Join Me in Jamverse | Hacker News Reader

Join Me in Jamverse

contraptions.venkateshrao.com

39 pointssurprisetalk15 comments

Off topic but it’s getting crazy how confidently you can point at a websites design and go “An LLM designed this.”

Jamverse kind of just reminds me of a less guided SCP wiki? I’m not sure I fully get it though. Seems interesting though, I’ll have to poke through and read.

I think what we sense as “LLM design” now is what used to be “oh, they used a popular squarespace template or Wordpress theme”. Makes sense that as the models were training on UI, they would heavily favor recurring patterns such as re-used design templates and popular UI libraries over the bespoke stuff.

That plus the AI generated imagery being used in hero images on a lot of sites is built from lazy prompts and riddled with tells like weird shape choices, smooth glossy surfaces, or mangled text.

Isn't this just Substack? I don't think they allow too much styling - body and section fonts, header size, header image and icons, etc. Could be wrong.

EDIT: Oh the Jamverse website. Yes, agree 100% - apologies for missing at first.

> Jamverse (named for Fred Pohl’s dictum that the science-fiction writer’s job is to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam)

clarke once said he was proud of one of his books not only having predicted the portable personal music player, but that people would use them to be public nuisances.

Half the fun of writing science fiction can be coming up with novel concepts or 'rules', what happens when everything of consequence in the 'Jamverse' has been built out? Will they start a new one?

I agree that there's a tension you're pointing to here. But I can imagine narrative devices to get around it, if it's ever a problem.

Maybe go one level deeper? Or maybe branching the timeline in the past, like Marvel popularized?

Shared fiction communities happen naturally when you have simple rules and a strong appealing grounding (visually, intellectually, ritually, or otherwise).

See: Minecraft, Sonic, MLP, SCP, even Bored Apes Yacht Club for 15 minutes

Which is me agreeing with you: this seems too hard to get; there's already 4 timelines and no faces to get attached to.

So why wouldn't I just write my own stories unrelated to this?

There are lots and lots of fun shared sci fi and fantasy universes out there, some of which were carefully designed to be a shared universe from the start. George R. R. Martin's "Wild Cards" comes to mind. Plus of course all of DC and Marvel. Every fan fiction author knows the fun of picking a ready to go universe and going "what if this guy fought/loved that guy?" Sometimes setting up a template can be a really cool way to encourage growth, like an artificial coral reef.

But this specific one does seem like a complex starting point.

I was hoping for a post about learning to use the Jam build system that Boost uses, but the "extended fiction"part was interesting. I don't think I still understand what this is.

It looks like Ethereum is somehow a part of this universe along with AI? I am not sure what the identity is here fully, but I get that writers are wanted. Are they supposed to also be crypto broish?

Venkat's an advisor to Ethereum in some capacity. The Protocolized Reader has a couple essays that are blockchain-adjacent, but from the more utopian angle of using them to build a better world rather than just a vehicle for currency speculation and graft.

It looks like the way in is through a contest that expired then?

Yes to the contest having expired; I was surprised to see this posted now instead of a month back. There's still a decent and growing community around all this on the Protocolized discord (https://protocolized.io/community) and there's bounties for both fiction and nonfiction pieces.

(I'm an enthusiast, but not a current producer. Too many other open threads in my life.)

If it weren't on discord I might think about it.

Makes sense. A lot of the community overlaps onto Substack. I find the format there slightly better, though the ownership is worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com