Graham Sutherland / Polynomial"texting a message used to take a time approximately proportional to the sum of the alphabetical indices of the message's characters modulo 3" is one of those things that is absolutely true but also 100% sounds like a shitpost if you weren't around for that era.
nota@gsuberland also subsequent characters in the same 3-group add a penalty
@nota a funny detail here is that I thought "roughly modulo 3 because most groups are 3 letters, with some being 4", then calculated the actual modulus as 3.25 across all groups, but it turns out if you include space and use the naive mean approach then the modulus is exactly three (27 / 9)
of course this ignores letter frequencies and, as you said, re-use penalty.
Matt Hardy 3.11 for Workgroups@gsuberland @nota in practice for me, the seek time for the next button outweighed the number of times I’d have to press it.
twifkak@nota @gsuberland When Tom Petty sang, "The waiting is the hardest part", I think it was about this.