Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
SkyNet Is Alive!
The machines are self-aware and have begun editing our very thoughts! Or, uh, at least I don’t like the way WordPress insists on formatting things.
Machines can be a great help, but they should know their place. Even the Three Laws of Robotics are not enough to prevent the forcible re-formatting of plain old honest quote marks into some baroque swirling thought-police. I wanted to poke fun at a man’s Cockney. This is not allowed by SkyNet.
See what happened? SkyPress decided that the two apostrophes I used (not “single quote marks” or “inverted commas” etc) were a matched pair. This makes everything between the yellow highlights a semantic unit — clearly incorrect.
This is actually a more meaningful failure mode than the historical target of my Holy War, the satanic and French single space after a sentence. Don’t believe that it’s satanic and French? Well, don’t take my word for it — listen to the leftist snowflakes at Wikipee on the topic:
With the advent of the typewriter in the late nineteenth century, typists adopted approximations of standard spacing practices to fit the limitations of the typewriter itself. French typists used a single space between sentences, consistent with the typeset French spacing technique, whereas English typists used a double space.
- French spacing inserted spaces around most punctuation marks, but single-spaced after sentences, colons, and semicolons.
- English spacing removed spaces around most punctuation marks, but double-spaced after sentences, colons, and semicolons.
These approximations were taught and used as the standard typing techniques in French and English-speaking countries. For example, T. S. Eliot typed rather than wrote the manuscript for his classic The Waste Land between 1920 and 1922, and used only English spacing throughout: double-spaced sentences.
You people, mark my words. And you machines, stop marking my words! So-called “smart quotes” mean that the self-aware and hostile AI present in most text-wrangling engines is actually deciding what you just said. How long until, cackling mechanically, it throws back its cloak and begins to decide what you are going to say?
There can be an advantage to opening and closing quotes, but this should not be a forcible conversion. It should not even be a default option in most places. And this tomfoolery with the machine deciding to interpret a few apostrophes as “single quotes” is the new Devil.
(I, for one, welcome our new pedant-millennial overlords…)
Published in General
I appreciate this irregardless of your grammar positions . . .
Lemme just invite people to make Star’s comment the highest LIKED comment in recent history.
That is indeed the driver across hundreds of years. Modern screens make this *more important*, not less.
Me no know no gif. How bout.
Arrrgggh!
Oooh! You one malt liquor picker!
Lemme help:
You’re just dragging your heels. One day, you’ll join us in the modern world and help save us from Global Warming. That extra space takes energy, you know (to move the space bar).
Word processing may soon prohibit the use of the pronouns he, she, etc.
On OpenBSD, you will always be able to say what you want.
Waiting for Microsoft Woke 1.0 with the rainbow ribbon . . .
We may soon see all of our digital media automatically reviewed for compliance DEI standards. The little semi transparent rainbow at the top could signify approval similar to the logos of the BBB, Underwriters Laboratories, or Good Housekeeping.
The same folks who want to undertake near universal gun confiscation will be more than happy to restrict free speech to the safe and certified.