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Dotsies (2012)

dotsies.org

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Re: Dotsies (2012)

#151

Post by qlk1123 »

KennyCason wrote: post #144
qlk1123 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks for sharing your perspective as a native English speaker and a Chinese learner. > I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc. It had been a dominating language/writing system for part of Asia, and we can still find its legacy in Vietnamese, Korean, Japan. But I th…

Thanks for your perspective as well. I initially learned traditional Chinese characters (lots of Taiwanese friends), and the traditional variant that Japanese used. Even though initially I was stubborn and would claim that traditional characters are more beautiful or pure, I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :) I…

> I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :)

Improvement or not? I argue that it depends. Once in an international situation, Mr. Xi wanted to speak a seldom-used and very old idiom in his draft, which was "通商宽农", roughly standing for the meaning that farmers (农) can live much better (宽) if economy is getting good. However, he spoke it as "通商宽衣"， which is not a established phrase but can still be reasoned as "get economy better and get undressed (宽衣)"。

As a reference, the traditional version of this idiom is "通商寬農"。"農" (farmer, agriculture) has a very different shape compared to "衣" (cloth, surface) in traditional Chinese, but obviously they looks similar when you become a important but nervous guy.

If we regard the Chinese language/writing system as a huge project, I would say that simplified Chinese was a hard fork without much testing but soon widely adopted, and its design was based on some novel but destructive compression algorithm without any peer review process.

> I sometimes have imagined training a neural network to generate "word vectors" that are actually just small 32x32 colored images, just to see what they would look like. ...

Cool idea! Sounds like some kind of esoteric language. Looking forward to it.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#152

Post by Klover »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #150
Klover wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website states “was created thousands of years ago, and is optimized for writing, not reading. About time for an update, no? Dotsies is optimized for reading.”, and other claims on the website, and people are not instantly convinced just because it’s free. Positivity is fine, but blind positivity is not helpful for anyone..

> Positivity is fine, but blind positivity is not helpful for anyone.. I'm with you on that one, but at this point I'd even take blind positivity over the usual constant blind negativity to anything new on HN. Maybe that's the actual remedy to that, a bit of blind positivity in every thread to counteract the immediate all-around pessimism.

That’s fair. I guess the karma system makes for more combative comments, or comments that more align with the status quo. Like https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewforum.php?id=13 seems to be welcoming a lot more discussion. I can only give that as an example because it was the last non karma forum I’ve visited in ages, and even that was a long time ago.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#153

Post by nothrabannosir »

jeremyw wrote: post #46
stavros wrote: post #17

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,…

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.

A problem with HN is that the rules essentially incentivise this behaviour: if you simply think something is good, you cannot say so until someone else said it was not. “This is great “ is not a good comment. So people upvote instead. But scores are hidden , so you can’t see that from the outside.

you can see this effect in action on your own posts : 10 upvotes, 1 critique. From the outside however, it just looks like “HN is at it again!”

Sure, people could say “this is good because X”, just as they should with critique , anyway. But that’s not how we think : it’s easier to motivate why you don’t like something than why you do.

I think HN is much more positive than it seems. We just need to find a way to stop hiding it.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#154

Post by rekshaw »

It's a great idea and I am all for efficiency. My only worry is that the vertical alignment of the dots drastically alters the word. a,b,c,d,e are all the same exact black square, just moved up and down the vertical axis. Same with p, s, and v. It's the equivalent of python requiring precise spaces for it to work properly.

I guess I should hold any comments until I actually try it properly, but that would take me years :)

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#155

Post by KennyCason »

qlk1123 wrote: post #151
KennyCason wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your perspective as well. I initially learned traditional Chinese characters (lots of Taiwanese friends), and the traditional variant that Japanese used. Even though initially I was stubborn and would claim that traditional characters are more beautiful or pure, I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :) I…

> I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :) Improvement or not? I argue that it depends. Once in an international situation, Mr. Xi wanted to speak a seldom-used and very old idiom in his draft, which was "通商宽农", roughly standing for the meaning that farmers (农) can live much better (宽) if economy is getting good. Ho…

Haha that’s a great example. Those are definitely areas where the written language has room for improvement. I could also imagine myself making a similar mistake.

Regardless, I’ve always been impressed that the Chinese can make such a bold change as their written language yet here in the United States, I’m still arguing with people who don’t know how many feet are in a mile as to why we should switch to metric. :)

If I ever get around to making my “hyper language”, I’ll be sure to post or let you know. I imagine it will likely be “not-very-user-friendly”. haha

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#156

Post by xg15 »

stavros wrote: post #17

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,…

To be fair, you could use your exact post to argue in favor of Juicero, uBeam or Theranos.

More in-depth, yes, a lot of posts here are criticizing - but it seems to me, a lot of it is constructive criticism from someone who actually did find the idea interesting.

I personally would find a HN where each post is just a variant of "woah that's super cool!" a lot less interesting.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#157

Post by Semiapies »

Vendan wrote: post #98
Semiapies wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Eels. My hovercraft is full of eels. http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm

That's the reference, yes.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#158

Post by dmos62 »

This is so cool.

I'd like to be able to change it for my needs. I'd try making vowels round, so that I'd have more visual cues.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#159

Post by mkl »

idle_zealot wrote: post #139
mkl wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned Shavian a few years ago, with my own transliteration dictionary based on my New Zealand English pronunciation (which Shavian doesn't quite seem to handle all of). Unfortunately, different dialects of English have very (inconsistently) different pronunciations, and hence there would be many different spellings for the same words; I really struggled to read Shavian written by people from other parts of the wo…

Or it would require standardizing on certain pronunciations.

I don't think that's possible. Much of the popular media in the English-speaking world is in a standard-ish General American accent, and yet still the diversity in accents is enormous.

The only way I can think of to do it is if all phones and computers had really good voice control systems that nonetheless only understood the standard pronunciation (like early versions of Dragon dictation). The voice system makers have a vested interest in not doing that, but in understanding everyone as they talk. Arabic has tried for centuries, with the full force of a major religion, and yet still the language is splintered into mutually unintelligible dialects.

People talk how they talk, and it's constantly changing. I don't think anyone can control that.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#160

Post by m3at »

KennyCason wrote: post #144
qlk1123 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks for sharing your perspective as a native English speaker and a Chinese learner. > I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc. It had been a dominating language/writing system for part of Asia, and we can still find its legacy in Vietnamese, Korean, Japan. But I th…

Thanks for your perspective as well. I initially learned traditional Chinese characters (lots of Taiwanese friends), and the traditional variant that Japanese used. Even though initially I was stubborn and would claim that traditional characters are more beautiful or pure, I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :) I…

About the neural network part, not exactly what you're looking for but you might enjoy this blog post[1] by David Ha with a neural network "dreaming" fake kanjis.

[1] http://otoro.net/kanji/

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