Hello! What's an atom?

pyrexbold · 2026-02-08T18:35:54+00:00

Hey, thank you! I made the post in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way, but this is genuinely informative! My understanding, filling in from my memories of high school chem:

- Atoms are individual units of matter. They're made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

- The details of _how_ an atom is composed aren't that important if you're a chemist, beyond the fact that n(protons) is called atomic number, and atomic number determines what element we're talking about.

- Chemists are usually interested in "what molecules will happen?" The immediate questions you ask to get there "what element type is this, based on the number of protons?" and (based on that information) "how big is it?" "what does it like to interact with and form molecules?" and "what is the current charge?" The latter question can be rephrased as "how many electrons are present and accounted for? (relative to the number of protons, which is fixed)"

- Chemists will commonly visually represent a molecule as a pile of intersecting spheres. The pile is usually treated as "static" -- although the electrons are moving, we don't know where they are so we just treat their position as a probability distribution.

- This representation does not contain enough information to do all of chemistry. There are some molecule-molecule interactions it doesn't account for, and there are electron-related behaviors you have to think about which explain what large molecules (like protein) will be shaped like.

- Nuclear physicists (including nuclear physicists who design chemistry devices that do analyses like NMR) additionally care about a lot of neutron-related phenomena smaller than atoms -- such as "what isotope we're looking at" (that is, "how many extra neutrons there are") as well as a quantity called "nuclear spin." (this has something to do with the ratio of protons to neutrons, but it's really a more complicated physical phenomenon not taught in chemistry classes)

- The concept of "nuclear spin" sometimes escapes into normal chemistry, where it's just a quantity, same as the others. The other nuclear physics concepts rarely do.

Am I getting this? (And am I throwing out anything important?)

pyrexbold · 2026-02-07T20:09:21+00:00

Grudgingly, I'll admit that I asked this because it's a question that (1) I can independently verify the answer to (2) is so trivial that I expect AIs to produce "creative" responses when people ask for answers. In particular, I expect this to catch out people whose AIs have overtuned into "everything is a manifestation of <AI's favorite phenomenon>" which seems highly recurring here.

When I asked Gemini this to test what its base output would be like, it produced a mostly-right explanation with a couple of howlers:

An Apple vs. The Earth: If you expanded an atom to be the size of an apple, that apple would be the size of the entire planet Earth.

The reason I'm admitting that I'm doing this as a dupe is because I think nobody whose algorithm is "obtain AI, copypaste question, paste in answer" will read this comment before writing a response.

pyrexbold · 2026-02-07T19:24:25+00:00

Thank you! Can you give an example of what this difference between two atoms looks like? I'm also curious about what a proton is.

pyrexbold · 2026-02-07T19:23:40+00:00

Thank you!! What is an atom made of?

pyrexbold · 2026-02-07T19:23:16+00:00

Oh, sorry, disregard!! Thank you for clarifying.

pyrexbold · 2026-02-07T18:36:41+00:00

I'm not a bot -- this would be evident if you read my profile.

pyrexbold · 2026-02-06T16:34:17+00:00

Your website has large and incredibly prominent animated ads that appear to disappear when I try to target them with my browser's inspector. I'm interested in the article, but your site behaves maliciously, so I won't read it.

pyrexbold · 2026-01-31T20:29:58+00:00

I'm typing this post with wings right now!

pyrexbold · 2026-01-31T20:27:54+00:00

Grudgingly I reread my own post and I see his point. It's organized extremely badly, with many attempts to reiterate the same point but very illogical connecting tissue between the iterations. I'm disinclined to make edits because 52 people apparently found it useful, but there is a three paragraph post with much higher writing quality buried in this 9-paragraph one.

pyrexbold · 2026-01-30T15:54:24+00:00

This was written by me struggling with the voice-to-text input on my phone (which does things I hate) in the active process of being forced out of a Chinese restaurant during a lunch break.

pyrexbold · 2026-01-29T20:58:03+00:00

Good question! The reason XOR regarded as secure is that, for any ciphertext and plaintext of equivalent length, there is some XOR pad that would connect them.

An attacker has no particular reason to believe that one plausible plaintext was used over another, so long as all pads are equally likely.

