Like Tweeting, but You Can't Use the Letter E
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
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.
(I wasn't going to, but skimming his words, I can't spot what this is a followup to; so I thought I'd ask, though with that initial jocular quip.)
Ki, the plant Cordyline fruticosa from the Pacific islands and China, this word coming from Hawaiian.
Chi or qi, the life force in Chinese philosophy.
Li, a Chinese mile.
Mi and ti, represents the third and seventh notes of a major scale.
... maybe more, I've just found a page on Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/i%CB%90#One_sy... (Fi, ghi, gi, shchi, ski (!) and maybe Twi.)
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.
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.
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'm not entirely convinced that we do, no.
rocky1138@kwat.chat
rocky1138@gnusocial.no
Does Mastadon suffer the same problem?
> https://social.tchncs.de/@voidnill > https://mastodon.cloud/@voidnill
are the same user (me) on two different instances.
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.
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...
And about a day later, he posted this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8-WtH4ujps
Even without the e's you can probably infer meaning with a high probability of success.
It's a proposal to post normally but to omit any symbols that don't fit by just not typing anything.
Try using Mastodon and you'll find it's twitter with meaningful conversations. 500 characters is a game changer.
Second, it's based on a centuries old literature/poetic challenge/game, of writing a text based on some constraint, and especially with avoiding a specific letter (a "lipogram").
Third, the challenge itself, which removes the ability to use the most common letter in English, is amusing enough to people. It makes you think harder about phrasing, and solve how you express something in alternative and creative ways. So it's a kind of fun game, like e.g. Scrabble.
Fourth, besides the fun/challenge factor, exploring alternative ways of writing a sentence is something that most people seldom think hard about, but that has applications in general writing too (in other words: what you gain by working around some constrain can make you a better writer in general, even when there are no artificial constrains imposed).
P.S. How are things going in Vulcan?
It's not as if you can simply work around and pick similar words for that individual's particular noun, you miss almost all of a thought by dancing around it vs. using a fast shortcut that quickly aligns thoughts with low odds of ambiguity.
Zip2 collaborator
X.com collaborator (by and by, part of PayPal, of which a principal and also a primary joint stock-holding guy, and so an original PayPal Mafia "mafioso")
Mars colony instigator, for which aim's promotion also principal of orbital propulsion firm with first major victory involving launching an orbital craft propulsion unit again and again
Popular luxury voltaic-propulsion motorcar firm kingpin
SolarCity capitalist
Scary fast monorailish-but-not vacuum transport plan originator and champion
Philanthropic patron of folks with a major fascination for AI, apologists for both caution and gusto about it
Boring Company instigator with plans to dig subways in L.A.
plus additional stuff (that guy has had a hand in astonishingly many things...)
For Musk, ^this nym in particular
We're working with an arbitrary constraint here (and I, for one, am enjoying it, actually); we kind of /have/ to do that. ;)
> you miss almost all of a thought by dancing around it vs. using a fast shortcut that quickly aligns thoughts with low odds of ambiguity.
You seem to forget that we're trying to find clever ways to refer to people and things without using the most common letter in the English language.
A trick is to try to say how you know of such folks, finding a path or paths along which you can form a link, such as "my dad's mom's son" or "my pal's husband's pal" or "a woman who knows my boss from an old job" or "I know of a particular lady's writings from a class I had at school".
This social platform's author own account within said platform shows an additional gimmick or option, viz., translation, insofar as you'd normally hail said author as "[small gray animal with a tail]", but within this platform's constraints as "[said animal, only in Latin]".
This is not so hard for participants whom you call with words common to kinds of things, kinds of animals, jobs, and so on, but possibly difficult for folks lacking a commonality of naming of this sort (viz., with "nomina propria").
(Sorry if "viz." is illicit on account of what it actually stands for... you can just think of it as "in particular" if you want.)
But if you say "300" in words and not digits, you would say two words both lacking suitability for that forum. So I ask, possibly oratorically: by what logic is "300" OK if "viz." (or "BRB") isn't?
So 300 is okay: I do not recoil from a foul glyph in it.
Imo such would warrant a distinct class of "non-format" strings, just for that noun class; that you might talk about it as-is without violation?
Or for purists... commonalization of a particular 'magic' shorthand, such as 'xqx', that is uncommon in that noun class thus can act as a quick shorthand. Though such has additional 'logic' to say initially, it and similar shorthands form a basis for a community 'pidgin' within constraints.
Also, I am now full of irk. Continually colliding with taboo words containing (un)said symbol. Ugh. (WHY MUST SO MANY WORDS FINISH WITH TABOO GLYPH?!)
Just talk on and on without using that char.
Simply a function of your... uh, surplus chronological units.
Wəθ ʃwə (ə) ənstəd əv dəʃ əz ðə pləshəldr, ət əvən ləks lək ə rəl rətəŋ səstəm.
* No problm I'll writ lik this.
No. Stop. Don't do this.
'A Dcntralizd and Fdratd Social Ntwork'.
* 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.
On Chrome the CPU still spikes, but it's no nearly as bad.
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.
Oh, sad day... :)
Can you not look at posts on Mastodon without signing up for it? That sounds fatal for adoption.
Clearly the more constraints we add, the better it is!