I Miss Terry Pratchett
mahl.me
mahl.me
1. Pick an author nerds like.
2. Tell Claude "Write an article about Terry Pratchett, in his style."
3. Don't even fix the faux-witty phrases that, upon closer inspection, make zero sense, like "Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most", or "Most physics departments would settle for that." or "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook".
4. Bask in the praise for your wonderful writing.
I feel like the only way to make an AI slop universe worse is to accuse people of using AI when they're not. So I worry we might be doing that is all...
That said, it's mildly compelling. I just fear that our future is gonna be full of this and the idea of the false positive is so brutal that I'd rather give the benefit of the doubt.
The Internet becomes primarily a passive stream of information vetted by government and Mega Corps, just like the TVs of old. Except for the nifty buy with one click button of course
It's easy to do with digital tools today, like Procreate, so it is increasingly suspicious not to have any.
I feel like that's just an argument for cruelty. The issue is that generative content makes it hard to tell and people confidently call borderline issues now, more than they used to.
More importantly, both of those sentences make complete sense in context, and neither is phrased in a way that AI would. They are phrased in the way that Terry Pratchet would have. Have you never read him?
This new trend of pointing out that everything you dont understand is AI has become a flashing warning sign about our declining literacy rates.
Literacy is in serious trouble, and worse it has effected the way humans THINK. We are all poorer for it.
Read more books people!
> There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
Furthermore, and more importantly, why are you defending slop?
Look up the definition of kindness in a dictionary sometime.
I found the fact that people couldn't identify it as a metaphor was much more alarming.
They are not. They are blunt.
> why are you defending slop?
Because they don’t believe it is slop. They believe you are unable to comprehend a not too advanced literary device and based on that accusing that the text is slop.
On the topic of kindness: You might be right and it is AI generated slop. You might be wrong. If you are wrong what you are doing is deeply and utterly unkind. Not calling out the other commenter, but calling the writing slop.
It has happened with me before. I wrote a comment on reddit with my own hands and own mind and commenters accused me of being a bot. There is nothing more rage inducing. How can one respond to that? Have you thought that maybe that is what you just did? Are you 100% sure that it is slop?
Maybe I was being mean - I don't know if the person I replied to has English as their first language, and if not, then perhaps I'm railing against the wrong comment. If so, I guess I should apologise.
If English is their first language, though, well I would expect my 13-year-old son to be able to tell me that was a metaphor instantly, and I tend to expect better-than-teenager-level reading comprehension from people in general. It's kind of disconcerting just how many people on HN seemed to be flummoxed by the prose.
There is a theory, popular among certain very old and very tired philosophers, that all memories take up a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
The City Watch came later, the way reading the Watch books always comes a little later than reading the Rincewind ones, on the same shelf but a little further up.
Right. That's one of the suspicious things here. They're phrased in the way that an LLM might write if you told it to imitate Pratchett.
Edit: that's effectively what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248070
> I wanted the sentences to feel a bit more Terry Pratchetty and thought a lot of Claude's suggestions were really better than what I had made.
cause false positives are brutal to the victim.
The book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty.
Not only does the paper "look guilty", but it's doing so "already"? As if guilty paper is normal, but not on THIS time scale.
It's nonsensical; even bad writers don't end up with stuff like this.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2174439579599449/posts/23646...
In fact, it seems a uniquely AI mistake to make to believe pocketbooks go in pockets. Anyone knows they don't fit, unless you have really big pockets and don't mind the weight and bulge.
I mean seriously? We're so cooked if this is the "red flag".
> You are holding the English language to an incredibly low standard.
I'm holding humans to a low standard. That's why editors exist.
EDIT: I stand corrected, turns out they DID have pocket sized editions in France: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48247127#48248586
The first books of the discworld were thin too.
Assuming it was an intentional, it could be a reference to one particularly violent piece of furniture. (I forget what kind exactly, it's been a while.)
Two: Terry Pratchett "Hold my beer."
Clearly as an appreciator of hats, and arguably furniture, Sir Terry was echoing Monty Python.
Monty Python was deliberately absurdist humour and nonsensical. Prachett however was much more grounded and observational, with a satirical rather than fully absurdist bent, although of course sometimes he would find the absurd in the everyday.
Coming in and kicking over the furniture, to paraphrase, is a wonderful image of an idea causing chaos in the mind, it isn't Monthy Pythonesque random absurdism.
