> That is one hell of a confession for someone who's trying to write fiction.
Indeed. A significant part of gaining skills in creative writing is learning to 'read as a writer'. How to examine classic texts to understand how to develop scenes, characters, narrative styles, etc.
An important part of writing is also to write as the reader, eschewing meaningless fluff and sentences that use bombastic emotional language without really communicating.
The latter is prevalent in LLM writing. Imitating "poetry" without the feelings is something that the default, "aligned" chat models with reinforcement all do in one way or another. It's hard to get even a technical essay without empty emotional language.
And I'm only speaking for myself, I like reading novels, but it's perfectly possible to have a slop-meter without doing so.
My own signal-to-noise ratio in writing is also often bad, but with today's "frontier" LLM output I feel there's a specific tendency towards this harmless, emtpy, flowery language full of false dichotomies and rhetorical devices devoid of any purpose to communicate.
A model trained and fine-tuned to generate divisive Reddit threads sure has different tendencies.
But for the friendly assistants, there's often this solipsism and pseudo-poetic aspect.
> the play are written in iambic pentameter and the spoken text is far from natural (yet incredibly precise)
(Iambic pentameters are 10-syllable lines with alternate syllables unstressed and stressed, like "if MUSic BE the FOOD of LOVE ...", the so-called heartbeat rhythm)
Shakespeare actually used a variety of different styles to demarcate different characters, moods, etc. As a very rough rule-of-thumb in Shakespeare, posh characters speak in iambic pentameters, commoners and clowns speak in prose. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, the Athenians speak in iambic pentameters and the clowns speak in prose. When the clowns put on a play for the Athenians, the clowns and the Athenians swap speaking styles, so the Athenians make snarky comments in prose (just like a badly behaved audience) on the badly rhymed acting of the clowns. The fairies, meanwhile, speak in trochaic verse, so their king and queen sound stylistically different from their Athenian equivalents, almost like Shakespeare has given them a foreign accent. When two characters are arguing, the ten syllables of a normal line are sometimes split between them to emphasize the back and forth nature. If a character is flustered or annoyed, their lines may be obviously different from the 10 syllable norm, again to emphasize their mood.
For actors learning their lines, the syllable counts almost act as stage direction hints: if they aren't 10 syllables, then some mood or other needs to be taken into account.
> As I understand it, a big part of produced clothing just goes straight to waste to begin with.
My niece runs a business that relies on the way we discard clothes. She buys clothes from suppliers in India who source them from the bales of discarded clothes sent to them from Europe. Her suppliers have in effect sorted through the mountain of discards to find the ones that have sufficient value to sell back to us. She specifically buys clothes that have 'vintage' appeal (think tailored jackets rather than hoodies) and sells them primarily to students in a northern English city. Her business has done well enough to move from market stalls to a dedicated high street store and she is just branching out into 'vintage' kids clothes.
I was in Bishop Auckland last summer! But only long enough to have lunch at the delightful Fifteas teashop. If I'm passing that way again I'll make a point of staying longer and have a look around.
Robert has a whole set of youtube channels on electric vehicles and other renewable technology. It’s quite impressive what he does now but I always see Kryten in him, strange.
He's done a lot of things, but for my money the "Scrapheap Challenge" show was his best.
(This is a show where two teams are left inside a scrapheap and given a day, or so, to build a contraption/device.)
He was just so enthusiastic about all the teams, and seemed genuinely interested in both the design, the building, and the performance of whatever it was they were being challenged to build.
But I can't say I've ever heard of that before, or seen any. I used to watch the UK series while having lazy breakfasts every Sunday morning with my then-partner.
In the UK, if a homeowner (customer) pays a company to clear domestic rubbish, and the company illegally fly-tips it, it's the homeowner who gets chased. The law requires them to check that the company is legit.
See 'genetic programming' for techniques that are sort of based on this idea. Typical approach is to have a problem representation (gene analogues) that can be used to create a population of different individual solutions. Test them all against a fitness function and retain those that are 'best' according to some metric. Then create (breed) some new individuals who have some of the characteristics of the winners, perhaps mutated somewhat, insert these into the population. Repeat until you have solved the problem or have a good enough solution.
Challenges (apart from the time taken) are coming up with a good enough gene representation that captures the essence of the problem, building an efficient fitness function, and avoiding local maxima - i.e. a solution that is almost but not quite good enough, but from where you can't breed a better solution.,
Yeah I vaguely remember learning about those in grad school because Minsky deigned to cross the Charles and guest lecture for that one. It always seemed like you had to embed so many expectations in the reinforcement discriminators that you were basically still writing the program, just in an obnoxiously inconvenient way. Though I suppose you could make the argument that this is what diffusers are.
Indeed. A significant part of gaining skills in creative writing is learning to 'read as a writer'. How to examine classic texts to understand how to develop scenes, characters, narrative styles, etc.
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