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.
While "rhyme" unfortunately contains the letter "e", although not the sound; "quay" doesn't contain it, but does have the sound (it's pronounced "key") I couldn't think of another word that rhymes with e but doesn't contain it.
> 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.
Can't help you with your use of hallucinogenic substances, but I think you're mixing your decimal and hex. Decimal 65 is a capital "A". Hex 65 (0x65) gives you lowercase "e".
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'm not sure what this ad hominem comment was supposed to accomplish. Don't we already have people who appreciate subjective and cultural concerns involved?
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.
Do you have a reference for that? It seems hard for a federated system to enforce such a constraint. And what would be the use? that's what the @domain is for.
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.
Personally I find interesting the general idea that adding constraints to a system leads to creative outlets, forcing the participants to break entablished thinking patterns. The fun stuff here is not the content, but the alternative paths the writer has to take to convey the message.
For one, it's a gimmick that brings attention to Mastodon, which as a foss/decentralized alternative to Twitter, is interesting in its own.
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).
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.
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?!)
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.
Most difficult is accounting for, and introducing into a chat, folks wholly unknown to anybody you talk to.
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.)
I was okay with using "imo" and "lol" in words in this discussion as full forms also lack taboo glyphs, and I concur that such with said glyph is tantamount to a violation.
A good point and strong advocacy, though @mus, who thought up this particular handiwork and built it from scratch (not all of lipography, just this journalistically-fascinating lipography discussion forum), and also said in this discussion, supra, "this kind of broad situation is hard to fix" and so on, was so bold today as to post "300" in a toot purporting to follow lipographic norms. Ipsa dixit!
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?
Words do not contain glyphs during annunciation. A man pronouncing a word is not a man pronouncing glyph 1, glyph 2, glyph 3 but sound 1, sound 2, sound 3.
So 300 is okay: I do not recoil from a foul glyph in it.
If you think so, don't you find "BRB" and "viz." OK too? My post's dad-post (though not by you) calls for avoiding such short forms on account of matching long forms' violations of lipographic norms.
And why not? Can trivially construct a toolbox of known-good variants of 'standard' words, and think of synonyms for nonstandard words as you go, to string into minimal-but-functional-communication.
Simply a function of your... uh, surplus chronological units.
I find I do this sort of thing a surprising amount. You'd think spurious symbols would jump out at you, but actually it turns out that's not how it is. Luckily oulipo.social automatically stops you posting bad sigils.
But you still don't instill that actual individual in minds, and an actual, non-abstract, particular individual is occasionally crucial to a thought. Without that word you would basically go back to that activity in which pairs of folks try to find out a thing without using words. This is a bit of an auto-proof as I can't say its word.
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.
You could point to Mr. Musk by using his South African origins, but also with circumlocutions such as:
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...)
But for fact that said individual was said prior, and that I am slightly in a similar domain to him, I would not know which (singular) particular individual half of that points to
This is good! I guess a bit of thought can go a long way toward good workarounds. I'd hazard that it is harder if a taboo glyph is in both particular nouns though.
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.
Though it does give a good bar. If the posts altering word choice end up roundabout and less comprehensible than simply throwing out the letter, they are doing a poor job.
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.
You can see any users public timeline and posts at /@username, but the complete public timeline requires authentication (with this or any instance it's federated with).
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.