5 ms·

Meaningful Nonsense: How I generate sentences

212 points by ingve 2y ago

wg0 2y ago
Poor man's LLM.
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  Why in this world would you buy clay, turn it on a wheel, fire and glaze it, just to make a coffee-mug? Yeah, it'd be easier to go to a shop and buy a mug, maybe with something banal like "Worlds Greatest Dad" or Darth Vader printed on it But making your own, you learn something. You apply effort. You apply intelligence. You apply your sense of aesthetics. You work through trial and error. You refine your technique. You spend time. In the end, you've constructed something that is meaningful, and not disposable. Something that you understand, and something that reflects yourself. How much more value would that be as a gift? Or even just as a "because I could"? This project is that. I'd hire that artist over you in a heartbeat because the artist understands something, worked through it, and applied themselves.
  - wg0 2y ago
    I agree with every single word that you say including the part where they generate their phrases with an algorithm which I find very clever. Poor man's LLM is not meant as contempt of the art but more for the LLMs if at all.
mkarliner 2y ago
Lovely
franky47 2y ago
At the age of AI, this kind of human-centric process (thinking about the problem and designing an explainable algorithm to solve it) needs more praise. The handwritten output gives it an extra nice human touch.
- amygoodchild 2y ago
  Thanks! I'm the artist and it's nice to see this recognised. I have been worried with this project that people might think I should just use a LLM, but I think there is value in how controllable and explainable this is.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Meaninglessness is liminal because the context is shared. (for the opposite direction, see https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ )
    - ryanjshaw 2y ago
      > Meaninglessness is liminal because the context is shared. Can somebody explain this or is it one of the generated sentences in question?
      - 082349872349872 2y ago
        It could be one of the generated sentences, but I composed it via wetware, in order to get a more-meaningful-than-average utterance: Meaninglessness (because a product of a random process) is liminal (because it's betwixt and between, neither meaningful[0] nor meaningless[2]) because the context is shared (the vocabulary for the generator —the context shared between we meaningful creatures and the stochastic parrot program— are constraints, especially chosen by the artist to be evocative no matter how they are combined) [0] compare SLN: Just like the white winged dove Sings a song Sounds like[1] she's singing Ooh ooh ooh [1] there are many references to animal sounds sounding like human speech; here are two: Ajax in the Little Iliad —having turned Athena's grey eyes green by managing to tank without asking her for buffs— is driven mad[2] by her shortly after he loses a prize to Odysseus: he interprets the greek cows, instead of saying "moo", as saying "μου" (mine), each claiming the prize for herself, not for him ... and so he kills them all. In a less sanguine vein, Pechkin the Postman also has a nervous breakdown after thinking Khvatayka the Jackdaw is continually asking him "kto tam?" (both a fairly corvidesque sound and "who's there?" in russian) despite his efforts to explain that he's the postman bringing a magazine. [2] in The Eden Express (1975), Mark Vonnegut points out that maybe he could've figured out he was going schizophrenic, if only he'd stopped to notice that everything had suddenly become meaningful.
zimpenfish 2y ago
I've got a similar thing which generates output for several bots. You can get surprisingly good output just from simply replacing placeholders and some recursion.
adelpozo 2y ago
very grateful to have been introduced to the artist site. Inspiring
6510 2y ago
Is it safe?
vunderba 2y ago
Back in the day, I used the same "NLP meets madlib" approach in my silly little chat bots before I was introduced to the concept of Markov chains which completely blew my teenage brain.
crustycoder 2y ago
I had a bot running at http://twitter.com/bollocks http://twitter.com/bollocks until twitter made it ridiculously complicated to use their API, there's a Linux kernel driver that does the same (http://www.fatsquirrel.org/veghead/software/bollocks/ http://www.fatsquirrel.org/veghead/software/bollocks/) and a Perl module (https://metacpan.org/pod/Dev::Bollocks https://metacpan.org/pod/Dev::Bollocks) and I'm sure many others.
iankp 2y ago
She asks the question of if it makes sense, but I find the example sentence "Existence learns about a dream" actually very interesting and poetic
- passion__desire 2y ago
  We can thread a sentence through overloaded words easily and it will make sense to someone. Words which are very broad in topological sense.
