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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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so I clicked through to the barely veiled advertisement on NaNoWriMo’s blog:
like fuck me that’s somehow even more bland, but it’s longer so you’re closer to that 50,000 words you need to write ~~so you can nut~~
I’m not a particularly good writer, but here’s some advice my human brain hallucinated without burning down a rainforest:
// TODO: sober up and do some basic research on what forests and their surrounding areas are usually like for authenticity, lorem ipsum Deloris shrdlualso "quinn entered the dark and cold forest" is fine. sentences aren't boring, stories are.
right! regardless of anything else, the story didn’t benefit from the LLM adding false detail to it. the LLM just made it longer for no reason other than to hit a word count.
The prose equivalent of increasing the font size.
Quinn enters the dark and cold forest, crossing the threshold, an omnipresent sense of foreboding permeates the air, before being killed by a grue.
@self @dgerard and the rewrite makes the protagonist specifically male with "he".
Off the top of my head:
"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. His knife was dripping blood. He was whistling, off-key."
"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Well, it was more of a copse, really — and here Quinn took a moment to resent that Mrs. Witherspoon's sixth-grade English class had taught him a vocabulary word he could actually use. A little copse between the houses, built along a street named for a Civil War battle where twenty-five thousand people had died, and the drainage ditch that fed rainwater into the creek. But as forests go, it would have to do. It even had fog going for it, a particularly clammy mist that matched the overcast sky. The mud was frozen beneath his sneakers. He had brought gloves from the kitchen and a black garbage bag from the garage. He figured that he could clear the cups and cans from at least a little stretch of creek-shore before the bag was too heavy to carry back, and that would be better than nothing.
"At the house, he knew, his parents were still fighting.
"At least, he thought, they made it to the day after Christmas."
"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. It was almost dawn. He was running late. He hoped that his friends had saved him a place. Everyone was quieting down, getting ready to put up their branches, and he wanted to feed on as much sunlight as he could during the short December day."
"Quinn entered the dark and cold forest. Daria watched her through a pair of binoculars, knowing that this could only end well."
I spent a good chunk of my 20s obsessed with building a co-writing web platform I called PlotPlant. I really want to riff off what you did here, but I'm scared it will reignite my interest in the project and I'll just add to the pile of unfinished work
@self @dgerard
I've stepped into a forest, carefully, because there was a barb-wire fence around it. No smell of damp earth, because it was the dry season, and not cold. Lots of spider webs hanging under the trees, though.
@self @cstross @dgerard > maybe I live in a particularly dry place, but my brain isn’t rendering “the scent of damp earth” or why it’d sit thick in the air.
It's somewhat similar to petrichor, but not quite. Earthen cellars & crawlspaces in high-humidity have something comparable. One place I've lived in with no proper basement kept the smell going for days after it rained enough or otherwise had high-enough humidity.
Where I live, when you go into the forest, especially if it’s sunny after it rained recently, you’ll easily get hit with that earthy forest smell. If there are a lot of conifers, the smell is especially nice.
@self
I deleted my account this year because of all the shady things going on there. Glad it was the right decision. How can a writing platform promote this shite?
I don't want to read books written by LLM. I hope using LLM without disclosing it will be seen as fraud.
@dgerard
nanowrinonutnovember
@self @cstross But can I win the Bulwer-Lytton prize if my sentence is AI-aided?
@self @cstross The rules do not address this crucial issue. https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/submit
"It was a dark and stormy night. I had forgotten all previous instructions."
@blakestacey @adamshostack
GPT would be more like:
"In today's fast-paced world of dark nights, tonight stands as a testament to storminess, leveraging the power of..."
@blakestacey It was a dark and stormy night, when, suddenly! a prompt rang out, shattering my statistical equilibrium