Briefly, one of my favorite jokes:
A computer programmer is heading to the grocery store for necessary supplies. As they’re heading out, their spouse yells down the stairs, “Oh, hey, when you’re at the store could you grab a gallon of milk? And if they have any eggs, get a dozen!” So the programmer comes home with 12 gallons of milk.
I happened to see some discussion of sentence-structure and it reminded me of this. C’mon now, that’s funny!
I laughed.
Droll, that I can’t dispute. But then, the programmer would grok the scope, no
(Still, that’s natural language; always the implicit context)
[no?]
(syntax error)
There has to be a good FORTH programmer joke in there but I can’t C it.
(groan (without lisp))
I found it funny!
A student is in the elevator when the professor of logic gets in.
The student asks the professor “are you going up or down?”
To which the professor replies “Yes”.
Why are the secret police arresting functional programmers?
Because functional programmers are enemies of the state.
—
A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables, it walks up to them and says “hey, can I join you?”
I can’t remember enough specifics to look it up, but I’ve seen a couple trolling threads on twitter and what not, where someone deliberately pitted a confusing order of operations against a confusing parenthetical (I don’t know the proper term, sorry…)
Reading the fallout and vitriol was sorta interesting, but more fascinating was how so many people absolutely refused to acknowledge the confusing nature of the proposed equation, in favor of just demeaning any who disagreed with them as stupid and/or uneducated. Amongst other insults…
I love jokes about the ambiguity of human language. Some Russian ones are really fun. In Russian there’s a phrase “да нет наверное,” which means literally “yes no maybe.” Separately, in Russian the word “да” means “yes,” the word “нет” means “no,” and “наверное” means “maybe.” As a phrase “да нет наверное” means “probably no.”
This joke translates as:
A foreigner asks his Russian girlfriend,
“Do you want a dinner?”
She responds with, “Yes no maybe.”
The foreigner thinks, “And we still wonder why we cannot understand their soul.”
Here’s one more.
Americans made a computer that translates from Russian to English.
At first the computer started thinking, and then it exploded after a conversation between two Russians:
“Are you going to celebrate the New Year?”
“Yes no maybe.” (Meaning: “No, I guess…”)
“But what is there known, not known?”
“Yes we’ll take a look, afterwards we’ll decide—will be won’t be.”
The last two lines sound perfectly normal in Russian, those are standard phrases commonly used when referring to the future. It doesn’t sound philosophical or weird in original Russian phrasing. For example, “будем не будем” that means literally “we will be we won’t be” actually means something like “we will see.”
I just tried to post a comment about similar jokes in Russian, and it didn’t work. Do you have some comment moderating algorithm that doesn’t like Russian jokes?
By the way, there was a subtle joke in my previous comment in the phrasing, “Do you have some comment moderating algorithm that doesn’t like Russian jokes?” My comment that got censored included a joke about an American-made computer exploding after being confronted with Russian language.
I like the gender neutral formulation. I had heard this joke before, and usually it was written so as to imply that the programmer is male and the person asking for groceries is his wife.
Other than that, I find this joke funny, because it’s very obvious what the spouse asking for groceries actually meant and how their request was misunderstood. In real life situations ambiguous formulations are a pain in the ass and not funny at all. If you notice the ambiguity, you don’t always have an opportunity to ask for clarifications. And there are also situations where you misunderstand the meaning without even noticing that there could be a possible alternative explanation.
Andreas
>>>Do you have some comment moderating algorithm<<<
I does depend on what you Put in
Andreas Avester@#10:
Do you have some comment moderating algorithm that doesn’t like Russian jokes?
Nope! Lemme go search the spam bucket.
Probably the spam blocker has been trained to reject Russian (because spam, not politics)
[I pulled both copies out of the spam bucket, approved them to train the algorithm, then deleted the duplicate.]
Over at languagehat — a blog dedicated to discussing different languages — the blog owner has acknowledged the continued frustration with the blog/spam software automatically moderating/spambinning/deleting-without-a-trace comments that have “too many” characters from non-Latin-character languages (I’ve seen it happen with Hebrew, Greek, and Cyrillic, and probably others). I say “too many” because a word or two does not trigger the problem, but some number of characters in a sentence? or paragraph? does. No-one is quite sure how many it characters it is.
The author/supporter of the spam software, Akismet, will not publish the information about how many, because duh, spammers would exploit the knowledge. Security through obscurity.
