A young shitposter sits in kes pod. It just so happens that today, the 4th of Sepember, Epoch 224, is this young poster's birthday. Thought it was twenty-six years ago ke was given life, it was only today ke will be given a name!
What will the name of this young poster be?
> Enter name.
TETRA | 💎
You can't have that name. That's my name.
> Examine pod.
Your name is ETTIL. As was previously mentioned it was your BIRTHDAY. A number of CAKES are scattered around your pod.
You have a variety of INTERESTS. You have a passion for LONG NETFIC. Pinned on one wall, connected by red ribbons, are your WORLDBUILDING PROJECTS. Atop your TERMINAL OF A NORMAL DEGREE OF FANCINESS is an UNREASONABLY FANCY PDA. You like to play MAP SIMULATORS sometimes. For gender euphoria, you POAST; but that goes without saying.
What will you do?
> Message the best programmer among your friends and ask them about the new game that they've decoded from combining messages on two ancient ruins, or that new game that's coming out soon that you've been able to get a beta copy of, or whatever the obvious plot hook here is. Probably it involves a game.
Oh, right, Sgrox. That makes sense.
So, like, Sgrox does seem like the obvious plot hook in your life, and you could message your favourite hacker friend who has somehow managed to obtain server time from the actual AGI program, and now that you think about it it did turn out to be the 4th Sepember was the scheduled date, but it's your birthday! Talking about work is so drab and dour. Your favourite hacker friend likes data structures, maybe you could fuck around together with data structures for a bit.
> Probability?
Okay, OKAY, yes you're kind of itching to go launch Sgrox, the mysterious thing that everything in your recent life seems to have been building up to. You got, uh, you!
You open up textnet.
Not now, textnet.
> Ettil: Check messageroll.
Your most recent messages are with your esteemed textnet friends VAVEL | 📊, ESPAY | 🗡️ and MAJIE | 🚀. It's VAVEL you're after.
> 🌐: Message 📊
The following is a chat between Vavel | 📊 and Ettil | 🌐. This chat took place on the 4th Sepember, Epoch 224.
🌐: oms hi vavel
📊: Ettil!
🌐: awawa thats me
🌐: im sooo ettilcore
🌐: they're calling me the most ettil entity that ever existed
📊: Who's been doing that /q
🌐: orach, canonically! that's the basis by which i make this claim
📊: I could eat Orach's breakfast on the prediction markets.
🌐: so do you mean to say that there's a more ettil entity out there
🌐: that would actually be huge news
🌐: do you know who ke is /q
🌐: like if there was an entity more ettil than me we'd basically be bound by the ancient compacts between simulator and simulacrum to fuck
📊: I'm not saying that, I'm only saying that Orach is systematically miscalibrated such that I can on average get money from claims that Orach makes in earshot of me.
🌐: hmmm idk this is sounding a lot like there's a more ettil entity than me
🌐: hypothettilaly where would amplified ettiloids of this nature be...
📊: I imagine that we could construct a Great Silence-like argument whereby, if there was a more Ettil entity out there, it would be able to locate the less Ettil entities, and you would already have been contacted.
🌐: soooo are you saying orach is right about this
📊: If we were placing bets on this, then my argument would have already been priced in, and Orach would have been making an overconfident buy order.
🌐: do it then.
📊: Boop.
🌐: huh okay 43% is actually like really high
🌐: i mean i guess in teg4 sure and the interpretation it's elsewhere on tetratopia implies i have a WLD stat below 40
🌐: can't be. obviously spurious
📊: The volume is extremely low because you haven't operationalised "more Ettil".
📊: There are subspaces of Ettil-traits you value where there are entities who have more of those traits than you, and the market uncertainty is uncertainty over the definitions that you're using.
🌐: in an adequate civ we'd have an unambiguous loglang to specify these
🌐: le sigh
📊: sina ken toki e toki Baseline. toki Baseline e toki pi kon wan.
🌐: no you ken toki Baseline we plebes can only live with fallen Standard
🌐: doesn't it have like a bajillion cases
📊: It has 96 cases and actually that's more like 6 cases but different.
📊: ona li jo e wile nimi mute. ni li wile nimi mute en ni li ante.
📊: It does so happen to be that everyone can speak Baseline, if they're my friend.
🌐: im skeptical of this claim unless you're being very mean with modus ponens the tollens
📊: Nothing like that; I hold it as literally true that all of my friends can speak Baseline, under the straightforward interpretation of those words. jan pona mi ale li toki Baseline.
📊: Insofar as words can be interpreted straightforwardly in fallen Standard :)
🌐: i remain skeptical of this claim
📊: Do you want to take the other side of this bet /q :)
🌐: hm
🌐: hm hm
🌐: hm hm hm
🌐: okay no what's the trick here
📊: Actually, before I reveal this fingersnap, I should get a slightly-serious-business agreement that you won't share this outside of this chat.
🌐: oh wow
🌐: lemme think about this for five minutes
> Think about this for five minutes.
You think about this for one round and then you spend the remaining time allocated doing nothing because you already decided.
A slightly-serious-business agreement! Exquisitely tantalising. Of course you're not going to share this.
> Navigate to the language server shell
You are greeted with documentation for two functions that each takes one input, called translate_standard_to_baseline and translate_baseline_to_standard respectively. The inputs are suggested to be text in Standard and text in Baseline; the outputs are suggested to be text in Baseline and text in Standard.
Obviously, this is fake. Computer translation is famously an unsolved problem.
The first part of this is because there's only language actually used for economic translations, STANDARD, so there's no gigacredit reason to try to make a computer translate things.
The second part is that translation is difficult, so it doesn't get solved by hobbyists on the kilocredit scale. As much as l'Academie Tetratopique and everyone else wishes it not to be so, natural languages are ambiguous by necessity, and in everything but formalised subsets of language it's not possible to unambiguously compute the exact context a word is being used.
The best available for conlangs and historical languages where a lot of effort has been put into making good translation software is a little bit more sophisticated than mapping words over 1:1 to their first entry in a creator-defined dictionary, but not usefully so. Standard → Baseline is no exception to this difficulty, especially since Standard does not have 96 explicitly marked cases.
And thus, obviously this is fake. You have deductively proven such information using facts and logic.
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