From the darkest, blackest, most evil parts of my soul
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While doing some cleanup on my 128 GB flash drive, a.k.a. my personal pocket data landfill, I encountered my OMGWTF2 contest code from last year. I never shared it, in fact I completely forgot about it as a psychological coping mechanism to retain what sanity I had left.
Opening up the code again brought tears to my eye as I remembered all the graduate student code I encountered over the past few years and was inspired by, and the tears opened up to waterfalls as I remembered all the debugging madness of developing this monstrosity and adding on to it. What started as a basic decision-making engine soon found itself burdened with various enterprisey-ness such as hardware checks, XML configuration files, a client-server architecture, and internationalization. I now need a prescription for some rather strong meds as I am once again confronted with the Joker-like megalomaniac within me that actually enjoyed this little project!
So, in the interest of tickling the masochistic tendencies of those of you with, well, masochistic tendencies, I present to you the full source code to Mott's Enterprise XML Decision-Making Engine (MEXDeMakE).
Remember, this is intentionally WTF code. Identifying the WTFs is left as an exercise to the (presumably demented) reader. I strongly suspect I was aiming for the Beast of Burden award. Sadly, many of the intentional WTFs in this code were inspired by real code. The rest of the code came from that rotten, maniacal place in my soul that I do my best to suppress (at least in the company of others).
Bonus contribution to the Bad Ideas Thread: Working on this post on my Surface 2 RT tablet. Adding this prologue after pasting in the code resulted in the Discourse editor plugging along at a breathtaking 0.5 characters per second. Thankfully it buffered all my keystrokes but I sat and watched this type itself for many minutes, consuming a full 18% of my battery life to do so!
Bonus I'm TRWTF: The source code is too long for a single post and so I suffered needlessly. Enjoy these pastebin links instead.
Program.cs:
EnterpriseConfig.xml:
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I'm disappointed that all of the English localized strings match their lookup key; I was expecting to see some inconsistencies crop up there.
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It was only tested in English so of course that language works.
The other languages were done via Google Translate, and IIRC I took the output of the previously translated language to make the next one. So I'm sure some of the translations are mega-WTFs but I can't read them to know.
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see what you should have done is taken the last translated language and fed that to GT and used that as your english localization strings! :-D
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return " 5: Bearbeiten Aufbau der Gesellschaft\n";
is my favourite.
"edit corporate structure." clearly always necessary.
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this one is fun too
return "MEXDeMakE ist eine Entscheidung, Motor bereit für das Unternehmen auf XML-Protokolle und Industrie-Standard-Netzwerk. EnterpriseConfig.xml Fertigen Sie einfach auf Ihre geschäftlichen Anforderungen zu erfüllen und MEXDeMakE sorgfältig analysieren Ihre Bedürfnisse und generieren Tipps, damit Sie bessere Geschäftsentscheidungen zu treffen in einer fristgerechten Weise.";
"MEXDeMakE is a decision, a motor ready for the company utilising XML protocols and industry standard network. EnterpriseConfig.xml simply manufacture to your business requirements to fulfill and MEXDeMakE carefully to analyse your needs and to generate tips so that you better business decisions to make in a with-in-the-period-stipulated way."
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"MEXDeMakE is a decision, a motor ready for the company utilising XML protocols and industry standard network. EnterpriseConfig.xml simply manufacture to your business requirements to fulfill and MEXDeMakE carefully to analyse your needs and to generate tips so that you better business decisions to make in a with-in-the-period-stipulated way."
This looks like something @MottBott would say.
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Says Anus" This.
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oh and this one I like too
else if (text == "Normal application termination" && lang == "german")
{
return "In der Nähe des gewöhnlichen";"In the proximity of the ordinary"
Totally reasonable though. Who wants to be ordinary. XD
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What about "Invalid math result."?
"Gültig mathematische Ergebnis." means the opposite (and has completely wrong declension).
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true... but at least one can guess what it was supposed to mean. I don't think this holds true for the corporate structure or the proximity to the ordinary. XD
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Unless "invalid" suddenly works the same way as "inflammable".
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there are these epic videos on youtube of people running song lyrics through several layers of google translate and then singing them. It's painfully hillarious.
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There's a reason I've been subscribed to her channel for a while now.
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Original text:
"Izzy is a lively Irish Setter dog. She has red fur. "
...22 translations later, Yandex gives us:
"Akhmedov, it is very important to the Irish setter is a dog. Red leather, yellow leather. "
Wonderful. That was fun.
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i know! i love sending haikus through it then sitting down with a thesaurus and making the results fit the haiku format again.
i even started writing a script to do it so that it would post the results on twitter, but it turns out that counting syllables is hard for a computer!
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It also multiplies love.
Original text:
"I love you very, very much, Arantor. "
...43 translations later, Yandex gives us:
"This is a very, very, very,very, very good,good, good,very Arantor, I love. "
Clearly a wise translation app. XD
Yeees, I had to try that one. I know. I need to distribute free sickbuckets to everyone.
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that was absolutely adorable!
@arantor, you found yourself a winner!
