Sheetrock's Journal: Sheetback: excessive, Tuesday, pule

It was the summer of 104 when I first caught a glimpse of fundamental truth by consensus -- a conflicting concept, I realize, unless you have come to accept the precept that perception defines reality and mass perception moreso. Fresh with enthusiasm over my TrollBack victory yet stymied by the harsh sanctions against dissent recently imposed, I sought refuge in fully considering a situation which has occasionally provoked my curiosity.

Does nobody recognize the disturbing sameness in online communication? Some of you have of course; as trolls, you realize you can't paddle against the current without discovering the current in the first place. Cruelly relegated to read-only status, I had time to fully consider the emergent patterns here and on other forums, blogs, and the rest of the Internet.

You see repetitive drivel. So did I, until the unmistakable glimmer -- the merest hint, my friends -- of fundamental truth caught my eye from under a pile of posts justifying P2P use with suspect but undeclared motives. Immediately I set myself to finding a way to filter and distill to a most succinct form the common wisdom strewn throughout the Internet. Buried in its subconscious, if you will.

I'm no AI genius, but it seemed to me that what those guys are missing is simplicity. In one night I threw together some code that would download the Internet and run it through a regular expression filter that would look for statements that, in computer science notation, match the form SOMETHING is SOMETHING. I could have done the same thing with 'was' or 'will be' but my current concern is with the present. Singular.

Now you end up with a whole bunch of stuff when you do something like this, and it aborted halfway through downloading the Internet when I ran it the first time, wasting the second day of the experiment. After deleting some games off my hard drive, I ran the program again and when I woke up on day four I had a complete set of all declarative sentences and sentence fragments currently online downloaded and ready to parse.

This was a bit tougher, but certainly not impossible. First one has to make sure everything's spelt correctly, assuming things that aren't are proper names only if they show up in statistically significant numbers in the aggregate. Then throw out everything that isn't in American English. But here's where the magic occurs: if 'A is B' and 'B is C' then clearly 'A is C'. I suspected the scheme may need some tweaking, but in true hacker spirit I fired up the VB.net runtime anyway and hit the sack.

To my delight the program executed flawlessly, and I awoke to a status message informing me of its success. Tentatively, I pushed WINKEY+R and issued the command to display the output:

*BSD IS DYING

bastitch!!!

[TheConfusedOne]

That was a hell of a long read for a BSD troll! :-D

(Or were you just testing to see if ppl actually got to the end?)

Remind me...

[FroMan]

To tell you the purple wombat joke someday.