Linus Torvalds: you take a week-long swing at a problem you find annoying, fascinating, or both. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by some alternative from the GNU project that, pinky promise, is coming out any day now.
Grace Hopper: BEGIN a framework that powers critical government functions, AND has secretly saved America from mass destruction time and again, only to be dunked on by Reddit for trivial matters of syntax END.
John Carmack: Doom, but better-looking.
Brendan Eich: you take a week-long swing at a problem your employer finds commercially compelling. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by the prior art it was supposed to build on.
Fabrice Bellard: A problem with several competing solutions catches your fancy. Within a week you have a gleaming, state-of-the-art solution that is flexible, reliable, and extensible—all written in pure, efficient C. Everyone begins to build on your work.
Donald Knuth: While writing your magnum opus, a minor irritation arises. You invent a new subfield of computing and spend two years developing a highly idiosyncratic language and tool system.\footnote{And several new typefaces!} Your irritation dissipates and you go back to work with your writing. Generations of academics curse your creation but have nothing better to work with. They wonder if they can get Fabrice Bellard to take a crack at it…
Working on (a medium-sized team that is working on) an LTE base station in the late 2000s and then I'm introduced to his work. It was a very humbling experience. Over the decades I've met a handful of people who were, at times, within reach of Fabrice but he is truly in a league of his own.
> Brendan Eich: you take a week-long swing at a problem your employer finds commercially compelling. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by the prior art it was supposed to build on.
Jack Woodford, a decent pulp writer in the first half of the 20th century who also wrote several books on writing and on how the publishing industry works, including "Trial and Error" in 1933 which Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury both cited as a major influence in getting their writing careers started, had a nice description of how to plot:
> Boy meets girl; girl gets boy into pickle; boy gets pickle into girl
It's an earlier work. I see that the release date of the free book was just this year. If Radio Razz entered the public domain this year then it's possible that Trial and Error will be on that site within the next decade.
To summarize Dan Brown books by describing the characters fundamentally misunderstands them. The characters are about as important as the characters in a porno.
The point of a Dan Brown book is to chart the stupidest possible path through history and pop science, and he's uniquely capable of this.
Terry Pratchett: A visionary on the Discworld invents something vaguely like a modern object or industry. That invention enslaves the visionary and must be stopped by a crotchety old person who hates change.
Wodehouse: Titanic forces beyond your control such as scheming aunts, accidental engagements, and inability to express your feelings threaten to irrevocably ruin your life forever. It’ll take a Machiavellian mastermind and a series of unlikely coincidences to extricate you from this predicament but you’ll have to pay a price.
The above was written by hand. As an experiment, I asked Claude to generate a few dozen more. Most weren't great. Here are the highlights:
Michael Crichton:
You're a brilliant scientist who's just created something that will revolutionize the world. Congratulations! It's now trying to eat you.
Michael Crichton:
You've stumbled upon a conspiracy involving [insert scientific field]. Now you're being chased by [insert government agency] while trying to explain complex scientific concepts to the reader.
Suzanne Collins:
You must choose between two brooding love interests while simultaneously overthrowing a totalitarian regime. Priorities!
Stephen King:
Welcome to small-town Maine, where the biggest threat isn't the weather, it's the [insert supernatural horror]. Don't worry, a writer will save the day.
Neil Gaiman:
Mythology crashes into modern life. You're either a god who's fallen on hard times or a regular person about to have a very weird Wednesday.
Margaret Atwood:
Society has taken a slight turn for the worse. Women are now [insert dystopian scenario]. This is definitely not a commentary on current events.
And perhaps my favorite:
George Orwell:
Big Brother is watching you. So is your toaster. And your pet. Trust no one, especially not the pigs.
Out of 30 generations, there were a few more that made me smile, but these were the main ones I enjoyed. Something I've noticed with statistical content generation is that it has a difficult time not being too "on the nose" -- almost like next-token-prediction is making it want to rush and get to the punchline a little too quickly. It has a hard time being subtle, and too often it felt like it was just a glib little summary of a story, rather than a sardonic take-a-step-back-and-look-at-the-big-picture sort of approach.
No major revelations, but just barely interesting enough to warrant commenting here. If there were a Dull Men's Club version of Hacker News, I would have posted this there.
In their defense, I appreciate that they actually tagged it as AI. A lot of people would be tempted to post them without attribution, especially given that tagging it is a great way to get dumped on.
Even more so, they provide commentary at the bottom on the weaknesses of the model, which is useful!
Andy Weir: Your indomitable human spirit has gotten you far. Now in the face of overwhelming odds, you will need to show resilience and science the shit out of your situation.
Whoooa, what a blast from the past. I loved that site, but I bet I haven't been there in 15 years. It seems their most recent update was just last week.
