From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Fri Dec 20 2002 - 03:14:08 MST
On Thu, Dec 19, 2002 at 07:54:31PM -0800, spike66 wrote:
> >but hopefully it'll be a comprehensive, provocative, and interesting read.
>
> I tyrannically demand that all hip humans immediately
> stop referring to a book as a read.
It's not a book; it's a magazine.
> I have a vision
> that before the singularity, we will be conversational
> with our wearable computers.
Eeeeewww!!!!
Have you ever tried using speech recognition software for anything
creative? It's getting on for an AI-complete problem to do anything
significantly more complex than a business letter or telephone-hell
voicemail navigation menu.
> If we keep verbing, that
> is making nouns out of verbs and vva, we make machine
> speech interpretation practically impossible. Verbing
> weirds language.
Right. "Don't do that, it'll break the software." In other words, let's
dumb ourselves down enough to use pre-broken tools.
> Do review Orwell's newspeak in the wonderful novel 1984.
> He proposed a universal subset of English in which words
> are unambiguously defined and redundant words eliminated.
> All ungood words would equal unhere. Language would
> equal double plus easy.
You _are_ aware that he didn't think this was a good idea, I hope?
-- Charlie
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