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Happy third birthday, Horse_ebooks

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Re: Happy third birthday, Horse_ebooks

#3
She uses the phrase "spam robot". Is that semantically equivalent to automated? If so, for the love of god, can someone tell me how I can build something that auto-generates beautiful existential poetry like that? (I am only half joking here)

Re: Happy third birthday, Horse_ebooks

#4
post #3

She uses the phrase "spam robot". Is that semantically equivalent to automated? If so, for the love of god, can someone tell me how I can build something that auto-generates beautiful existential poetry like that? (I am only half joking here)

I only have half an answer: Markov chains. It's probably going through text and using Markov chains to create "similar" text.

Then question then becomes what text to go through, how long the Markov chains are, how you vary them, etc.

Not long ago I took a workshop on algorithmic music where the lead professor had published a book of haiku. The vast majority of the haiku were algorithmically generated via Markov chains, while a very slim minority were actual haiku from 17th century Japan (iirc) translated into English. Guessing which haiku were "real" and which algorithmic was very hard to do.

Re: Happy third birthday, Horse_ebooks

#5
post #3

She uses the phrase "spam robot". Is that semantically equivalent to automated? If so, for the love of god, can someone tell me how I can build something that auto-generates beautiful existential poetry like that? (I am only half joking here)

Some ideas from the guy who created @nytimes_ebooks: http://harrisj.tumblr.com/post/23737140672/nytimes-ebooks

Re: Happy third birthday, Horse_ebooks

#6
post #3

She uses the phrase "spam robot". Is that semantically equivalent to automated? If so, for the love of god, can someone tell me how I can build something that auto-generates beautiful existential poetry like that? (I am only half joking here)

Have you played around with markov chains? They're really easy to build and produce very entertaining results - a few years ago I tried feeding all of the SXSW Interactive session titles in to one and got results like "Participatory budgeting crowdsourcing for real time marketing growing a digital culture".

Re: Happy third birthday, Horse_ebooks

#7
post #3

She uses the phrase "spam robot". Is that semantically equivalent to automated? If so, for the love of god, can someone tell me how I can build something that auto-generates beautiful existential poetry like that? (I am only half joking here)

Its original purpose is affiliate marketing spam - every so often it tweets links to buy crappy ebooks, and the random text was presumably originally an attempt to evade spam detection. The fact that the amusement it provides is entirely accidental in origin (we don't even know for sure whether the operator knows about it now) only adds to the brilliance.

(This is briefly mentioned in the article, but since you asked...)

Re: Happy third birthday, Horse_ebooks

#8
post #3

She uses the phrase "spam robot". Is that semantically equivalent to automated? If so, for the love of god, can someone tell me how I can build something that auto-generates beautiful existential poetry like that? (I am only half joking here)

half joking... have a look at http://www.polygen.org. AFAIK it's only in Italian, but it can generate pretty much anything with a little grammar...

-- EDIT --

on http://www.polygen.org/it/grammatiche/tecnologie/eng/manager... you can find an online example in English.

I found ff cache the page on refresh instead of reloading it, so if you want other generated phrases you need to fool the browser appending some gibberish in get (à la ?foo=1234)

Re: Happy third birthday, Horse_ebooks

#9
post #3

She uses the phrase "spam robot". Is that semantically equivalent to automated? If so, for the love of god, can someone tell me how I can build something that auto-generates beautiful existential poetry like that? (I am only half joking here)

I only have half an answer: Markov chains. It's probably going through text and using Markov chains to create "similar" text. Then question then becomes what text to go through, how long the Markov chains are, how you vary them, etc. Not long ago I took a workshop on algorithmic music where the lead professor had published a book of haiku. The vast majority of the haiku were algorithmically generated via Markov chain…

Do you happen to have more information on that book?

Re: Happy third birthday, Horse_ebooks

#10
horse-ebooks.com now goes to quotestatusjoke.com.

What does this iframe on quotestatusjoke.com do? http://quotestatusjoke.com/twitter/tw.php

The contents say:

> Now 07:27 - we work from 14:00

And a cached version says:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:M0v3DQU...

"1000_quotes|2441|2049|13240 1 - that matter, of National Review - there is not much reason to pay it attention. OK 0 - If a church offers no truth that is not available in the general culture - in, for instance, the editorials of the New York Times or, for OK

Search by tweets: fun & follow: 1559500496 158361802 375521629 391547065

Unfollowing... ok 56349379 ok 113315835

delete in messages:

delete out messages: 352898710100922368, 352898708427382785, 352898707064225792,

exit check new followers

Send thank you message to: 50860829, 414537821, 479947786,"

Is this a site visitor-triggered cron job?

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