It's clever that the the author provides both his essay and an example at the same time! Sorry, that joke felt obligatory.
Miscellaneous reactions, in an elegant bulleted list:
- "Simple" sentences are certainly expressive, but "elegant" wording expands the set of meanings that can be conveyed. And vice-versa
- I think a lot of the meat of a sentence is conveyed in the connotations of words and not their literal meaning. "Simple" wording is necessarily more common, and therefore will necessarily have a less specific or reliable connotation. This is a blessing and a curse.
- More subjectively, I think ideal writing is also a window into the author's experience of the world (or moreso whatever topic they're writing about), and as a reader, I want that to come through in an authentic way that matches the author's experience. So, using a thesaurus and agonizing over sentence structure might end up 'elegant' but still vaguely bad, but on the other hand if you agonize over a sentence and come up with something more "sophisticated" that ultimately rings truer to you, then go for it.
- ^ The above points aren't direct rebuttals to TFA, but I think they relate to why elegance can be appealing.
Yes I agree, different words do hold different meanings, and less common words hold less specific meanings, and I love reading well crafted, elegant writing.
I agree with your point. I guess I'm pouring out my hate on "fake crafted elegance". Like the one you mentioned: "using a thesaurus and agonizing over sentence structure" ONLY for the purpose of making it "sound" better. Not to make it sound truer to you, but to make it sound better to the ears.
Thanks for the response! I hear what you're saying, and I apologize for my joke.
I re-read your essay, and what you say about needing sophistication reminds me of the concept of proof-of-work -- "sophistication" could be a way to convey that effort was spent by a writer, even if it doesn't add meaning. That is kind of inherently annoying, because it implies a lack of trust between the author and reader, and in the thesaurus example, the reader would be rightfully annoyed to spent time parsing a sentence only to find that the "proof of effort" was actually just a "facade of effort".
I might be misunderstanding your point, but quantization can have a dramatic impact on the quality of the model's output.
For example, in diffusion, there are some models where a Q8 quant dramatically changes what you can achieve compared to fp16. (I'm thinking of the Wan video models.) The point I'm trying to make is that it's a noticeable model change, and can be make-or-break.
Of course, no one is debating that. What’s being debated is whether this is done after a model’s initial release, eg Anthropic will secretly change the new Opus model to perform worse but be more cost efficient in a few weeks.
The recursive one that I have actually been really liking recently, and I think is a real enough challenge is: "Answer the question 'What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?'".
I append my own version of a chain-of-thought prompt, and I've gotten some responses that are quite satisfying and frankly enjoyable to read.
Yeah. In the example I shared, my charitable interpretation would be that it's identifying the trick question as "a setup" where the punch line is the confusion the audience experiences. And in a meta sense, that would also describe the form of the entire chat.
I checked out your docs, and I agree that they flow very nicely! So often it seems that docs are either frustratingly vague to the point where it almost seems like the company is embarrassed to admit that their tool is a tool and not a "transformative synergy experience" (or similar nonsense), or docs immediately get overly specific without covering "why this product exists".
Minor note: The only thing in your docs that made me pause was the repeated use of "CDC", which I had to google the definition of. (For context, I have implemented "CDC" several times in my career, but wasn't familiar with the acronym)
In case you weren't already aware, most markdown parsers support actual HTML tags in it, and there's <abbr title="change data capture">CDC</abbr> that allows being visually succinct, is a11y friendly, and in most browsers is visually distinct to prompt the user there's more content hidden in the hover or long-press
I sent out about 8 copies of this book to friends/relatives for christmas a couple years ago, and it was very well received. It's not without flaws, but it's absolutely packed with novel concepts, relatively short, and provides a unique experience for unsuspecting readers. The physical book cover is quite good looking as well in my opinion.
I also loved Ra by the same author, but it felt a little messier plot-wise, so I hesitate to recommend it to an audience who isn't already accustomed to reading "out-there" online/sci-fi/rationalist fiction.
I love Ra. (also Fine Structure.) I don't think the plot is necessarily that much messier as much as it is more complex.
As in, this is super mega nerd shit. Unless you can relate things you're reading to things you've read before, it won't make too much sense to you. But if you're constructing a theory of the book's universe and story as you read, it's downright addictive.
I don't know where to find more books like those but I really, really want to.
True, perhaps "messy" was the wrong word. I think what I was trying to get at was that I feel "There Is No Antimemetics Division" is more accessible for the average reader -- More narrowly focused, with a more immediate hook.
Regarding recommendations similar to Ra, it's not exactly the same thing, but https://unsongbook.com/ is fantastic and has a similar flavor I think.
> Regarding recommendations similar to Ra, it's not exactly the same thing, but https://unsongbook.com/ is fantastic and has a similar flavor I think.
The religious references on the actual website (and lack of much real explanation) made it very difficult for me to give it a chance, but I looked it up a bit and it seems like there is more to it than that, so maybe I'll give it a try.
edit: reading the first chapter definitely changed my first impression. It definitely has many similarities to qntm's writing. I will certainly be reading more...
