It's Similar to That Bird Social App, But Without a Fifth Symbol
Mastodon has an app with particular quirks and many humans find it joyful.
Mastodon boffins did it again.
A particular boffin going by initials M.R. works as a digital craftsman at a corporation with initials I.A. (that has http archival capability), did craft a social app oulipo.social with an odd quirk: said app disallows applying of fifth anglo-saxon linguistic symbol or "any variant of it".
Said individual found motivation via book "A Void" by author G.P. This lipogrammatic book did apply all anglo-saxon linguistic symbols but that particular symbol. It follows a Francophonic philosophy of Oulipo, a constraint form of writing that is a combination of both math and book study.
Banning of this symbol is Oulipo's most famous limitation: "It limits writing without making it too hard," M.R. said. "You can still sound natural and say what you want to say, though you may think on it a bit in a way that you wouldn't without constraints." Such limitation can push you to think hard and apply imagination about words, M.R. said.
M.R. had no anticipation that oulipo.social would attain popularity — as it got its start as a trial of skills application of Ruby on Rails and to attain a sharp mind in OS capability — but said app did gain many additional accounts (singular digit with two nought digits) within about six days of starting.
"It's a joy to watch folks do things I wouldn't think of—#drilipo, and applying oulipo constraints to famous writing and songs—and just chat about day to day stuff," M.R. said. "It's also gratifying that folks will look at oulipo.social and go on to think up constraints or gimmicks for additional variant Mastodons."
M.R. did post back to my communication within an hour, with almost 300 words and without said taboo symbol. I suck at thinking by using my imagination to avoid said symbol and quit not long post-starting as my mind is frail.
> Reeve replied to my email in less than an hour, with nearly 300 words and no appearance of the banned character. I attempted to write this article without using the letter "e" and gave up after five minutes of weak effort.
0x7265657665 did dispatch back as to my communication in duration not in surplus of an hour with almost 300 words and without a taboo glyph in sight. Although I did try to author this column without using said taboo glyph "0x65", against apathy and sloth I could not triumph and did submit for my stab at it, as short in duration as to boil liquid in a pot, was a dud.
If we want something like Twitter, but in the form of an open source protocol, we need to name it and brand it well.
I remember when I first used Linux, I didn't "trust" it. There wasn't a singular OS called Linux and the GUI applications looked low quality because they didn't have good design or branding. To most people, the UI and branding is the product, so when they see it poorly implemented, it simply feels like a bad product.
If you make open source feel expensive and luxurious, they will come.
> If you make open source feel expensive and luxurious, they will come
Hmmm...So: let's ask a bunch of objective, analytical, concrete techies to pivot themselves over to a subjective, abstract, feelings-based judgment process which requires a great sensitivity and sense of cultural refinement.
I don't understand how you could open source twitter. I would think that the infrastructure and features would be very hard to do without some centralized provider.
This sounds like a fun gimmick, but it makes me more excited about the concept of Mastodon (GNU Social). I think this creates a really fun use case for federation. Hell I never thought of it before, but maybe now I'll want accounts on multiple servers now.
Fun yes, but it also points towards a future where you can have different flavors of a social network. There could be instances of Masto geared towards photography or visual art with large pictures, or geared towards sharing code, or geared towards any number of special needs. And all of them would be able to federate with each other.
As it stands we're all stuck on the same Twitter and the same FB. It's so limiting. I hope Mastodon and its descendants pull through and give us this better future.
One of the constraints of GNU Social is that you shouldn't have two identical usernames on two separate instances. I did that and I don't know how to fix it.
There's a musician named Andrew Huang who sometimes makes music based on song challenges from his fans. Years ago, I asked him to write a rap song in which none of the lyrics contain the letter "e." Like the person in the article, I had read "A Void" by Georges Perec, so that's where the idea came from.
I think I need help understanding why this is in any way relevant or interesting. I'm actually serious and open to listening. Obviously it got on the front page.
It's limiting in a big way. Occasionally, you can say a string of words without that symbol that flows without worry, but an individual word trips you up and brings much difficulty, as any of its obvious synonyms all contain that symbol too.
this kind of broad situation is hard to fix; usually a particular thought has a particular solution. Similarly, using a synonym lookup may hold you back. Look at what you want to say, not what individual words you'd pick without any constraints.
Interesting puzzle: one can leave out one letter, then another, and measure at what rate does understandability decrease for people (until eventually it's complete gibberish). Also, given a large enough audience, one could try different combinations of letter-removal orders and distribute those randomly, and measure the same... the question being:
* Which letters are the most vital to understanding written English? or
* Which combinations of letters? Are the letters the same in all the combinations of a certain rank, or do they differ? (where certain letter combinations themselves make each other more necessary) -- etc.
Alternatively: the same experiment, but where all words submitted by a user must match to a dictionary of real words. To that one may even add a grammar checker! (Which sets of sub-alphabets lend themselves best to proper English? Which allow for the shortest subsets? -- etc. etc.)
This would be utterly useless and I have no idea how it could be done.
The thing is, the hardest part of solving this puzzle, if one were to try, is not designing the experiment and writing the code, but figuring out how the hell to convince a massive audience large enough to collect the significant data to subject themselves to this experiment in the first place (or trying to design an AI that could be subjected to it -- and evolve the AIs themselves until they excel at deducing unintelligible text -- Would the results be the same for people and AIs?)...
I like this puzzle because it's so utterly stupid yet it would probably take an incredibly gifted person who has off-the-charts OCD to actually solve.
If I were a multi-millionaire I would hire a crack-team of engineers and mathematicians to work non stop on this particular problem; just for the hell of it.
If you're willing to turn off JavaScript, you can have all the same content, but with silky smooth performance.
