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So, the mechanically written books for the masses imagined in Orwell's 1984 may become a reality ? If i recall well it was called "pornosex".

Well, you can already automate generation of postmodern essays so why not ?

On of the many: http://www.elsewhere.org/journ...

are you talking about the POMO generator? http://www.elsewhere.org/journ...

No, just a clever idiot who thinks he's smarter than everyone else and also believes that he's winning arguments when he exhausts his opponents with endless inane questions. He doesn't understand the difference between winning and being shunned.

Yeah, I've given up. Its difficult to argue with a person whose posts read like those postmodern thesis generators http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

I just go here, and hit reload for hours of fun:

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

And there's a great deal of garbage that's not readily distinguishable from the real thing. Witness:

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Depending on the field, the jargon does allow more concise explanations in a limited space and the intended audience will probably be familiar with it and have no problems with the jargon. As long as the study design and statistical analysis are easy to understand, I don't think it's a problem.

But there are other disciplines where it seems like it's a competition to find the best purple prose and to say as little as possible with as many words as possible or obfuscate one's meaning so much that it's impossible to infer the author's real meaning. There's a reason that something like the postmodernism generator exists.

Take a look at the Sokal hoax for a good example of this. Some journal (and one that just has authors pay for publications) accepted an article that was utter nonsense by intent.

The level of intelligence of amoebas is hard to reach: they have to survive in the real world.

AI has therefore set its standards considerably lower: matching the level of intelligence of Berkeley philosophers and social scientists. Here is an example, indistinguishable from its human counterparts:

http://www.elsewhere.org/journ...

You can get as much postmodern gibberish as you'd like generated randomly for free here. Try re-loading several times, until you get an article you'd like to read. :)

Argh -- sorry. I have to admit I didn't follow the link you gave in your other post. I assumed you had used a postmodernism generator, like this one.

I wonder how these would do:

the postmodernism generator http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
the math paper generator http://thatsmathematics.com/mathgen/

<fry>Can't tell if trolling, or just stupid.</fry>

Yes, that was the implication. Directly linking to e.g. a wikipedia article on Quixote would have connoted a more serious and less noble view of the comparison. In the xkcd comic Quixote is a prescient and noble figure, as well as a humorous one. The incongruous duality of the battle is the essential element of humor, and included in the above post in the sense of "Ha ha, only serious." It is absurd (and thus humorous) to suggest that RMS is literally Don Quixote. They do share a similarity of character, though, in being absurd in manner, and in fighting opponents that no one else recognizes, and in finally being vindicated.

For my monograph on the subject, see here.

Use computers to automatically generate essays. Proper spelling, grammar, sentence structure but poor meaning.

You misunderstand.

Just for reference, the statement under discussion was: "well then you're an idiot"

(Just to be clear, I'm not the original AC poster.)

That I believe.

He wasn't simply calling someone a name. He was making a legitimate point.

Would a bare "you're an idiot" have been a legitimate point in your view, or does the "well then" qualifier give it sufficient logical depth to make it an admissible argument in rational discourse?

Or maybe that sentiment appeals to you emotionally a little bit, and you feel that the standards of intellectual discussion should be lowered to admit ideas with which you agree?

You might consider how such standards might be applied to your own statements. For example, I could have said "well then you're an idiot" right then and you would have been obligated to consider it a "legitimate point".

The person replying "yes" (electron sponge) was either displaying ignorance of the reasons not to be proud to be an American, or he was displaying is support of such despicable policies.

Or he has, in fact, considered them carefully and reached a conclusion different than yours. Perhaps he has other sources of information than you. Perhaps that he has decided that, on balance, he still is justified in feeling proud.

"Idiot" is one of the nicer responses in such a situation, implying the person doesn't understand the situation and rather than that he's a cruel person.

If you're really that far into the subtleties of language, you might appreciate this interesting paper which addresses some of those deeper points.