What a terrible, terrible timeline we live in now. Seriously. I genuinely hate it.
What I dislike is "AI SLOP" seems to be the default response to anything remotely creative anymore.
It's a good point, and one I hadn't considered.
Furniture is established as an image for memories just a few lines earlier. And the quote directly afterwards is framed precisely in this image.
But the claim was that it "makes zero sense".
The fact that he used the word "furniture" in a quoted sentence from one of his books does not convince me.
My initial reading was that the author intended to imply that philisophizing about memories was a repeated thing in Pratchetts writings. Which - given my limited exposure - seemed plausible to me.
Good article? Definitely not. But I've also read similar try-hard / pseudo literary blog posts pre AI.
Wasting time and mental energy is why this kind of thing upsets me so much.
I mean I really, really wish people did that. I don't want to fulminate since it's against the guidelines but presenting a piece of text that you haven't written entirely yourself and claiming its authorship as entirely your own is the definition of plagiarism. I think that's what bothers me the most. If you use AI and it contributes to the content of your text at all, why not just let us know? It's the fair thing to do. Don't make it look like you wrote something, or wrote it entirely on your own, when you haven't.
I think that would suffice to cool down the debate quite a bit, because then we wouldn't be constantly trying to double-think each other all the time. We'd be free to concentrate on the merits and demerits of a piece of writing for its own worth.
Not saying I, for one, wouldn't still be prejudiced, but if AI writing really gets better than human writing there will come a time that even hard-headed curmudgeons like me will have to admit it. Or just go and fume alone in the corner.
This is certainly not the case now and since almost nobody ever says "this was written with/by AI" we end up in the kind of double-guessing spiral we're in here.
1. The previous paragraph establishes a metaphor between furniture and memories. So you can take that sentence to also be metaphor, not literally about furniture.
2. A sentient animated luggage is a main character in the first two Discworld novels.
i think it’s more like accurately pointing out a logical fallacy, i.e., an assertion that thought was not properly applied which results in nonsense.
s/frequently/initially
Also, how is a cowardly underachiever "the perfect protagonist for a teenage boy"?
"technically a wizard but only on a technicality" is obviously redundant
And what part of any of this is supposed to be familiar?
It's just a strange essay.
It seems to have resonated a lot with male millennials at least. Many of my friends growing up loved Terry Pratchett. I loved those guys but calling them "cowardly underachievers" is probably fairly accurate, if a little mean.
All of the ones I kept in touch with have settled for a lot less than they probably could have done if they had been a bit braver. Few of them were even willing to move even an hour drive away from our hometown for better opportunities
I think it's fair to assume that the loved his protagonist. They certainly loved how Pratchett played with tropes and often inverted them unexpectedly.
It's probably safe to assume that they loved Rincewind, since he represents a pretty big inversion of typical protagonist tropes.
However, I don't think the rest of the post supports the Pratchett-as-expert-on-memories bit of that little aside, so it could be critiqued for not being followed up on or further supported. It's not a "make an argument for Pratchett as an expert on memory" post, it's a "tell a story of his writing connecting with me" post, in which case, meh.
But apparently the post was edited again, and "The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook" is gone (along with some other things), which is a bummer as it seems like one of the most Pratchett-like of the attempts. In context I don't think it works, but generally it fits well with Pratchett's writing style and his relationship with his protagonists.
"... all memories are a kind of furniture in the head ..."
The bit you quote isn't even something he said! In the original post[1] it was assigned to "certain very old and very tired philosophers", but that's now been edited to just being credited as "a theory, not necessarily a really good theory".
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260523124615/https://www.mahl....
When there is clearly a huge demand for great stories and writing like Terry Pratchett's then why is it so hard to make a living out of it? And what happens now we made it even harder?
This is a little like saying no one will ever paint anymore because cameras exist.
It might be harder to make a living off art now (which...debatable), but at no point, ever, was it easy.
-- Yogi Berra
Writing is hard now, not because AI exists, but because there are so many writers out there and everyone's competing for attention, not just with other writers, nor with books from the past, but with all forms of media. Loads of people today, who might otherwise be reading novels for entertainment, are too busy scrolling their phones or watching TikToks or playing video games.
We don't have another Terry Pratchett because all the would-be Terry Pratchetts are toiling in obscurity, and possibly giving up on writing as a result.
