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Comment by ehvatum | Hacker News Reader

The absolute state of Twitter says everything about the cogitation required to type: none at all. Yet, the spray-painted vandalism seen in public spaces is only marginally more informed.

Cuneiform is far more engaging of the faculties and demanding of careful composition. Struck by a strange mood, the aspiring author must gather clay from the river at low ebb, gather ash wood or reed and craft styluses, and must also build an oven, all the while lovingly musing upon the intended opus. Any mistake is the ruin of the opus. The tablet must be smashed and new clay gathered. In comparison, handwriting is but the careless ejaculation of worthless ink; fit only for brief amusement and animalistic territorial piss-marking.

You’ll note the erudition of this post. Indeed, I pound my words into my laptop with a hammer and then cook the bastard thing in an oven in order to submit.

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You speak of cuneiform as it is the highest form of expression. That is foolish, for how does it compare to the high art of painting on a cave wall? Rhetorical question, poorly of course. Cuneiform completely bypasses hunting for most crimson okra , blackest ash, and sparkling chalk. And that is before we get to the availability of the writing surfaces. Tablets are cheap but caves are rare! We are talking about pondering for many moons of what messages to send to the far futures versus mindless hammering of most inane things. It is plainly obvious that the gulf between the two is like that of Arecibo message compared to a conversation between two twitter bots.

Given the most pervasive argument that is as a matter of fact is a fact. I am sure you will agree that cave paintings are the most superior form of communication bar none.

You can smooth over clay if you make a mistake, you know. You can also gather a lot of clay beforehand, keep your styli around, and re-use your oven.

You've failed to interpret the comment, and you are making the poster's point for them.

Tail wags the dog.

I think you’ve failed to interpret the parent who is just adding to the joke by pretending to take it seriously.

I understand "The tail wags the dog."

I also understand "Tail wags dog."

But "Tail wags the dog" -- why the articular/anarthrous difference? What does it mean?!?!

I doubt the scribes of Sumeria bother doing the tablet themselves. They were among the top of society, they probably had people making the tablet for them (at least the clay preparation, apprentice modeling the tablets from it). You don’t create a piece of paper from scratch either everytime you want to write.

Digital clay. A revolution in computer interfaces.

Dude writes like GPT-3

That would be backwards. GPT-3 was trained on content and comments from the internet so it quite literally writes like him. Considering the length of his comment it is probably fairly biased towards his style of writing.

/s (slightly)

The cuneiform we see is mostly accounting and short snippets to glorify the ruler of the day. So, basically, W2 forms and Trump tweets.

Most cuneiform is an inventory of stuff like amount of wheat and who owes who how much.

Most surviving cuneiform is that kind of thing. Various incidental items, though, like the complaint letters sent to Ea-Nasir [1], suggest that casual discourse was far from unknown and may just have usually been done with un-fired clay that wouldn't have lasted for long periods.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

I loled.

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