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this is significantly more compact than braille. braille is less compact than latin characters, and the point of this exercise was more compact information.
Dotsies (2012)
41–50 of 204 posts
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Please give me a reason why someone should be embarrassed for creating something that harms nobody.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too bad I'm not an automatic reader!
I've been an automated reader since I was probably, what, five years old?
Me too, I didn't even mean to read your comment, but as soon as my eyes saw it: boom, processed and read. like a computer without virus scan or security or anything, to see the words was to run their executable on my wetware.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#44Earlier 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…
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.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#45Earlier 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…
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.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#46I feel compelled to write up a summary of the comments here and responses to each one: > This is useless. Who cares? It's super cool! > This is not well-suited for use case X. Did you read the page? It's so great that someone thought of this and did it. > This has been done before. SUPER. COOL. > It's hard to read. I don't know what you aren't getting about this. > What if it implemented improvement X? I don't know,…
I feel like HN should implement a "positive-only" or "constructive-only" flag for posts, whether set by posters or moderators. Perhaps all Show HN. Start to experiment, see what sticks.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#47On a barely more productive note, I am pretty sceptical that an "optimized" alphabet glyph would be one dot for a b c d e, two adjacent dots for f g h i, etc. How likely is it that alphabetical order also happens to be the best dot pattern?
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#48Interesting, similar to how the korean alphabet works; letters are composed into syllabic units. “Lol,” for example, is 롤, which is a combination of ㄹ + ㅗ + ㄹ. It’s easy to see how they match up with their latin counterparts.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#49Very interesting. It's definitely more compact but I would challenge the more readable claim.
If you think about how the human vision system is constructed (similar to convnets in deep learning), the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc. Recognizing letters requires the triggering of multiple layers of these constructs.
A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get conflated. There's going to be a high degree of uncertainty. We have a hard enough time distinguishing '1' and 'l', and 'O' and '0'. This makes it so every letter takes on that trait. We usually must rely on context of the surrounding letters and words to fill in the missing information.
I think the concept of this idea is valid, but we need more than moving pixels up and down to distinguish letters. If instead a form existed that mixed various small primitive shapes it might work.
I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring.
There's also color but lots of people are color blind.
Re: Dotsies (2012)
#50Earlier 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…
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.