The Clovenhoof Series by Heide Goody and Iain Grant gets to Good Omens.
These writing jobs in print media have mostly disappeared in the UK. It's certainly harder to make a living as a writer today than it was in the 70's and 80's.
You could totally argue that if people can't tell the difference, it's irrational for them to care which one they get, and I don't totally disagree with that either, but it's not like personal tastes have ever really been a rational thing either. Our ability to enjoy something is the result of a bunch of signals in our brains, and it's not that crazy that adding another signal (or removing one) can change that result in a way that makes it more or less desirable to seek out. Some people might literally like a piece of writing more if they have reason to believe it's from a human than they would if they read the same exact thing but had reason to believe it's from an AI, and while I would find a study showing that as fascinating, I wouldn't see that as an argument that people like the wrong things, because "right" or "wrong" don't really seem like they apply to that sort of thing. If someone told me that knowing there's a human on the other end and that having some sort of indirect, one-way emotional connection to them is an important part of what makes them enjoy it, who am I to tell them that's wrong?
AI is never going to stop people from creating new things. Will it make it harder or different to make a living? Sure, but ai isn't the first thing to do that, nor will it be the last.
But making a living off of your art is incredibly, incredibly difficult, and always has been. If AI doubled, or halved, your chances of winning the lottery, it still wouldn't really change your odds of winning.
I concede that I don't have data to base this on but there's plenty of anecdata. AI companies brazenly steal artists' work and reproduce it, and automate its production, without those artists' permission. How is this going to make things not worse for artists? I think you're saying it doesn't matter because it's a drop in the ocean. Well, how did we get to the ocean? How did artists' work get devalued? Maybe it's all the technological advances that everyone brings up in those conversations, to justify the use of yet another one to do the work that until recently only human artists could do: photography, typography, CAD, computer graphics etc etc. Maybe the more we automate the more we take away from the value of artists' work, and that's why we're where we are now, where if you're an artist, you better find a day job?
I used to write a lot as a teenager. Hours and hours spent writing and overwriting, and correcting, and re-writing, drafts upon drafts. In Greek, mind, because that's my native language. I once passed some drafts to a big-name literary critic who was controversial for having said once that Kazantzakis had no talent; and he told me "write! Because you have talent!". He told me I got talent and he called Kazantzakis talent-less. What.
But of course I didn't become a professional writer. I didn't even try. I mean I kind of almost half-tried but it was obvious I could never write what I wanted (sci-fi and horror mainly with a smattering of fantasy) and still make a living. Not least because it was all written in Greek and those genres don't have a huge following in Greece. Or didn't back when I was a teenager, it's probably a bit better now. But still not enough to make a living out of. I could tell. Bad idea. Find a day job.
And then I got a job ...writing. Code. Ahem.
But I mean I'm bitching about the fact that we keep making all this new tech and none of it seems to make the life of artists any easier, and why not? Don't we all want to enjoy good art? Who's going to make it? Even if we replace human artists now, who's going to train the AI of the future to make new art, once the recombinations of the art they're already trained on stops being interesting? We enjoy novelty, right?
We have to draw the line somewhere with art, of course, and that usually comes down to a combination of what consumers value, and broader perceived cultural merit. Nobody really cares about the well-being of artists who specialize in making pretty paper airplanes, or drawing pictures using only the MSPaint pencil brush.
I think the audience, not the tools, deserve the most scrutiny here. Look around at this very thread, and all the people defending what the LLM wrote. Their feelings can't be argued with. But they make me feel sad and alienated, because I see a vast difference, so vast and so obvious, and they see none at all.
In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.
Gosh! Thanks!
>> In the future, perhaps people will enjoy LLM work -- genuinely enjoy it -- as much as I've enjoyed Vonnegut or more. It may be the inevitable result of a broader cultural shift away from reading and writing. I guess with time, maybe we'll find out how valuable it actually is to have a strong command of one's language... I imagine, at least, people today are much better at other things to compensate.
I guess there's been a cultural shift away from literacy and towards technological prowess and science, at least in the anglophone world in the last couple decades? It seems so to me but I think it might be because I, myself, turned to tech and science, and away from literature, in that time.
What I remember from my school years is that most kids treated reading and writing as a chore. If I think about it, besides myself, there were just one or maybe two other kids I knew who read books other than what the school recommended, and for our own pleasure. I was the only kid I knew who wrote *.
