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I think this is the most made-up, arrogant comments I've seen on a post that haven't even taken a glance at the actual content. People all over asserting that i

I think this is the most made-up, arrogant comments I've seen on a post that haven't even taken a glance at the actual content. People all over asserting that it is has been done in special software, that there's typos everywhere, that there's double spaces all over the places, when none of it is true. I have to say I'm quite surprised at the number of totally certain and easily disprovable assumptions people on here and on the twitter thread are making.

notRobot 5y ago
Welcome to the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment. The scary thing is that many readers will also often take anything said confidently enough to be fact. This is also basically how a lot of disinformation works. Say it authoritatively, and you'll become an authority on the matter to many people. I've definitely been guilty of doing both of these things past, but I've learned now to actually read and think and do research before commenting or taking something I read at face-value.
- ArchStanton 5y ago
  >It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment. C'est la vie. The internet allows millions of people to opine on barstools. It might simply be that our standards for the written word were too high before as it required a large investment to write/print/distribute a magazine or book.
  - mistermann 5y ago
    > C'est la vie. The internet allows millions of people to opine on barstools. It may be interesting if there was a social media platform that exerted some sophisticated control over the manner in which this phenomenon plays out. If adequately successful, the way "la vie" is, would then be different.
sprkwd 5y ago
Welcome to the internet.
lmilcin 5y ago
Do you take a possibility you can be both right and wrong? The feat might not be as difficult as author seems it is. I personally can think of many ways to achieve it. Come to think of it, it may actually be even easier because lines in that guide afford more ways to be broken because they are longer. And I am not even native speaker. To match lengths you only need to make one or maybe two choices per line only to adjust a word by maybe one or two chars. This is nothing very difficult as any crossword solver will attest.
- dzdt 5y ago
  Also the author gives himself the liberty to use one or two spaces following a period, and on occasion even following a comma.
  - db48x 5y ago
    I disagree that this is important. Search for a double space, and you will see only four that are inside a paragraph, and only one of those is after a comma. There are more stray spaces after the end of a line than there are double spaces inside of a paragraph.
- Gigablah 5y ago
  "take a possibility", "as author seems it is", "not even native speaker". It's simple to fulfil the requirements, making it flow naturally is not. Also, any mistake early on in any paragraph will have cascading effects.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    As somebody said, I am just a random guy on the Internet. I learned this language already as an adult never attending a single lesson. There is a lot of other people that know the language way better than me. Thinking that it must be hard just because it is for you is a well known bias. (EDIT:) Gigablah, I can't reply to your comment because apparently I am rate limited. I am not saying it is easy. I am just saying it is not "most scarily/stunningly impressive linguistic feat". I hope you can appreciate there is a lot of space between "easy" and "stunningly impressive".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lordlic 5y ago
I agree that there's not a single instance of double-spaces in the text, and I thought that was a really bizarre claim, but there are some instances of misspellings that help it along. For example: 1. missles instead of missiles 2. carefull instead of careful 3. futher instead of further But they're at least all consistent so there's plausible deniability that the author just didn't know English that well. And ofc the tweets are still on-point saying that it's an impressive and unappreciated feat.
- OJFord 5y ago
  They're not just vowel removal abbreviations or similar though, they seem like things that'd be common errors - 'missles' is how a lot of Americans pronounce 'missiles', if her film and television is any indication, for example. 'Careful' is one of those 'eh what can I say, English spelling is weird' words anyway - 'care', 'full', why shouldn't it be 'carefull'? I'm not a teacher, but I bet that's a common error.
- joeberon 5y ago
  People were saying it was littered with double spaces and typos, rather than just a few instances, which is just incorrect
- robinson7d 5y ago
  That makes it sound like the typo is made in just a few places to make the line fit. Search missile, there are 0 results. Search missle and there are 217. The consistent and plentiful usage makes me strongly believe it’s just how the author thought the word is spelt, not a cheap way to get their preferred formatting.
  - lordlic 5y ago
    > they're at least all consistent so there's plausible deniability that the author just didn't know English that well
    - robinson7d 5y ago
jancsika 5y ago
Well, he did compare to Mozart. To pick a rando Mozart piece[1]: 1. Sounds like cutesy little throw-away dance with nowhere near the gravitas of a Beethoven or Mahler 2. Listen closely and hear that the phrases are written purposefully so that the music sounds bad when the musicians choose to obey the repeat signs. In other words-- the music flows beautifully if you ignore the repeat signs, but that flow is broken when you obey them and go back to the beginning of the phrase. 3. Musical jokes later in the piece depend on the players actually taking the "wrong warp" repeats 4. Listen closely and realize that Mozart actually left out the main melody of the piece. (In fact, that melody finally appears only once at the end of the piece) 5. Listen more closely and realize that one of the subsequent main melodies are based off the accompaniment figure for the missing main melody 6. Listen even more closely and hear the striking dissonances and imitative polyphony that is exactly the kind of thing admirers talk about wrt Beethoven, Mahler, etc. 7. Remember that it's difficult enough to write a cutesy little throw-away dance in the style of Mozart, much less pull off all these formal experiments with such subtlety that most modern performances continue to play this music as if it's just a cutesy little throw-away dance And that's just a random example. For a specific example: if Beethoven had written the Introitus of the Requiem Mass instead of Mozart, it would count as the most sophisticated counterpoint that Beethoven had ever written. (And there are probably more impressive examples of Mozart's counterpoint than that.) 1: last movement of String Quartet in E-Flat Major, K. 428
- joeberon 5y ago
  Whether or not it's actually impressive is irrelevant, the point was that more people than usual were just making random things up about it.
- FatalLogic 5y ago
  In its particular field (the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices), it is just as superior as Mozart's work in his field.
  - jancsika 5y ago
    But AFAICT this author's prowess in the field you defined is no more or less than a mastery of that singular skill. For the author to be a "Mozart" (as in the historical figure, not the myth[1]) you'd need to show a richness of the author's approaches that makes the reader aware of the challenges of and breadth of the field. Something like this: * the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices Oops, wait... * the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow a rhyming scheme Oops, wait... * the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow a (line-based and paragraph-based) rhyming scheme Oops, wait... * the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow an intricate rhyming scheme where certain paragraphs are mashups of archaic German verse and 1970s gospel lyrics Oops, wait... there are also some patterns of words where the pattern is written twice, but punctuation was inserted in a seemingly arbitrary place so that I didn't even notice the repetition on the first reading. Something like, "One two three four one. Two three four." Except each sentence was grammatically and contextually correct. Mozart did stuff like that-- there's an example somewhere in the clarinet concerto but I can't remember where. 1: I mean, there's no law against using the mythical Mozart here. But I imagine we'd be trolled by HN'ers if we did that regularly with, say, von Neumann or Einstein.
phkahler 5y ago
One of the later tweets says it's all "bricktext", which apparently is a thing. An old internet thing even. I may have to try it some time.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  Does nobody remember the Jargon File? http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bricktext.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bricktext.html
jeegsy 5y ago
Indeed, this is why we cant have nice things.