tveita 2y ago
A good old fashioned AI approach, e.g. compare with Peter Norvig's https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/simple.lisp https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/simple.li... > A third, quieter feeling - if the universe was to communicate some message, who’s to say it would not choose this as a conduit? Look away before you feel compelled to write your own operating system - maybe "SacredOS"?
MrVandemar 2y ago
I be like "Woah, cool!" This kind of thing is why I read hacker news and other sites that regularly throw up thought provoking, interesting and captivating things. This kind of human ingenuity, playfulness and exploration is worth trawling through all the I-used-an-AI-to-make-a-app posts.
man4 2y ago
[dead]
immibis 2y ago
I used a similar but less sophisticated type of process to generate random space station announcement messages for the hackerspace, such as "Problem detected in hyperspace bay three." Mostly, making sensible messages comes down to using word lists that make sense in the context. "caterpillar" is a perfectly valid noun, but it doesn't fit on a space station: "Problem detected in beautiful caterpillar omega" just doesn't have the same ring to it. I implement phrases at the top level, with rules like: "sentence: $foreign_object_noun detected in $spaceship_part_noun" Articles and plurals are problems. I may have to add some actual code to deal with them, as the OP did, rather than just blind string replacement with a rules table. It's a shame that "noun: $adjective $noun" doesn't cut it. Stupid English.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Caterpillar is also a pretty well known brand of construction equipment. I could imagine the tools of the future could be named after all sorts of animals. There could even be some funny environmental storytelling there, administrators could call things by formal names, workers who grew up on earth could call them by similar animals, workers who grew up on the space-station might have become familiar with the equipment before knowing about the animals, so their associations might be backwards. But it all like it’d have to be done intentionally, generating these associations procedurally seems like a total mess.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  Did something like this back in '96 w/ a recursive macro parser. Stuff like: "To %TABLOID%, %CELEB% %ADVERB% %ACTION.PAS% %NUMBER% %OBJECT.P%." Each substitution referenced a file and entries in those files could reference other files (or themselves). Reflecting the zeitgeist, in the "CELEB" file I find: "Billy Corgan, frontman of %ADVERB% %ADJEC% band The Smashing Pumpkins" If I was going to do it again today I'd combine tenses into a single file and have the parser track the tense that should be used based on previously selected words. That's probably a lot harder than I think it would be.
hello_kitty2 2y ago
I thought this was going to be an essay about hacker news comment section. Disappointed.
remipch 2y ago
It reminds me of "Le Pipotron" [0] (in French) that made me laugh when I was younger. The goal was to make fun of political bullshit. "Meaningful nonsense" is much more evolved and beautiful. Thank you Amy Goodchild for the detailed explanation. [0] http://lepipotron.com/ http://lepipotron.com/
frabert 2y ago
I'll take this opportunity to plug a similar doodad I made that generates english-ish words: https://bertolaccini.dev/cromulent.html https://bertolaccini.dev/cromulent.html It's just a Markov chain built by tokenizing a corpus of English words into syllables and analyzing the probability of transitioning from one syllable to another. I think the library I used to tokenize the words did not do a perfect job and the corpus was suboptimal too, but it works well enough for a bit of nonsense :)
cubefox 2y ago
This point got me thinking: > In general, there is perhaps a meaning-nonsense continuum that sentences can be placed along. Some philosophers and linguists did say there is a difference between grammatically valid and nonsensical sentences. Chomsky's example was "Green ideas sleep furiously." But I think the sentence just seems nonsensical because it presupposes that ideas can be green, and presuppositions are invariant under negation. Which means "Green ideas do not sleep furiously" still presupposes that ideas can be green. Since the presupposition is false (presupposition failure), the sentence itself is neither true nor false, just like a meaningless sentence with ill-formed grammar. But sentences with presupposition failure can be meaningful. E.g. "Mr Smith put his children to bed early", true or false? Neither, Mr Smith doesn't have children. In case of grammatical "nonsensical" sentences without presupposition failure the issue seems to be that they are necessarily false. E.g. "Ideas are green" or "Gravity learns about regret". But that's not much different from saying "Bachelors are married", which is necessarily false, or "Bachelors are unmarried", which is necessarily true. They don't seem particularly nonsensical. I think the case of semi-nonsensical sentences like "Vibrations become chances" can be explained with their ambiguity, where it isn't clear whether there is some metaphorical interpretation of the sentence which could be true.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > it presupposes that ideas can be green They can if you consider "green" to be "aligned with environmental / ecological ways" or "naive / inexperienced".