On the "downside", though, you miss out on the social media sharing buttons, and auto-loading of the next article when you get to the bottom of the page.
[+] [-] biot|9 years ago|reply
It's Similar to That Bird Social App, But Without a Fifth Symbol
Mastodon has an app with particular quirks and many humans find it joyful.
Mastodon boffins did it again.
A particular boffin going by initials M.R. works as a digital craftsman at a corporation with initials I.A. (that has http archival capability), did craft a social app oulipo.social with an odd quirk: said app disallows applying of fifth anglo-saxon linguistic symbol or "any variant of it".
Said individual found motivation via book "A Void" by author G.P. This lipogrammatic book did apply all anglo-saxon linguistic symbols but that particular symbol. It follows a Francophonic philosophy of Oulipo, a constraint form of writing that is a combination of both math and book study.
Banning of this symbol is Oulipo's most famous limitation: "It limits writing without making it too hard," M.R. said. "You can still sound natural and say what you want to say, though you may think on it a bit in a way that you wouldn't without constraints." Such limitation can push you to think hard and apply imagination about words, M.R. said.
M.R. had no anticipation that oulipo.social would attain popularity — as it got its start as a trial of skills application of Ruby on Rails and to attain a sharp mind in OS capability — but said app did gain many additional accounts (singular digit with two nought digits) within about six days of starting.
"It's a joy to watch folks do things I wouldn't think of—#drilipo, and applying oulipo constraints to famous writing and songs—and just chat about day to day stuff," M.R. said. "It's also gratifying that folks will look at oulipo.social and go on to think up constraints or gimmicks for additional variant Mastodons."
M.R. did post back to my communication within an hour, with almost 300 words and without said taboo symbol. I suck at thinking by using my imagination to avoid said symbol and quit not long post-starting as my mind is frail.
[+] [-] koytch|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bandushrew|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pacaro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legostormtroopr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgotpwtomain|9 years ago|reply
0x7265657665 did dispatch back as to my communication in duration not in surplus of an hour with almost 300 words and without a taboo glyph in sight. Although I did try to author this column without using said taboo glyph "0x65", against apathy and sloth I could not triumph and did submit for my stab at it, as short in duration as to boil liquid in a pot, was a dud.
[+] [-] whitepoplar|9 years ago|reply
I remember when I first used Linux, I didn't "trust" it. There wasn't a singular OS called Linux and the GUI applications looked low quality because they didn't have good design or branding. To most people, the UI and branding is the product, so when they see it poorly implemented, it simply feels like a bad product.
If you make open source feel expensive and luxurious, they will come.
[+] [-] themodelplumber|9 years ago|reply
Hmmm...So: let's ask a bunch of objective, analytical, concrete techies to pivot themselves over to a subjective, abstract, feelings-based judgment process which requires a great sensitivity and sense of cultural refinement.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tdb7893|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erkose|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milesrout|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ryanschneider|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmdrfred|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orblivion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teleclimber|9 years ago|reply
As it stands we're all stuck on the same Twitter and the same FB. It's so limiting. I hope Mastodon and its descendants pull through and give us this better future.
[+] [-] rocky1138|9 years ago|reply
[email protected]
[email protected]
Does Mastadon suffer the same problem?
[+] [-] feld|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|9 years ago|reply
It's referenced in one of the exercises in the Think Python book:
Write a function called has_no_e that returns True if the given word doesn’t have the letter “e” in it.
http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/html/thinkpython010...
[+] [-] dkurth|9 years ago|reply
And about a day later, he posted this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8-WtH4ujps
[+] [-] schoen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebringj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Programmatic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ClassyJacket|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tripofmice|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notgood|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nightski|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeboy|9 years ago|reply
* No problm I'll writ lik this.
No. Stop. Don't do this.
[+] [-] noam87|9 years ago|reply
* Which letters are the most vital to understanding written English? or
* Which combinations of letters? Are the letters the same in all the combinations of a certain rank, or do they differ? (where certain letter combinations themselves make each other more necessary) -- etc.
Alternatively: the same experiment, but where all words submitted by a user must match to a dictionary of real words. To that one may even add a grammar checker! (Which sets of sub-alphabets lend themselves best to proper English? Which allow for the shortest subsets? -- etc. etc.)
This would be utterly useless and I have no idea how it could be done.
The thing is, the hardest part of solving this puzzle, if one were to try, is not designing the experiment and writing the code, but figuring out how the hell to convince a massive audience large enough to collect the significant data to subject themselves to this experiment in the first place (or trying to design an AI that could be subjected to it -- and evolve the AIs themselves until they excel at deducing unintelligible text -- Would the results be the same for people and AIs?)...
I like this puzzle because it's so utterly stupid yet it would probably take an incredibly gifted person who has off-the-charts OCD to actually solve.
If I were a multi-millionaire I would hire a crack-team of engineers and mathematicians to work non stop on this particular problem; just for the hell of it.
[+] [-] evincarofautumn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroManArmy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SlySherZ|9 years ago|reply
On Chrome the CPU still spikes, but it's no nearly as bad.
[+] [-] j4_james|9 years ago|reply
On the "downside", though, you miss out on the social media sharing buttons, and auto-loading of the next article when you get to the bottom of the page.
[+] [-] hashhar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d_j_b|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DonHopkins|9 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gHPaVxkdPA
[+] [-] amenghra|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zapdrive|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owenversteeg|9 years ago|reply
https://oulipo.social/about
[+] [-] rspeer|9 years ago|reply
Can you not look at posts on Mastodon without signing up for it? That sounds fatal for adoption.
[+] [-] OscarCunningham|9 years ago|reply
Clearly the more constraints we add, the better it is!
[+] [-] adynatos|9 years ago|reply