weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Emacs Weenie) (03/23/88)
Posting-Front-End: Gnews 1.3 [This hasn't been about new newsgroup proposals for quite a while--and you sysadmins expect USERS to find the correct newsgroup?--so I'm re- directing the discussion over to news.misc. See you there.] In article <34@ncar.ucar.edu>, woods@ncar (Greg Woods) writes: >In article <1501@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes: >> b) Even smarter commands, which might check the article text >> to help make suggestions. > We're talking serious AI here. This is really the rub. When someone >actually implements this, only THEN will I believe it can be done. This is >a lot more difficult than it appears on the surface. And AI means Lisp, which Gnews is coded in. True, only a minority of news users will ever run Gnews, but I expect that there will soon be enough of them that Gnews makes possible the rapid development and testing of new newsreader techniques. Gnews has features and features galore--so many that I've even converted people from vi & rrn to Emacs & Gnews. And the reason Gnews has so many features is because it is written in ELisp. RMS has already done most of the nasty low-level work for me, and I'm left with merely programming the concepts. End of advertisement, back to the testing of new newsreader techniques: if these seem to work in the limited context of Gnews users, getting the code into C for everyone else will proceed rather straightforwardly, as the de- sign problem has already been solved and shown viable. Note that Gnews it- self doesn't have to hold anyone hostage to someone else's testing: it'd be very trivial to introduce a gnews-volunteer-hook. But it would be very easy to force a successful scheme into the C code. Indeed, such a two-layer approach to obnoxious features might mitigate against harsh user reactions, as when the 50% rule suddenly appeared. And as for the "serious AI" we're talking here: Greg, you're exaggerating. Remember ELIZA? The program doesn't have to be great, just good enough to block noise noise noise that you and I and hundreds of other posters are absolutely sick of. And similarly, while any code can be gotten around, most of it will be left in at most sites. Thus, looking for "Guin?ess" in articles crossposted to 4 or more news- groups, or counting the number of times "abortion" or "fetus" shows up in a non talk.abortion article, etc. are not terribly difficult tasks. There are 100s of these kludges that could be tried. And now for some fairy stories. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ask yourself: what would be the effect of the following warning window if it showed up to a potential sci.astro poster on "Velikovsky": ** Hello. You are apparently posting about Velikovsky to sci.astro. ** Unfortunately, this is an extremely volatile topic, and all such ** discussion is to take place in talk.origins. ** ** Note that the question of whether Velikovsky's work is or is not ** "science" is irrelevant: newsgroups are not ideal Platonic cate- ** gories, but convenient ways to organize topics. ** ** Nor is there any need to "defend" science, if that is why you are ** posting. Most newsreaders don't need to be convinced, so keep your ** chastisements to e-mail. And if your e-mail bounces, consider the ** matter dead--surely others sent e-mail too. ** ** If your site doesn't get talk.origins, it is for a reason: your site's ** management has decided that it cannot afford to carry or merely does ** not want to appear to sponsor this very topic of discussion. ** ** Do we understand each other? (y or n) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ask yourself: what would be the effect of the following if it showed up to an article cross-posted to comp.unix.{questions,wizards}. ** Hello. You are crossposting between the unix questions and wizards group. ** I suspect you have a question which you find exasperating, and you want to ** make sure that the wizards see it to save the day. ** ** Please don't bother the wizards like this; more than enough knowledgeable ** people read the questions group that you will probably get the help you ** need there. If you don't get any help in question, then ask the wizards ** group. Do not cross-post that time either. ** ** Do we understand each other? (y or n) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ask yourself: what would be the effect of the following if it showed up in response to a short article containing "I vote yes/no" in news.groups. ** Hello. You are posting your vote. Don't bother. The vote will be ** ignored no matter what. Believe it or not, there are people out there ** who care very much about this matter--more than you do--and will take ** your name down if you post, and then double-check to see if your name ** appears on the final tally. ** ** Since mail bouncing happens on EVERY collection of votes, the rules ** for newsgroup voting have already taken into account this problem in ** an ill-defined but generally fair way. ** ** So if you can't get your mail through, we're sorry. You tried, and ** that's the end of that. ** ** Do we understand each other? (y or n) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ask yourself: what would be the effect of the following if it showed up in response to a long signature: ** Oy gevelt, with a signature that big, who needs an article? (y or n) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Surely each of you can each think of a dozen more like this! Perhaps a mailing list for collecting these should be set up--since I'm not around that often for now, I can't volunteer. If I convert Brad or someone else who likes his idea over to Gnews, I expect that by the end of this summer there'd be a working prototype, plus enough Gnewsers to give it a real workout. Note that the default response means the posting is rejected, or in some cases, like the questions/wizards cross-posting warning, means that the "Newsgroup" field is modified. So, how about it? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- About Gnews: 1.3 will be released in about a week; it'll be on ucbvax for anonymous FTP. FSF will distribute Gnews with the rest of Emacs as soon as someone tests and debugs the rn-emulator code. I'll throw in some testimonials this time around: | We have a couple of our local emacs fans sorta |beta testing it, and they drop by and show me all the funky features |and such all the time. They think its the best thing since sliced bread. |Definitely a win. My congratulations. Looks far more flexible |than rn or rnews |I love Gnews; I use it every day. |Thanks for the fixes you sent me. I'm very impressed with Gnews now |that it is basically working. Gnews isn't perfect yet--most of the above came with a big "but...". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ucbvax!garnet!weemba Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720 I vote YES on soc.intercourse, YES on comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d.d.d, YES on talk.wheat.chaff, and am now collecting votes for alt.collectivism --the moderated group where everyone agrees with us at the Brahms Gang or ELSE. (Or else what? I don't know. We'll start with Maroney Awards!)