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    I think the former are sleeping furiously, while the latter are probably not so furious for the most part, some ideas don’t mind having a little longer to ripen.
tpoacher 2y ago
Stop giving managers more buzzword phrases!
- hashtag-til 2y ago
  Interact with regrets to find your learnings.
- follower 2y ago
  Instructions unclear, here is your buzzword list link: https://github.com/words/buzzwords/blob/main/index.js#L1 https://github.com/words/buzzwords/blob/main/index.js#L1
follower 2y ago
This is so great--both in terms of the project & the write-up. Thanks for sharing your work! :) A "quick" dump of some thoughts it provoked: (1) Really like the "meaning-nonsense continuum" concept--and that neither extreme is explicitly labelled in the image immediately following where the term is introduced. :) (And, yes, "Gravity learns about regret." is indeed kind of beautiful.) (Aside: Adding alt text to the generated images would be beneficial both for copy/pasting & accessibility reasons. :) ) (2) This statement made me smile: "If you don’t enjoy reading and contemplating these sentences like this, we are simply very different people." Because while I very much fall into the category of "enjoy reading and contemplating these sentences" I can also imagine people who definitely don't. :D (3) Part of the reason for (2) was because I'd already encountered a couple of the "don't work" examples where my immediate thought was "wait, how about in this situation though?". e.g. "Aligning with compass." Which then got me thinking about stylistic, metaphor or time-period related aspects of grammar, e.g. pirate treasure map instructions written in cryptic sentence fragments. (4) Which leads into the whole "procedurally generated diagrams/documents" aspect of the project that I also think is particularly cool. It immediately got me thinking of being in a game and walking into an inventor character's lab or a magician's library and finding all manner of technical or arcane drawings generated for either environment or game mechanic purposes (e.g. in a detective/mystery game like "Shadows of Doubt"). Then again, since I was a kid I've always had an interest in browsing technical component and, err, office stationery catalogues, so maybe it's just me. :D It also made me think back to "Interminal" an entry to the 2020 ProcJam procedural generation game jam, which generated an airport terminal including duty-free stores with procedurally generated perfumes (including "name, visual identity and smell"): https://nothke.itch.io/interminal https://nothke.itch.io/interminal (5) The "physicalization" aspect of the project to render it in a tangible form is also cool--particularly because (at least to me but maybe also to all those vinyl-owning kids with no turntable :D ) a physical form seems to the amplify the "meaningfulness" of a message... The underlying "digitalized cursive handwriting" project was also of interest--though I only skimmed its write-up in an attempt to avoid yet another rabbit hole. :) The handwriting system seemed like it might also be amenable to animated use--which then made me think, "Wait! I've seen something about that recently...", had no idea what, but then some background retrieval process just produced the answer as I was writing, it was Noclip's recent "The Making of Pentiment" documentary: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ffIdgOBYwbc https://www.youtube.com/embed/ffIdgOBYwbc (6) With regard to the technical execution/implementation side of things: I've observed that a project's need for text generation often raises a question of what implementation approach to use, in terms of a DIY vs pre-existing solution. One issue which affects text generation specifically is "general solutions" often seem to tend toward specialization over time (e.g. "text generation for interactive fiction", "text generation for branching narrative-driven games", tools such as Yarn Spinner[0] & Ink[1]), which ends up making the solutions less suitable for simpler/different use cases & increases difficulty of the learning curve. This was something I ran into during a small sub-project[2] last year where the text generation was somewhat "incidental" to overall project goal. I started out with a "quick DIY" solution but