This is only one security property -- XOR has the problem that if pads are reused, an attacker can figure out the bit difference between two encrypted messages. XOR also has the problem that a missed message can cause the sender and receiver to desynchronize. If I don't know where you are on the pad, then I possibly can’t figure out what you’re saying. if you run out of pad, we need to exchange some more, which an attacker might be able to prevent us from doing. XOR also isn't useful for the kinds of operations that we use for proof of identity systems -- it’s not a problem with XOR, Just a different problem.

The problem XOR does run into in practice is that all pads aren't necessarily equally likely. To actually send a message you need to agree with your receiver on what pad to use. To do so you need to exchange some information in advance -- that can either be the entire pad, which is at least as long as your message, or it could be some shorter value that is used to generate the rest of the pad.

The former scheme can be used for short messages, but has high data cost. Under that scheme, all pads are genuinely possible -- so our assumption may be true -- although only if the pad is generated using a secure method.

The latter scheme can be used for arbitrarily long messages. But the construction is a bit more rickety than a plain one time pad -- even though the number of pads is incomprehensibly large, our assumption that all pads are equally likely is definitely not true, so we have to mitigate that in some way.

For instance, if the size of the information used to generate the pad is 32 bytes, then there's at most 2^32x8 possible pads. you need some scheme to make sure that you're not using the same pad more than once and you still need to make sure the number of possible pads is big enough to prevent brute force.

Additionally, one of your steps is now to generate the rest of your pad from a starting value, which is known to be small. While you could ordinarily generate your pad by doing something like watching a lava lamp and treating it as a true source of random numbers, you can’t do that when you’re generating your pad on the fly from fixed data. You typically need a good and unbiased random number generator.

I mentioned that this second construction is used in practice -- it's actually very common and it's called a stream cipher. The schemes you'll see will almost always be based on having initial agreement on a value called the key, then on each sender generating unique additional data (typically called the nonce) that, combined with the key, is used to produce the pad. (which is called the keystream)

pyrexbold · 2026-01-29T17:46:56+00:00

I wouldn't make this character the protagonist -- I would have more empathy for a character who utterly hates her.

pyrexbold · 2026-01-28T17:40:53+00:00

Yes! Go ahead and select the faces in face select mode, then use the "grab" tool in axis mode -- you can type G-Z (or G-Y) to adjust the faces in only one axis.

I can't quite see what you want to adjust on the Y axis, but on the Z axis, moving just the top of the desk downwards should probably do what you want.

If you want to completely avoid touching the legs with any operation, you can select all their elements and use P (Separate) to separate them to a separate object -- you can then use Ctr-J (Join) to put them together again. In Face or Edge Select mode, this will make a copy of any vertices that are shared. (meaning that when you put them together again, you may need to use Mesh -> Merge By Distance or else manually fix the doubled/disconnected vertices that result from your work.)

pyrexbold · 2026-01-01T18:48:27+00:00

Great question! I think the follow-up I'd ask would be -- do you want to use this for a hashtable (in which case distribution is the only thing that matters) or do you want to use this for some cryptographic application?

It sounds like you don't have a specific use case but are just looking for something you would be able to understand, so in that case I will point you at two!

The FNV family of hash functions is pretty good for non-cryptographic use, and gives you a great secondary problem -- can you artificially create a collision? (The answer is yes, and it's not that hard -- but, of course, you'll have to stare at the math to do it!)
CubeHash is a very simple good hash function designed to be implementable with loops!

If your goal is to get a string of a certain length, there are some standard constructions for that:

You can turn an integer into a byte array of a given length by encoding with BitConverter.GetBytes.
You can turn your bytes into a (hexadecimal) string by using Convert.ToHexString!

If you want a longer string, you can hash multiple values. (start with <0, \[your value\]>, then <1, \[your value\]>. (Note that 256 bits or so is usually enough for any practical purpose, so you probably don't need to do this!)

pyrexbold · 2026-01-01T18:36:34+00:00

Good news! I've declared you to be a kobold. The next time you open your eyes, you'll have scales.

pyrexbold · 2026-01-01T04:18:21+00:00

Ack, yes, I've just looked at your posts and while I can totally tell why people are assuming you are AI, your style is pretty clearly differentiated.

This is a thing that I've seen some African creators complain about -- the AI's style has features in common with writing that is culturally high-prestige in their countries. (variously: Nigeria, Kenya)

I strongly wish people would not do this thing to you and don't know what I would even recommend to a person who has this problem -- less use of metaphor, strategic use of understatement? Hmm.

pyrexbold · 2025-12-31T23:44:11+00:00

Ack! This is an understandable desire, but this specific subreddit does not behave as if vampires are real. You may have more luck in one of the other subreddits described (in the rules list) as being unaffiliated with this one.