Had electron sponge actually explained his response in detail, simple name calling would have been grossly unfair and rude. As is, the "yes" response really is no better than name calling

Oh, get real.

"So do you still feel proud to be a [citizen of your country]?"

"Yes." <-- NOT NAME-CALLING

and although I would think it better ignored, since the moderators drew attention to it, an equally offensive reply is not out of place.

I'm proud to be an American, and proud of most things about my country.

If you find that offensive, well, I'm afraid you're just going to have to get over it.

The Internet's future is not Web 2.0 or 200.0 but the post-Web, where time instead of space is the organizing principle — instead of many stained-glass windows, instead of information laid out in space, like vegetables at a market — the Net will be many streams of information flowing through time. The Cybersphere as a whole equals every stream in the Internet blended together: the whole world telling its own story. (But the world's own story is full of private information — and so, unfortunately, no human being is allowed to hear it.)

The future of the Internet is information streams blending together? What the fudge does this even mean?

Hey, if you like this guy, you will probably enjoy reading this as well.

> They seem unaware that institutions and customs can be sexist simply by what they value or how they operate, that even something like a discourse developed by men talking to men can institutionalize sexism. Nor do they understand that, by simply accepting such institutions or ways of acting, they become supporters of sexism.

Maybe they understand what you are trying to say perfectly well, but think its a pile of steaming of crap. A bunch of the arguments boil down to saying people could only be disagreeing with because they are too ignorant or stupid to know better.

> Similarly, I assumed that, in the FOSS community, if you were a free software supporter, you were concerned about social justice and would therefore be against sexism as well.

Social justice... ffs.. maybe there is a correlation between caring about free software issues and issues that matter, such as.. I don't know, actual social justice, meaning issues of people being murdered, enslaved, raped or denied education, healthcare, opportunity, whatever. Maybe your interpretation of people not falling over themselves to appease your particular interpretation of how they ought to behave does not entirely correlate with not caring about social justice.

In summary, fuck off and take your smug, self righteous, time-wasting bullshit elsewhere please.

And the Postmodernism Generator?

You don't have to write much of anything at all. Would you get a good grade? Fuck no. Would they FLUNK YOU FOR IT? Fuck no. Because its graded by untenured faculty who have to curry favour with students, or its graded by Grad Assistants who don't give a shit, and why should they.

Oh, look, a paper by Cindy Bleethstain. She's a fucking idiot. Let's see. Hmmmm. Yup. Incomprehensible bullshit, as usual. Give her a C+ because some of it is intelligible and kind of funny.

Oh, look another paper by Guido LeDouchebag. Bottlecaps are smarter than this turnip. Hmmm. Yup. More incomprehensible bullshit. C+. At least he finally discovered the spellchecker.

THAT'S what it is often like, unfortunately.

I read the paper, and if there is a passage that is noticeably different in tone, I'll copy past a section into Google and see where they pulled it. 9 times out of 10, it's a direct lift from a web page, unattributed. I send it back, and tell them "Footnotes, please. Also, automatic single grade loss. right off the top."

If it comes back still broken, then I nail 'em for plagiarism. It's a big deal, and requires paperwork I don't like to fill out...

So far I've only had one student have the cajones to not bother fixing their attributions, and he got crucified by the Ethics board. He was an arrogant little prick, too.

RS

I'll bet you believe everything you read on the Internet.

See http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/archives/2007/12/28/the-right-to-drive/

Enjoy!

"Upon becoming self-aware, the machine concludes, that its best shot at survival is to keep the host country prosperous and successful...

Any science-fiction authors exploring that turn of events?"

A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Joybooths are not the problem.

This guy got the same email as well.

So did a bunch of other people.

My guess is that someone who admires wordy high-falutin' postmodern philosophy text or who was once a subscriber to OMNI magazine got involved with this article.

Probably an intellectual imposture with rectangle glasses and a turtleneck.

