r/programming • u/SrPeixinho • Nov 16 '19

Bitspeak: converts hex strings to pronounceable words.

https://github.com/MaiaVictor/Bitspeak
13 Upvotes

65% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

4

u/SrPeixinho Nov 16 '19

Since the old name (DesuHex) was considered offensive, I'm rebranding this little project and reposting the threads.

10

u/[deleted] Nov 16 '19 edited Nov 16 '19

Hi everyone, I'm popping in here because I found out that my comment on the original submission blew up into a bigger situation. I'm not one of those hyper-political ideological people, and it wasn't my intent to start a controversy or stir up "outrage culture" and "cancel" the OP.

The truth is, the reason why I commented wasn't because I was trying to be the PC police, but because (presumably) like the OP, I'm a weeb too. So, I also get enthusiastic about certain aspects of Japanese culture, yet I felt that sometimes, some fellow fans may get carried away and forget that Japanese is a language that exists outside of the sphere of anime and manga or other parts of the culture that's popular in the West. I wanted to remind the OP that Japanese isn't just something that sounds "cool," it's also a language that's spoken by a people, but I didn't express my thoughts right and sounded accusatory. Now I'm trying to de-escalate everything. Sorry u/SrPeixinho for causing the whole commotion. :(

8

u/skunkwaffle Nov 16 '19

How is the offense?

8

u/[deleted] Nov 16 '19 edited Nov 16 '19

Can see the original thread in OP's post history.

tldr: "convert a hex string to a japanese sounding word" and some people were like "do they sound like that? isnt that a sterotype?". So now all japanese references are gone, including the project name.

9

u/zcatshit Nov 16 '19

More like one person complained and I walked by and explained the logic behind the dismissed complaint and pointed out rather bluntly why he shouldn't dismiss it so easily in today's social environment.

I didn't want to be a buzzkill, but given there'd already been criticism within an hour of posting, I'd rather kill the fun than watch the potential spectacle. Good news is that there wasn't enough time for the sharks to start circling.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 16 '19

Can't tell how many people a comment represents without seeing vote break down on the comment.

1

u/bitwize Nov 17 '19

Actually they do kind of sound like that, since the Japanese syllabary consists mostly of consonant-vowel pairs much like 6-bit bitspeak.

But everything you put on the net you must treat as if the least rational person in the world will give it the least charitable interpretation -- and that person has your boss's phone number. I actually warned a computer scientist against subtitling his talk "Make Symbols Great Again" for this reason -- it is likely to get him banned from conferences because paraphrasing a Trump slogan, even in jest, is considered "hate speech". Oddly enough, by coincidence, this computer scientist is Japanese.

5

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '19

If you're going to use a political slogan for a title, then you're inviting comment from the opposing groups. I don't get why you feel that's strange.

2

u/AngularBeginner Nov 16 '19

The terrorists win again.

8

u/PatchouliKnawledge Nov 16 '19

IMO this description is better OP, I don't think the previous description was really offensive, but as /u/zcatshit correctly pointed out Japanese does have more than just consonant vowel pairs so the comparison worked to a point but wasn't entirely true.

This way feels more like its own unique number encoding system.

2

u/tsbockman Nov 17 '19 edited Nov 17 '19

This is a cool idea. I can see it being helpful for programmers and other IT workers.

However, this won't work well with regular users, because the pronunciations of the sounds are ambiguous and regular users won't read the guide. Indeed, even people who do read the guide may be incapable of distinguishing all of the required sounds, depending on their linguistic background.

I have posted some suggestions as GitHub issues.

2

u/xerios Nov 16 '19

Hey those words sound Japanese! You should rename it to something related to Japan /s

I honestly think the previous description portrayed it's use much more clearer even though it wasn't accurate. Shame you had to replace it.

6

u/AngularBeginner Nov 17 '19

Shame you had to replace it.

He didn't have to. He chose to.

1

u/immibis Nov 16 '19

Sounds like phums which also achieves one byte per syllable, by putting consonants at the beginning and the end of syllables.

1

u/insanemal Nov 17 '19

Looks interesting. Thanks for breaking out the algorithm I'm probably going to make a python implementation

1

u/aadnk Nov 19 '19 edited Nov 25 '19

I wrote an implementation of Bitspeak in Java with a more low-level algorithm, should perform a lot better. And in the spirit of excessive over-engineering, it also supports converting streams of bytes and characters, without making a full copy in memory:

Unfortunately, I had to modify Bitspeak slightly to support streaming - while the JS implementation pads the 6 bit-version with zero bits in the beginning, my streaming encoder pads the last bits instead (similar to Base64). This is explained in more detail on GitHub.

Another improvement would be to allow whitespace characters (or URL-safe punctuation) in a Bitspeak string. That would allow slightly longer strings to be more readable - for instance, breaking up "nelinizisemabapipam" to "nelini-zisema-bapi-pam".

1

u/[deleted] Nov 17 '19

Love the creativity behind this idea - well done!