AWS services, explained in Victorian English with GPT-3 | Hacker News Reader

AWS services, explained in Victorian English with GPT-3

victorianaws.com

91 pointsthesephist27 comments

Bollocks - really, really big bollocks.

I'm 52 and wrote quite a few letters by hand on paper and posted them. You do not get to riff about something you have never experienced. This wankery is absolute twaddle.

I doubt that whomever created this monstrosity has actually written a letter or a bluey.

I've read through the nonsense "by an army of ethereal code-monkeys" and it is awful. Who on earth says: "It is a rare thing, my lord"? For starters Lord (capital L) and no one I know would even say that.

This is not Victorian English. It is not even English English.

> Who on earth says: "It is a rare thing, my lord"?

Baldrick

'tis a rare thing, my Lord. Baldrick always dropped vowels correctly and in keeping with the nostalgic and nonsensical notions we often have of those days.

'tis and 'twas and all that tosh was part and parcel of Bladder.

EDMUND: Tell me young crone, is this Putney?

CRONE: That it be, that it be.

EDMUND: "Yes it is". Not "that it be". You don't have to talk in that stupid voice to me. I'm not a tourist.

Its training set includes, among other things, text written by millennials using Ye Olde English for comic effect on Reddit. I think I detect that flavor of twaddle in the output.

People have the ability to hear large amounts of lowbrow content but not emit much of it. Their output doesn't match their training set in that way. It'd be interesting to try to train an ML model to have only highbrow output despite substantial lowbrow input. That's a particularly expensive labeling project because you have to hire highbrow people (or at least upper-middlebrow people who can tell the difference) to label the brow-height of every bit of content.

"Ye Olde English"

That is pronounced: the old english. The Y is actually a "thorn" - a letter lost to modern english. The trailing e on olde is the least of its worries. "Correct" spelling used to be completely optional back in the day. The word english has had many variants and the capitalisation for all three words is simply for effect.

I live in a little town now called Yeovil (Somerset, UK) that was documented as gifle (bend in a river) in about 300 or 400AD and since has had at least sixty documented spellings. It went via Ivel and Givelle and a lot of others. Substitute y for g and squint a lot.

That y for g thing works quite a lot for English to German place names. For example Weybury (en) and Wegburg (de) - note that -burg and -bury are fortified towns.

There are a few simple patterns that can be seen with the old and modern languages but it rapidly gets out of hand and it gets quite hard to see how say: scire gereva becomes shire reeve and hence a sheriff!

It is incumbent upon you, dear reader, to extend the hand of charity and goodwill toward your fellow man, and in so doing eschew all malice, unkindness, and sarcasm. I implore you, do not take up your pen in anger and unleash a seething torrent of invective against my person, for I have only the deepest respect for you, and it would cause me great pain to know that I had caused you distress. Please do not sneer, including at the rest of the community, whose interests you do not represent, whose intelligence you do not comprehend, who suffer while you prosper, who live in ignorance of your existence while you enjoy the fruit of their labors.

[1] https://victorianhackernews.com/

There is quite a difference between sounding off "for a larff" as the twittering classes call it and vicarious malice tempered with spite. I had hoped, even desired, that I had provided enough clues (as Sherlock might say) and other indicators within my former missive to ensure that a reader might infer the former was my intention rather than the latter. Perhaps I should have been more forthright and made my point crystal clear, rather than hiding behind crass attempts at humour and not a little hyperbole.

If you closely examine the Victorian "H.N." rules, you'll note multiple oxymoronic phrases and not a few inconsistencies. It might appear initially that someone is attempting to effect a writing style that they are not normally accustomed to.

It's still bollocks!

"EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)

The tried and trusted method to conjure the dark arts known as "Kubernetes" is one of great study and contemplation, for it is not to be taken lightly, this dark path on which you embark. With dedication and perseverance, you may find success where others have failed. Trust in yourself, and the rewards shall be great."

Can't argue with that!

Lord knows a product is problematic and complicated when it's synopsis badly translated into Victorian English seems "about right".

Truly a relic of the timeline where not only was Mr. Babbage successful in building his analytical engine, but proceeded to commercialize it as a service.

AEaaS

I'd like to see DALL-E making a painting of what GPT-3 would look like if it were a human.

My very first prompt to Craiyon was to generate a self portrait. In two of the outputs it showed me a picture of someone holding up another persons picture in front of their face.

Is it self aware? That is pretty interesting inference anyway, I guess we’ll never understand why it “thinks” this way.

It is not self aware -- it was trained on a data set of labeled images.

Therefore, it tried to produce something similar to the set of images with "self" and "portrait" which unsurprisingly include quite a range of self portraits.

Someone with an English degree explain, why did Victorians back in the day think that degree of wordiness was good writing?

Most authors were paid by the word at the time.

One classic example would be Charles Dickens, whose novels started out as serialized chapters in newspapers. While it doesn't take away from him being an excellent writer, if you ever wonder why some of his stuff seems to have filler chapters... well, now you know.

Likewise why were German philosophers and thinkers so apt to write dense and convoluted sentences? I'd like to know.

I love this style. Is it just me? Dickens, Stevenson, ...

I would rather ask the opposite : why the need to adopt a "modern" style (well except in fantasy books, I guess).

the elastic container service definition reads like an absolute funding pitch and i love every word of it.

“Route 53

Route 53, the fleet-footed messenger of the gods, delivers your DNS traffic across the Internet with the speed of a Thracian chariot, and at a fraction of the cost.”

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Thracian chariot loaded with parchment barreling down the road.

Being ex-AWS I can now breathe a huge sigh of relief and reveal what was once a tightly-guarded secret, viz. that this is in fact the underlying design of Amazon Glacier. The service team has for years feared that some squirrely commodities analyst with a penchant for correlation would eventually cotton on to how closely retrieval fees are indexed by horse feed futures

Similar to electricity in the 1700's, is AI in its 'parlor trick' phase? Really feels like we're close to the edge with AI where it might start to snowball hard.

> "an army of ethereal code-monkeys"

this is poetic

This is priceless.

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