still ended up spending enough time on that aspect that I started to wonder if I'd be better not entirely re-inventing the wheel. Around this time I ran into the "Blur Markup Language"[3][4][5] project which has the tag line "write text that changes" and--while I haven't yet used it--seems like it might be a promising "mid-level abstraction" solution for text generation, so thought I'd mention it as a potential option for others with text generation needs. (7) In terms of other helpful text generation related resources, I've found various "word lists" to be of use, so thought I'd mention this "weasel words" list as a starting point: https://github.com/words/weasels/blob/main/data.txt#L14 https://github.com/words/weasels/blob/main/data.txt#L14 (The repo README also links to other word lists under the same org including word categories such as "buzzwords", "filler", "hedges" & words listed in order of associated positive/negative sentiment.) Thanks again for sharing your work & look forward to seeing where your projects go in future, should you share more in future. :) ---- footnotes ---- [0] https://github.com/YarnSpinnerTool/YarnSpinner https://github.com/YarnSpinnerTool/YarnSpinner [1] https://github.com/inkle/ink https://github.com/inkle/ink [2] I wanted to generate "scripted dialogue" samples[2a] to demonstrate the 900+ individual Text-To-Speech speaker voices in the Piper TTS[2b] LibriTTS voice model[2c], in a form that is: useful for evaluating the voices; not incredibly tedious to listen to; and, makes it possible to identify which speaker you are currently hearing. [2a] Subset of resulting generated[2d] speech output can be heard in the second example here: https://rancidbacon.gitlab.io/piper-tts-demos/ https://rancidbacon.gitlab.io/piper-tts-demos/ [2b] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper https://github.com/rhasspy/piper [2c] https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/blob/main/en/en_US/libritts/high/MODEL_CARD https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/blob/main/en/en_... [2d] Text generation script: https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/larynx-dialogue/-/blob/feature-piper-port/tools/generate-demo-speakers-dialogue.py https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/larynx-dialogue/-/blob/featur... [3] https://bml-lang.org https://bml-lang.org [4] BML intro/overview: https://bml-lang.org/docs/guide/language-basics/ https://bml-lang.org/docs/guide/language-basics/ [5] Online BML editor with syntax cheat sheet: https://bml-lang.org/sandbox/ https://bml-lang.org/sandbox/
derbOac 2y ago
Also known as "word salad" in the psychiatric literature, to draw a parallel.
cassepipe 2y ago
"A moment manifests the environment" "You must develop from truth" You just invented a philosophy generator, Rudolf Carnap's nightmare I believe: https://www.ditext.com/carnap/elimination.html https://www.ditext.com/carnap/elimination.html
- passion__desire 2y ago
  Here's another one interdisciplinary of physics and art. "The light is painting me."
aaroninsf 2y ago
Bemusing to find that there are no hits in the post for "markov."
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bitwize 2y ago
Bullshit generators are fun to write, and every seasoned programmer has probably written one, or a similar app, at one point. It's nice to see someone new discovering the joy they can produce.
forgot-im-old 2y ago
This shows you don't need a very complicated Algorithm to produce passable sentences. I suspect it's similar to simple autonomous car algorithms that can start as simple lane following feedback loops. The question is how performance scales as the controller complexity scales.
baxtr 2y ago
You could easily write a philosophy book with that and sell it to become famous.
rickcarlino 2y ago
Something like this could be fun for language learning and memorization of new grammar patterns. Thanks for sharing.
JohnKemeny 2y ago
> for example ‘universal’ which starts with a vowel but is pronounced with a y sound and therefore would go with ‘a’ not ‘an’ I spent a good minute with this sentence. For me, "universal" is pronounced with a j sound, not a y sound; a y sounds is pronounced with a w sound, a letter which happens to be pronounced with a d sound; indeed thanks, English. (The word "yes", to me, is indeed pronounced with a j sound, the j being pronounced with a d sound.)
- gnubison 2y ago
  Explanation for other confused people: the pronunciations of these words and letters, expressed in IPA (or perhaps an orthography like Spanish’s) begin with odd other sounds: Universal /ˌjunɪˈvɝsl̩/, y /ˈwaɪ/, w /ˈdʌbl̩.juː/, j /dʒeɪ/
- tivert 2y ago
  > For me, "universal" is pronounced with a j sound, not a y sound... Is your mother tongue non-English? If so, what language are you talking about? I'm monolingual, but I think German pronounces a J as a English Y.
koolala 2y ago
amazing json and drawings!

