Show HN: BrainTripping - language model comedy | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: BrainTripping - language model comedy

matt.is

283 pointsh34t41 comments

BrainTripping is a lot of fun, but what I love about is that it's one of those ideas that is completely unique. Something I've never heard of before and then get to experience something completely new.

Once you get past the learning curve of knowing that the end trip is a mash of your thoughts and the original's writings, it becomes easier to see how to think on BT.

Kudos on the launch, and here's hoping for a bright future.

Nice resurrection of Forum2000! Props.

http://randomfoo.net/junk/200402/xalton.forum2000.org/matrix...

http://slashdot.org/story/00/08/13/0213225/end-of-an-era-for...

Oh, fascinating! Thanks for the link.

Pretty cool! There are some hilarious submissions: http://images-cdn.braintripping.com/trips/4f9efd4088cbda0300...

Total blast! Love how each selection can take the sound bytes into a whole new direction. Well done!

Really nice! Amazing graphics. Did you do them too?

An illustrator helps me out on those. That was a happy accident; I was going to use photographs, but found that getting permission for all of them could be impossible, so the only way to make it graphical was to come up with original portraits. I didn't realize that they'd change the entire character of the site in a really good way.

Hi, Nice work on that, is there any way you can introduce me to the illustrator?

My email is my HN username @ gmail

Me too please. realfilip @ gmail.com. Thanks.

I laughed at the premise alone, but seeing the submissions and trying it out myself was a blast. Great work on this. I'd almost like to see an X vs. Y poetry slam.

http://www.braintripping.com/new/paul-graham

This one's interesting:

"I'll just write everything this way from now on." - pg as Paul Graham 3 months ago

http://www.braintripping.com/trips/4f90ad9fb3b88b0300000f3a

Nice work on this! The illustrations are superb -- Sort of reminds me of the "Fake steve jobs", "Fake Grimlock" and that whole set of cool meme-generating twitter feeds.

Seems a bit overdesigned/overengineered though right? Do you really need the adlib typeahead? Or did you realize that people needed more constraints than just being able to type whatever they wanted into a box?

Seems like you could have an entire conversation between a few famous celebrities (alive or deceased) and then take that conversation page and make it atomic and shareable... and I feel like that would get traction.

Just my 2 cents.

Quirky idea, gave it a little whirl. Really love the feel of the website; the graphics are awesome! Nice work.

I have been playing with this for a few weeks now and I've had some really great conversations with people I don't know, using the vocabulary of people who are not me. Surreal and addictive.

I enjoyed the way that the "intelligence" of it left a lot of room for ones creativity. Nice game/tool when one is in need of a little something to get the writing flow going!

This is really fun! I kind of would like to be able to select a few different "expressions" from the character I choose to emphasize the tone of what they say.

This is really fun, but coming up with interesting things to say is hard independent of whose brain you are using.

This is better than anonymity.

Great! Are you using a markov chain for the suggestions? Is it a "dissociated press" kind of thing?

Similar, yes. The main difference here is the role that you (the user) play in shaping the output.

Are you using only the previous word as the input for the chain? I wonder if it would be better to use something like the previous 2 words. I think that's how Mark V. Shaney managed to be so convincing.

I want something like this but hooked up to my facebook friends.

I've been playing with that. Haven't got it right yet, though.

Really creative idea and +1 for Backbone.js! It seems like your Leaderboard views linger when changing to another view. Otherwise, really polished, good luck!

Ah, thanks for catching that!

Wow, great work! It takes a lot of effort to think and write in character (phrases, vocabulary, and most importantly mood).

I've had a lot of fun tweeting as the old-timey characters for one of my brands (https://www.blamestella.com/news) but it's definitely felt like hard work at times. Huge kudos for really breaking it down and simplifying it.

Thanks! I took a screenwriting course a couple of years ago, and the first exercise was writing dialogue as a 17-year-old girl. It was rather mind-bending. While developing BrainTripping I was often surprised by word combinations that are second nature to me, but other people never use (and vice versa).

Would be cool to allow people to have themselves added + feeding the site text written by them. Oh, and you need Gandhi on there.

While I have fun writing in Jerf's voice, I'm not sure why anybody else would want to...

Mind sharing what OCR software you used? I'm working on project which has just this need.

Thanks!

If you email me (me at matt.is) I can get back to you - I played with so many I can't remember which one at the moment.

awesome, I'm currently working on a website to build experiments around the writing process

I have quite a few idea and I like those kind of projects that permit to liberate the creativity (through constraints!)

Love the ability to download the trip so I can add it to my own site.

That's a really interesting project. And I love the graphics!

This is incredible!

Love this site

This rules.

I don't like the text input system.

Tutorial doesn't work in ios

~or~ how to get a bunch of people to train your neural network

Only Facebook connect or manual login? I choose neither.

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