4 ms·
The whole thing: "I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector
by card_zero 2y ago
The whole thing:
"I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was icecold against the rust-colored mountains. The Brylls shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right."
I like how Chandler writing sci-fi sounds exactly like Chandler writing one of his gumshoe stories. It's terse and tense and cynical. The protagonist drives a vehicle into some kind of ambush, and everything's incredibly snappy (including the scenery). Not at all like the actual sci-fi author who turned the parody into a complete story, and felt compelled to discuss something in the middle of the action, and ruined the pace.
I don't think "Google" here is a machine or all-knowing entity, sounds more like it's just some guy. With prior experience of disintegrating Brylls.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hammock 2y ago[flagged]
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- angryantant 2y ago[flagged]
- card_zero 2y agoHa, yes, a bitterly droll simile every third sentence, that was what was missing.
- ThrowawayR2 2y agoThe moderators have said that machine generated submissions and comments are not welcome on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33945628
- card_zero 2y agoThere was an old text generator program from the 80s called "Travesty": https://www.macintoshrepository.org/50200-travesty https://www.macintoshrepository.org/50200-travesty That's basically all ChatGPT is being used for here, so I think it's OK. It's not like a fake user, or "I ran the question through the chatbot and now I'll show you the output because I have no idea myself".
- lampiaio 2y agoHoly wow just yesterday I was toying with Travesty. I had no idea it existed back then and only found it recently when I went page by page through Macintosh Garden's whole database, so it's great to see someone mention it!
- card_zero 2y agoSource (or source of an earlier version at least), in BASIC: https://archive.org/details/BYTE_Vol_10-07_1985-07_Computers_and_Space/BYTE%20Vol%2010-07%201985-07%20Computers%20and%20Space/page/n180/mode/1up?q=+travesty https://archive.org/details/BYTE_Vol_10-07_1985-07_Computers... I couldn't find the Nov 1984 Pascal version, but like they say, Basic is easier for working with strings.
- CamperBob2 2y agoThat's basically all ChatGPT is being used for here, so I think it's OK. Don't bother arguing, it's a religious thing at this point.
- zeristor 2y agoWilliam Gibson on Chandler: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fi... Via https://archive.ph/qmwKj https://archive.ph/qmwKj “ GIBSON When science fiction finally got literary naturalism, it got it via the noir detective novel, which is an often decadent offspring of nineteenth-century naturalism. Noir is one of the places that the investigative, analytic, literary impulse went in America. The Goncourt brothers set out to investigate sex and money and power, and many years later, in America, you wind up with Chandler doing something very similar, though highly stylized and with a very different agenda. I always had a feeling that Chandler’s puritanism got in the way, and I was never quite as taken with the language as true Chandler fans seem to be. I distrusted Marlow as a narrator. He wasn’t someone I wanted to meet, and I didn’t find him sympathetic—in large part because Chandler, whom I didn’t trust either, evidently did find him sympathetic. But I trusted Dashiell Hammett. It felt to me that Hammett was Chandler’s ancestor, even though they were really contemporaries. Chandler civilized it, but Hammett invented it. With Hammett I felt that the author was open to the world in a way Chandler never seems to me to be.” Assuming, of course, that The Gibson hasn’t been hacked.
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- CamperBob2 2y agoGreat review, thanks for the link. His point that it's easier to forecast and accept the future than to understand the time before television or telephones really got under my skin.
- Suppafly 2y ago>sounds more like it's just some guy That should be apparent to anyone that can read, I think people just like to pretend to be dense for some reason.