Linus Torvalds: you take a week-long swing at a problem you find annoying, fascinating, or both. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by some alternative from the GNU project that, pinky promise, is coming out any day now.
Grace Hopper: BEGIN a framework that powers critical government functions, AND has secretly saved America from mass destruction time and again, only to be dunked on by Reddit for trivial matters of syntax END.
John Carmack: Doom, but better-looking.
Brendan Eich: you take a week-long swing at a problem your employer finds commercially compelling. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by the prior art it was supposed to build on.
Fabrice Bellard: A problem with several competing solutions catches your fancy. Within a week you have a gleaming, state-of-the-art solution that is flexible, reliable, and extensible—all written in pure, efficient C. Everyone begins to build on your work.
Donald Knuth: While writing your magnum opus, a minor irritation arises. You invent a new subfield of computing and spend two years developing a highly idiosyncratic language and tool system.\footnote{And several new typefaces!} Your irritation dissipates and you go back to work with your writing. Generations of academics curse your creation but have nothing better to work with. They wonder if they can get Fabrice Bellard to take a crack at it…
> Brendan Eich: you take a week-long swing at a problem your employer finds commercially compelling. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by the prior art it was supposed to build on.
Jack Woodford, a decent pulp writer in the first half of the 20th century who also wrote several books on writing and on how the publishing industry works, including "Trial and Error" in 1933 which Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury both cited as a major influence in getting their writing careers started, had a nice description of how to plot:
> Boy meets girl; girl gets boy into pickle; boy gets pickle into girl
Stephen King: A character wonders if, given all the suffering recently endured over the last few hundred pages, life is nonetheless still worth living. This character is killed by an entity which, despite all appearance and reputation, is permanently and inexplicably murderous.
Terry Pratchett: A visionary on the Discworld invents something vaguely like a modern object or industry. That invention enslaves the visionary and must be stopped by a crotchety old person who hates change.
To summarize Dan Brown books by describing the characters fundamentally misunderstands them. The characters are about as important as the characters in a porno.
The point of a Dan Brown book is to chart the stupidest possible path through history and pop science, and he's uniquely capable of this.
Wodehouse: Titanic forces beyond your control such as scheming aunts, accidental engagements, and inability to express your feelings threaten to irrevocably ruin your life forever. It’ll take a Machiavellian mastermind and a series of unlikely coincidences to extricate you from this predicament but you’ll have to pay a price.
Every social network: you make something for your friends and end up with viral growth immediately or after years of nothing. You spend the rest of your days policing trolls, spammers, and scammers trying to abuse or hijack the network. You or someone in marketing send out too many spammy notifications abusing user trust and users block your notifications. Nobody shows up
anymore and network dies.
Every rom-com: Boy meets girl and they have good times. Somebody messes up. They have a fight. The get back together again.
Every Hallmark movie: Big city girl ends up in small town by coincidence. While decorating for Christmas she falls for the small town guy and decides to stay. (The productions get cheaper by the year, so where they had scenery you now see people talking in front of a blurry background for 90% of the plot. )
The above was written by hand. As an experiment, I asked Claude to generate a few dozen more. Most weren't great. Here are the highlights:
Michael Crichton:
You're a brilliant scientist who's just created something that will revolutionize the world. Congratulations! It's now trying to eat you.
Michael Crichton:
You've stumbled upon a conspiracy involving [insert scientific field]. Now you're being chased by [insert government agency] while trying to explain complex scientific concepts to the reader.
Suzanne Collins:
You must choose between two brooding love interests while simultaneously overthrowing a totalitarian regime. Priorities!
Stephen King:
Welcome to small-town Maine, where the biggest threat isn't the weather, it's the [insert supernatural horror]. Don't worry, a writer will save the day.
Neil Gaiman:
Mythology crashes into modern life. You're either a god who's fallen on hard times or a regular person about to have a very weird Wednesday.
Margaret Atwood:
Society has taken a slight turn for the worse. Women are now [insert dystopian scenario]. This is definitely not a commentary on current events.
And perhaps my favorite:
George Orwell:
Big Brother is watching you. So is your toaster. And your pet. Trust no one, especially not the pigs.
Out of 30 generations, there were a few more that made me smile, but these were the main ones I enjoyed. Something I've noticed with statistical content generation is that it has a difficult time not being too "on the nose" -- almost like next-token-prediction is making it want to rush and get to the punchline a little too quickly. It has a hard time being subtle, and too often it felt like it was just a glib little summary of a story, rather than a sardonic take-a-step-back-and-look-at-the-big-picture sort of approach.
