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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Definitely proud. Why embarrassed?

Because the hubris of tech people to think something like "hey, trillions of humans have collectively decided over a few thousand years that the latin alphabet hits a pretty good sweet spot in human communication. I bet they didn't consider how readable it is, though. I can do better than all of them," is wearing thin.

This came up in the Robinhood checking thread a few days ago. "Do you really think that you're going to outsmart a financial institution that employs people like you (but smarter) because you happen to be better at math than your facebook friends who studied polysci?" The hubris of people in tech who think they're the only people who notice things is getting really tiresome.

Having said that, I think that's a slippery slope of a stance to take, because it stifles creativity and novel solutions, which history shows often come up when they're not looked for. But I think that's kind of the sentiment of embarrassment they were expressing: "groan, another techie is going to disrupt something that doesn't need disrupting."

Edit: To the people responding to this (and downvoting): this person asked for an explanation for why someone would feel embarrassment at this. I was trying to give what I thought was a reasonable explanation. I don't actually feel embarrassed by this, I was just trying to understand and articulate someone else's feelings on this. I'm sorry if the explanation didn't do it for you.

Robinhood is a weird example to bring up here. All the HNers who thought they knew better than a $6 billion financial company with an army of professionals turned out to be right, Robinhood got smacked down hard, and that top-rated comment in the initial thread now looks hilariously silly.

Because the hubris of tech people to think something like ...

Ya know, the marquee sign does say Hacker News. If this seems like silly "tech people" nonsense to you, maybe you're not the intended audience.

I completely fail to see the problem here. Let people try to disrupt whatever they want, what's the harm? It's extremely unlikely that dotsies will ever be anything other than a minor curiosity, but where's the problem? There's a one in a billion chance it could be the next evolution of the alphabet, and, anyway, what's bad about trying?

I don't see a reason for the negativity, because I don't see a single disadvantage in trying. If the author wants to waste their time, let them.

The difference from what was decided historically is that in the past, books had to be printed in a font chosen by the printer, so they chose one that the most people could read. Today, individuals can choose their own fonts to read in, so the legacy compatibility problem is greatly reduced.

Given how different some international alphabets are (Russian, Hebrew, Katakana) it's not self-evident that the conventional Latin glyphs are optimal.

> hey, trillions of humans have collectively decided over a few thousand years that the latin alphabet hits a pretty good sweet spot in human communication. I bet they didn't consider how readable it is, though. I can do better than all of them

I don't know all the fancy names for logical fallacies but this seems to be deliberately misrepresenting the argument. The website clearly states that the problem with the Latin alphabet is that it has to be able to be written efficiently as well as read. Your trillions of humans over a few thousand years have had to both read and write this alphabet. In the past few hundred years we've had technology that allows someone who made a huge investment to produce massive amounts of text without writing, and in the past few decades the ability to produce text without writing has become completely ubiquitous. Does it still make sense for this alphabet to optimize for hand writing? Are you arguing that the constraints that made the Latin (or any handwritten) alphabet have remained unchanged over thousands of years? They want to redesign an alphabet to fit modern constraints. We consume a lot of text on devices that need to have screens that fit in our pockets. Perhaps a two-thousand year old alphabet isn't still the optimal solution?

I also don't think the authors necessarily expect to disrupt anything. They just made something cool and put it on the internet. I'm happy people like this exist.

Yeah, text on computers and phones is so much different from handwritten or even printed text. We don't have to handwrite text that often anymore, so we don't have the constraints of how accurate our hands can move. Our screens have really high resolution and color (although using a script with colors would be problematic for color blind people), so we don't have the constraints of the paper medium. There's also the simple fact that Latin isn't the only writing system in existence, so how are we to know that Latin is the best writing system out of all the writing systems already in existence? Why not hànzì? Or hangul? Or Devanagari? Or the Arabic Script? Or even Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics? There are so many different scripts that it seems weird to me to focus on the Latin Script as the "pretty good sweet spot". That seems like the much bigger hubris to me. It's not like the Latin Script was scientifically created and proven to be efficient. It just organically evolved from what came before it, whether those changes were beneficial or not. And of course again, they didn't have screens back then.

> Because the hubris of tech people to think something like "hey, trillions of humans have collectively decided over a few thousand years that the latin alphabet hits a pretty good sweet spot in human communication. I bet they didn't consider how readable it is, though. I can do better than all of them," is wearing thin.

This isn't a unique aspiration of tech. Folks have been trying to achieve better othographies than the one we grafted on as a colonizer's comprimise for a long time. Projects like Shavian [0][1], Read Script (Quickscript) [2], and Deseret [3] come to mind as prior art in this space that predate the invention of the modern tech community and its current perceived class distinction.

I'd argue it's the supreme arrogance to assume that in a modern world populated with people who's average intelligence, nutrition and education was only accessible to the richest and most powerful 0.001% 200 years ago that NO progress can be made on a common linguistic platform. The classical alphabet we use has ALSO been revised and has literally hundreds of variants.

On a personal note, I don't at all regret the decision to learn to read and write in Shavian. Having a semi-private notation with which to take notes, form signatures, etc. The only thing I am sad about is that so few people in this community (and others) decided to put in the modest effort required to do the same. If I do occasionally offer thoughts in ·𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯, 𐑐𐑰𐑐𐑤 𐑸 𐑩𐑯𐑜𐑮𐑰, 𐑮𐑧𐑕𐑧𐑯𐑑𐑓𐑳𐑤 𐑰𐑝𐑧𐑯! 𐑤𐑲𐑒 𐑞 𐑧𐑒𐑕𐑦𐑕𐑑𐑧𐑯𐑕 𐑝 𐑩𐑤𐑑𐑺𐑯𐑩𐑑𐑦𐑝 𐑹𐑔𐑪𐑜𐑮𐑩𐑓𐑰 𐑦𐑟 𐑩𐑯 𐑦𐑯𐑕𐑳𐑤𐑑. 𐑲 𐑛𐑪𐑯𐑑 𐑜𐑧𐑑 𐑦𐑑.

I'm debating if dotsies would be valuable to learn. My biggest complaint about it is that it's a reproduction of our current alphabet, and that means you'll end up with a lot of our weird di-and-trigraphs. If you're going to to the trouble of a con-script, why not use a phonetic base?

[0]: 𐑮𐑰𐑛 𐑥𐑹 𐑣𐑽: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

[1]: 𐑢𐑦𐑗 𐑲𐑥 𐑒𐑳𐑥𐑓𐑹𐑑𐑩𐑚𐑤 𐑢𐑦𐑞, 𐑕𐑴 𐑮𐑧𐑤𐑰𐑕𐑛 𐑱 ·𐑤𐑦𐑯𐑳𐑒𐑟 𐑒𐑰𐑥𐑩𐑐 𐑣𐑽: https://gitlab.com/endomain/xkb-shavian-variant

[2]: https://www.omniglot.com/pdfs/quikscriptmanual.pdf

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet

You seriously, seriously need to reconsider a significant part of your worldview if you can easily think of the reasons one ought to be "proud" of such an effort, but you can't think of the reasons one might be "embarrassed".

Without knowing it, you've taken a weirdly extreme and limited perspective - and deprived yourself of anything remotely close to a complete understanding.

I assume you're probably proud of your "optimism" or something here, but it's absolutely silly.

Please give me a reason why someone should be embarrassed for creating something that harms nobody.

because it can come off as an incredible arrogance borne out of incredible ignorance. it really depends on how the idea is presented though.

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