Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2023 April 11

= April 11 =

Magic words code
Hi, can you say me where is the code of the Magic words? Especially the code of these three:,  and. I mean, the page where is the code in which the instructions were written so that these Magic words do their function? Thanks. 2A02:2454:421:900:5146:EF5A:A6D2:4898 (talk) 00:27, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * According to Manual:Magic words, the default magic words are implemented in CoreParserFunctions.php. The MediaWiki Support desk is a better suited place for further inquiries. --Lambiam 07:49, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Passage of time: living in the past, present, and future simultaneously
We are currently living in 2023. That is the present. But in 2022 and earlier (in the past), 2023 would have been considered the future. And in 2024 and later (in the future), 2023 would then be considered the past.

The present (2023) was once the future, and the past was once the present. Conversely, the present (2023) will be the past, and the future will be the present.

So, from this A-theory perspective, are we simultaneously living in the past (as seen from the future), the present, and the future (as seen from the past)? GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:54, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Only if you think the future has already happened. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:10, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion (Albert Einstein) --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  12:20, 11 April 2023 (UTC)


 * The discussion in "Notes on McTaggart, 'The Unreality of Time'&thinsp;" (the first external link in our article) uses the formulation "E is present & E has been future & E will be past". Assuming the description of the temporal ordering relation of the A series as given is reasonably accurate and complete, WWI and WWII are both in the past in this ordering, but it does not admit the expression of such judgements as "the Trojan War started after the abduction of Helen". I suppose, nevertheless, that both philosophers, Heraclitus and Parmenides, had a conception of temporal orderings in which such judgements are meaningful assertions. --Lambiam 07:32, 11 April 2023 (UTC)


 * You're not actually "living in" the past or future, only in the present, which is a point in time. You're living within 2023, or the 2020s, or the 21st century, but you're living in a point in time. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:31, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * You're actually mostly living in the near past; insofar as "living" might be thought of as that which you are aware of; since the transmission of signals from your environment to your brain (and around your brain) takes time, by the time you are aware of a thing happening, it already happened in the near past. All of your awareness of the world is a few tiny fractions of a second behind what is actually happening now.  -- Jayron 32 16:37, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * "Now" is so infinitesimally small as to be non-existent. Humans can't deal with this, so we approximate and include both the very recent past and the fast approaching future as our "now". --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:24, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Now doesn't exist? (Somewhere out there is a confused brown cow.) Being Infinitesimally small means something doesn't exist? Clarityfiend (talk) 09:21, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
 * This seems quite relevant to our current discussion. -- Jayron 32 13:18, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Now used to exist. I experienced it just now; where did it go? Athletes hearing the starting pistol go off always start too late. What with speed records being measured in centiseconds, the athletes near the starting pistol have a decided advantage. --Lambiam 13:27, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The athletics bodies have taken account of that potential problem. The starting pistol in first class events no longer fires a blank - it operates a switch which makes a sound like a starting pistol on the structure immediately behind each athlete.  So they all hear it at the same time.  See Starting pistol. --Phil Holmes (talk) 07:31, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Technically, the electrical signal wouldn't reach each athlete's speaker at the same time; though this isn't really an issue because the tolerances aren't great enough to notice. Since the electrical signal travels on the order of the speed of light, which is 1 foot per nanosecond (thanks Grace Hopper) or 0.03 meters every billionth of a second; until such time as our timing devices start to mark records to the 0.000000001 of a second, we're probably fine.  -- Jayron 32 14:11, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
 * There would be nothing to stop the wires linking each loudspeaker to the "starting gun" being made the same length. Whether that's how it's done in practice, I don't know.--Phil Holmes (talk) 12:17, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Interestingly, due to the way that electrical energy travels, it's not the length of the wire that actually controls the time, it's the straight line distance between the source and the load., , .  Electricity is carried via the electric field, and the distance traveled is the distance traveled through the field, rather than along the wire.  The furthest speaker from the starting gun will get the signal last, pretty much irrespective of the lengths of the wires involved. -- Jayron 32 13:24, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Assuming no reflections, with a wireless system the nearest speaker would be first, but with wire, it's my understanding the time taken for the signal is dependent on their lengths, and why we measure velocity factors (and I'm pretty sure the each speaker's wire inductance can be matched too). This is because the wires specifically propagate current along their conductor's surfaces as a medium. Medium dependency of phase velocity occurs with sound too (with a rail track vibration being felt before its train is heard). In addition, a percentage of the field interactions can occur faster than the materials' phase velocities (I learned this factoid while reading about x-ray propagation), but these should be irrelevant to each wire-guided propagation which can be tailored according to need. Modocc (talk) 20:28, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Does something exist that matches the description given by a wall of text I've come across, or is it just a copypasta spread around as a joke?
While scrolling down each of a couple of comments sections on YouTube, I've recently come across a comment in the form of an extremely long wall of text. It starts with a long essay about how certain moments in a particular video (whose description doesn't match any video I've seen it posted under) allegedly caused the comment's original author (if there was one) to go on some sort of overwhelmingly deep, intense emotional journey. The essay is repeated twice, each with variations and without any line breaks throughout the entire comment.

From what I understand, the original comment must've been posted under a lengthy animated music video about bacon in a microwave. – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 16:08, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * It smells like a chatbot. --136.56.52.157 (talk) 16:33, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Clearly generated by a bot, using a sequence of templates, each with several variations, and with slots to be filled in. The repetition was probably the result of a bug. Were hyperlinks included? I have seen something similar, with many separate and shorter but nevertheless similar texts, disguised as genuine human comments but all including hyperlinks and presumably intended to boost page ranks. --Lambiam 20:17, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Of the instances of the wall-of-text comment that I've seen so far, none of them contained any links besides timestamps and an unintentional link to times.it in the first version of the essay above. However, I have seen replies saying "Finally its here" and linking to other YouTube videos, and there used to be comments containing walls of Japanese text below links to URLs that sound like adult sites. – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 22:08, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I wrote a program to do something very similar. For a certain website, when you create an account, you need to perform a certain number of entries to be validated. So, my program went to random file on the website, loaded the most recent entry that was more than a minimum number of words, and then altered that entry by translating it to French or Spanish and then back to English. If the phrase changed, it would then make the edit using the new phrase. Then, repeat until the minimum number of edits were made to verify the account. Doing this allowed me to auto-generate hundreds of accounts and then verify all of them in minutes. With that understanding, this particular text looks like someone wrote a script to use comments on videos on YouTube and alter them slightly to repost them and get videos a lot of comments to boost rankings. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 13:30, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
 * There's one where it says "Hail bacon. Hail bacon. Hail bacon." instead of just "Bacon. Bacon. Bacon.". HansTheExplorer (talk) 15:55, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
 * HansTheExplorer (talk) 17:14, 6 May 2024 (UTC) Edit: I meant “Hail bacon. Hail bacon.” as in only two copies not three.