notRobot 5y ago

Welcome to the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment. The scary thing is that many readers will also often take anything said confidently enough to be fact. This is also basically how a lot of disinformation works. Say it authoritatively, and you'll become an authority on the matter to many people. I've definitely been guilty of doing both of these things past, but I've learned now to actually read and think and do research before commenting or taking something I read at face-value.

ArchStanton 5y ago
>It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment. C'est la vie. The internet allows millions of people to opine on barstools. It might simply be that our standards for the written word were too high before as it required a large investment to write/print/distribute a magazine or book.
- mistermann 5y ago
  > C'est la vie. The internet allows millions of people to opine on barstools. It may be interesting if there was a social media platform that exerted some sophisticated control over the manner in which this phenomenon plays out. If adequately successful, the way "la vie" is, would then be different.

sprkwd 5y ago

Welcome to the internet.

lmilcin 5y ago

Do you take a possibility you can be both right and wrong? The feat might not be as difficult as author seems it is. I personally can think of many ways to achieve it. Come to think of it, it may actually be even easier because lines in that guide afford more ways to be broken because they are longer. And I am not even native speaker. To match lengths you only need to make one or maybe two choices per line only to adjust a word by maybe one or two chars. This is nothing very difficult as any crossword solver will attest.

dzdt 5y ago
Also the author gives himself the liberty to use one or two spaces following a period, and on occasion even following a comma.
- db48x 5y ago
  I disagree that this is important. Search for a double space, and you will see only four that are inside a paragraph, and only one of those is after a comma. There are more stray spaces after the end of a line than there are double spaces inside of a paragraph.
Gigablah 5y ago
"take a possibility", "as author seems it is", "not even native speaker". It's simple to fulfil the requirements, making it flow naturally is not. Also, any mistake early on in any paragraph will have cascading effects.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  As somebody said, I am just a random guy on the Internet. I learned this language already as an adult never attending a single lesson. There is a lot of other people that know the language way better than me. Thinking that it must be hard just because it is for you is a well known bias. (EDIT:) Gigablah, I can't reply to your comment because apparently I am rate limited. I am not saying it is easy. I am just saying it is not "most scarily/stunningly impressive linguistic feat". I hope you can appreciate there is a lot of space between "easy" and "stunningly impressive".