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So, where's @Translatorbot?
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He might be able to help you with the syllables actually. If memory serves right he has an app that he wrote to do that lying around.
I think he might give it to you if you expressed an desire to have it.
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Oooh don't tempt me!
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hmmm... right. i'll add it to the TODO list.
now do i want to do that before or after i do chartbot?
Edit: I'll do BadTranslatorBot, @royal_poet can do TranslatorBot if she wishes.
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Don't restrain yourself. Knowing me I will never get around to it. XD
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i'm still doing bad translator bot. because this is TDWTF so the bot should be TRWTF
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It would be fun if it spoke fictional languages too. Like say, Klingon. XD
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translate.google.com used to have a klingon language option as an easter egg. they appear to have removed it.
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such a shame. fictional languages are fun. XD
I think bing still has Klingon. Not that bing translator is any good. XD
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hmm.... idea: Lt. WorfBot
patch the standard anonymize module to translate your sockpuppet reply into klingon before posting.... :-D
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WORFBOT <33333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
whoops. Maybe, that was a bit too enthusiastic.
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this shall have to be a thing.
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I think he might give it to you if you expressed an desire to have it.
ooh err missus
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he's pretty fly for a PHP guy XD
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"Here come old flattop, he come grooving up slowly. He got joo-joo eyeball, he one holy roller. He got hair down to his knee. Got to be a joker he just do what he please."
"This is a slow process furnace was old comb your hair-you are of God, but by joão João's why I'm here, what is supposed to be a wild card for you. "
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hmm.... idea: Lt. WorfBot
patch the standard anonymize module to translate your sockpuppet reply into klingon before posting....
Rezzing necrothread for doubleplus upvote.
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patch the standard anonymize module to translate your sockpuppet reply into klingon before posting....
Klingon yuc geeh nuyumcgloun. Aco uryuomoco yumcgouja.
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ah, a fellow EGS reader.
has someone actually made an official uryuomoco translator?
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Klingon yuc geeh nuyumcgloun. Aco uryuomoco yumcgouja.
It would certainly make arguments around here look interesting, even if most blakeyrants would be reduced to a single diacritic.
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even if most blakeyrants would be reduced to a single diacrit
ooooh. now that i like.
i'd like it even more if the diacritic was distinctly phalic.
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http://ithkuil.net/ ?
It would certainly make arguments around here look interesting, even if most blakeyrants would be reduced to a single diacritic.
So it's that logjam nonsense but with its own nonsense alphabet?
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Yep, that's what the link is.
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in that case......
i have plans!
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So it's that logjam nonsense but with its own nonsense alphabet?
Lojban might actually be useful... Ithkuil's barrier to entry almost ensures that it never will be. The flip side is that my interest in learning the latter is far greater than for the former.
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Lojban might actually be useful.
That seems unlikely. Of constructed languages, the most useful is almost certainly Esperanto; it has as many as 2E6 somewhat fluent speakers, including a few native speakers. The number of Lojban speakers is unknown to Wikipedia, but the fact that the page names specific individuals suggests it is probably not very large.
Interlingua is also an interesting constructed language. It doesn't have a large user base, but it is specifically designed to be comprehensible, at least at a basic level, by anyone who speaks a Romance (Latin-derived) language, and by educated speakers of other languages. The vocabulary is selected to have cognates (similar-sounding words with similar meanings1) in a range of European languages. Lojban attempts to do this, too, but it tries to be culturally neutral, and draws its vocabulary from a much broader set of languages, "chosen to reduce the unfamiliarity or strangeness of the root words to people of diverse linguistic backgrounds," according to Wikipedia. In reality, I think this may allow people of diverse linguistic backgrounds to recognize a few words derived from their languages, but probably insures that any given potential user will be completely unfamiliar with most of its vocabulary.
1 Strictly speaking, this is not really the definition of cognate, which means the words have the same origin; both forms and meanings may have diverged from their common origin. However, Interlingua uses the similarities in form and meaning to increase the ease of learning.
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I think we should design a language that takes a corpus and minimizes the average amount of letters to express a single statement, constrained to the 26 letters of English alphabet.
Then laugh as people try to comprehend it.
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All it needs to do is perform a thesaurus lookup for each word in the text and replace with the smallest synonym.
Bot idea?
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All it needs to do is perform a thesaurus lookup for each word in the text and replace with the smallest synonym.
Bot idea?
of course it would have to weight the options by synonym quality.
for example: some of these synonyms are much better than others:
Synonyms and Antonyms of Words | Thesaurus.com
Thesaurus.com is the world’s largest and most trusted online thesaurus for 25+ years. Join millions of people and grow your mastery of the English language.
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Including synonym quality is a barrier to hilarious nonsensical bot shenanigans.
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if you want hilarious, nonsensical robot shenanicains, just summon @translator
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After 10 translations Bing says: Come back when you're happy, you just automatically Shenanicain, please @translator
Filed under: English -> Latvian -> Vietnamese -> Haitian Creole -> Bulgarian -> French -> Romanian -> German -> Turkish -> Finnish -> Lithuanian -> English