Stephen King: A character wonders if, given all the suffering recently endured over the last few hundred pages, life is nonetheless still worth living. This character is killed by an entity which, despite all appearance and reputation, is permanently and inexplicably murderous.
Having just found out about topic X, and thought about it for 30 seconds, I have strong advice for the world's expert about an edge case they forgot for solutions to topic X.
Your project looks interesting... But, what's the point, when you can easily accomplish this (and much more) simply by self-hosting XYZ, wrapped by an instance of FOO, backed by a simple cluster of BAR, communicating with a BAZ? Also Rust.
Your comment does not have a license and even if it did I highly disagree with your interpretation of how it can be both available to all of humanity forever free of all obligation but also I disagree with your monetization scheme, also my partner and I on one of our many hobby vacations have long ago created the solution that sadly was lost to imposter syndrome and inappropriate recycling.
This product is really cool and congrats to the team for pulling this off. The rest of my paragraph is full of euphemisms of why my product is actually better, and why this product is actually shit.
To do King justice you have to capture some kind of on-the-nose allegory (alcoholism, childhood trauma, the existential dread of one's musical tastes being classifiable as dad-rock, the Cold War), and it can't be about the corruption and decline of small-town New England, which is everpresent. Yog-Sothoth should make an appearance.
What does it say about me that I've only actually read 14 of the 56 authors in the second list [1] as an adult (i.e. by choice)? I know of quite a few, but haven't read most of them.
Humanity would be a pretty bland experience if everybody universally read the same toplist of influences. Some may aspire to study The Classics at Oxford, but to me that sounds like a nightmare of deprivation.
Accordingly I see your balanced, partial foray into those classics as a positive. It shows you're an individual bespoke personality with broader influences. We won't know which of the modern works we read are future classics - that'll come in hundreds of years.
I would argue that a shared corpus that everyone has read is a key foundation to a society with rich and nuanced social intercourse. That doesn't mean everyone has read the same books, but there would be significant benefits in kids coming out of high school or college having all read 50 or 100 of the same great books (plus anything else they wanted to read).
I've had the pleasure of listening in on some discussions from high-school students that study classics meeting each other for the first time. Their discussions tend to be very different from what you'd hear from a typical high-school student. While other students might share the language, the ones who have read the same 50 or so great books tend to have a shared vocabulary of ideas at their disposal that doesn't seem to be there without the shared books.
The reality is that the average high school student will not have truly read 50-100 novels, and the opportunity cost of doing so would be substantial for the diverse aptitudes that comprise the entire youth population.
I believe my life has been richer and more joyful for having had some companions whose minor concessions to the fiction reading hobby in childhood leant more towards Asterix and Obelix than to Charles Dickens; I'm certainly not getting "second best" from them in either company or conversation!
Nonetheless I take your point about the potential benefits of shared corpus, despite contending that the extreme of One Universal Prescription also brings the potential downsides inherent to any artificial scope constraint. Diversity and balance of focus are important too.
Since 2022, I'm [only] on page 400 of Infinite Jest (D.F.Wallace). In particular, the intoxicated flashbacks (with no paragraph breaks for ppaaggeess) just make it difficult to plow through...
Meanwhile, I've concurrently read 70+ other "lesser" classics (i.e. less than Jest's 1300 pages + citations) in those same two years. This includes all of Vonnegut, most of Steinbeck, and half of Gárcia Marquéz.
I sent them all to ChatGPT 4o one by one and had it guess the books, this is how it did:
1. Anthony Trollope – I didn’t get this one.
2. Evelyn Waugh – Correct!
3. Henry James – Correct!
4. Graham Greene – I missed this, was thinking of the wrong tone.
5. W. Shakespeare (i) – Correct!
6. Samuel Richardson – Correct!
7. David Foster Wallace – I guessed Gaddis, but this makes perfect sense. Partial credit.
8. Marcel Proust – Correct!
9. Mrs. Gaskell – Correct!
10. Ian McEwan – Partial credit; I guessed Atonement after Henry James.
11. E. M. Forster – Correct!
12. Cormac McCarthy – Correct!
13. P. G. Wodehouse – Correct!
14. Alan Bennett – I guessed Chekhov/Osborne, so I missed this.
15. Jane Austen – Correct!
16. Dan Brown – Correct!
17. Agatha Christie – Correct!
18. Zadie Smith – Missed this one.
19. W. Shakespeare (ii) – Correct!
20. Iris Murdoch – Correct!
21. Ernest Hemingway – Correct!
22. John Banville – Correct!
23. Harold Pinter – Correct!
24. F. Scott Fitzgerald – Correct!
25. Tennessee Williams – Correct!
26. Oscar Wilde – Correct!
27. D. H. Lawrence – Correct!
28. Thomas Hardy – Correct!
29. Virginia Woolf – Missed this one, was thinking of Galsworthy.
30. Tom Stoppard – Correct!
Final score: 25/30 with a couple of partial credits. Not bad!