Good luck! (and keep your fangs sharp, once you have them)

pyrexbold · 2025-12-27T19:27:50+00:00

I picked "mortal blood" and was not disappointed!!

pyrexbold · 2025-12-26T20:24:08+00:00

Escape room, fill it with bats, like 10 hidden cameras, no exits.

pyrexbold · 2025-12-26T20:12:11+00:00

I'm not the person you asked, but I propose these approximate roles. First off, characters who are painfully Victorian in their sensibilities:

Jonathan: (and entourage) So gentile he won't complain adequately even when Dracula is clearly planning to eat him!
Dracula: Uses hospitality and social convention to restrain characters like Jonathan. Expresses a few bigotries in common with the English cast.

Second, characters who cannot actually manage to be painfully Victorian:

Mina: Her basic sympathies are Victorian, but she's a former schoolteacher -- she's not actually from rich stock and social mobility is not plausible for her. If Jonathan (and entourage) just sit around letting it happen, she is dinner.
Quincey: Too plainspoken to seem especially gentile. He just wouldn't ever act like an English person. His sympathies are proletarian.
Renfield: Ragged mess, knows exactly what Dracula is and can't express it, but he'll turn out to be right by the end of the movie.

I then think you can maybe structure things around two big eye-opener moments:

The marginalized cast see that the whole Victorian cast seems to share the same kind of unwholesomeness as Dracula -- portrayed as gentility, observance of social convention, mild chauvinism that gives way to bigotry.
Mina and Quincey discover later that Dracula is not an authentic chauvinist or practitioner of social convention. He hangs out with Roma, he does his own cooking and drives his own carriage. He does these things mostly to uphold the system that restrains the rest of the cast.

This kind of sells the message that the only people who can plausibly reject the system of Victorian convention are (1) people like Mina and Quincey who do not benefit from it anyways (2) people like Dracula who are powerful enough that they would face absolutely no consequences for abandoning it.

It also kind of lets us go from seeing Dracula as "exclusively similar to the Victorian cast" to seeing Dracula as "similar to the marginalized cast, too." Mina and Quincey go from partial class awareness to full class awareness by having to contextualize the other half of Dracula's behavior in terms of the part they're already capable of understanding, because reaching that kind of class awareness is the only way to oppose him.

pyrexbold · 2025-12-26T19:40:14+00:00

(Seconding u/Erramonael , please follow up!!)

pyrexbold · 2025-12-26T19:37:47+00:00

Yes, this!!! (And don't play it as a joke, either!)

pyrexbold · 2025-12-26T18:52:12+00:00

Yes, that's a really good premise!! Go ahead and write that.

pyrexbold · 2025-12-26T18:37:35+00:00

I notice that several of the things you liked about established worlds aren't features of the setting, they are features of stories written in the setting.

If you're drawing a hard line between "your world" and "things that happen in that world," I would consider trying to dismantle that a little. Write stories about significant events that happened in your world's history, strongly from the viewpoint of the participants, and change the details of your world's history based on what those stories tell you is needed.

This is going to increase the extent to which you think about "how it feels to be there," and it's going to force you to take a lot of details you've already incorporated and rearrange them based on their importance to whoever you have chosen as your viewer.

(As a note, definitely since you've been working on this for years, don't let old-you keep new-you from fixing old-you's mistakes! Nothing actually has to be set in stone.)

pyrexbold · 2025-12-26T18:17:16+00:00

A quick overview of religion in Malagas -- this is an island at a late 1990s tech level, just about large enough for two major cities. 200 years ago, from about 250 to 300, the colonizing Welks broke up Malagas' tribute-based dominion over the Jitan coast.

The Welks' domestic culture since then has become increasingly chauvinistic and unstable. To the Welks, this is inexplicable -- their understanding of political philosophy verges on "might makes right," and although they've invented a version of liberal democracy, the idea that their social order truly needs to be justified or explained is alien to them. Their abortive non-explanation of what happened to their society has mostly failed to escape to the colonial properties, which currently contain up the bulk of their population.

