Live data from Hacker News

Unker Non-Linear Writing System

s.ai

51–60 of 71 posts

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#51

They have a bogus link http://eaworld.conlang.org/relays/relay19/relay19.php?ring=3... which I am not able to decipher.

Thanks for reporting the broken link. Alex has fixed it in the document. The content is now at https://000024.org/conlang/relay19/index.html

Google "conlang relay" to learn more about the context for which this was made.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#52
post #14
post #2

What a fascinating concept, especially this part: > We have only started to develop how to hold a conversation in UNLWS itself. As we currently have it, it's a very, very different kind of thing than linear atomic turntaking. Rather, it's a sort of ongoing mutual edit of a shared structure, where revision history playback (or live observation) expresses the 'conversational' tone expected by linear conversation, and t…

As this seems to mediate consensus building, this also reminds me of: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/we-will-see-the-rise-of-civi... https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi... Especially having a global social media network with linear discussion maxed on 280 characters seems to be one of the most efficient ways to reach disagreement.

Interesting. I've long been interested in ways to make systems more pro-social, but I hadn't previously thought of UNLWS in that context. Thank you for giving me a new idea to mull.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#53
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took note of that part too, it reminds me of this article [1] posted on HN recently. It contrasts the fleeting and context dependent flows of posts on social media ("the stream") with enduring wiki style interlinking of posts where the context is embedded in the linking ("the garden"). It consider it in the context of personal note taking, and I feel what you mention is the garden approach to conversation, as oppos…

Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine). Some of the challenges I see: — Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch. — Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes. —…

PS I really like the garden vs stream metaphor for UNLWS-native "conversation". I agree that it's very apt. It nicely captures the spirit of non-linear interaction.

Thank you for this new way of looking at / describing it. We may borrow it for the UNLWS documentation. ;)

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#54
post #2

What a fascinating concept, especially this part: > We have only started to develop how to hold a conversation in UNLWS itself. As we currently have it, it's a very, very different kind of thing than linear atomic turntaking. Rather, it's a sort of ongoing mutual edit of a shared structure, where revision history playback (or live observation) expresses the 'conversational' tone expected by linear conversation, and t…

I believe that *Pad¹ does what you describe. In multi-user mode, it has an option to show each contributor's writing in a separate color. (I'm not sure if one can pick the color, though.)

¹ eg https://cryptpad.piratenpartei.de/pad/

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#55
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideograms clearly can work, and pretty dang well, as demonstrated by ancient China. Some phonetic representation would be nice too. Either way, you'd likely see common structures evolving into ideograms. Very interesting.

FWIW, we deliberately decided to have no phonetic representation at all, to avoid any linearizing influence. Yes, it would need a large number of glyphs. Not so many as speculated above, though — e.g. we have one glyph that covers communicate, say, tell, hear, speech (all senses), etc. (with some mix-ins for sensory modality); another one that covers give, receive, gift, sell, etc. Linear languages with European stru…

I love this idea so much that I would like to learn the language. Is there a group or something I could join? Does anyone want to make a group? I'm sure we could work something out with an online drawing app.

The possiblity of getting ideas out of my head and onto paper without having to linearise everything is very exciting.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#56

Holy shit. I'm blown away by this. Imagine the ability to use these as training inputs for language processing. Just add one more representation to the bucket of things to train models on. Very fascinating. Favoriting this.

Yes. Also, I suspect that feature vectors would have very natural translations into this kind of language. We could see inside the black box.

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#57
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine). Some of the challenges I see: — Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch. — Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes. —…

PS I really like the garden vs stream metaphor for UNLWS-native "conversation". I agree that it's very apt. It nicely captures the spirit of non-linear interaction. Thank you for this new way of looking at / describing it. We may borrow it for the UNLWS documentation. ;)

Your thank you goes to karl-j, who brought it up and whom I responded to!

Thank you for your work on UNLWS!

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#58
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine). Some of the challenges I see: — Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch. — Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes. —…

Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the other will add, there are relatively few places to look. Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which makes it easy to spot another's writing. Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be difficult. That is ent…

My concern with smaller screens is that naive zooming out would make conversation too small to be readable.

Perhaps some aspects could be borrowed from mapping apps—one-handed zoom, gradually simplifying conversation as it’s zoomed out, and highlighting which participant is looking at which area of the conversation.

I sense an exciting new approach to communication…

Re: Unker Non-Linear Writing System

#59
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps well-implemented collaborative sketching could be the medium that turns conversations from streams into gardens (and it’s the only way of chatting in UNLWS I can imagine). Some of the challenges I see: — Tracking where the conversation is being advanced, since it can happen at any place in the sketch. — Sketching, while can be more informative than text, is tricker to conform to smaller mobile screen sizes. —…

Tracking: if you're asking a question or otherwise anticipating where the other will add, there are relatively few places to look. Also, we use different colors per author in multi-author utterances, which makes it easy to spot another's writing. Of course, unless you have an animated or history-preserving medium (which we assume we don't), then reconstructing the order of conversation might be difficult. That is ent…

> we rejected it as too under-constrained and difficult to work with in practice

I’m imagining a conversation as a space containing multiple regular UNLWS planes, intersecting at certain [binding?] points.

Such an approach would ideally leave dimensionality to the medium, language itself could remain under same constraints as before.

A conversation plane would be viewed in 2D, but certain points could indicate connections outside of current plane. For such a point, viewer can pull up a projection that shows connecting conversation planes in some way (possibly 3D or pseudo-3D).

Of course, there are some technical challenges in implementing a medium that works this way, and it’s unclear how groundbreaking or useful it would be in practice (after all, all conversation planes should be possible to represent as areas on one larger plane, just with longer connecting lines).

Post reply on HN