A Showerthoughts Fortune File

I have created a fortune file for the all-time top 10,000 /r/Showerthoughts posts, as of October 2016. As a word of warning: Many of these entries are adult humor and may not be appropriate for your work computer. These fortunes would be categorized as “offensive” (fortune -o).

Download: showerthoughts (1.3 MB)

The copyright status of this file is subject to each of its thousands of authors. Since it’s not possible to contact many of these authors — some may not even still live — it’s obviously never going to be under an open source license (Creative Commons, etc.). Even more, some quotes are probably from comedians and such, rather than by the redditor who made the post. I distribute it only for fun.

Installation

To install this into your fortune database, first process it with strfile to create a random-access index, showerthoughts.dat, then copy them to the directory with the rest.

$ strfile showerthoughts
"showerthoughts.dat" created
There were 10000 strings
Longest string: 343 bytes
Shortest string: 39 bytes

$ cp showerthoughts* /usr/share/games/fortunes/

Alternatively, fortune can be told to use this file directly:

$ fortune showerthoughts
Not once in my life have I stepped into somebody's house and
thought, "I sure hope I get an apology for 'the mess'."
        ―AndItsDeepToo, Aug 2016

If you didn’t already know, fortune is an old unix utility that displays a random quotation from a quotation database — a digital fortune cookie. I use it as an interactive login shell greeting on my ODROID-C2 server:

if shopt -q login_shell; then
    fortune ~/.fortunes
fi

How was it made?

Fortunately I didn’t have to do something crazy like scrape reddit for weeks on end. Instead, I downloaded the pushshift.io submission archives, which is currently around 70 GB compressed. Each file contains one month’s worth of JSON data, one object per submission, one submission per line, all compressed with bzip2.

Unlike so many other datasets, especially when it’s made up of arbitrary inputs from millions of people, the format of the /r/Showerthoughts posts is surprisingly very clean and requires virtually no touching up. It’s some really fantastic data.

A nice feature of bzip2 is concatenating compressed files also concatenates the uncompressed files. Additionally, it’s easy to parallelize bzip2 compression and decompression, which gives it an edge over xz. I strongly recommend using lbzip2 to decompress this data, should you want to process it yourself.

cat RS_*.bz2 | lbunzip2 > everything.json

jq is my favorite command line tool for processing JSON (and rendering fractals). To filter all the /r/Showerthoughts posts, it’s a simple select expression. Just mind the capitalization of the subreddit’s name. The -c tells jq to keep it one per line.

cat RS_*.bz2 | \
    lbunzip2 | \
    jq -c 'select(.subreddit == "Showerthoughts")' \
    > showerthoughts.json

However, you’ll quickly find that jq is the bottleneck, parsing all that JSON. Your cores won’t be exploited by lbzip2 as they should. So I throw grep in front to dramatically decrease the workload for jq.

cat *.bz2 | \
    lbunzip2 | \
    grep -a Showerthoughts | \
    jq -c 'select(.subreddit == "Showerthoughts")'
    > showerthoughts.json

This will let some extra things through, but it’s a superset. The -a option is necessary because the data contains some null bytes. Without it, grep switches into binary mode and breaks everything. This is incredibly frustrating when you’ve already waited half an hour for results.

To further reduce the workload further down the pipeline, I take advantage of the fact that only four fields will be needed: title, score, author, and created_utc. The rest can — and should, for efficiency’s sake — be thrown away where it’s cheap to do so.

cat *.bz2 | \
    lbunzip2 | \
    grep -a Showerthoughts | \
    jq -c 'select(.subreddit == "Showerthoughts") |
               {title, score, author, created_utc}' \
    > showerthoughts.json

This gathers all 1,199,499 submissions into a 185 MB JSON file (as of this writing). Most of these submissions are terrible, so the next step is narrowing it to the small set of good submissions and putting them into the fortune database format.

It turns out reddit already has a method for finding the best submissions: a voting system. Just pick the highest scoring posts. Through experimentation I arrived at 10,000 as the magic cut-off number. After this the quality really starts to drop off. Over time this should probably be scaled up with the total number of submissions.

I did both steps at the same time using a bit of Emacs Lisp, which is particularly well-suited to the task:

This Elisp program reads one JSON object at a time and sticks each into a AVL tree sorted by score (descending), then timestamp (ascending), then title (ascending). The AVL tree is limited to 10,000 items, with the lowest items being dropped. This was a lot faster than the more obvious approach: collecting everything into a big list, sorting it, and keeping the top 10,000 items.

Formatting

The most complicated part is actually paragraph wrapping the submissions. Most are too long for a single line, and letting the terminal hard wrap them is visually unpleasing. The submissions are encoded in UTF-8, some with characters beyond simple ASCII. Proper wrapping requires not just Unicode awareness, but also some degree of Unicode rendering. The algorithm needs to recognize grapheme clusters and know the size of the rendered text. This is not so trivial! Most paragraph wrapping tools and libraries get this wrong, some counting width by bytes, others counting width by codepoints.

Emacs’ M-x fill-paragraph knows how to do all these things — only for a monospace font, which is all I needed — and I decided to leverage it when generating the fortune file. Here’s an example that paragraph-wraps a string:

(defun string-fill-paragraph (s)
  (with-temp-buffer
    (insert s)
    (fill-paragraph)
    (buffer-string)))

For the file format, items are delimited by a % on a line by itself. I put the wrapped content, followed by a quotation dash, the author, and the date. A surprising number of these submissions have date-sensitive content (“on this day X years ago”), so I found it was important to include a date.

April Fool's Day is the one day of the year when people critically
evaluate news articles before accepting them as true.
        ―kellenbrent, Apr 2015
%
Of all the bodily functions that could be contagious, thank god
it's the yawn.
        ―MKLV, Aug 2015
%

There’s the potential that a submission itself could end with a lone % and, with a bit of bad luck, it happens to wrap that onto its own line. Fortunately this hasn’t happened yet. But, now that I’ve advertised it, someone could make such a submission, popular enough for the top 10,000, with the intent to personally trip me up in a future update. I accept this, though it’s unlikely, and it would be fairly easy to work around if it happened.

The strfile program looks for the % delimiters and fills out a table of file offsets. The header of the .dat file indicates the number strings along with some other metadata. What follows is a table of 32-bit file offsets.

struct {
    uint32_t str_version;  /* version number */
    uint32_t str_numstr;   /* # of strings in the file */
    uint32_t str_longlen;  /* length of longest string */
    uint32_t str_shortlen; /* shortest string length */
    uint32_t str_flags;    /* bit field for flags */
    char str_delim;        /* delimiting character */
}

Note that the table doesn’t necessarily need to list the strings in the same order as they appear in the original file. In fact, recent versions of strfile can sort the strings by sorting the table, all without touching the original file. Though none of this important to fortune.

Now that you know how it all works, you can build your own fortune file from your own inputs!

Have a comment on this article? Start a discussion in my public inbox by sending an email to ~skeeto/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht [mailing list etiquette] , or see existing discussions.

null program

Chris Wellons

wellons@nullprogram.com (PGP)
~skeeto/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht (view)