Lorem Gibson | Hacker News Reader

Lorem Gibson

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I love the idea, but I wish the sentences were capitalized and the dashes were fixed. I think the spaces between dashed elements need to be removed. Right now, I see things like "cyber- neon" or "bomb- ware".

In a similar vein, there's DeLorean Ipsum, which I often use for fake text when mocking up UI: https://satoristudio.net/delorean-ipsum/

> At the calculated moment, you start off from down the street driving toward the cable execrating to eighty-eight miles per hour.

Not sure if my execrations have enough umph to propel a stainless steel-clothed automobile to 88mph.

Even though this is an obvious type, execrate is a real word, and it's not the one you are thinking of. It means "to express great loathing".

As in cursing; I assume they know what the word means.

I did indeed look it up before posting. I shall translate: I don’t believe my expressions of great loathing provide the required energy. YMMV.

> Even though this is an obvious type

An obvious typo, you might even say!

When correcting someone on a finer point, it’s only fair to subject yourself to the same even-handed criticism before posting.

(I am a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist when it comes to spelling and grammar, but I am a stickler for the rules when it’s time to follow them! It’s fair to assume that we didn’t know there was going to be a test, and I have made typos also. I just thought this was ironic. Carry on!)

I actually spotted that within the edit window but decided to leave it as I deserved it.

What a coincidence, I just saw Lorem Gibson referenced yesterday. OP did you just read https://mbh4h.substack.com/p/neuromancer-2025-review-william... ?

Yup. That's where I discovered it too. Greatness.

Love the idea, I immediately went to grok (testing for work) and asked it to give me a few placeholder paragraphs in WG's style:

"The street pulsed with a neon hum, data streams threading through the air like ghost veins in a concrete jungle. Holographic hawkers flickered at the edges of vision, their pitches fragmented by the static of black-market neural rigs. She moved through the crowd, her optic implants slicing through the visual noise, parsing faces for tells of corporate loyalty or freelance desperation. Every step was a negotiation with the city's rhythm, a dance of survival where the wrong move could flatline you in a datastream dead-end.

In the shadow of a megacorp tower, its glass skin reflecting a fractured sky, the air smelled of ozone and recycled dreams. He jacked into a public terminal, his fingers dancing over a haptic deck scarred with use, pulling fragments of encrypted chatter from the dark pools of the net. The data was alive, slippery, coded in dialects of machine and man, whispering secrets of a deal gone sour in some offshore server farm. Trust was a currency nobody carried anymore, not when every connection could be a trojan horse.

She crouched in the alley, her smartcoat shimmering to match the graffiti-smeared wall behind her. The drone overhead was a cheap model, its sensors blind to her cloaking, but she didn’t trust it to stay that way. Tech evolved fast here, and yesterday’s edge was tomorrow’s obsolescence. Her neural feed buzzed with alerts—proximity warnings, encrypted pings from a contact she hadn’t seen since the Osaka run. The city didn’t sleep, and neither did its ghosts, their voices woven into the code that kept this sprawl alive."

It's even more funny if you make a sort of Chinese whispers by asking to repeat it in some other writer' style. Eg try to start with Gibson and end with Dostoevsky, it's marvelous.

Start with "Gibson, William" and end with "Gibson, Mel"

That's pretty good! Would it pass a blind reader test vs actual William Gibson?

> industrial grade media physical math- dolphin motion market semiotics fetishism San Francisco A.I. assault.

Coincidentally the pitch for my new startup.

Fun idea, but I was hoping it would actually form grammatically correct sentences. Also proper capitalization wouldn't be that hard to implement.

Basically markov chains trained on Gibsons books. Programming something like that is starting to feel like the "hello world" of information theory.

Looks like somebody even made a cyberpunk style markov generator:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/6g4weu/i_made_a_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain

I think the next step up from a markov chain is throwing the results into https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool and checking for grammatical correctness, and retrying each sentence until valid.

LLM's have us spoiled. I'd like to see the ouput of something like nanogpt [1] trained on a Gibson corpus. Seems like a lot better looking result should be easy to achieve today.

[1] https://github.com/eniompw/nanoGPTshakespeare

For those who want a "down under" flavour there's the great https://boganipsum.com.au/

G'day Boyter :-)

Ah this takes me back. It felt as thought the early 2010s were replete with ipsum generators (https://hipsum.co/ was always fun), and they were really handy when coding up a PSD design.

Not really sure if it’s just me, but I don’t really reach for them in my work anymore. Not sure if it’s because everything used to be a blog and now everything is an app, lower information density, or that content is less likely to be text.

We are so back to the Older Matrix (eerrr, Internet). There used to be many lorem ipsums - Monty Python, Star Wars, Douglas Adams, Nick Fury, Pulp Fiction (Samuel Epsom), and what not. I still have quite a few ipsum generated text replacement as keyboard shortcuts via Alfred’s Snippets.

Cute idea, although I might have gone with Henrik Ibsen.

This here is a real stepping razor

Lorem Bel-airum - Lyrics of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air _but in Latin_

For fun I just tried this in Google translate, and then took its output in Latin and translated back to English.

This is the story of my life, and it's been turned upside down for a while, and I want to take a moment, sit there, and tell you how I became the leader of a town called Bel Air.

Born and raised in West Philadelphia, I spent most of my days in the playground. Taking it easy, being able to relax, being all calm, and throwing all B-balls outside of school.

When two men who were planning to do bad things, started causing a ruckus in my neighborhood, I got into a little fight and my mom got scared, and she said, "You're moving to Bel Air with your aunt and uncle."

I whistled for the car, and when it pulled up, the license plate said "new" and it had tickets in the mirror. If I could say anything, this car was rare, but I thought, "No, forget it, home to Bel Air."

I arrived at the house about seven or eight o'clock, and I called out to the driver, "Hey, house, smell it later." I looked around my kingdom, finally I was there, So I sat on my throne like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Lorem gypsum dolor sit cement

Half of gibsons work in the sprawl and in chiba describes trash, floatsomw and its accumulations. This misses that.

No “the sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel”, but neat enough.

Meta Gibson: Include words from works based on the work of William Gibson.

Hack the planet!

I wonder what authors think of things like this.

In a sense, he only has himself to blame.

Congratulations on hacking the Gibson.

BASE jump

Where are the verbs?

Descriptive hacker sentences eschewing verbs. Reflections of the neon retro-future nodality on the chrome surface detail. Illuminative apophenia semiotics. Digital tension but an absence of systemic narrative.

Staccato signals of constant information. A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires. Lasers in the jungle somewhere.

This is great. I will definitely be using this in my next product demo. Chapeau on the idea.

I just tried asking GPT to generate some Gibsonesque filler text, I'll same you the slop reading the slop but I think it did a pretty good job.

What surprised me is that I can kind of guess which novels various words and ideas came from.

https://gibsonipsum.com/

Whoa, the "japanese" checkbox animation is awesome, so satisfying!

Do View Source -- just take a look lol

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