91–100 of 204 posts
you could "solve" the same "problem" by making font smaller. but its annoying to read. oh whoops, thats what actually matters. this page is like the purest expression a cerebral cortex thinking its the only thing that exists. i like it though, because it accidentally makes some good points about the human condition. one is that top down designed shit like this (and esperanto) often sucks incredibly hard, and i think…
Problems that I immediately see with the approach: * No baseline or other orienting structure, so vertical shifts easily change meaning ("ab" turns to "bc"), same for rotations. * No redundancy to allow for recognizing incomplete / garbled / damaged letters. Both features are prominent in any machine-readable encoding (like bar codes or QR codes), and are relatively easy to find in any human script. The idea behind m…
There's also Shavian and Quikscript for English, which handle the language phonetically. I think it's a big miss for any new writing system to keep a language with 38 or so sounds limited to 26 letters. Not to mention other languages that might want to use it.
Problems that I immediately see with the approach: * No baseline or other orienting structure, so vertical shifts easily change meaning ("ab" turns to "bc"), same for rotations. * No redundancy to allow for recognizing incomplete / garbled / damaged letters. Both features are prominent in any machine-readable encoding (like bar codes or QR codes), and are relatively easy to find in any human script. The idea behind m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also Shavian and Quikscript for English, which handle the language phonetically. I think it's a big miss for any new writing system to keep a language with 38 or so sounds limited to 26 letters. Not to mention other languages that might want to use it.
Don't forget about the deseret alphabet. I think it's a shame that never stuck.
Also, English has many pronunciation variations, and links between many words may be obvious in writing but not as much in sound (breath / breathe). English needs something more of a morphology-based writing system, not a pure phonetic representation (like Spanish).
just use Chinese, it’s optimized for screen space (each character occupies a square, and has complex meaning of a word, and people read their shapes, rather than stroke by stroke )
But dots are more compact than strokes.
Very 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 co…
> 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. What you proposed here turns out very similar to the elements of Korean Characters. As an East Asian who is native to Chinese Characters, two-dimensional symbols are always more appealing to me. I st…
People who propose new writing systems would benefit from studying existing systems a bit more. The Latin alphabet is not the only game in town.
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…
Yeah, it's a telling point that when we're asked to read passages of Dotsies, the font's sized up least three times (36px to 42px)—and so at least nine times the screen area taken—compared to the base 13px size used in the "How much better is it?" example. You're going to need damn good eyes to read Dotsies at anything like 13px, and I suspect even the sharp-eyed are going to misread a lot. Size Dotsies text up to th…
Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14825571 (2017, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3601687 (2012, 98 comments)
Jesus Christ.
In any case, it's sad to me how when people on HN see someone having a bit of fun or messing around, their first instinct is to knock it down.
I 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,…
Positivity is fine, but blind positivity is not helpful for anyone..