Slashdot Mirror
New Project To End Stupidity Online
mrneutron2003 writes to tell us that StupidFilter, a new Open Source project started by Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr, plans to provide an intellectual prophylactic for memetically transmitted diseases. "Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point. It's time to fight back."
... no wonder it's so quiet here.
What I want to know is who this evil Dr. Noone is and why she is allowed to deny things we mere mortals cannot.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
You AOL whores
Never as now, has the phrase, "Nothing to see here. Move along" been more appropriate.
Ryan Fenton
"the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people"
First, BWAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Second, it's not 1978 anymore.
This just in: Natalie Portman, on behalf of the Hot Grits Council of America and in conjunction with the Reversalmasters of Soviet Russia, has released a statement crying out to end this First Postian genocide. "They are comments just like all the rest. Just because they were born in the mind of a less intelligent person does take away their inalienable rights of commentality."
I got a catholic block.
So, basically, this is going to compare every post against 4chan, and if it finds a match, delete it.
Great idea.
tits or GTFO.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I for one welcome ..[FILTERED]..
Perhaps slashdot should implement a requirement for writing a cogent, unique paragraph before it allows a user to have mod points. Then, if they also change the moderation to be accountable (no longer anonymous, and no longer scarce -- see Kuro5in.org for moderation technology that actually works), it might have a chance at being useful in the sense that one could actually use it to filter messages, instead of being relegated to endlessly observe people use mod points in place of actually expressing a counter opinion.
Then again, slashdot could continue on with completely broken moderation. I could see that as a possibility, given the existing sample set.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They are going to unplug the internet.
Imagine an outbound firewall that poses a series of questions to anyone who tries to use it.
If you can't solve a grammar problem that requires you to know the difference between "their", "there", and "they're" you don't get to use email.
If you can't choose the correct definitions from multiple choices for "intellectual property", "piracy", "flame", and "rtfm" you don't get to use the web.
If you can't solve a quadratic equation, your computer is set to inbound traffic only.
Problem solved.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
The server at www.fastsilicon.com is taking too long to respond.
:(
Apparently not as fast as someone thought it was
Ok who is the wiseguy that is actually reading the article.
... too bad it'll never be able to detect irony. As a sarcastic person, I rely on savage mockery to let my hatred of idiocy show.
OMG U CN'T BLOCK M3!!!!!!!1111 I R SMARTER THAN U GHEYFAGS
I have this really funny quote that I like to put here. Unfortunately, there's this really annoying thing called a char
First they came for the cliches, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't a cliche. Then they came for the memes...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I for one, welcome our stupid filt.......
[This post censored by StupidFilter v0.1 - Topic: Slashdot Memes.]
My blog
Dvorak seen in New York City just outside Wall Street shoeless and holding a sign: "Will make wild, unsupported predictions for food."
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Bigger problem is who decides what is stupid?
All too often on Slashdot people actually believe that "Smart==Thinks like me" and "Stupid==Doesn't think like me"
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. (Oh dear, I wonder if any proponents of Intelligent Design have ever read Hitchhikers?)
If there were such a thing as an Online Stupid Filter, it would have filtered itself out of existence.
Due to many/most of its pages being references to suchlike aforementioned stupidity. A blue-light filter works by absorbing blue-light, a coffee-filter works by absorbing coffee (well, the grounds, at least) - any guess what a Stupid Filter absorbs?
Due to the vast majority of The Internet being not much more than stupidity, and in much the same way as a Black Hole will absorb all light and therefore be essentially invisible (we have never *found* a black hole, just a whole bunch of conditions which theory predicts would be "caused by black holes").
Seriously folks, The Stupidity Filter obviously doesn't work - the proof is in most comments on this page (present company excepted, naturally).
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
And you didn't link the actual website in the post. It's http://stupidfilter.org
Go ahead, slashdot me. I dare ya.
n savyet rusha, a chezbergur can has a lolcats!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Skip the ad-laden overloaded blogodreck site and go directly to StupidFilter. The concept is straightforward - they're training a naive Bayesian classifier, like a spam filter, on a set of text excerpts rated by humans. You can look at random samples from the training set for amusement.
Wikipedia already has some 'bots that do somewhat similar things, looking for totally bogus edits and reverting them. Yahoo's "commercial intent" filter also does something like that, to separate commercial and non-commercial sites. We considered something like that for SiteTruth, where we need to distinguish non-commercial sites so we don't rate them by business criteria.
This approach to filtering will probably need domain-dependent filters. A political site, a social site, a sports site, and a game site all need different training sets. I'd go for a two-stage classifier, one that divided sites into about ten to twenty major categories, and then a stupidity filter trained for each of those categories.
Applying such a filter at blog posting time should be interesting.
And the characters in these books, and plays, and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate the very least he can do is to shut up. - Tom Lehrer.
Anonymous moderation is subject to its own sets of abuses, but "accountable" moderation is no panacea.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I bailed on kuro5hin.org a couple of years ago. Basically, it had become popular enough and let people vote on enough things (what got published to what pages, etc), that it seemed that the teaming masses of idiots were running the place. And basically they were.
/. may suck, mostly the crap sinks to the bottom, and good responses float to the top. Especially if you change your modifiers so that responses marked mostly "Funny" are given -2 in your personal filter.
As much as some of the editors here are idiots. As much as they fail to edit. As much as they abuse their editorship (quips in the article, changing article text), they are also answerable to someone. And I think that's probably a good and important thing.
And as much as the mod system here at