212 points by ingve 2y ago

wg0 2y ago

Poor man's LLM.

MrVandemar 2y ago
Why in this world would you buy clay, turn it on a wheel, fire and glaze it, just to make a coffee-mug? Yeah, it'd be easier to go to a shop and buy a mug, maybe with something banal like "Worlds Greatest Dad" or Darth Vader printed on it But making your own, you learn something. You apply effort. You apply intelligence. You apply your sense of aesthetics. You work through trial and error. You refine your technique. You spend time. In the end, you've constructed something that is meaningful, and not disposable. Something that you understand, and something that reflects yourself. How much more value would that be as a gift? Or even just as a "because I could"? This project is that. I'd hire that artist over you in a heartbeat because the artist understands something, worked through it, and applied themselves.
- wg0 2y ago
  I agree with every single word that you say including the part where they generate their phrases with an algorithm which I find very clever. Poor man's LLM is not meant as contempt of the art but more for the LLMs if at all.

mkarliner 2y ago

Lovely

franky47 2y ago

At the age of AI, this kind of human-centric process (thinking about the problem and designing an explainable algorithm to solve it) needs more praise. The handwritten output gives it an extra nice human touch.

amygoodchild 2y ago
Thanks! I'm the artist and it's nice to see this recognised. I have been worried with this project that people might think I should just use a LLM, but I think there is value in how controllable and explainable this is.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Meaninglessness is liminal because the context is shared. (for the opposite direction, see https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ )
  - ryanjshaw 2y ago
    > Meaninglessness is liminal because the context is shared. Can somebody explain this or is it one of the generated sentences in question?
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      It could be one of the generated sentences, but I composed it via wetware, in order to get a more-meaningful-than-average utterance: Meaninglessness (because a product of a random process) is liminal (because it's betwixt and between, neither meaningful[0] nor meaningless[2]) because the context is shared (the vocabulary for the generator —the context shared between we meaningful creatures and the stochastic parrot program— are constraints, especially chosen by the artist to be evocative no matter how they are combined) [0] compare SLN: Just like the white winged dove Sings a song Sounds like[1] she's singing Ooh ooh ooh [1] there are many references to animal sounds sounding like human speech; here are two: Ajax in the Little Iliad —having turned Athena's grey eyes green by managing to tank without asking her for buffs— is driven mad[2] by her shortly after he loses a prize to Odysseus: he interprets the greek cows, instead of saying "moo", as saying "μου" (mine), each claiming the prize for herself, not for him ... and so he kills them all. In a less sanguine vein, Pechkin the Postman also has a nervous breakdown after thinking Khvatayka the Jackdaw is continually asking him "kto tam?" (both a fairly corvidesque sound and "who's there?" in russian) despite his efforts to explain that he's the postman bringing a magazine. [2] in The Eden Express (1975), Mark Vonnegut points out that maybe he could've figured out he was going schizophrenic, if only he'd stopped to notice that everything had suddenly become meaningful.

zimpenfish 2y ago

I've got a similar thing which generates output for several bots. You can get surprisingly good output just from simply replacing placeholders and some recursion.

adelpozo 2y ago

very grateful to have been introduced to the artist site. Inspiring

6510 2y ago

Is it safe?

vunderba 2y ago

Back in the day, I used the same "NLP meets madlib" approach in my silly little chat bots before I was introduced to the concept of Markov chains which completely blew my teenage brain.

crustycoder 2y ago

I had a bot running at http://twitter.com/bollocks http://twitter.com/bollocks until twitter made it ridiculously complicated to use their API, there's a Linux kernel driver that does the same (http://www.fatsquirrel.org/veghead/software/bollocks/ http://www.fatsquirrel.org/veghead/software/bollocks/) and a Perl module (https://metacpan.org/pod/Dev::Bollocks https://metacpan.org/pod/Dev::Bollocks) and I'm sure many others.

iankp 2y ago

She asks the question of if it makes sense, but I find the example sentence "Existence learns about a dream" actually very interesting and poetic

passion__desire 2y ago
We can thread a sentence through overloaded words easily and it will make sense to someone. Words which are very broad in topological sense.

tveita 2y ago

A good old fashioned AI approach, e.g. compare with Peter Norvig's https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/simple.lisp https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/simple.li... > A third, quieter feeling - if the universe was to communicate some message, who’s to say it would not choose this as a conduit? Look away before you feel compelled to write your own operating system - maybe "SacredOS"?

