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Shaping Hint

Sunday 31 July 2022, 17:00

This is the output from one of my text-generation AI experiments. I started with the GPT-J 6B model, and fine-tuned it on about 200,000 words of my own fiction writing (about half of that being the text of Shining Path). It took about 36 hours to fine-tune the model on my 12-core desktop PC, notably not using GPU computation, and then maybe 12 hours or so to generate this text under human supervision.

Hermit books

Tuesday 13 November 2001, 20:37

The phrase "hermit books" describes any of 23 species of paper-based animals related to the familiar hard- and soft-cover books and also (less closely) to magazines, pamphlets, facial tissues, particle boards, and so on. The life cycle of the hermit book begins during spawning season in mid-October, when adult females release thousands of tiny particles of paper called /crufts/. Meanwhile the adult males release fertilizing /toner/, an inky black powder, which combines with the crufts on the library floor. Fertilized crufts soon grow into larvae, or /chads/, which live for a few weeks in a free-floating state before seeking permanent covers.

At the WCOC '01

Monday 12 November 2001, 22:58
[View source for Usenet headers]

Date: 13 Nov 2001 01:58:29 -0500

Summary: Intended to post this Nov 12, but beer and bad company intervened,
    and I spent the final hours of Monday watching Monty Python and smiling
    and nodding to much greater than the LD50 of other people's RPG
    anecdotes.

The World Counting Out Championships were held last week in Exeter, UK.
Opening ceremonies began Monday afternoon, with the national anthems of all
eight finalist countries, a selection of baton twirling and marching band
performances from local high schools, and so on.  Also included in the
ceremonies were speeches by the foreign ministers from Switzerland and
Canada, who (as the top-scoring nations not among the finalists) were
providing counters.  The ceremonies were followed by the traditional opening
count-out among the captains of the teams.  This would not directly count as
part of the tournament, but would determine the scheduling of matches for
Tuesday and Wednesday.

The Terrible Secret of Livejournal: archived comments

Thursday 9 August 2007, 04:00

Link to Part 1.

When I posted my item on "The Terrible Secret of Livejournal" in 2007, it attracted a lot of comments. I've since changed the code that runs my Web site, and it's not easy to import those old comments as regular comments in the new code; but I wanted to preserve them, so I'm posting them here in the form of another entry. New comments are disabled here; you should add them on the concluding page of the article.