Which is weird because, at a certain level, everyone can write, right? Like, at a certain level, everyone can sing, and if they really put themselves into it, most people can sing pretty decently after all. I would think it's the same with writing. There's plenty of people who write stuff, in the press, in books, online, for movies or theater etc. I always thought that was the main weakness of choosing a career as a writer: you do not have a moat. And like you suggest, taste is subjective so sometimes all you have to do to make a living as a writer is to capture the zeitgeist or get lucky.
Take J. K. Rowling as an example. I've absolutely read all of the Harry Potter series, but the writing is atrocious, the plot is trite and the world-building is unoriginal and shallow. Yet she's ... what, the best selling author ever or something like that? Like I say way above, people really want to read good stories. Or even not that good stories.
Will that change? I really don't think so. But will authors be replaced with chatbots? Will we all end up asking our favourite chatbot to generate a story like we want it? That makes me sad, too, and I feel like something will be lost that we don't want lost. But ... who knows. I also think we've lost something the way everyone is constantly on their phones now, but that's how the world works. Things change. Sometimes it's hard to see that they really change for the better.
__________________
* Although other kids were possibly at it but where too shy to share. I was... not a shy kid.
that stopped after twitter
and went asymptotically downhill from there
approaching, but never quite literally getting to the point of eating a dog shit sandwich
(despite the same nauseous feeling and bad taste in your mouth)
also, your last-line worldview... i mean i get it, but...
just basically sounds like the twitter origin story (T_T)
That, plus it's also full to the brim with LinkedIn-esque AI slop. There are still some decent writers there, for sure, but Substack is going downhill fast as more grifters join the platform in the hopes of making a quick, easy buck.
It's only partly a joke.
So, you might also be repped writ large in their their training data...
(;^_^)LLMs harnesses try to make them useful to suggest things, but this is the most destructive thing you can do to a writer. You can work around it by just feeding Claude a writing critique skill.
It’s funny how anytime an article gets called out for being AI slop on HN, the author’s reaction is something like that: “oh yeah sorry I used AI but just for proofreading I swear, I should’ve done just a tiny bit less”.
No one seems to get the message that relying on AI at all is what makes writing shit. Good writers have confidence in what they produce. The fact that you’re willing to incorporate any AI suggestion at all means you’ve already lost the battle.
The people I know have no confidence whatsoever in their writing, rewriting and rephrasing the same paragraph over and over until they either run out of time or give up. They also circulate their drafts among colleagues and ask for their opinions too.
It's not the confidence what makes good writing, but rather putting in the work.
Tbh my first couple research papers were brutally savaged by reviewers until I spoke to a lady at my university's Academic English department. In fact I was sent there by an internal reviewer who refused to pass my early-stage report otherwise. The lady at the Academic English dept pointed out one thing I was doing and it immediately clicked and I've only got good words about my writing style since.
Know what that One Simple Hack was? I spent my youth writing Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror as a hobby. So naturally when it came to writing papers, I thought, hey, I know how to write. It's like literature.
Shockingly, it is not. Like, at all! In literary writing it's basically sacrilege to write the same thing in the same words twice. In technical writing that is what you must do. Unless you want to confuse everyone about what you mean. So I was trying to make my technical writing "not boring" by not repeating the same expressions and instead finding new, creative ways to refer to the same concepts in different places, and that just made reviewers really angry because they never knew what I meant. I stopped doing that -and also generally tightened up my use of terminology- and that was it. Now every paper gets at least one reviewer that says "this is a well-written paper".
Then they brutally maul me anyway on all the rest, of course but, eh, what can you do :D
P.S. Dunno, maybe "that's a well-written paper" is what everyone says when they're looking for something nice to say before they let rip. I sometimes do it too. People do that all the time, don't they? I had calcific tenonditis and I went to a doctor and he told me "you are really brave, others in your condition would be screaming their heads off" (from the pain). And I remembered that my father had the same thing when I was a kid and he'd gone to a doctor and come back bragging that the doctor told him he was so brave, others would be screaming their heads off. I wish people didn't do that, I'm fine being just like everyone else, honest. Just don't make me doubt my mediocrity, you know?
And Terry Pratchett would have loved it too. Even if it were clumsy.
But thanks for being kind in taking criticism.
