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The Up-Goer Five Text Editor (splasho.com)
80 points by ColinWright on Aug 28, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 53 comments


This is GREAT. I'm trying my hand at "cryptocurrency" now.

"Money that is written on joined computers and can't be over written or taken away. Everyone can see every time you send money from one person to another, except you can use a not real name or number to show who you are. It uses a lot of computer power to work out whether or not what you did is real and by you. A big group of computers talks to each other to agree that what you did was real, but right now it has to use too much power that we pay for and that is bad for the world to get it done. Newer ways will use less power and will instead make people give some of their money to the computer for some time to show that the thing works and that they want to keep using it, and that they want other people to keep using it."

ugh


Sometimes the words that are used to make the money moving plan have a problem and the money goes to a bad person. Sometimes bad people give the computer money and take real money when they know that the computer money is not good to be used. And sometimes, instead of computer money, people will give the right to own a picture, such as of an animal that looks like a human, and the person who buys the picture thinks that the picture can be given for more money at a later time, but it can not.

All that being said, I think the computer money is a good idea, as I am the type of person who does not trust the people who tell us what we can and can not do. You must keep your eyes open to use it in a safe way.


I was able to get something passable with:

https://splasho.com/upgoer5/?i=Gz8tMz9loFOiMvOgo25yrFO3MFO1p...


There are ten and two different notes, or steps, in my people's music. The sounds go up and down such that a note that is ten and three higher than another sounds the same but higher up. We group those notes into pleasing sounds, and those groups are made up of notes that have a set number of steps between them. The notes have names, but there are fewer names than there are steps! The notes between the named notes are named by adding a changing word that says if the note is higher or lower by one step than a named note.

To write down this music, we use one or more sets of five lines drawn from side to side next to each other. The notes are drawn as spots on or between the lines in the spaces with sticks going up or down from the spots. We use more lines and some smaller spots to say how long the note should be played. Some of the steps (the ones that don't have their own names) are really in between the lines or spaces, so we use two different pictures to say if a note is really higher or lower by one step.


I found I got some pretty clear writing by starting considering the thousand most common words free for use and carefully considering before adding an additional word as available for use. In part, it stopped me from talking about one thing with several different words, because I would need to consider whether I had added the word to the allowed list, and would find that I could use words already added to the list.

I think the idea actually has some merit, if you start there, introduce words carefully, and define introduced words from only introduced words and the otherwise free words (or just add a standard English word where it really carries its weight).

Takes time. Obviously, I didn't do it for this comment, and it shows!


Since this is HN, let me note a wonderful talk based on the "introduce words carefully" concept: growing a language, buy Guy Steele

https://youtu.be/_ahvzDzKdB0


This is an excellent talk, and exactly where my mind went, too. I might suggest watching this upload of it instead, to avoid capture errors in the older upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6TaiXzHAE


You walk into a picture. Other people walk in the picture. You can talk to people in the picture. You can meet people in the picture. You own some things in the picture. You can move your own things. Other people own some things in the picture. You can buy new things to put in the picture. You can buy clothes to wear in the picture. You can buy a house in the picture. You can walk into your house. You can have friends in your house.

That's the metaverse.


The things I can do in this new picture do not appear to be any different than the things I can do in the picture of now. You have just added a new word for it. That is very annoying.


That would be more like VR or AR, right?

Metaverse implies these worlds are interconnected somehow.

Or have Meta, Inc. managed to change the meaning of the term already?


Where did this list come from, or what source was used to generate the list? Just glancing through it, it contains 'piss', 'TRUE', and 'eyebrow' as the top 1000 words. Seems like an odd source.

https://splasho.com/upgoer5/phpspellcheck/dictionaries/1000....



