
Soylent: Mechanical Turk for Microsoft Word - po
http://futurismic.com/2010/09/29/soylent-is-people-word-processor-plugin-crowdsources-your-editing/
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grinich
Here's the original author's site: <http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/>

Paper: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/papers/soylent-
uist2010...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/papers/soylent-uist2010.pdf)

Video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_miZqsPwsc>

Code: <http://code.google.com/p/soylent/>

Slides: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/talks/soylent-
uist2010....](http://people.csail.mit.edu/msbernst/talks/soylent-
uist2010.pptx)

Please try to link to original content for submissions.

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8ren
I've just been reading _A Deepness in the Sky_ with its focussed zipheads, who
provide human-level automation in the the Slow Zone. Only difference was that
that was realtime.

What I'm trying to say is that this is _creepy_.

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judofyr
Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1740796>

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ephermata
This is wacky beautiful. I look forward to the packaged precompiled plugin so
I can try it out myself.

One thing that comes to mind -- it may not be that hard to overwhelm the
Mechanical Turk tasks associated with Soylent to reach a situation where I see
every single Soylent task from a single document. It's an interesting question
to calculate how many people you would need, given the volume of Soylent
usage.

The point is that if I control every single worker on your Soylent task, then
I can lean a lot about your document. That in turn could lead to exciting
conversations with your IT department.

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po
Yeah this is definitely not for sensitive documents. Users have enough trouble
already distinguishing between native and web applications, public and
private, etc… Now you need to explain the difference between AI and non-AI
computation.

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ecaradec
It could be very nice for blog posts, and website infos. I'm not a native
speaker, I'd love to have an army to fix my mistakes.

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po
Maybe you can use something like MyGengo and just ask for an english to
english translation. ;-)

<http://mygengo.com/>

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ecaradec
I'd love a service that does english to english translation. It would fix my
english and I would learn what I did wrong as well and improve.

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fredpeters
I can not see how this could be efficient. The amount of time you would spend
evaluating the different options and the cost of having the edits rejected
would not add up.

So alternatively.. Find people you think are good by testing them. Hire them.

I would personally like a few editors that I could trust. This would sort out
the privacy issues too. Is there such a service that manages these contracts?
It seems like a good business idea.

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recoiledsnake
I stopped reading at 'Micro$oft'. I am sorry but that's pretty juvenile.

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daychilde
I nearly stopped - but it's the opinion of the blog writer. The video is not
from the blog itself, and is definitely worth the watch.

But I agree - stupid things like 'Micro$oft' are a pet peeve of mine. I think
people should use what they like and what works better for them. I personally
use Windows and Linux, just for different things. And I've have a Mac box to
play with if I wasn't broke.

So I suggest to anyone else who didn't watch the video - ignore the irritating
blog author and check the video out. It's completely unrelated to the idiotic
comment.

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owrange
i hope it doesn't require any downloading like silverlight