MrVandemar 2y ago

I be like "Woah, cool!" This kind of thing is why I read hacker news and other sites that regularly throw up thought provoking, interesting and captivating things. This kind of human ingenuity, playfulness and exploration is worth trawling through all the I-used-an-AI-to-make-a-app posts.

man4 2y ago

[dead]

immibis 2y ago

I used a similar but less sophisticated type of process to generate random space station announcement messages for the hackerspace, such as "Problem detected in hyperspace bay three." Mostly, making sensible messages comes down to using word lists that make sense in the context. "caterpillar" is a perfectly valid noun, but it doesn't fit on a space station: "Problem detected in beautiful caterpillar omega" just doesn't have the same ring to it. I implement phrases at the top level, with rules like: "sentence: $foreign_object_noun detected in $spaceship_part_noun" Articles and plurals are problems. I may have to add some actual code to deal with them, as the OP did, rather than just blind string replacement with a rules table. It's a shame that "noun: $adjective $noun" doesn't cut it. Stupid English.

bee_rider 2y ago
Caterpillar is also a pretty well known brand of construction equipment. I could imagine the tools of the future could be named after all sorts of animals. There could even be some funny environmental storytelling there, administrators could call things by formal names, workers who grew up on earth could call them by similar animals, workers who grew up on the space-station might have become familiar with the equipment before knowing about the animals, so their associations might be backwards. But it all like it’d have to be done intentionally, generating these associations procedurally seems like a total mess.
EvanAnderson 2y ago
Did something like this back in '96 w/ a recursive macro parser. Stuff like: "To %TABLOID%, %CELEB% %ADVERB% %ACTION.PAS% %NUMBER% %OBJECT.P%." Each substitution referenced a file and entries in those files could reference other files (or themselves). Reflecting the zeitgeist, in the "CELEB" file I find: "Billy Corgan, frontman of %ADVERB% %ADJEC% band The Smashing Pumpkins" If I was going to do it again today I'd combine tenses into a single file and have the parser track the tense that should be used based on previously selected words. That's probably a lot harder than I think it would be.

hello_kitty2 2y ago

I thought this was going to be an essay about hacker news comment section. Disappointed.

remipch 2y ago

It reminds me of "Le Pipotron" [0] (in French) that made me laugh when I was younger. The goal was to make fun of political bullshit. "Meaningful nonsense" is much more evolved and beautiful. Thank you Amy Goodchild for the detailed explanation. [0] http://lepipotron.com/ http://lepipotron.com/

frabert 2y ago

I'll take this opportunity to plug a similar doodad I made that generates english-ish words: https://bertolaccini.dev/cromulent.html https://bertolaccini.dev/cromulent.html It's just a Markov chain built by tokenizing a corpus of English words into syllables and analyzing the probability of transitioning from one syllable to another. I think the library I used to tokenize the words did not do a perfect job and the corpus was suboptimal too, but it works well enough for a bit of nonsense :)

cubefox 2y ago

This point got me thinking: > In general, there is perhaps a meaning-nonsense continuum that sentences can be placed along. Some philosophers and linguists did say there is a difference between grammatically valid and nonsensical sentences. Chomsky's example was "Green ideas sleep furiously." But I think the sentence just seems nonsensical because it presupposes that ideas can be green, and presuppositions are invariant under negation. Which means "Green ideas do not sleep furiously" still presupposes that ideas can be green. Since the presupposition is false (presupposition failure), the sentence itself is neither true nor false, just like a meaningless sentence with ill-formed grammar. But sentences with presupposition failure can be meaningful. E.g. "Mr Smith put his children to bed early", true or false? Neither, Mr Smith doesn't have children. In case of grammatical "nonsensical" sentences without presupposition failure the issue seems to be that they are necessarily false. E.g. "Ideas are green" or "Gravity learns about regret". But that's not much different from saying "Bachelors are married", which is necessarily false, or "Bachelors are unmarried", which is necessarily true. They don't seem particularly nonsensical. I think the case of semi-nonsensical sentences like "Vibrations become chances" can be explained with their ambiguity, where it isn't clear whether there is some metaphorical interpretation of the sentence which could be true.

