Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

29 Aug 2002, 10:35 a.m.

While I was at the Shweta Moving Stuff Extravaganza, I…

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

While I was at the Shweta Moving Stuff Extravaganza, I made two memorable suggestions. One was that Shweta could influence negotiations between the university and the clerical workers' union with "strongly worded letters, that sort of thing." This was a memorably stupid suggestion, evidently, and it was scorned and scoffed.

The second one did better.

Me: What if someone wrote a program like "Eliza" that played Questions with you?
Zack: Doesn't the original do well enough?