I will attempt to tell you about one of my favorite movies, Back to the Forward-Time. It is about a high school boy who is friends with a funny man with a very good brain. The man is a doctor, but he is not the kind of doctor who fixes hurt people. One day the doctor has a crazy idea and he uses twenty and ten years to build a small thing with a lot of power to make people move through time. He puts the thing into a very cool car. But to get some money to change the car, he gives some things with no use to some angry men. The angry men learn about this and kill the doctor - oh no! They want to kill the boy too, but he gets in the car and begins to drive - and then he goes back in time twenty and ten years!

In the past, the boy meets with the doctor, but of course the doctor is younger at that time. The doctor learns that the boy has gone back in time and together they plan a way to return the boy to the time that the boy came from, which is in the forward-time. They decide they will use the power from the loud light-lines in the sky to give the car enough power to do this. While this is happening, however, the boy meets with his mother and father, who are in high school at that time, and his mother falls in love with the boy instead of his father. Oh no! If his mother and father do not fall in love, the boy will not be made! So he and his father (who does not know the boy is his son from the forward-time) make a plan to have the father help his mother so the mother will fall in love with him.

The plan does not go as it was planned because a bad kid from the high school tries to make love with the mother when she does not want it, but the father hits the bad kid and the mother is happy. They did not fall in love yet, though. But then the boy plays a rock song from the forward-time with a music stick and everyone dances and is happy, and the boy realizes that he will be made. But now he still has to go back to the forward-time! He tries to tell the doctor about the angry men who kill him, but the doctor does not want to listen. It is a good thing that the doctor made a good plan, as the boy gets in the car that can go through time and it is given power by the light-lines in the sky and the boy returns to his time.

After he returns, he finds the doctor and is sad because the doctor is dead. However, the doctor shows the boy that he wore a shirt to stop the gun-balls of the angry men and he did not die. The doctor listened to what the boy had said in the past after all! The boy also learns that his father has done better business than had before, so it looks like he has changed things in time that he did not want to change… but maybe it is a good thing?

This movie came out almost twenty and twenty years ago but I still think it is a good movie today. Have you seen it?


It’s depressing that thirty and future aren’t popular words, but gun is.


Doomering aside, there's definitely some weirdness with the word list that this particular site uses, I think. In that and other posts I kept getting frustrated that I couldn't use "sell," but "attempt" was fine?


Jokes to the side, I find that writing this way is like how I change my speaking to be easier for people who do not learn this word-set when they were a child, or when I speak the word-set that I did not learn as a child and in which I do not know many words. It is very interesting and makes my brain work in a fun way.


I think the simple words for those who learn as children are not the same for those who learn as grown ups.

For example in English, "English" and "example" are not simple words, but "word-set" is.

But you learn "English" on day one, and "set" much later, and "example" is simpler than "word" for many.


"set" has more than 400 different senses listed in the OED.


I want to put my finger on that "word-set" is a kind of cheat. In "Set this thing here", "set" not is not the same word "this set of things", and the last meaning is much harder.


April Fools idea: enforce this on HN for 24 hours and watch the chaos


I would pay for this to happen.


I want to see that on Reddit


[I could make this better if I spent some more time.]

The world has many places with different speaking words and tongues. Without spending a lot of time studying and learning new words for things, you can only understand your own tongue and your own words. This is sad since there are so many people you can never talk to. They don't know your words and you don't know theirs.

Maybe one day every "different word" speaking place will make it easy for those that do not know how to speak their words. They can promise to use only one hundred of their own words and no more. Then we will each only need to learn their one hundred words to talk to them. Something we can easily do in one week.

Imagine the feeling of being able to talk to them finally. All without a computer.

Let us learn to speak different words together.


This will make it very easy to see how much understanding is in the single words and how much is in knowing places and talks of other people and what happened before to someone.

His eyes open. When the walls fell.


That is amazing... what I need now is a tool that suggests synonyms or phrases from the ten hundred words to help me filter down my vocabulary.

[after some work*5]

That is amazing... what I need now is a means of finding words from the ten hundred words close to my beautiful but not easy to recognize words.

[later]

We are a group of people who carefully write very tall sets of words for a living, we should be used to using middle men to change our words into fixed sets of numbers.