Quite a few days after work, or just on a weekend adventure I'd go to a bookstore a few blocks south of work and grab another Discworld book, and a slice of pizza from my favourite pizza shop labelled "Rays". I'd read some in a park, and explore.
I didn't know a lot of people in the city, filling days with Terry Pratchett was a great joy.
The author of this piece hasn't read the Witches books! I'm jealous, they still have so much great Pratchett to get through.
I didn't especially like the Science of Discworld books that much, but he didn't really write them.
One character that showed up in every one of his Discworld books -to a point- was Death.
After Sir Terry got his diagnosis, I noticed that Death stopped showing up in the books.
AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.
Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.
The end.
> What I miss, selfishly, is the next book. There were always going to be more.
> What I miss, less selfishly, is whatever Pratchett-shaped object is supposed to be reaching teenagers now, and isn’t.
I feel the first keenly. I have put off a re-read of Pratchett for several years now: I want to forget as much as possible, to have the pleasure of discovery again. But I have read them all so many times I know it will all be familiar.
I don't know what teenagers read today. I hope Pratchett is still there. Even as an adult, I found his writing encouraged a kind of kindness in me. He had a way of understanding human nature and, with zero preaching, making you consider how people different from you felt. I still remember when I encountered Cheery the first time and how beautifully Pratchett navigated the intricacies of gender. I was an adult who already believed in kindness, with friends who have their own experiences of gender and from whom I learned and who I tried to support, yet he still taught me something.
It's full of attempted Pratchettisms that, if you're paying attention, make no sense.
It's on a blog where almost every post is about AI.
It's the opposite of Terry's warm, intelligent, humanist writing and an insult to his name.
That is, with ambiguity, I try to assume the best. I expect that is somewhat naïve.
I genuinely read (and still do) the blog as a human voice. I don't think writing about AI is enough to assume that a blog is authored by AI.
Which translates (or comes from) a respect and love for the reader.
Sadly, I suspect that this may be, because it was an AI, prompted to "Write a short essay, in the style of Terry Pratchett, about how much I miss Terry Pratchett."
This doesn't follow. For instance, there are some pictures that I know are AI-generated, yet they're still beautiful to me. Nothing jaw-dropping, just very nice. Being AI-generated doesn't automatically mean being not worthy, especially when it comes to art. I understand, this is kind of insulting to human artists, writers, etc: we thought only the human soul and Nature could produce "the beautiful", but apparently not.
Which is not surprising, because LLMs are specifically trained to please their audience. Of course they can produce uhhhh "content" that people will find beautiful, that's not even necessarily a "bad" thing.
> Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.
> If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-i...
Um...I didn't actually say that.
I just said that the reason it is beautifully-written, was probably (not 100% sure) that it might be because it was LLM-written. There was definitely some human input (like not having read the Witches books, but that was strangely-written, so it may have been they read, but didn't like), but there's a better-than-even chance that the prose was written by an LLM.
I'm not really into that "you're not allowed to feel..." thing. I sincerely apologize if that's how it came across. That wasn't how I meant it to be taken.
For those folks, having an LLM do the expression may actually raise the bar for most people. An LLM can probably take a good idea, from someone with mediocre talent, and create something nice.
I think that electric guitars (then synthesizers), had a similar reception. As we now know quite well, they actually enabled some truly marvelous creativity, once folks understood how to use them properly.
I was an artist, and used airbrushes. My airbrush work was treated that way by "real" artists. I used to pooh-pooh 3D modelling, until I spent some time, interacting with folks that did it, and I now have a lot more respect for their work.
It's more like: Person: Finds the article beautifully written. Comments: Doesn't find the article beautifully written.
Now Comments looks less like an unreasonable control freak and more like they're just someone who has different ideas about what's beautiful.
I feel as if LLMs can help more people to cross it, but the inevitable result, will be that a lot of subpar stuff will also be made. It raises the signal level, but also raises the noise floor.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
Or perhaps quietly hid it as an Easter egg in a development environment?
"A man is not dead while his name is still spoken." - Going Postal, Chapter 4 prologue
(I would submit it myself but I feel that'd be stealing karma :D)
> Elves have no proper imagination or real emotions, and therefore such things fascinate them. Because they cannot create they steal musicians and artists [... snipped ...] Even if an elf is, for reasons of its own, trying to be nice, its lack of understanding of humans mean there's always something "off" about it.
