this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
469 points (98.6% liked)

tumblr

3307 readers
7 users here now

Welcome to /c/tumblr, a place for all your tumblr screenshots and news.

Our Rules:

  1. Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.

  2. No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.

  3. Must be tumblr related. This one is kind of a given.

  4. Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.

  5. No unnecessary negativity. Just because you don't like a thing doesn't mean that you need to spend the entire comment section complaining about said thing. Just downvote and move on.


Sister Communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Cool story bro. I do mean that sincerely, it has the sort of energy that made me want to say that, but I am genuinely glad to have now heard that story, it's pretty interesting

My first thought was it might be a non sequitur, but it seems like it has too much structure for that or to be the earliest recorded troll.

What I find fascinating is that we might find the answer - language has math, AI research has made us start looking at language as high dimensional shapes in information space. Turns out, not only do languages have a consistent rate of information expression when spoken, but there's a common human shape to language

Having just a few examples of writing and distance in time makes it harder, but with the combinations of studying language evolution (they have shockingly clever methods with a solid mathematical basis) and the many things we're learning about the math of language (now that we've discovered it's incredibly important technologically)...

We might understand the joke one day, maybe even soon. Or maybe we won't, because not enough information remains to definitely declare an answer. Or maybe this is the first troll, and over time more humans that had ever existed when the author wrote it will spend lifetimes trying to understand this weird, unsolved language puzzle.

Maybe, as humans grow in number and specialize more and more, this specific joke spawns multiple fields of study

Regardless, that dude was epic.