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Dotsies (2012)

dotsies.org

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Re: Dotsies (2012)

#31

Post by Koshkin »

jdougan wrote: post #28
pavel_lishin wrote: post #2

One advantage of regular letters compared to this is that it's pretty easy to tell that even a fairly mangled A is still an A; a word written in dotsies loses a lot of its legibility as soon as it's not displayed in fairly large pixels across a very clear background. Viewing things at an angle? While it moves by? On a dirty or wet piece of paper? Forget about it. It's a super fun idea, though. I would 100% put this i…

Dotsies is even worse if your eyes are some variant of broken. Nearsighted, cataracts, crosseyed, etc.

Perfect for automatic readers though.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#35

Post by userbinator »

This reminds me of the old "real programmers use binary" meme, and how I experimented with bitmap image files by typing text into them and looking at the resulting patterns.

I wonder if I'm the only one who would find it easier to read if it was just ASCII printed in binary instead of its own symbol-set. ASCII has some patterns which make it easy to memorise, and it's something a lot of developers have indeed memorised already. That would make a great "1337 hax0r" font.

...and why not go the whole hog and make it 8 bits, so you can encode all of Unicode (as UTF-8)...

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#36

Post by StavrosK »

Koshkin wrote: post #30
StavrosK wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely lossless (it encodes leter-for-letter). However, it has much higher entropy than the latin alphabet.

> higher entropy How so? The entropy looks (dangerously) low to me.

High entropy = very low margin for error.

"aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" is low entropy, "JkjgpUBn74AREExy" is high.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#37

Post by lazzlazzlazz »

StavrosK wrote: post #15
gallerdude wrote: post #14

Only hackers would try to reimplement the alphabet. I can't decide whether I should be proud or embarrassed.

Definitely proud. Why embarrassed?

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.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#38

Post by snuxoll »

lumberjack wrote: post #11
ziffusion wrote: post #3

Is this person completely insane? Or am I just not getting something? In which universe is this font remotely useful?

It's like DVORAK but for reading. The ambition is noble.

DVORAK isn’t useless though, it’s the only reason I was able to learn touch typing.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#39

Post by kazinator »

gallerdude wrote: post #14

Only hackers would try to reimplement the alphabet. I can't decide whether I should be proud or embarrassed.

Or maybe "script" kiddies, ha. Pun intended.

I think, real hackers lose interest in monoalphabetic substitution ciphers by junior high.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#40

Post by mikeash »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #27
StavrosK wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goin…

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.
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