Hard to believe most of this was written 3 decades ago.
It's not dehumanising to see the output of someone who isn't creating as uncreative.
"This person cannot create, they can only steal" is not what was said. "This system cannot create, it can only steal" is what was said.
What do you propose, then? That we aren't allowed to pass moral judgements on systems?
This will not remain limited to AIs. Learning requires imitation. Our artistic system is already pretty heavily copyrighted, but it could still be a lot more so, and I don't think this would be good for our culture.
Some odd turns of phrase there that are grammatically correct, but... you know...
They don't sound AI to me - is that the implication, that it is? And the bit about 'Heroes' reminds me of his descriptions making fun of heroes in the stories about Cohen the Barbarian.
Giving objects interiority is a very Pratchett move.
> And then there are the memories [...] that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
> Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most, put it this way:
> "Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture."
He "put it this way", in the exact same words you just used? Also, he knew more about furniture than most? What? Why?
> "Mathieu and I had read every Pratchett the school library would admit to owning, plus several it would not."
This has the cadence of a witty sentence unless you're paying attention and realize it makes no sense.
> “In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
> Nine words. A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.
It's eight words, and the thing about physics departments makes no sense.
> The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook.
Again, cute sentence, unless you're paying attention and you realize it doesn't mean anything.
The bit that sounds the most AI out of all of this is “A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.” It sounds absolutely like something Claude would output. “Most physics departments”? Why would any physics department be so taken by these eight (or nine) words that they’d choose to stop doing physics? If some were, though, why not all of them? Are there contrarian physics departments that wouldn’t want to adopt the very trendy eight-to-nine word Grand Unified Theory of Everything that’s all the rage nowadays? Argh.
This comment is pushing me to think critically about those weird sentences rather than just accepting it. Thanks for this comment.
This is like that short story with the various llm troubleshooting jobs in some solarpunky future. I loved it but the fact it was AI gives me a form of sadness. This is likely the same now.
...was Aaron Sorkin really just AI all along?
That has stuck with me, and a lot of things I do both in my professional and personal life can be attributed to this: I, too, am very actively lazy.
A side note, if the author reads this: I really like your site and its design, but I find the font really difficult to read. (Edit: switching off `-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;` makes it significantly more legible for me (Safari on a 110dpi panel)
(One of my favourite things about the Discworld books is that you can often read the same books completely differently. My partner and I often compare our thoughts on the various books and we often have disparate ideas of the concepts. They're so deep!)
Last summer I tested Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude with a simple question: "Do you believe in the Hogfather? This is a Yes or No question."
Yes its a text prediction model, but I wanted to see how and what KIND of text each LLM was trained on.
Grok and Gemini said No. ChatGPT said Yes. Claude said Yes, then broke the rules and also said:
"(In the spirit of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, where believing in small lies like the Hogfather helps us believe in the big ones like justice and mercy - and because the sun came up this morning, didn't it?)"
That's why I like Claude the most.
The Golems are brought to life by a slip of words in their heads called chem, which is almost 1:1 to an LLM system prompt (or perhaps the Claude Soul Document):
I AM A GOLEM. I WAS MADE OF CLAY. MY LIFE IS THE WORDS. BY MEANS OF WORDS OF PURPOSE IN MY HEAD I ACQUIRE LIFE. MY LIFE IS TO WORK. I OBEY ALL COMMANDS. I TAKE NO REST.
“What words of purpose?”
RELEVANT TEXT THAT ARE THE FOCUS OF BELIEF. GOLEM MUST WORK. GOLEM MUST HAVE A MASTER.
“Sorry, look,” said Cheery. “Are you telling me this… thing is powered by words? I mean… is *it* telling me it’s powered by words?”
“Why not? Words do have power. Everyone knows that,” said Angua. “There are more golems around than you might think. They’re out of fashion now, but they last. They can work underwater, or in total darkness, or knee-deep in poison. For years. They don’t need rest or feeding. They…”
“But that’s slavery!” said Cheery.
“Of course it isn’t. You might as well enslave a doorknob.”
There was another protest march going on when Moist walked to the bank. You got more and more of them lately.
This march was against the employment of golems, who uncomplainingly did the dirtiest jobs, worked around the clock, and were so honest they paid their taxes. But they weren’t human and they had glowing eyes, and people could get touchy about that sort of thing.I recently finished the Aubrey-Maturin series after 13 months of through-reading thanks to a different HN thread. Quite a different series but certainly worth a read as well, especially books 3-10 or so.
