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Comment by mjd | Hacker News Reader

For those not familiar with it already, the writing and art style are a well-executed pastiche of Arnold Lobel's ”Frog and Toad” books.

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

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And the story this was inspired by in particular is called “Cookies”:

Toad makes very good cookies and he and frog can’t stop eating them. “We need willpower!” they say.

So they put the cookies in a box. But they realize they can just open it, so they tie it with string and put it on a high shelf. But they realize they can get it down so Frog goes outside and scatters the cookie and birds eat them all.

There says Frog “now we have lots and lots of willpower!”

Toad is upset. “You can keep your willpower Frog. I am going home to bake a cake!”

And then Frog gave Toad Wegovy and his eating disorder was mostly fixed.

Sadly Toad was one of the ~0.5% of Wegovy users who get gastroparesis.

I just recently saw that story in a book. What was it... Oh yes, it was in "Situated" by Angela Duckworth (of "Grit" fame). That's the gist of the book. Frog and Toad changed their situation rather than the downstream thoughts or behaviors (through willpower). Make it harder to do (friction up) what you don't want to do and make it easier (friction down) to do what you want to do.

You should pick up a collection of Frog and Toad stories. I read them because I have little kids, but they are genuinely great little with stories. The stories are simple, but it is amazing how well developed the two characters are, and how they play off each other in different situations.

Arnold Lobel is also just very funny. Grasshopper on the Road made me laugh out loud the first time I read it my kids. The opening story about beetles that love morning ("The Club") feels so timely.

Life is a bit easier when we see the conditions that lead to the undesirable outcomes, and so much harder when we aspire to perfect ourselves and use moral strength to over come our weaknesses. Like my mom always said of parenting, "Make it easy to be good." - works for self-management as well, and is much more relaxing and happy than constantly trying to grind or improve.

And oh my goodness it's well-executed!

There is also a very nice musical based on the Frog and Toad books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Year_with_Frog_and_Toad

I got to see this with my kids in Toronto last summer. It was a lot of fun!

The main post also reminded me of Mr.Toad, a character in a book I read as a child - The Wind in The Willows by Kenneth Grahame. One of the editions had illustrations of Toad similar to Lobels work.

Thanks for mentioning this- I completely forget this toad is from a different book.

One of the things I've done periodically with LLMs is asked them to write a story in the style of Lobel's Frog and Toad stories, and... they've always done an incredibly bad job. Either meandering texts that go nowhere, or just straight up ripoffs of the original stories. I haven't asked in a year or two, though.

Sometime in the past 6 months, I asked ChatGPT to write stories in the style of a Ramona Quimby book. It does pretty well imitating the style. It writes from the perspective of a child, vocabulary, tone, and pacing are all similar.

It's never wonderful prose though. It's missing that je ne sais quoi.

It has done okay with the style, I think, but the stories had no point, they had no motivation.

I used to play with this on TextSynth when it has very few models and plain design (so GPT-6J or whatchamacallit). “Meandering texts that go nowhere” was the precise defining characteristic of all of the completions, every single one of them.

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