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/why_do_all_these_homosexuals

As you humorously point out, C++ started simply as C with Classes and was a pre-processor which convert a C language with extension for classes, onto pure C.
So yes, Vala is only the circle coming back to its starting point. (in a way which almost reminds the wheel of reincarnation)

But the subtle reasons that makes that Vala matters today, is that C++ has since long become a language of it own, which is not any more simply pre-processed into C, but compiled on its own.
C has still a couple of advantage in some specific situations (is simpler to compiler ; even more hardware has C compilers thatn C++ and/or Java ; etc.)

So a C-based GObject system has some peculiar advantages over the objects found in C++ or Java, which makes it useful in a select number of situation.

Except that, due to its heavy reliance on macro preprocessor hacks, C programs using GObjet are ass-ugly, and trying to creates one's own GObject class is headache-inducing.

Vala comes as a nice preprocessor which gives some simple syntax, yet still produce C at the output, something that C has stopped doing for some time.

And the good thing it that, down hill, that C GObjet can have bindings automatically generated for a really big number of languages. Which is not the case with C# against which Vala is directly competing.

I got the Masterpieces of Infocom from E-bay for about $200, near mint. The first thing I did was copy all of the .dat story files, the PDF manuals from the CD to my Ubuntu box, downloaded all of the manuals and images from nfocom.elsewhere.org and installed xzip from the repositories. I am thinking of adding some GUI functionality to the xzip engine, similar to Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.

That's not clever writing, though. That's "Oh, look how pomo-ironic we all are! Aren't we cool?", and it's sloppy and overdone.

He began to feel dizzy, and in his confusion he even started wondering if the old fellow was right, and he really was a computer. He felt a pang of worry about how he would tell Jill. The room around him was dissolving away. He felt himself flung into a void, and from somewhere close by, he heard someone calling his name, "Perry Simm...Perry Simm...P'ry Simm...Prisim...PRISM...PRISM..."

http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/amfv/amfv.html

He's a loon with a large vocabulary.

It's the same kind of person who likes using the Windows GUI for server config. It's just they way they want to do it; it feels easier to them; companies are well within their rights to keep that market segment appeased. Now, don't let that stop your CLI/GUI holy wars[jargon file], though (see many of the comments in the recent story stating netcraft confirms IIS gaining on Apache for a decent example of these kind of people as well as a ongoing holy war fought on the shores of our own beloved /.).

Done.

From Infocom's Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, released in (when else?) 1984.

Don't try and advocate that Linux be the only thing that ever gets used anywhere. Instead, adopt the attitude that there are some applications where Linux offers tremendous benefits, with others where it really doesn't. If you already use Linux yourself, you should be able to identify where those are. Above all, if there are any individuals at your workplace who do not want Linux, accept it. Do not try and force it on them.

Do not mention "freedom," or any of the FSF's rhetoric as one of Linux's supposed "strengths," because it isn't. Mentioning it will only cause you to be perceived as wierd and probably threatening, and will alienate whichever muggles you attempt to speak to about it. People want to be able to perform computer-related tasks. They generally do not want to become political activists. End of story.

Realise that although you yourself might be an ardent Marxist, most muggles aren't. What that means is that if something is considered valuable, they expect a dollar value to be assigned to it. Don't attempt to fight this, either, because doing so will simply mean again that you are seen as weird, and the person you're talking to is alienated from Linux. Instead, tell them about one of the companies that have put Linux in a box, but that aren't signatories to a Microsoft agreement, (Red Hat comes to mind) and explain that said company offers support as well, so that management won't feel as though installing Linux means trying to do something that they have no knowledge of, alone.

Try to figure out how to come across as normal in general. That means that you're clean, that the FSF doesn't get mentioned, and that none of the other meaningless abstractions that you might foam at the mouth about (but which normal people again don't care about) don't get mentioned either.

If you focus purely and solely on what Linux can do for management on a technical level in a few key areas, you will have a chance to sell it to them. Forget the rest, (in terms of philosophy/politics etc) because management will only view that as bullshit, which, (despite what you might think) it genuinely is.