Because I hope that more people listen to the audiobook series Strange Company:
Nick Cole:
Log Keeper's Note: Aftermath. In those dark years of the long crossing between the world we'd cut loose of the bad contract on, and the repair facility on Hardrock, the Strange Company slept and the galaxy caught fire as we dreamed for twenty-five years of sublight. The old order of the Monarchs, mighty yet petty gods determined to burn worlds and take humanity with them down into the deep dark graves of empire, began its final collapse. Worlds fell into shadowy chaos, overrun by the cackle of automatic weapons carried by the Simia Legions, while ring stations at Oberon and Circe burned like fiery jewels. Into this madness and maelstrom rode the Strange Company.
(That’s a slightly abridged excerpt from the second audiobook of the duology, Voodoo Warfare. I call them audiobooks rather than novels because in print form they are merely quite good but very derivative examples of their genre, but as narrated by Christopher Ryan Grant, they are among the most epic and inspiring stories I have ever heard come alive.)
Epigraph: Wherever in the universe one happens to find them, an old battlefield, a forgotten glade, buried deep in the rubble of a dead and beam-ravaged world, the graves of Strange Company are often marked such: “Strangers to the Universe, Brothers to the End.”
Every social network: you make something for your friends and end up with viral growth immediately or after years of nothing. You spend the rest of your days policing trolls, spammers, and scammers trying to abuse or hijack the network. You or someone in marketing send out too many spammy notifications abusing user trust and users block your notifications. Nobody shows up
anymore and network dies.
Every rom-com: Boy meets girl and they have good times. Somebody messes up. They have a fight. The get back together again.
Every Hallmark movie: Big city girl ends up in small town by coincidence. While decorating for Christmas she falls for the small town guy and decides to stay. (The productions get cheaper by the year, so where they had scenery you now see people talking in front of a blurry background for 90% of the plot. )
I want an author who's work is completely unidentifiable from one release to the next. Or to find a dozen authors who have inconceivably and independently created identical manuscripts. Surely if there were a library with all possible books, we would find one of those two things...
HN comments, N levels deep: The subtle mention of a largely tangential but controversial topic is important to me. Here is an eight-paragraph thinly-veiled diatribe on why you are wrong.
A snippy comeback that isn't remotely as clever as I thought it was. I am now quoting every other sentence of your reply as I try to both double down on my point and furiously back-pedal my use of the term.
A performative personal attack, disguised as helpful suggestion; revealing that the purpose of my engagement was never a serious discussion, but only making myself look good. The use of a semicolon tastefully solidifies my position as a very smart commenter.
Cervantes: hipster idealistic old fart with vintage books tries to roam around the world with a pragmatic and grounded singleton as if they lived in 'the good old times from the books' kicking the asses of bad guys.
Instead of a militia, they look like funny hobos disguised as comedy soldiers in a TV sketch.
'Modern', real life events hit the hipster back. Literally, up to the point seeing the singleton lecturing him over and over after several clashes with the world. Everyone laughs.
>> Dan Brown -- Award-winning author Dan Brown has written a complicated role for you with his expensive pen. You are a humanities professor at an Ivy League university, but also, somehow, in mortal peril. Your love interest is picturesque but ill-mannered and French. This is somehow worth several million dollars.
Kafka seems low-effort though. I humbly substitute:
You have inside you an extraordinary writer but are instead employed at the postal service, where you spend the rest of your days watching your first manuscript submission mistakenly misrouted back across your desk.
> Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.
> Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.
> The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors...
I got the impression that Dr. Jones was well-liked by his female students (in his younger days) and a few friends, but was generally avoided by most of his peers.
…I know literature, like all art, is open to interpretation, but I am immensely curious as to how you came away from The Mayor of Casterbridge with joy, of all things.
Haha, you're right, joyful isn't the right word but there's something pleasant in all the twists and turns. There's something comical about Henchard's sadness.
Brandon Sanderson: scrappy protagonist discovers that they have magical powers, despite struggling from crushing depression and/or trauma. This annoying guy named Hoid smirks at everyone. The next weekend they accidentally trigger the end of the world, which they prevent in the nick of time by becoming a god.
Brandon Sanderson: Spacebar activates your special movement ability, F activates your special attack, watch your power meter--and don't miss the cutscene at the end of the final boss fight!
William Gibson: You are an adequate but drug-addled hacker, navigating dangerous, high-tech worlds where blurred realities, conspiracies, and corporate power struggles force you to uncover hidden truths, survive against powerful forces, and ultimately question the nature of identity, technology, and control.
