Viewing profile — sieve

I have read almost every kind of fiction under the sun. My standard for what is great is pretty high. This is why I am perfectly willing to accept LLM output as lot as the writer h…

> The 'window' is I assume a french door, which I suspect is a mistranslation. It is a french door/window. The original story is by Saki (HH Munro), one of the greatest short story…

Did you read the original by Saki (Exhibit 12)? Ideally, you should read all 14 exhibits. Each has been produced by a different LLM, some local, others frontier models of the time.…

This is something from early 2025. The situation and my own way of driving the models has improved somewhat in the intervening period. Variations on a Theme of Saki https://gist.gi…

My solution to this, as the human-in-the-loop, is pretty simple. If the generated draft is missing something that was implicit in the chapter outline, I ask the LLM to incorporate …

Yeah, if I think something is worth publishing, I might do that. I don't do this for the money. I do it because I enjoy building a completely lived in world from character sheets a…

> Producing a bunch of filler content to pad things out is the opposite direction from most of the reading that I have found helpful. Padding, though it is probably the wrong word …

Because I care about the world and the characters? And want to read stories set in that world instead of five pages of bullet points?

> But they generate objectively bad text. They don't. I don't think people are taking full advantage of their capabilities. They produce perfectly functional prose. Sometimes, they…

> If what you care about is the characters and the plot, you already have those, you wrote them yourself. Nah. What I have is the skeleton. You want it made flesh. That is what the…

I do not expect the LLMs to do everything. They are assistants. You still bear the responsibility of stitching everything together into a cohesive whole. Make changes as required. …

There is some stuff you read for the prose. Most books, I read for the characters and the plot. So the LLM-assisted output works for me.

I tried the programmer's method. Automating stuff. Then I realized I prefer the wood carver's method. So I take it slow. I think and write the outline for a chapter. Then I have th…

> inconsistency across various parts of the story, items that are introduced, questions that go unanswered etc. This is a workflow problem. What the LLM normally needs: - very basi…

Think of it this way. You like well-designed houses. Like looking at them, living in them. So you design a house per your liking having bought a plot overlooking a stream and a mea…

I have read thousands of books in my lifetime. I don't really have too many hobbies outside of reading. Trust me when I say there is an audience for literal crap. LLMs actually rai…

You could say that for any book. People are too precious about man-made art. I don't see the point. Every book ever written might have some novelty value of its own. But it mostly …

I have hundreds of plot ideas from 40 years of reading and watching crappy books and films/tv. Never had the time or energy to explore those. LLMs let me try out various plots. To …

I often produce have LLMs extract the text from a book scan and then translate it into English or some other language I know. Then I load it into my interlinear reader for side-by-…

Everyone should learn Sanskrit if only to read the great poets and dramatists in the original. The translations are often nice, but you do lose something in the process. Thanks to …

Melville's "Bartleby" is very good

> Can you name three titles that you would recommend? I can recommend some authors from the period: W Somerset Maugham, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, H Rider Haggard, Wilkie Coll…

I installed this the moment I got my Kobo Libra H2O. Mostly read fiction from the 1800s and early 1900s and I did not want to fight whatever proprietary software the reader came wi…

Indian companies do not like to do research. Too much risk. They prefer to buy proven stuff. There are small companies doing a lot of what the Chinese are doing (including LFP and …

It is a name. The identity comes from the rituals, beliefs, clothing, literature, temples, architecture, food and so many other cultural and civilizational markers. Pakistanis who …