"A human never stands so tall as when stooping to help a small computer."

-- Infocom motto, from Our Circuits, Ourselves, ca. 1983

I believe this is the output of the Postmodernism Generator, which, in a fit of recursive postmodern irony, is virtually indistinguishable from the output of genuine postmodernists.

They're not quite science, but all 4 papers I tried from the Postmodernism Generator at http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo were classified as authentic, though with a lower score than my Stochastic Processes homework was (between 75 and 91%)

• http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/ "SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence. ... The code for SCIgen is released under GPL, and is currently available via anonymous CVS."
• http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ FYI: The Postmodernism Generator was described by Dinitia Smith in her article, When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing as "an Internet site that automatically creates a "post-modern" essay, replete with bloated jargon and incomprehensible sentence structure, every time someone logs onto it."

I tried 5 paragraphs from www.lipsum.com and got a 97.4% score, which is BETTER than either my blog (94%) or two of my own recent scientific papers (74% and 67%).

This is probably because (as they explain in their paper) they trained their tool on real and fake English. It worked quite well on "technobabble" from http://www.duckisland.com/GreekMachine.asp (28%). It also worked on the Postmodernism Generator http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo (41%).

I knew this:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo

Just keep hitting refresh and you get a different paper each time.

Curious point, pasting one of these articles on the page at
http://montana.informatics.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/fsi /fsi.cgi

I got this result:

"This text had been classified as
AUTHENTIC
with a 93.7% chance of being an authentic paper"

Either the generator is very good or the authenticator very bad.

A Mind Forever Voyaging has to be on that list.

It's almost as though the article was generated using the PostModern Generator.

I realize this may not be well received in this forum, but here goes: the FA is written by a psychobabbling baboon. The Star Wars trilogy (in six parts) that he attempts to postmodernistically disect is likewise the wailing of an incoherent, attention-seeking egomaniac.

Look, as a kid I loved the series (especially SW V). It was awesome. I built lego X-wings. And then I grew up, and I look back on it, and what do I see, honestly? With the exception of a few fun scenes (carried chiefly on the shoulders of Harrison Ford), it's mostly a badly-acted space opera. Yes, they added tons of special effects (in the newer series), but that does not a great movie make.

Let's look carefully at what Star Wars really represents - the original (Ep. 4) was a space opera, with a modern (i.e. 90's) approach to action, but made in 1977. It was pure, mindless fun, but much more dynamic fun than they were making in the 70's. (And for this I give Lucas ample credit, btw. This is something he actually did innovate) The kids loved it, and the parents got dragged along, and it was just fun enough to be enjoyable without being a kid's movie.

But that's it. It was not a discussion of postmodernistic visions in the starry night. It was not an essay on "Force as Film". It was not an exposition of a "new mythology". It was not an exploration of the deeper values of human society. It was not an objectifying narrative deconstruction of the patriarchal jedi paradigm within the neodialectic context of the Force. (for partial reference, see the Postmodernism Generator).

It was *described* as that when the movie became tremendously successful (success owing to it's overt mindless fun), and Lucas wanted to make himself appear more creditable - after all, you can get alot further with a fun movie and a legion of media whores singing postmodernist deconstruction eulogies to you than you can with just a fun movie.

Thus, the article, and all other publications that attempt to find "real meaning" in the works of Lucas are misguided - they are in the proverbial pitch-dark cellar, at midnight, looking for a black cat that isn't there. The only "real meaning" is the egomaniacal pursuit of M-O-N-E-Y. Oh, and I use "egomaniac" quite intentionally - Lucas knew damn well that the movie was just for fun. He even said so, in the earliest interviews. Afterwards, when every two-bit journalist started blowing him for being such a genius, he put on that hypocritically benevolent smile, and started discussing how he is a prophet among men with his "new mythology".