zimpenfish 2y ago
> it presupposes that ideas can be green They can if you consider "green" to be "aligned with environmental / ecological ways" or "naive / inexperienced".
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I think the former are sleeping furiously, while the latter are probably not so furious for the most part, some ideas don’t mind having a little longer to ripen.

tpoacher 2y ago

Stop giving managers more buzzword phrases!

hashtag-til 2y ago
Interact with regrets to find your learnings.
follower 2y ago
Instructions unclear, here is your buzzword list link: https://github.com/words/buzzwords/blob/main/index.js#L1 https://github.com/words/buzzwords/blob/main/index.js#L1

follower 2y ago

This is so great--both in terms of the project & the write-up. Thanks for sharing your work! :) A "quick" dump of some thoughts it provoked: (1) Really like the "meaning-nonsense continuum" concept--and that neither extreme is explicitly labelled in the image immediately following where the term is introduced. :) (And, yes, "Gravity learns about regret." is indeed kind of beautiful.) (Aside: Adding alt text to the generated images would be beneficial both for copy/pasting & accessibility reasons. :) ) (2) This statement made me smile: "If you don’t enjoy reading and contemplating these sentences like this, we are simply very different people." Because while I very much fall into the category of "enjoy reading and contemplating these sentences" I can also imagine people who definitely don't. :D (3) Part of the reason for (2) was because I'd already encountered a couple of the "don't work" examples where my immediate thought was "wait, how about in this situation though?". e.g. "Aligning with compass." Which then got me thinking about stylistic, metaphor or time-period related aspects of grammar, e.g. pirate treasure map instructions written in cryptic sentence fragments. (4) Which leads into the whole "procedurally generated diagrams/documents" aspect of the project that I also think is particularly cool. It immediately got me thinking of being in a game and walking into an inventor character's lab or a magician's library and finding all manner of technical or arcane drawings generated for either environment or game mechanic purposes (e.g. in a detective/mystery game like "Shadows of Doubt"). Then again, since I was a kid I've always had an interest in browsing technical component and, err, office stationery catalogues, so maybe it's just me. :D It also made me think back to "Interminal" an entry to the 2020 ProcJam procedural generation game jam, which generated an airport terminal including duty-free stores with procedurally generated perfumes (including "name, visual identity and smell"): https://nothke.itch.io/interminal https://nothke.itch.io/interminal (5) The "physicalization" aspect of the project to render it in a tangible form is also cool--particularly because (at least to me but maybe also to all those vinyl-owning kids with no turntable :D ) a physical form seems to the amplify the "meaningfulness" of a message... The underlying "digitalized cursive handwriting" project was also of interest--though I only skimmed its write-up in an attempt to avoid yet another rabbit hole. :) The handwriting system seemed like it might also be amenable to animated use--which then made me think, "Wait! I've seen something about that recently...", had no idea what, but then some background retrieval process just produced the answer as I was writing, it was Noclip's recent "The Making of Pentiment" documentary: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ffIdgOBYwbc https://www.youtube.com/embed/ffIdgOBYwbc (6) With regard to the technical execution/implementation side of things: I've observed that a project's need for text generation often raises a question of what implementation approach to use, in terms of a DIY vs pre-existing solution. One issue which affects text generation specifically is "general solutions" often seem to tend toward specialization over time (e.g. "text generation for interactive fiction", "text generation for branching narrative-driven games", tools such as Yarn Spinner[0] & Ink[1]), which ends up making the solutions less suitable for simpler/different use cases & increases difficulty of the learning curve. This was something I ran into during a small sub-project[2] last year where the text generation was somewhat "incidental" to overall project goal. I started out with a "quick DIY" solution but still ended up spending enough time on that aspect that I started to wonder if I'd be better not entirely re-inventing the wheel. Around this time I ran into the "Blur Markup Language"[3][4][5] project which has the tag line "write text that changes" and--while I haven't yet used it--seems like it might be a promising "mid-level abstraction" solution for text generation, so thought I'd mention it as a potential option for others with text generation needs. (7) In terms of other helpful text generation related resources, I've found various "word lists" to be of use, so thought I'd mention this "weasel words" list as a starting point: https://github.com/words/weasels/blob/main/data.txt#L14 https://github.com/words/weasels/blob/main/data.txt#L14 (The repo README also links to other word lists under the same org including word categories such as "buzzwords", "filler", "hedges" & words listed in order of associated positive/negative sentiment.) Thanks again for sharing your work & look forward to seeing where your projects go in future, should you share more in future. :) ---- footnotes ---- [0] https://github.com/YarnSpinnerTool/YarnSpinner https://github.com/YarnSpinnerTool/YarnSpinner [1] https://github.com/inkle/ink https://github.com/inkle/ink [2] I wanted to generate "scripted dialogue" samples[2a] to demonstrate the 900+ individual Text-To-Speech speaker voices in the Piper TTS[2b] LibriTTS voice model[2c], in a form that is: useful for evaluating the voices; not incredibly tedious to listen to; and, makes it possible to identify which speaker you are currently hearing. [2a] Subset of resulting generated[2d] speech output can be heard in the second example here: https://rancidbacon.gitlab.io/piper-tts-demos/ https://rancidbacon.gitlab.io/piper-tts-demos/ [2b] https://github.com/rhasspy/piper https://github.com/rhasspy/piper [2c] https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/blob/main/en/en_US/libritts/high/MODEL_CARD https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/blob/main/en/en_... [2d] Text generation script: https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/larynx-dialogue/-/blob/feature-piper-port/tools/generate-demo-speakers-dialogue.py https://gitlab.com/RancidBacon/larynx-dialogue/-/blob/featur... [3] https://bml-lang.org https://bml-lang.org [4] BML intro/overview: https://bml-lang.org/docs/guide/language-basics/ https://bml-lang.org/docs/guide/language-basics/ [5] Online BML editor with syntax cheat sheet: https://bml-lang.org/sandbox/ https://bml-lang.org/sandbox/