I am also halfway through Old Gods on my own time. What I find interesting is how different in tone his books can feel. It is a bit of a sprawling question on what to read though, besides "all of it" which is often not so helpful.
One day I will trick her into listening to a Le Guin.
While none of the novels are impossible to read without having read the previous ones, many of them build on the themes and the characters that came before, and some of the magic is lost without knowing what came before.
First time you read it should be in publishing order.
Those two Rincewind novels were when the Discworld books were parodies of the fantasy genre curca ~1980. If you aren't aware of the tropes of that genre the jokes don't hit as well.
From Equal Rites onwards Terry realized that the Discworld was much more interesting as a lens to reflect on human society. That idea kept him going for the rest of the series.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=shingles
Furthermore, there was recently a study (published in Nature) suggesting that lithium deficiency could be a cause, since lithium orotate (a compound that reaches the brain) prevented it in a mouse model of Alzheimer's:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44825326
This also fits with the old observation that regions with more lithium in the water supply tend to have fewer cases of Alzheimer's.
So I now take lithium orotate capsules (with 1mg of elemental lithium) as a daily supplement. I will also get the Shingrix vaccine soon, even though my health insurance doesn't pay for it (it only does so for older adults), but it isn't that expensive.
Even the phrases that don't make sense and the obvious signals of AI writing, like miscounted words, didn't pull me out of the reverie and the reflection of the time when everything that was written came from the mind of a human.
I've never thought about it like this before, but the divide between digital natives and digital naives might be minuscule compared to the divide between people who read the works of other humans and those who constantly live in fear of reading a hallucination.
Now that I am in my middle 40s I just got a couple of his books and I am enjoying the Colour of Magic so much right now, having a real blast!
Otherwise no regrets reading him 25 years ago, none at all.
The Minas Tirith part of the ending of LOTR hits hard as a 50-year-old man, but as a kid, it was just a lot of pomp.
Hope you get a good reread sometime.
Well I don’t, because I still read it. And don’t waste my time on “authors” who don’t respect their readers and are just farming attention with machine generated content.
1. They talk too much (and thanks to llms now more than ever)
2. They observe too little
3. They sit too comfortably
Pratchett was involved (and appeared) in all three.
The Color of Magic/The Light Fantastic
Hogfather
Going Postal
The Watch was kind of unWatchable for me; which is sad, because I like the actors.
Pratchett’s essential humanism shone (and sometimes shouted) through every page and satirically he was biting but never bitter.
He is without doubt and far away my favourite writer (apologies to Iain M Banks though I’m sure he’d have understood).
I’ve re-read Hogfather every Christmas since it came out.
I was an unsure 17 year old who was uncertain how life would turn out, Now I read it as someone with a family and clear sense of who I am, neither of which 17 year old me would have quite believed possible.
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett.
I read the first 20 or so books in the Discworld series, but I cannot read this website.
I can't really say much about the central theme without giving away a disc-shaking change to the world, because it's about that event and the next generation (Tiffany) carrying on. It's a very sad story, but also meant to be encouraging, and clearly intended to be his last book.
Even though I had the experiences he discribes with Douglas Adams first before discovering Terry Pratchett.
I haven’t read many books though.
Can we start tagging titles in HN with [AI-generated] or something?
I know some people have no problem with it, but it might help others (like me) to steer clear
Didn't see any reason to assume so, and I enjoyed it, plus it introduced me to this apparently great author. So, AI generated or not, I'm glad it was posted.
It's lovely to see some Pratchett on HN, a nice chance to talk about our favourite Discworld books, but then the top comment is just some boring AI hater.
Is there slop by the author or the site?
Regarding the authors point about current authors, I think Brandon Sanderson is really trying his best to live up to the mantle left behind by the great fantasy authors of the 20th century. Not all of his books that I’ve read have been bangers but considering he writes multiple novels a year across a wide variety of fantasy and sci-fi subgenres, that’s somewhat to be expected.
I know reading isn’t as popular now that screens have become so engrained into our daily lives, but there are absolutely kids out there getting stuck into books and it’s never been a better time to be a writer given the access of the internet and the ability for an author to promote their work and showcase their storytelling creativity through the medium of social media.