• theneverfox@pawb.social
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      11 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.