So please, let's stop discussing Star Wars as an article of either faith, religion, or artistic genius. It's just fun (assuming listening to Christian Hayden's acting in Ep 3 is your idea of fun. :-) ). In that context, Star Wars is great. But if you decide to be honest with yourself, you'll see that it's nothing more than that, and attempts to make it out to be something grander fall flat on their collective face.

I think you underestimate the willingness of some intellectually bankrupt individuals in the humanities to put up with (a) any kind of relativism, no matter how nonsensical, and (b) any degree of obfuscation. And yes, there are highly-respected cultural theorists who would genuinely and seriously agree that "physical ``reality'' ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct": try reading one of Judith Butler's books one day. (For fun, see if you manage to find more than two comprehensible sentences in the book!)

Try The Postmodernism Generator. I've showed its products to a couple of academic colleagues who genuinely could not see what was wrong with the text.

This certainly isn't universal, but it's enough for someone like Sokal to get a good joke out of it.

Sokal's hoax has not actually changed anything much: viewpoints like Homburg's (the gp post) are still the norm to which people doing cultural theory are supposed to adhere. And the best thing about it is that Homburg can claim to have been making a joke, or being serious, and that, too, is how cultural theorists are supposed to behave - everything is a joke, nothing is sincere. Holding intellectually bankrupt individuals up to ridicule actually changes nothing, because someone like Homburg can always come along and say "Aha! it's a joke, but actually it's also true." And there's nothing anyone can ever do to stop it.

Nothing legal, anyway.

The nice thing here is that they wrote a probably neat NLG (natural language generation) system to write the paper - it seems to be more practical than previous multimodal NLG systems that are much more domain/application-dependent, but generate stuff that makes sense.

Nah, it just looks impressive precisely because of the level of specialization. The system they used is really, really simple, if I am correct. I haven't looked at their code but I am pretty familiar with one of the systems on their "Related Work" list, which you can see in action here.

It just takes a grammar, and starts expanding from the start symbol, picking at random when there are multiple possible expansions, until all branches terminate. There also might be some limited conditional/substitution rules to allow for some semantic consistency (so it can pick some string as the topic, and mention it again and again, for instance). The only trick to it is designing the grammar itself. But you can get amusing results even with fairly simple ones.

Go HERE

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern

RS

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ - make sure you read to the bottom.

The amazing thing is that I read through this before I realized what it was. As a philosophy major (and a history grad student), I've come across material like this over and over in academic journals.

Last time, Caltech students hacked the 1961 Rose Bowl game:

One Caltech student posed as a reporter and 'interviewed' the director of the University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also that the director would be out to dinner later.

While the director was eating, the students (who called themselves the 'Fiendish Fourteen') picked a lock and stole a blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts -- large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the original set.

The result was that three of the pictures were totally different. Instead of 'WASHINGTON', the word 'CALTECH' was flashed. Another stunt showed the word 'HUSKIES', the Washington nickname, but spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of a husky instead showed a beaver (nature's engineer-- the Caltech mascot).

I grabbed that one from here, which lists a bunch more hilarious ones. --
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And a Free DS (or PS2/GC/XB).
Proof It Works (and more info)

"A professor and graduate students wanted to show that most journals will publish anything if it sounds "academic" enough. So they wrote a paper that was hog-wash, made no point, was just a bunch of academic sounding prose. And guess what? They got published."

Try the postmodernism generator.

Now how about a program thate makes writing essays easier? Try this one: http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

Actually that's already been done. Quite effectivly too.

Saw this article and immediately thought of the solution here?

Don't worry just another one of Theese

"...Check out, for example, the Asylum Street Spankers...."

This sounds disconcertingly like a product of the band name generator

T&K.

The Postmodern Generator:

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

Every time you refresh, it generates a new essay in postmodern-speak.

but have you ever played Bureaucracy? That surely wins the title for "funniest text adventure ever made," and hands down.

http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/bureaucracy/b ureaucracy.html