the earlier versions, some operations would cause him to be loaded into the pilot seat and those operations didn't check if he was deceased. As a result, you could lose him on a mission only for him to spontaneously appear at the controls of another mission.

The community responded with fan-art of "Jebediah Kerman, thrillmaster."

[ReactiveJelly]

I don't think I got the punchline. Thrillmaster and coming back from the dead?

[marcosdumay]

The KSP community has lore about the Kraken. They will joke about anything.

[TeMPOraL]

The Kraken is a great example indeed. An eldritch horror lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system, that is not fond of Kerbals who are too ambitious, trying to get too far, too fast. A cosmic being beyond understanding. You can't see it and will never know where it is, if the concept of being in a place even applies to it. All you can know is that, as you travel further and further out, one day you may notice the laws of nature start to change, and this means the Kraken is about to have you for dinner. And sometimes, if it spots you doing something you shouldn't be, it will reach out even all the way to your home world and consume you there.

When it strikes, it eats you swiftly, and eats you whole. It disassembles your crafts, spaghettifies your crews. No weapon or speech will save you. The Kraken transcends reality - even time travel, reloading from a saved game state, does not always stop the attack.

--

Of course, the Kraken is just a manifestation of unstable physics calculations and a floating point-based coordinate system: as you travel further out, the spacing between two consecutive coordinates gets bigger, until it overwhelms the physics engine and your craft disintegrates. And if you start doing crazy stunts, particularly involving high impulses or very fast rotations, the physics will break even if you're close to coordinate origin, due to rounding errors.

[shadowgovt]

The trick the devs used to ameliorate Krakening was pretty clever: they "smeared" acceleration between the reference frame and the ship components so that the position delta frame-to-frame was lower and therefore more of the interactions occurred in the higher-density floating point space of lower forces and smaller displacements.

[a_e_k]

I haven't played KSP yet, but that description makes me think a lot of the Dragons in the 1955 short story "The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Cordwainer Smith [0].

> Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and horror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached out for inter-stellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns kept the Dragons away.

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29614/29614-h/29614-h.htm

[iamdbtoo]

My theory for why people think they are being "shadowbanned" or otherwise targeted by a social media company is often because of bugs like this. They are weird and almost like gaslighting in the way you experience them and people who don't understand how these bugs can exist assume sinister motives.

[TeMPOraL]

I remember Facebook around ~2010 would often seemingly delete posts I published, or hide them from some of my friends. Or from me. I could easily confirm that by viewing my profile from another browser that wasn't logged in, or having a friend sitting next to me open my profile.

Of course, it wasn't any kind of UI bug or automated moderation. The experience gave me a visceral understanding of what eventual consistency means - a term I also first learned around that time, during internship in an Erlang company, and connected the dots.

I was one of the first people in my social circle to spot the issue, but as it became apparent over a year or two before eventually getting fixed (or at least made less obvious), I ended up giving a very high level intro to distributed databases to quite a few non-tech people, in order to alleviate their concerns about Facebook gremlins.

This and other experiences using and building software systems make me agree with you. Especially for large web platforms, that weird thing you're experiencing could be some nasty form of shadow ban, but if you just noticed it after doing something, then chances are it's just a transient issue with queues or database consistency.

[nyanpasu64]

Shadowbanning is a very real phenomenon; my current Reddit account was shadowbanned twice because I had created and posted memes which got unusually high upvotes for a new account, and the algorithm thought I was a bot reposting images to farm karma for future spamming. And from time to time I see HN users whose posts are flagged by default. I'm less sure if/how shadowbanning occurs on Twitter.

[kevingadd]

The problem is that while shadowbanning is a real thing, there are lots of bugs that also appear to be shadowbans and might just be a momentary glitch or an unintended interaction between systems. In Twitter's case, there are multiple different penalties that can apply to account and people refer to them all interchangeably as a "shadowban". And some people claim to be shadowbanned when as far as anyone can tell there's no function in Twitter's system to do it, there's just something weird happening in the infrastructure or algorithms (or it's all imaginary, who can say)

[mistermann]

Or it is actually real and it is those who are imagining it to be only imagined who are mistaken. Almost everything we do is composed of substantial imagination, the whole system runs on it.

What I find interesting is the substantial curiosity and effort people will put towards solving questions in video games, but when asked to solve problems in the game of life that we are embedded in, people often seem to have opposite instincts.

[LelouBil]

Great read, thanks for sharing !