sieve

4 ms·

31.
by sieve 2mo ago
I have read almost every kind of fiction under the sun. My standard for what is great is pretty high. This is why I am perfectly willing to accept LLM output as lot as the writer has put in sufficient work into the same. Because this kind o
32.
by sieve 2mo ago
> The 'window' is I assume a french door, which I suspect is a mistranslation. It is a french door/window. The original story is by Saki (HH Munro), one of the greatest short story writers of all time. He was English. The
33.
by sieve 2mo ago
Did you read the original by Saki (Exhibit 12)? Ideally, you should read all 14 exhibits. Each has been produced by a different LLM, some local, others frontier models of the time. E4 = Claude E6 = ChatGPT E8 = Mistral E11 = DeepSeek V3 E12
34.
by sieve 2mo ago
This is something from early 2025. The situation and my own way of driving the models has improved somewhat in the intervening period. Variations on a Theme of Saki https://gist.github.com/s-i-e-v-e/b4d696bfb08488aeb893
35.
by sieve 2mo ago
My solution to this, as the human-in-the-loop, is pretty simple. If the generated draft is missing something that was implicit in the chapter outline, I ask the LLM to incorporate it and rewrite the para/section. Then I fix the outline
36.
by sieve 2mo ago
Yeah, if I think something is worth publishing, I might do that. I don't do this for the money. I do it because I enjoy building a completely lived in world from character sheets and outlines
37.
by sieve 2mo ago
> Producing a bunch of filler content to pad things out is the opposite direction from most of the reading that I have found helpful. Padding, though it is probably the wrong word for what the LLM does when it expands the outline, lets y
38.
by sieve 2mo ago
Because I care about the world and the characters? And want to read stories set in that world instead of five pages of bullet points?
39.
by sieve 2mo ago
> But they generate objectively bad text. They don't. I don't think people are taking full advantage of their capabilities. They produce perfectly functional prose. Sometimes, they produce something genuinely amazing to read. B
40.
by sieve 2mo ago
> If what you care about is the characters and the plot, you already have those, you wrote them yourself. Nah. What I have is the skeleton. You want it made flesh. That is what the prose does. It produces a fully realized world. I do not
41.
by sieve 2mo ago
I do not expect the LLMs to do everything. They are assistants. You still bear the responsibility of stitching everything together into a cohesive whole. Make changes as required. That is where expectations differ I guess.
42.
by sieve 2mo ago
There is some stuff you read for the prose. Most books, I read for the characters and the plot. So the LLM-assisted output works for me.
43.
by sieve 2mo ago
I tried the programmer's method. Automating stuff. Then I realized I prefer the wood carver's method. So I take it slow. I think and write the outline for a chapter. Then I have the LLM produce it. I read the draft. Tweak things.
44.
by sieve 2mo ago
> inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. This is a workflow problem. What the LLM normally needs: - very basic outline: what the story is about - basic cast of charac
45.
by sieve 2mo ago
Think of it this way. You like well-designed houses. Like looking at them, living in them. So you design a house per your liking having bought a plot overlooking a stream and a meadow. And you hire someone to build it for you. You may not e
46.
by sieve 2mo ago
I have read thousands of books in my lifetime. I don't really have too many hobbies outside of reading. Trust me when I say there is an audience for literal crap. LLMs actually raise the bar significantly. I do not think they will ever
47.
by sieve 2mo ago
You could say that for any book. People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly has the same plots, character archetypes and other trop
48.
by sieve 2mo ago
I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To see which ones work and which don't. I haven'
49.
by sieve 2mo ago
I often produce have LLMs extract the text from a book scan and then translate it into English or some other language I know. Then I load it into my interlinear reader for side-by-side reading. Convenient when you are starting out with a la
50.
by sieve 2mo ago
Everyone should learn Sanskrit if only to read the great poets and dramatists in the original. The translations are often nice, but you do lose something in the process. Thanks to the incredible efforts of Pāṇini[1], the language was mostly
51.
by sieve 2mo ago
Melville's "Bartleby" is very good
52.
by sieve 2mo ago
> Can you name three titles that you would recommend? I can recommend some authors from the period: W Somerset Maugham, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, H Rider Haggard, Wilkie Collins, Saki, Maupassant, O Henry. Dickens, Hugo, Austen, El
53.
by sieve 2mo ago
I installed this the moment I got my Kobo Libra H2O. Mostly read fiction from the 1800s and early 1900s and I did not want to fight whatever proprietary software the reader came with (Kobo is probably better than the Kindle for this, but I
54.
by sieve 2mo ago
Indian companies do not like to do research. Too much risk. They prefer to buy proven stuff. There are small companies doing a lot of what the Chinese are doing (including LFP and other battery chemistry). But they cannot scale up because t
55.
by sieve 2mo ago
It is a name. The identity comes from the rituals, beliefs, clothing, literature, temples, architecture, food and so many other cultural and civilizational markers. Pakistanis who were looking for their fathers in Arabia, Persia and Turkey
56.
by sieve 2mo ago
> There was no unified political entity prior to 1947 There have been many (empires, not modern, Westphalian nation-states), but the British managed to create the largest yet. Pakistan was carved out of British India on Muslim and non-Mu
57.
by sieve 3mo ago
I wonder what is it with this denial of the existence of India prior to 1947. If people were specific and said that they were referring to the Republic of India as the successor state to British-controlled India, then it would at least make
58.
by sieve 3mo ago
The biggest problem with a lot of northern languages is the awful schwa deletion. Even the Marathi of Maharashtra is subject to it. Strangely, the Marathi of Thanjavur has far, far less of it from what little I have heard of it. Sanskrit do
59.
by sieve 3mo ago
A lot of Hindu calendars do this. They use śukla and kr̥ṣṇa pakṣa (waxing and waning phases respectively). Days are numbered 0-14 with 0 referring to the full/new moon. Problem is each regional calendar is slightly different. And days
60.
by sieve 3mo ago
I tried this yesterday using the hosted demo. The project info is being circulated in many Sanskrit-related WA and other groups. The documentation of the `transliteration to Kannada` workflow is good. I (and I think a few others) was using

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