This is double plus good!


A program:

A computer do it book is a book of things to do for the computer. The computer will do one thing at a time until the do it book is done. Sometimes the do it book will decide what to do using what it sees in the outside world. This will cause the do it book to do something else.


Do the books ever have any problems, or are they always perfect?

What kinds of people write these books? Are they happy?


Looking at the sun-colored place where the people who write these books are often found writing things not for a computer but about computers.

I think they have lots of money but are never happy.

Do the books have problems? Yeah. But that is why the people who write these books always have a job.


The thing that always irks me about that title "Up-Goer Give", is that "goer" does not seem to be a common English word at all. "Go" is, but "goer" is not the same thing. Quite obviously "rocket" is far more common and easier to understand.


Life builds new life by making new things that are almost the same as things that live now but with small changes. Those changes are how life grows better, over time.

---

Not sure that's "evolution" precisely, but it was fun to try.


You can work around the restriction, and thus store any arbitrary information you wish, by encoding it as binary; e.g. "one zero one zero zero one..." :-)


Only if you also include instructions to decode it using the ten hundred most common words, I think!


If the first position is a one then it is a one, the next position is two times the number, position 3 is two times that number and so on.

Each bite is 8 bits. Meaning 256 things to pick from.

ASCII makes each letter a number which can fit in a bite.

(I allowed myself ASCII on the basis that it isn't a word)


I tried my best to describe “permutation”. I’m sure it can be done but I’m not that linguistically skilled.


"one way that a group of things can be lined up one after the other, which is different than any of the many other possible ways you could have lined them up instead"


This is great. I made my comment in a rush, the thing I was trying to describe wasn’t a single permutation, but the concept. Turns out you made that easy for me too: “the ways you can line up a group of things”.


When all we have are the most used words, it can be easier to show what something is by showing what it isn't instead. :)


“it is not the notes you play that are important but the notes you do not play”. I don’t think the up goer understands jazz but I think it gets the concept


A way that a set of things can be ordered.


Also well done! Much better than I would’ve done on my own.


If you like this, you might want to attempt to learn Toki Pona.


I stumbled upon a very similar editor hosted on xkcd.com when searching for the list of most common words, which Randall used for Up Goer Five and Thing Explainer:

https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/


And obviously, the exact list of words is contained in the source:

https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/words.js


Was hoping for an automatic synonym substitution system.


I wish it was slightly faster


The fact that this does a request with the text you're entering to a server is just funny to me. This would be super easy to check in the frontend.


Average word length in English = 4.7 characters

4.7 * 1000 words = 4700 bytes of additional data to download.

For some reason it intuitively felt like it would be a lot of data to bundle in the frontend, but we routinely include images in our websites that weigh 100 times that figure.

Let's keep going: the average English-speaking person knows about 30,000 words. A spellchecker in the frontend would use 30,000 * 4.7 = 141 KB. Still less than the average 3x image in a blog post.

There are 171,000 words in the Oxford dictionary. That's 800 KB, less than the weight of many popular websites.


And you can compress it, so it's actually much less than this as English (and languages in general) are highly compressible...


I thought the same and rewrote this in JavaScript running on the client only

https://bunkerbewohner.github.io/js-up-goer-five/


I like the idea but the UX of this is somewhat disappointing:

1. This is probably better implemented as a syntax highlighter, e.g. uncommon words get blocked out in red.

2. The reporting is waaay too slow because each word gets fired out in a request to https://splasho.com/upgoer5/phpspellcheck/dictionaries/check.... Why isn't this implemented in clientside JS?


> Why isn't this implemented in clientside JS?

This appears to have been built in twenty hundred ten and three. It may be that the make-person did not have the things in their brain they needed to build it in that way at that time.


>This is probably better implemented as a syntax highlighter, e.g. uncommon words get blocked out in red.

I get a squiggly red underline. Maybe you didn't notice because it looks similar to your browser's spelling checker?




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