derbOac 2y ago

Also known as "word salad" in the psychiatric literature, to draw a parallel.

cassepipe 2y ago

"A moment manifests the environment" "You must develop from truth" You just invented a philosophy generator, Rudolf Carnap's nightmare I believe: https://www.ditext.com/carnap/elimination.html https://www.ditext.com/carnap/elimination.html

passion__desire 2y ago
Here's another one interdisciplinary of physics and art. "The light is painting me."

aaroninsf 2y ago

Bemusing to find that there are no hits in the post for "markov."

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bitwize 2y ago

Bullshit generators are fun to write, and every seasoned programmer has probably written one, or a similar app, at one point. It's nice to see someone new discovering the joy they can produce.

forgot-im-old 2y ago

This shows you don't need a very complicated Algorithm to produce passable sentences. I suspect it's similar to simple autonomous car algorithms that can start as simple lane following feedback loops. The question is how performance scales as the controller complexity scales.

baxtr 2y ago

You could easily write a philosophy book with that and sell it to become famous.

rickcarlino 2y ago

Something like this could be fun for language learning and memorization of new grammar patterns. Thanks for sharing.

JohnKemeny 2y ago

> for example ‘universal’ which starts with a vowel but is pronounced with a y sound and therefore would go with ‘a’ not ‘an’ I spent a good minute with this sentence. For me, "universal" is pronounced with a j sound, not a y sound; a y sounds is pronounced with a w sound, a letter which happens to be pronounced with a d sound; indeed thanks, English. (The word "yes", to me, is indeed pronounced with a j sound, the j being pronounced with a d sound.)

gnubison 2y ago
Explanation for other confused people: the pronunciations of these words and letters, expressed in IPA (or perhaps an orthography like Spanish’s) begin with odd other sounds: Universal /ˌjunɪˈvɝsl̩/, y /ˈwaɪ/, w /ˈdʌbl̩.juː/, j /dʒeɪ/
tivert 2y ago
> For me, "universal" is pronounced with a j sound, not a y sound... Is your mother tongue non-English? If so, what language are you talking about? I'm monolingual, but I think German pronounces a J as a English Y.

koolala 2y ago

amazing json and drawings!