December 11, 2003

Jorn Barger is alive. Whether or not he's well is a matter of opinion. Fans of his blog became concerned after a 2 month haitus from updating. Finally chum Eric Wagoner posted this in hopes of finding him, which he did recently. Apparently Born simply moved to another apartment... and didn't tell anyone.
posted by pyrrthon1 20 years ago
  • By the way, check out the nifty photo of him on the left in the wired story.
  • Jorn is a wacky fucker. Like they said over on that other filter, his views on I/P run perilously close to the anti-semitic. He's got some utterly wisible views on machine translation, too, although this issue is somewhat less combustible.
  • Just out of innerest, hey, Hat, you got any views on machine translation? Are they as pessimistic as my own? (Which is to say "useful in an extremely limited sense and absolutely not to be trusted".)
  • The Barger thing was weird in that I lived in Socorro (I was briefly at NMT), and knew (sorta, friend-of-friend and all that) "Schlake", the guy in the Wired story that tracked him down. It's a small world. A weird "small world" thing happened to me with MeFi. I've been reading MeFi for about a year now. But last month there was a front page post by "blakewest". I was like, hmm, I know a Blake West. Looking at his profile, sure enough, it's the guy I know. In the comments thread for his fpp, he mentioned that he and his wife were due their baby within a couple of weeks. I thought, hmm, is that when the baby's due? Talking the next day to my best friend who is close friends with Blake and his wife, I confirmed that their baby was due within a couple of weeks, and asked, "You know how I know that? I read it on MetaFilter."
  • Hey, when I moved to another apartment, nobody started a massive manhunt for me! Hat, you got any views on machine translation? Are they as pessimistic as my own? Yes and yes. Language is probably the most human thing about us, and until they manage the Turing-test AI thing (which I'm equally dubious about) I can pretty much guarantee they're not going to get beyond the awkward, barely comprehensible "translations" we get such amusement from now. Unless, of course, they train people to use language only in logical, univalent, machine-comprehensible ways. They're probably working on that as we speak.
  • . Unless, of course, they train people to use language only in logical, univalent, machine-comprehensible ways Pardon me, I'll just pop off to run some poetry through Babelfish.
  • Ah, linguistics and artificial intelligence. Good stuff.