Neal Stephenson: You are a small cog in a historical epic leading to a far-flung speculative future, where you grapple with the complexities of technology, cryptography, and philosophy, as well as incidentally discovering the best way to eat Captain Crunch cereal.
I think you're giving Gibson too much credit. It's more like: Mysterious person with unlimited resources hires scrappy set of hacker types to obtain a McGuffin, which usually someone else is also seeking out. They find the McGuffin. Mysterious backer reveals themselves in some way. The end.
That's the plot of every single novel. In Neuromancer: Case & co. is hired by Armitage. In Count Zero Turner is hired to rescue a scientist out of a biolab, although the McGuffin is the scientist's daughter; there is a second hire plot involving a mysterious millionaire hiring an art curator to look for an art piece. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, Mona is hired by a mysterious group for a gig that turns out to be a way to kidnap a McGuffin. Not much else happens. In Virtual Light, Rydell is hired to recover a McGuffin stolen by another character. In Pattern Recognition, Cayce is hired by a mysterious millionaire to trace an obscuree Internet video. In The Peripheral, the main character is hired by a mysterious group to remotely patrol a building. And so on.
It's like Gibson can't invent a plot where the plot isn't about work. And the person hiring the main character is always this shady and incredibly wealthy individual, so that the main character can be supported by all their resources.
Blurred realities and questions about identity doesn't sound like any Gibson book I've read. That sounds more like Philip K. Dick.
due to my being saddled with the British National debt it turns out that a loner of a dying race must set out on a morally ambiguous journey through all reality, killing everyone he meets except for a thinly disguised Sancho Panza - Volumes 1 through 119.
due to my having accidentally stolen the brown acid from Alan Moore, who you probably suspected I might actually be for some years, in Volume 120 loner from a dying race meets other loners from other dying races in future and merges into 1000 limbed kaiju and is forced to eat the soul of Sancha Panza.
on edit: due to having eaten the brown acid I stole I forgot how to spell words like eldritch and Alan and have edited one of them in a new edition of my previous work to undo the typo introduced in the acid-addled version.
due to coming down from previous trip I realized that racism has infected fantasy like a virus, and the only way forward is poorly disguised Gormenghast pastiche.
on edit: thinly veiled threat to write 500 more comments on this issue in the next few months.
due to my having survived the last 3 or 5000 comments, this part is somewhat hazy, I would just like to say that China Miéville is my legacy and he thinks of me as his literary father, which I am in a way, although I am a heroic loner from a forgotten race doomed to wander through HN writing comments for all eternity until I can finally destroy the Evil God who cursed me to do so and cash my royalty checks.
on edit: or perhaps I have cashed these royalty checks here, in the end times, and am having lovely sex times with erotically gender strange creatrixii - a word like any other. While the world dissolves into a tangerine ice cream created by the whim of the last human minds to develop a plot point.
OK, but what if it turns out - in the end of all this - I'm actually Jesus! huh!? Pretty cool right! Those drugs were so freaking worth it!! Now to pay off the mortgage I took out to afford the drugs!
on edit: I would like to detour into a very long series of comments in the following subtree of this site as to why Grant Morrison sucks and has ripped me off and is no good.
this is the first of my congratulatory interviews with people who admire me with I_complete_me, in which I talk about how I was the first originator of the character Jerry Cornelius and how he is I, while Gideon Stargrave is just a cheap ripoff by a no talent hack, later I shall take out a massive loan on my future creative output to buy enough drugs to allow me to stomp about the countryside flattening cottages in the hope of squishing Grant Morrison who is an agent of Chaos.
on edit: it may appear that I am easily hurt and somewhat petty, but given that I am stomping about the countryside flattening cottages it follows I am actually very strong and the far bigger man.
Hemingway: All of life’s problems start and end with a drink. You drink because there’s something inside you that’s broken, something you can’t fix—or at least not yet. Anxiety gnaws at you, born from problems you can’t solve, or the weight of old trauma. The bottle seems like a way out, a moment’s peace from the storm in your head. And for a while, it works. The drink quiets the noise, softens the pain. Soon enough, the drink that was supposed to save you is the very thing pulling you under. The problems you were running from don’t disappear—they grow, just like your need for the next drink.
Linus Torvalds: you take a week-long swing at a problem you find annoying, fascinating, or both. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by some alternative from the GNU project that, pinky promise, is coming out any day now.
Grace Hopper: BEGIN a framework that powers critical government functions, AND has secretly saved America from mass destruction time and again, only to be dunked on by Reddit for trivial matters of syntax END.
John Carmack: Doom, but better-looking.
Brendan Eich: you take a week-long swing at a problem your employer finds commercially compelling. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by the prior art it was supposed to build on.