No major revelations, but just barely interesting enough to warrant commenting here. If there were a Dull Men's Club version of Hacker News, I would have posted this there.
To do King justice you have to capture some kind of on-the-nose allegory (alcoholism, childhood trauma, the existential dread of one's musical tastes being classifiable as dad-rock, the Cold War), and it can't be about the corruption and decline of small-town New England, which is everpresent. Yog-Sothoth should make an appearance.
Having just found out about topic X, and thought about it for 30 seconds, I have strong advice for the world's expert about an edge case they forgot for solutions to topic X.
Whoooa, what a blast from the past. I loved that site, but I bet I haven't been there in 15 years. It seems their most recent update was just last week.
I want an author who's work is completely unidentifiable from one release to the next. Or to find a dozen authors who have inconceivably and independently created identical manuscripts. Surely if there were a library with all possible books, we would find one of those two things...
Brandon Sanderson: scrappy protagonist discovers that they have magical powers, despite struggling from crushing depression and/or trauma. This annoying guy named Hoid smirks at everyone. The next weekend they accidentally trigger the end of the world, which they prevent in the nick of time by becoming a god.
Brandon Sanderson: Spacebar activates your special movement ability, F activates your special attack, watch your power meter--and don't miss the cutscene at the end of the final boss fight!
>> Dan Brown -- Award-winning author Dan Brown has written a complicated role for you with his expensive pen. You are a humanities professor at an Ivy League university, but also, somehow, in mortal peril. Your love interest is picturesque but ill-mannered and French. This is somehow worth several million dollars.
Kafka seems low-effort though. I humbly substitute:
You have inside you an extraordinary writer but are instead employed at the postal service, where you spend the rest of your days watching your first manuscript submission mistakenly misrouted back across your desk.
> Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.
> Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.
> The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors...
HN comments, N levels deep: The subtle mention of a largely tangential but controversial topic is important to me. Here is an eight-paragraph thinly-veiled diatribe on why you are wrong.
A snippy comeback that isn't remotely as clever as I thought it was. I am now quoting every other sentence of your reply as I try to both double down on my point and furiously back-pedal my use of the term.
A performative personal attack, disguised as helpful suggestion; revealing that the purpose of my engagement was never a serious discussion, but only making myself look good. The use of a semicolon tastefully solidifies my position as a very smart commenter.
William Gibson: You are an adequate but drug-addled hacker, navigating dangerous, high-tech worlds where blurred realities, conspiracies, and corporate power struggles force you to uncover hidden truths, survive against powerful forces, and ultimately question the nature of identity, technology, and control.
Neal Stephenson: You are a small cog in a historical epic leading to a far-flung speculative future, where you grapple with the complexities of technology, cryptography, and philosophy, as well as incidentally discovering the best way to eat Captain Crunch cereal.
Cervantes: hipster idealistic old fart with vintage books tries to roam around the world with a pragmatic and grounded singleton as if they lived in 'the good old times from the books' kicking the asses of bad guys.
Instead of a militia, they look like funny hobos disguised as comedy soldiers in a TV sketch.
'Modern', real life events hit the hipster back. Literally, up to the point seeing the singleton lecturing him over and over after several clashes with the world. Everyone laughs.
What does it say about me that I've only actually read 14 of the 56 authors in the second list [1] as an adult (i.e. by choice)? I know of quite a few, but haven't read most of them.
Humanity would be a pretty bland experience if everybody universally read the same toplist of influences. Some may aspire to study The Classics at Oxford, but to me that sounds like a nightmare of deprivation.
Accordingly I see your balanced, partial foray into those classics as a positive. It shows you're an individual bespoke personality with broader influences. We won't know which of the modern works we read are future classics - that'll come in hundreds of years.
I would argue that a shared corpus that everyone has read is a key foundation to a society with rich and nuanced social intercourse. That doesn't mean everyone has read the same books, but there would be significant benefits in kids coming out of high school or college having all read 50 or 100 of the same great books (plus anything else they wanted to read).