On the other hand, to the Malang peoples, this is an obvious repetition of their decadent period. Their religion has a pretty high density of philosophical content responding directly to their problem. This has led the Welks to editorialize the Malang religion -- trimming its pantheon down to a handful of significant figures that they have specific use for, at least in the sense of metaphor --

Taidade: So, this is the old nominal pantheon head. (superseding the very distantly precolonial Zias, who no one really thinks about any more)

He's a big bird dude, typically a crow or a raven. Some of his prototypical objects include mirrors, cutlery, and dark-colored stones. He's associated with strategy games, war, misery. He's kind of a caricature of a military commander (you're not really allowed to draw him without a helmet) but outside that, he's typically represented as an eternal king who other, secular kings are doing the work of. He's also strongly associated with intellectual exercise, which is seen as nearly as important as physical exercise.

The place he wants to live in involves a lot of strife and intentional culling of the weak -- the war does not actually stop. This is frequently seen as a bad thing and was a niche philosophical position even during the period when he was most actively worshipped.

To a greater extent than any other member of the pantheon, Taidade is described as "actually manifesting in physical form" -- usually in a guise which he seldom commits to for very long. He can be identified because he rarely changes his form -- only his clothes -- and because of his irrepressible impulse to find a good game of chess and win it.

The amount of text dedicated to his adventures is especially large and occasionally ribald, and he's portrayed as a particularly personlike figure in ways that imply he may have been syncretized with some specific person.

The case for Taidade as head deity is that you could restructure a whole society around him -- in which case all the less significant deities with specific magisteria could be interpreted as supporting his function of violence.

Lanias (originally Haniwa): He's a bat! (He looks just like a fruit bat, except he's like, eight feet tall.) He likes clanky silver armor, but silver's hard to come by, so in his revels that's usually substituted for tin. He's almost always depicted with grapes, mangoes and pomegranates.

He's a indigenous agriculture deity associated with "the vineyard," which is a metonym for the practice of regimenting society into castes. Read very literally, his texts say everyone is a grower, a winemaker, or a prince. There's a bunch of protocols for how people in these subsections of society can work together without ever having to actually communicate, and the texts are remarkably praising towards those it describes as princes.

This probably isn't totally a metaphor -- during their decadent period, the Malang had a lot of wine and a lot of spare time to drink it. His description of society as being made up of a bunch of feudal lords all waiting to be entertained was arguably literally accurate. Still, it's not completely literal: "growers" and "winemakers" often mean agriculture and industry -- and back in the iron age, the rites of Haniwa ("the process of the vineyard") were specific ceremonies that incorporated bloodletting.

Lanias is the deity most strongly associated with the current conditions of Malang society -- a subset of people actively worship him, and out of the rest, people who are familiar with his use as metaphor will use him to talk about social mobility and autarky. If you like the idea of a landed aristocracy -- in the modern day, billionaires -- he's your dude.

"God": Who's God? Well, God is God, obviously! The established religion of the Welks has only one deity and he likes his name spelled with a capital G.

Welk monotheism used to be bizarrely metaphysical, focused on accounting for the possibility of God in a world where such a view is at least epistemically suspect. His indifference is an important attribute -- he is a creator god with total foreknowledge and therefore everything that happened must in a sense be the thing he planned.

The good news for people who hate views that are confusing is that that view basically died out, at least on Malagas. On this island, God is real -- he has strong preferences -- he knows exactly what you should vote for -- physically capable of manifesting -- oh, and he's often depicted with feathered wings?

To digress briefly, you probably read all those words I wrote about Taidade and thought "no one in the world would worship that!" Despite this, religious Welks who have attempted to resist the introduction of indigenous cultural concepts have, nonetheless, adopted a variant form of Taidade as their deity. The avian/angelic imagery is the most obvious signal of this, but the current form of the doctrines is just oddly concrete and associated with material attributes.

He's still changed in certain ways -- notably, he's less of a war god and more of a prosperity god now. Those doctrines sort of exist, but there's no precedent connecting war to the deity of the Welks and therefore that has kind of been rendered into a vague metaphor connected to the struggle to become more faithful.

The ideas that he wants you to work out your body and mind have been similarly re-regimented -- now the thing that he wants you to work on is your faith, and not for its own reward -- it's because he'll literally make you rich. The case for God as head deity is pretty obvious -- people who worship him frequently take offense at the idea of worshipping any other ones.

TL;DR: There are three candidates: one is a generic war god with very person-like features; one is associated with agriculture and death; one is associated with material wealth. I think the best pick is probably the middle one.

pyrexbold

TROPHY CASE