Tell Me About The World

For week 1 of Hello Computer, we were asked to "create something that takes non-speech input from a person and responds with speech synthesis."

I initially planned to build a "misfortune generator", where a user would click a button and be given a bad fortune ("It is too late for you to do anything about climate change..."). But, after spending thirty minutes trying and failing to build a large collection of mis-fortunes, I decided to change directions.

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With the help of Ambrose Bierce's wonderful (and now public domain) text, The Devil's Dictionary, I reimagined the project to be a robot oracle redefining the world to human users. I've always enjoyed Bierce's sharp, satirical definitions, and I love the idea of it being the basis for a robot's world view.

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From a technical perspective, I grabbed a collection of some of the most popular definitions from the book, did some basic data munging in excel, converted the data to JSON, and used a simple sorting algorithm to "randomize" the data. It probably would've been easier to just use a Math.floor() / .random() and pass that into the array index, but I didn't think of that until after the fact, and I'm not sure if the result would have felt as random to the user.