I've had the pleasure of listening in on some discussions from high-school students that study classics meeting each other for the first time. Their discussions tend to be very different from what you'd hear from a typical high-school student. While other students might share the language, the ones who have read the same 50 or so great books tend to have a shared vocabulary of ideas at their disposal that doesn't seem to be there without the shared books.
due to my being saddled with the British National debt it turns out that a loner of a dying race must set out on a morally ambiguous journey through all reality, killing everyone he meets except for a thinly disguised Sancho Panza - Volumes 1 through 119.
due to my having accidentally stolen the brown acid from Alan Moore, who you probably suspected I might actually be for some years, in Volume 120 loner from a dying race meets other loners from other dying races in future and merges into 1000 limbed kaiju and is forced to eat the soul of Sancha Panza.
on edit: due to having eaten the brown acid I stole I forgot how to spell words like eldritch and Alan and have edited one of them in a new edition of my previous work to undo the typo introduced in the acid-addled version.
due to coming down from previous trip I realized that racism has infected fantasy like a virus, and the only way forward is poorly disguised Gormenghast pastiche.
on edit: thinly veiled threat to write 500 more comments on this issue in the next few months.
due to my having survived the last 3 or 5000 comments, this part is somewhat hazy, I would just like to say that China Miéville is my legacy and he thinks of me as his literary father, which I am in a way, although I am a heroic loner from a forgotten race doomed to wander through HN writing comments for all eternity until I can finally destroy the Evil God who cursed me to do so and cash my royalty checks.
on edit: or perhaps I have cashed these royalty checks here, in the end times, and am having lovely sex times with erotically gender strange creatrixii - a word like any other. While the world dissolves into a tangerine ice cream created by the whim of the last human minds to develop a plot point.
OK, but what if it turns out - in the end of all this - I'm actually Jesus! huh!? Pretty cool right! Those drugs were so freaking worth it!! Now to pay off the mortgage I took out to afford the drugs!
on edit: I would like to detour into a very long series of comments in the following subtree of this site as to why Grant Morrison sucks and has ripped me off and is no good.
Linus Torvalds: you take a week-long swing at a problem you find annoying, fascinating, or both. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by some alternative from the GNU project that, pinky promise, is coming out any day now.
Grace Hopper: BEGIN a framework that powers critical government functions, AND has secretly saved America from mass destruction time and again, only to be dunked on by Reddit for trivial matters of syntax END.
John Carmack: Doom, but better-looking.
Brendan Eich: you take a week-long swing at a problem your employer finds commercially compelling. The result enjoys staggering worldwide success in the ensuing decades, despite being clearly outclassed by the prior art it was supposed to build on.
Donald Knuth: While writing your magnum opus, a minor irritation arises. You invent a new subfield of computing and spend two years developing a highly idiosyncratic language and tool system.\footnote{And several new typefaces!} Your irritation dissipates and you go back to work with your writing. Generations of academics curse your creation but have nothing better to work with. They wonder if they can get Fabrice Bellard to take a crack at it…
Pretty brilliant, right? Right?
> In reply to that, Mr Markus was asked whether he had considered energy usage when creating the cryptocurrency.
> “i made doge in like 2 hours i didn’t consider anything,” he wrote.
> Boy meets girl; girl gets boy into pickle; boy gets pickle into girl
The point of a Dan Brown book is to chart the stupidest possible path through history and pop science, and he's uniquely capable of this.
They really didn’t do Wodehouse justice in the OP
Every rom-com: Boy meets girl and they have good times. Somebody messes up. They have a fight. The get back together again.
Every Hallmark movie: Big city girl ends up in small town by coincidence. While decorating for Christmas she falls for the small town guy and decides to stay. (The productions get cheaper by the year, so where they had scenery you now see people talking in front of a blurry background for 90% of the plot. )
Michael Crichton:
You're a brilliant scientist who's just created something that will revolutionize the world. Congratulations! It's now trying to eat you.
Michael Crichton:
You've stumbled upon a conspiracy involving [insert scientific field]. Now you're being chased by [insert government agency] while trying to explain complex scientific concepts to the reader.
Suzanne Collins:
You must choose between two brooding love interests while simultaneously overthrowing a totalitarian regime. Priorities!
Stephen King:
Welcome to small-town Maine, where the biggest threat isn't the weather, it's the [insert supernatural horror]. Don't worry, a writer will save the day.
Neil Gaiman:
Mythology crashes into modern life. You're either a god who's fallen on hard times or a regular person about to have a very weird Wednesday.
