Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/276/
“I just chose words carefully”
71–80 of 364 posts
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#72I’ve been searching all over for a classic example of this that I first found around 1986, but I can’t locate it. It went on for a page or two, hand justified lines of maybe 40 characters, and then at the end of it he started making each line one character shorter, until the essay ended with these, the only words I remember from it: dumb is what I think this end is ! If somebody can find it, share it here, I’m going…
Lewis Carrol was about 123 years ahead!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse%27s_Tale
I know the feeling - a lot of what I remember from the internet 20 years ago simply doesn't exist, and is unfindable on any search engine.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could be a saving grace in the age where the robots come up with all the copy.
Robots would excel at writing that sort of copy I’d assume. (I haven’t tested it but doubt an LLM couldn’t handle that)
"perhaps it would be best to let the browsers do it on screens, and typesetting software for printed materials, since they have access to the font, size, text region boundaries, it comes at the small cost that users don't actually get to read what an author wrote, but increasingly this is an LLM anyways, if its a website or legal contract alike"
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#74I must admit I've indulged in constrained writing when I was a teenager with the same purpose: circumventing spontaneous layout errors in Word when writing a paper for school, feeling a non-negligible amount of anxiety due to the deadline being around the corner. Terrifying.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#75In a very real sense this is exactly what LLM watermarking does. It "chooss the words carefully" in order to get text to "line up," but not with a visible margin... instead with a verifiable word distribution that proves the author knew a secret key.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles" I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.
Should be missels then?
Let's settle the argument by all agreeing on mussels instead, and enjoy a nice seafood dish with garlic and a white wine sauce. Delicious.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could be a saving grace in the age where the robots come up with all the copy.
And here I at first thought the direction the original post was going was "here's how I got a LLM to do this automatically". Seems like it would not be so difficult. Might still be be a win over their innate dispositions.
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Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles" I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.
Should be missels then?
They're where they keep the nuclear wessels.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#79Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles" I choose to believe that the author was channeling the spirit of Noah Webster as a deliberate champion of phonetic spelling reform.
Or Andrew Jackson approaching the problem from the other end. “It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.” As a rather, well... "creative" speller I blame Webster for locking things down and ruining it for the rest of us.
I few years ago I saw a TV interview where some gen-z kid confidently stated: "the dictdionary is supposed to reflect how I talk, not the other was around."