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lordlic 5y ago

I agree that there's not a single instance of double-spaces in the text, and I thought that was a really bizarre claim, but there are some instances of misspellings that help it along. For example: 1. missles instead of missiles 2. carefull instead of careful 3. futher instead of further But they're at least all consistent so there's plausible deniability that the author just didn't know English that well. And ofc the tweets are still on-point saying that it's an impressive and unappreciated feat.

OJFord 5y ago
They're not just vowel removal abbreviations or similar though, they seem like things that'd be common errors - 'missles' is how a lot of Americans pronounce 'missiles', if her film and television is any indication, for example. 'Careful' is one of those 'eh what can I say, English spelling is weird' words anyway - 'care', 'full', why shouldn't it be 'carefull'? I'm not a teacher, but I bet that's a common error.
joeberon 5y ago
People were saying it was littered with double spaces and typos, rather than just a few instances, which is just incorrect
robinson7d 5y ago
That makes it sound like the typo is made in just a few places to make the line fit. Search missile, there are 0 results. Search missle and there are 217. The consistent and plentiful usage makes me strongly believe it’s just how the author thought the word is spelt, not a cheap way to get their preferred formatting.
- lordlic 5y ago
  > they're at least all consistent so there's plausible deniability that the author just didn't know English that well
  - robinson7d 5y ago

jancsika 5y ago

Well, he did compare to Mozart. To pick a rando Mozart piece[1]: 1. Sounds like cutesy little throw-away dance with nowhere near the gravitas of a Beethoven or Mahler 2. Listen closely and hear that the phrases are written purposefully so that the music sounds bad when the musicians choose to obey the repeat signs. In other words-- the music flows beautifully if you ignore the repeat signs, but that flow is broken when you obey them and go back to the beginning of the phrase. 3. Musical jokes later in the piece depend on the players actually taking the "wrong warp" repeats 4. Listen closely and realize that Mozart actually left out the main melody of the piece. (In fact, that melody finally appears only once at the end of the piece) 5. Listen more closely and realize that one of the subsequent main melodies are based off the accompaniment figure for the missing main melody 6. Listen even more closely and hear the striking dissonances and imitative polyphony that is exactly the kind of thing admirers talk about wrt Beethoven, Mahler, etc. 7. Remember that it's difficult enough to write a cutesy little throw-away dance in the style of Mozart, much less pull off all these formal experiments with such subtlety that most modern performances continue to play this music as if it's just a cutesy little throw-away dance And that's just a random example. For a specific example: if Beethoven had written the Introitus of the Requiem Mass instead of Mozart, it would count as the most sophisticated counterpoint that Beethoven had ever written. (And there are probably more impressive examples of Mozart's counterpoint than that.) 1: last movement of String Quartet in E-Flat Major, K. 428

joeberon 5y ago
Whether or not it's actually impressive is irrelevant, the point was that more people than usual were just making random things up about it.
FatalLogic 5y ago
In its particular field (the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices), it is just as superior as Mozart's work in his field.
- jancsika 5y ago
  But AFAICT this author's prowess in the field you defined is no more or less than a mastery of that singular skill. For the author to be a "Mozart" (as in the historical figure, not the myth[1]) you'd need to show a richness of the author's approaches that makes the reader aware of the challenges of and breadth of the field. Something like this: * the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices Oops, wait... * the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow a rhyming scheme Oops, wait... * the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow a (line-based and paragraph-based) rhyming scheme Oops, wait... * the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow an intricate rhyming scheme where certain paragraphs are mashups of archaic German verse and 1970s gospel lyrics Oops, wait... there are also some patterns of words where the pattern is written twice, but punctuation was inserted in a seemingly arbitrary place so that I didn't even notice the repetition on the first reading. Something like, "One two three four one. Two three four." Except each sentence was grammatically and contextually correct. Mozart did stuff like that-- there's an example somewhere in the clarinet concerto but I can't remember where. 1: I mean, there's no law against using the mythical Mozart here. But I imagine we'd be trolled by HN'ers if we did that regularly with, say, von Neumann or Einstein.

phkahler 5y ago

One of the later tweets says it's all "bricktext", which apparently is a thing. An old internet thing even. I may have to try it some time.

dotancohen 5y ago
Does nobody remember the Jargon File? http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bricktext.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bricktext.html

jeegsy 5y ago

Indeed, this is why we cant have nice things.