Comment by joeberon

Welcome to the internet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's not hard to find highly opinionated people making assumptions while confidently believing they're right. If you look closely, you'll notice this all the time on HN and Reddit and basically anywhere that allows people to comment.

The scary thing is that many readers will also often take anything said confidently enough to be fact. This is also basically how a lot of disinformation works. Say it authoritatively, and you'll become an authority on the matter to many people.

I've definitely been guilty of doing both of these things past, but I've learned now to actually read and think and do research before commenting or taking something I read at face-value.

  Do you take a possibility
  you can be both right and
  wrong? The feat might not
  be as difficult as author
  seems it is. I personally
  can think of many ways to
  achieve it. Come to think
  of it, it may actually be
  even easier because lines
  in that guide afford more
  ways to be broken because
  they are longer. And I am
  not even native speaker.

  To match lengths you only
  need to make one or maybe
  two choices per line only
  to adjust a word by maybe
  one or two chars. This is
  nothing very difficult as
  any crossword solver will
  attest.

Well, he did compare to Mozart. To pick a rando Mozart piece[1]:

1. Sounds like cutesy little throw-away dance with nowhere near the gravitas of a Beethoven or Mahler

2. Listen closely and hear that the phrases are written purposefully so that the music sounds bad when the musicians choose to obey the repeat signs. In other words-- the music flows beautifully if you ignore the repeat signs, but that flow is broken when you obey them and go back to the beginning of the phrase.

3. Musical jokes later in the piece depend on the players actually taking the "wrong warp" repeats

4. Listen closely and realize that Mozart actually left out the main melody of the piece. (In fact, that melody finally appears only once at the end of the piece)

5. Listen more closely and realize that one of the subsequent main melodies are based off the accompaniment figure for the missing main melody

6. Listen even more closely and hear the striking dissonances and imitative polyphony that is exactly the kind of thing admirers talk about wrt Beethoven, Mahler, etc.

7. Remember that it's difficult enough to write a cutesy little throw-away dance in the style of Mozart, much less pull off all these formal experiments with such subtlety that most modern performances continue to play this music as if it's just a cutesy little throw-away dance

And that's just a random example. For a specific example: if Beethoven had written the Introitus of the Requiem Mass instead of Mozart, it would count as the most sophisticated counterpoint that Beethoven had ever written. (And there are probably more impressive examples of Mozart's counterpoint than that.)

1: last movement of String Quartet in E-Flat Major, K. 428

I agree that there's not a single instance of double-spaces in the text, and I thought that was a really bizarre claim, but there are some instances of misspellings that help it along.

For example:

1. missles instead of missiles

2. carefull instead of careful

3. futher instead of further

But they're at least all consistent so there's plausible deniability that the author just didn't know English that well. And ofc the tweets are still on-point saying that it's an impressive and unappreciated feat.

One of the later tweets says it's all "bricktext", which apparently is a thing. An old internet thing even. I may have to try it some time.

Indeed, this is why we cant have nice things.

Welcome to the internet.