Robin Sloan is awesome: if you haven't read Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, it's a really fun and easy read. He works Hadoop into the writing!
Also something I realized only a year after purchasing the book: it's glow in the dark!
I'm also playing with RNNs for text generation - currently trying to make a Haiku writer that'll actually "make sense". In case anyone else is interested: https://speakerdeck.com/herval/creating-creative-machines-v0 (shared the code of the experiments too)
Wow. Love it.
A corpus of books, organized by genre, available from Zhu & Kiros:
Ha! I wonder if it's possible to replace the sci-fi texts by actual code from GitHub and let the computer codes randomly for you. :)
Or train it to predict code in a code base conditioned on the rest of the code in that same code base. That way, when you condition it on your current code base, it might be able to generate sensible completions that could actually be useful.
Fun project, API works perfectly, but as Robin Sloan says, "it could go offline at any time."