Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karellen | Hacker News Reader

> The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is an excellent book.

Wait, did you mean The Diamond Age is an excellent book? Or... has someone made/written the book-within-the-book into an actual (e-?)book?

View on HN

I think it is the subtext of the book: "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

The full title of the book is The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.

Yeah, but if you're referring to a book, it's customary to refer to it by its main title, rather than just its subtitle. Especially when the subtitle is also the name of a different book, even if that book is a fictional book within the book.

If I started talking about how great The Modern Prometheus is, people would generally either a) be very confused, or b) think I was a totally pretentious dickwad for not simply calling it Frankenstein.

I guess that's a misunderstanding of protocols on my part, because the subtitle began with 'or', I assumed 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' was an alternate title and an alternate way to refer to it.

I kept thinking it should be possible to make something like it back in the day, and now with LLMs and deepfake, it's even closer to reality!

I’ve seriously toyed with the concept. It may be possible now to get an application like that on a tablet, offloading computation to OpenAI and its ilk, but it wouldn’t be reliable. We’re not good enough at text and image generation to do it autonomously yet. We’re a little better at speech synthesis than Stephenson predicted, but it might still be nice to have a ractor too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com