Margaret Atwood:
Society has taken a slight turn for the worse. Women are now [insert dystopian scenario]. This is definitely not a commentary on current events.
And perhaps my favorite:
George Orwell:
Big Brother is watching you. So is your toaster. And your pet. Trust no one, especially not the pigs.
Out of 30 generations, there were a few more that made me smile, but these were the main ones I enjoyed. Something I've noticed with statistical content generation is that it has a difficult time not being too "on the nose" -- almost like next-token-prediction is making it want to rush and get to the punchline a little too quickly. It has a hard time being subtle, and too often it felt like it was just a glib little summary of a story, rather than a sardonic take-a-step-back-and-look-at-the-big-picture sort of approach.
No major revelations, but just barely interesting enough to warrant commenting here. If there were a Dull Men's Club version of Hacker News, I would have posted this there.
[0] https://www.the-fence.com/all-possible-plots-ii/
https://archive.ph/h2y0R
https://theonion.com/man-feels-like-he-gets-gist-of-enlighte...
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/what-your-favorite-sad-d...
Most of the entries are for specific books, but there are also some authors mentioned, e.g. "The Collected Works of Dean Koontz": http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/koontz.shtml
[0] - http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/dick.scanner.shtml
- Napoleonic sea fighting
- early cyberpunk (Hardwired)
- middle cyberpunk around the Solar System (Voice of the Whirlwind)
- late cyberpunk post-scarcity space opera(Aristoi)
- transhuman space opera (Implied Spaces)
- New Mexican police procedural / thriller (Days of Atonement)
- near future thrillers (This Is Not A Game and sequelae)
- fantasy of city infrastructure (Metropolitan and City on Fire)
- comedy of manners (the Drake Maijstral trilogy)
- Fall of the Space Roman Empire (Dread Empire's Fall series)
- Medieval fantasy (Quillifer and sequelae)
and a Giant Disaster novel, a Zelaznyesque SF mystery, and a Star Wars work-for-hire.
There's enough there for five separate authors to make marks on the field.
(From someone who loves Brandon Sanderson)
Kafka seems low-effort though. I humbly substitute:
You have inside you an extraordinary writer but are instead employed at the postal service, where you spend the rest of your days watching your first manuscript submission mistakenly misrouted back across your desk.
> Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.
> Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.
> The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors...
https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/2013/06/12/dont-make-f...
> He reached for the telephone using one of his two hands
lol
This is also true of Indiana Jones, which everyone likes.
Also, a comment that misses the point of what was said, but performatively appears to challenge it.
Followed by a comment roughly identical to ones made by several green accounts, made by a green account.
Neal Stephenson: You are a small cog in a historical epic leading to a far-flung speculative future, where you grapple with the complexities of technology, cryptography, and philosophy, as well as incidentally discovering the best way to eat Captain Crunch cereal.
Lies, lies, misery, lies, suicide, rape, and corn prices."
So true
1) https://garykac.github.io/plotto/plotto-mf.html
2) https://www.npr.org/2012/02/19/146941343/plotto-an-algebra-b...
Here's my list (++ indicates more than 1):
A missing classic author is Robert Louis Stevenson - all his books are amazing, even 150 year later.If you've read more than one Dickens novel, you have my deepest respect.
1. https://www.the-fence.com/all-possible-plots-ii/
Accordingly I see your balanced, partial foray into those classics as a positive. It shows you're an individual bespoke personality with broader influences. We won't know which of the modern works we read are future classics - that'll come in hundreds of years.
I've had the pleasure of listening in on some discussions from high-school students that study classics meeting each other for the first time. Their discussions tend to be very different from what you'd hear from a typical high-school student. While other students might share the language, the ones who have read the same 50 or so great books tend to have a shared vocabulary of ideas at their disposal that doesn't seem to be there without the shared books.
on edit: due to having eaten the brown acid I stole I forgot how to spell words like eldritch and Alan and have edited one of them in a new edition of my previous work to undo the typo introduced in the acid-addled version.
on edit: thinly veiled threat to write 500 more comments on this issue in the next few months.
on edit: or perhaps I have cashed these royalty checks here, in the end times, and am having lovely sex times with erotically gender strange creatrixii - a word like any other. While the world dissolves into a tangerine ice cream created by the whim of the last human minds to develop a plot point.
on edit: I would like to detour into a very long series of comments in the following subtree of this site as to why Grant Morrison sucks and has ripped me off and is no good.