[ExI] Consequentialist world improvement

[BillK]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 4:49 AM, spike wrote:
> I would be serious about it if I were a better programmer, and I am willing
> to work towards being a better programmer to get this done.  I am open to
> suggestion here from *real* programmers, but I thought the way I would start
> is to collect a particular person's archives.  I will use my own, to get
> around the ethics questions.  Then I drop all that into (I suppose) an excel
> file, although I do not know the storage capacity limits of that software
> (it is crazy big, but might not be big enough.)  I might need to break down
> the archives into subgroups somehow.  Then I need to think about a macro
> that will filter away everything that is a quote from someone else.  In my
> case that might be relatively easy, because I have made a habit of preceding
> other peoples' comments with >... as shown above.
<snip>
>
> Mike are you a code guru?  Anyone else with ideas on how to create a
> you-bot?  For the first time in history, we have enormous text samples of a
> person's thought space, readily available in a form easily manipulated.
> This is a cool time to be alive, ja?
>
>

I suspect Excel is the wrong tool for this job.
(Although if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail).  :)

It is more complex than you estimate (but most projects are).
e.g. synonyms.  If somebody talks about a car, you have to know all
the other words that might be applicable. Parsing English get
complicated very quickly.

There are plenty of websites around which you can chat to and ask questions.
Mostly within a specialised subject domain, like computer help sites.
e.g. chat to Frank about drugs.
<http://www.talktofrank.com/>

Your posts are just such a specialised database.
So have a look at how these sites are set up.

BillK