As far as I know, there is no way to “allow” multiple languages while also blocking spam.
Marcus:
I happened to see some discussion of sentence-structure and it reminded me of this. C’mon now, that’s funny!
*waves*
It is funny — or was funny the first time I heard it. Now I just deadpan “you know there’s a thing called pragmatism that is essential to processing natural language, and it makes no sense that a person would make this mistake”. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s one of the main reasons you need good AI for computers to understand human language. There are some unexceptional examples where a computer can not easily guess the referent of a pronoun [1], and some cleverly constructed examples where you can’t parse, or even “lex”, an English phrase without understanding its meaning [2].
[1] take this:
Alice: “Hand me the 10 spanner, please.”
Bob: “Here you go.”
Alice: “Large flat-blade screwdriver.”
Alice: “Can you find the idle adjuster screw? It’s the smaller one.”
Bob: “This one?”
Alice: “Yes… Okay, the larger one now.”
Alice: “Can you go inside and press on the gas a couple of times?”
Alice: “Thank you. Let’s see…”
Bob: “Do you think it’ll work?”
What’s “it” in the last sentence?
It’s none of the words that occurred recently — or at all, in this example. You can make this much longer and it’ll be even more obvious to a person, but an algorithm that naively looks for referents three, or ten, or even fifty sentences back would be stumped.
[2] You need to understand the meaning to even tell what part of speech a word is:
“Time flies like an arrow” (noun verb adverb article noun)
“Fruit flies like a banana” (noun noun verb article noun)
Wow, I always thought Trumpet just did Putin’s bidding, and assumed his way of speaking was just his habitual word salad. Now I see he’s quoting Putin directly when he talks like that!
nitpick @cvoinescu: In “Time flies like an arrow,” “like” is a preposition, not an adverb. ;)
Ridana @ #17:
My apologies. Of course it’s a preposition. I was pretty sure, in fact, but equivalent words are not always deemed the same part of speech in different languages, so I checked a dictionary, and misread one of the examples…
@Andreas Avester you could probably add some gender ambiguity to the joke. Change “so the programmer comes home with” to “so she comes home with”. Sadly probably wouldn’t work with they, because of society treating men as the default.
All these jokes are great! (I’ll go be embarrassed in private now :P)
dangerousbeans @#19
I’m fine with “they,” because at least it doesn’t explicitly add some gender stereotype to a joke. Sure, some bigoted people will still imagine that a joke is about some gender, but at least I won’t be annoyed and happily imagine that the joke was meant to be gender neutral.
I strongly dislike jokes about gender stereotypes where people act according to how a sexist society expects them to act. Even noticing some gender stereotype hidden in an otherwise nice joke decreases my appreciation of said joke.
Here is a translation of a text written by a German comedian Loriot.
Back when I was studying in Germany, I took a university course about phonetics and German pronunciation. Of course, the course included some theory about phonetics in general, but we were also expected to improve our own German pronunciation. This meant we had to practice speaking in German. In Language lessons teachers routinely give their students dialogues to read. Pretty much always female students are told to read female roles, while male students are told to read male roles.
Overall, this course about phonetics was interesting and fun. Except for one specific lesson. Our teacher gave us this dialogue to read. She split us in pairs, each pair with a male and a female student, and of course I was told to read the female role. I decided not to make a scene and abstain from complaining about how I dislike being treated as a woman. Making scenes usually only causes more problems than they solve. Besides, if I don’t want people to perceive me as feminine, I shouldn’t give them a reason to assume that I’m emotional and can be easily hurt by something as trivial as reading a female role in a dialogue.
Nonetheless, I was angry and annoyed. And I got grumpy. Firstly, this dialogue wasn’t funny, it was offensive, because it included stupid gender stereotypes. Secondly, teacher didn’t just treat me as a woman, she ordered me to behave as a woman and told me to read the female role together with other students, who, unlike me, actually were women (no cis male student in my group was told to read the female role, I was the only guy who had to read it). On top of that, some of the things my teacher said (jokingly) during that class implied that I could have something in common with Berta (I perceived Berta as a foolish and clueless character; I wanted to have absolutely nothing in common with her).
@16 cvoinescu
Always did love that line. Reminds me of a silly from some years ago when my then-girlfriend out of nowhere asked “Have you ever seen a banana slug?” and I instantly responded “No, but I’ve seen a fruit punch.”