Category Archives: Online Life

Oops, we passed the Turing Test

Humor, Online Life

I was bored last month. I decided that it would be fun to hack up an AI bot to sit on the #haskell IRC channel.

I wanted this bot to be a conversation bot, so I would need some sort of AI engine. I wanted it to be a learning bot, so it could learn from what people have said before. I searched around, and it seems there aren’t many good learning AI engines out there for Linux. I eventually settled on MegaHAL.

I then obtained the logs for the conversation in over the past year, and used it to train the bot.

The result was sometimes hilarous, and often riddled with typos and nonsensical (considering the source, many would say that would be expected).

I started a page of MegaMonad quotes with some of the funnier exchanges.

But here’s the best part: there was a person on the channel that didn’t realize that MegaMonad was a bot! Perhaps we just passed the Turing Test accidentally…

We the Media

Online Life

According to reviews I have read, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People should make a fascinating read. It’s now available as individual PDFs from its home page. I also used pdftk to combine those into a single large file (1MB). I’ve also then converted that into ASCII text, Plucker, and Palm DOC formats.

Downloads via HTTP

Downloads via Gopher

Here are some other reviews and discussions about We the Media:

Find A Job By Blogging?

Online Life

One year ago, I noted the Quovix experiment to find candidates for a job by blogging. That experiment didn’t work out.

This year, they tried it again. This time Quovix CEO Marty Morrow reports Blogging beats Monster.com for job posting. He lists some benefits, which center around greater interaction and ability to learn about what makes potential employees tick (and the ability to learn what makes potential employers tick).

Meanwhile, Dan is going the other way: he’s blogging to find employment.

Maybe someone should write something to match up the Martys and the Dans… but then we already have monster.com, right?

Does the whole thing stop working if “everybody” starts doing it, because then you have all the riff-raff too? Or does that just make it better, because the social network is larger?

An AdSense Experiment

Online Life, The ChangeLog

Dan was telling me a month or two ago that he’s using Google AdSense on his blog. Now that I’m actually doing this regularly, I figured I’d try it out, and while I’m at it, on a few parts of my other sites.

I’m highly curious what sort of ads it will dish up. There isn’t exactly a massive market for products related to developing Russian languages patches for FreeCiv, for instance. Initial results are not all that positive, but we’ll see. It may be a very short-lived experiment :-)

This is presently deployed here on The ChangeLog, on the directory indices on the HTML-to-Gopher gateway on quux.org, and the message pages of the list archives on lists.complete.org.

On the monetary side, running all this costs me about $600 per year. While I would be quite surprised if AdSense brings in that much, maybe it would at least bring in enough to pay for some more disk space for the Gopher server…

I’ll keep you updated.

Community Doesn’t Generate Income?

Online Life

I came across this article in PC World about the rising usage of Usenet. The story talks about reasons for this, and has this quote from Forrester Research: “Community just doesn’t generate much income.”

There is where I disagree. The Internet itself developed as a new tool for communication — for building communities, and helping those communities function (yes, even when it was ARPANet). And everwhere you look people are building communities online: Usenet is one prime example, but I can also site the proliferation of IM/IRC systems, web forums, communities surrounding prominent sites such as EBay, the entire Weblog phenomenon, and several others.

To Forrester I say: Check out this new thing called “The Internet.” You might find a whole new world — er, community — out there.