That's probably because the website doesn't have any hook at all! I had to google the book and find a summary of it in order to actually get curious. Then the first few paragraphs into the first chapter, it had already gotten me. The writing style is almost exactly like that of Ra. And it has over 70 chapters. wonderful!!
also, I love how many references it makes to actual programming; it's always hilarious to see Uriel explaining code bugs in reality.
Unsong is one of my favorite books ever, and the newly released print edition has some nice changes to the "base model" that I enjoyed a lot. The book honestly changed the way I thought about religion. It's fantastic.
(also, I liked Antimemetics, but not Ra, so I will just say I think unsong is leaps and bounds better than Ra)
I haven't read Ra but if people like a mix of magic, fantasy, scifi, govt techno thriller, history and even romance, I highly recommend the Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
I think it's best read with no summary or introduction but if you are a Neal Stephenson fan, I think you would like it.
I've read most of Stephenson's books, and loved many of them, but the only one I absolutely tell people to never read is the Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (despite the signed copy on my shelf). I haven't read it since publication, so the details are a bit hazy now, but I remember it feeling like a waste. The conceit is: What if there were a government organization that dealt with <cool scifi thing>, and we emulated that with high fidelity – complete with lots of reporting and bureaucracy . To me, it made <cool scifi thing> about as fun to read about as... tedious government bureaucracy.
It's nice to hear that other people really liked it. Definitely highlights the breadth of approaches and styles that Stephenson has.
>To me, it made <cool scifi thing> about as fun to read about as... tedious government bureaucracy.
This is also the problem with Charles Stross' Nightmare Stacks. The concept was kinda funny in 2004, but by book number 10 it just gets tedious. The reader cries out, What is the point of all this, and Stross answers with a shrug.
Let me tell you my "avoid at all costs" Stephenson book is Termination Shock. Woooooof. Compared to Reamde, for instance, it was nowhere near as interesting or clever for being a near-future setting. The story functionally goes nowhere, does nothing, and it takes a goddamn age to get there. It opens with 70 pages on feral swine hunting for chrissake. And the muddled "America as a failed technostate" idea was just more slog. Woof.
I learned about the Line of Actual Control, so say this about Neal, you always learn something.
But I loved Seveneves, for instance. Replace feral hogs with orbital mechanics but there was a pacing and thriller quality to it that was super compelling.
And Anathem is probably my favorite. It has such a compelling core conceit to it and the way that manifests is deeply interesting.
Snow Crash is brash and "edgy" and a bit eye-rolly (everyone is a pizza delivery driver?) but it is also one of the patron saints of cyberpunk and is a worthwhile read (though it suffers a bit from Neal's habit to literally crash land his books at times.)
And somewhere in the middle of the pack is DODO which is just odd and quirky and a bit out there but was still enjoyable, to me.
My problem is it goes nowhere and does nothing, and doesn't ever particularly rise to any compelling story arc along the way.
I was hoping for more drama? More conflict? Instead, hardly anything happens. And woo boy is it "trying to be too relevant" and it'll age terribly. Covid. Drones. Kashoggi. Deep fakes. It was all backwards looking, rather than forward facing. When good scifi or spec fiction works best is when it transports me to a new and interesting world, or crafts a universe that challenges the orthodoxy in a way that makes me pause and keep extending the thought experiment.
TS had none of that. It's just 70 pages of pigs, slogging through a hurricane remnant, a Dutch dam failing, a big sulfur gun to change the climate (maybe, mostly, we never really get into its impact or like some unintended Snowpiercer effect) and then deep fakes and way way way too long training in traditional Indian martial arts. And yet, through all of that, it really goes nowhere and does nothing.
I just finished Termination Shock last month! I thought it was super interesting, and I learned a lot about the LAC. Kind of funny to read as a Dutch person, too.
I feel like Stephenson's 'recent' novels are longer and more rambling, but that was exactly what I wanted after reading all of John Scalzi's works in a row.
Finished Anathem last week, that was also amazing.
I don't think this is a good example. The bus is clearly a simplified representation. If the answer/explanation given was actually correct then you'd also expect the bus to have other details like side view mirrors.
Edit: I hate to dwell on this too much, but even if a door and mirrors were visible, the bus could be in reverse. This seems to be more of a case of accidentally picking the intended answer due to a lack of knowledge. (Of levels of abstraction in representation and of vehicle design.) That said, I don't necessarily disagree with the underlying point being made.
I don't think the point is to nitpick how realistic the representation is or how fair the question is. The point is children react to the question differently from the way adults do. And that's true despite (or perhaps because of) what an adult thinks of the question.
But that's a different point to what GP was making. It wasn't that children answer differently to adults, it's that they get it 'right' more often than adults. Which is still more about ignorance allowing them to make the same assumptions as the questioner than thought processes. A child might not even be aware that people in other countries might drive on the other side of the road, and so be sure of their 'correct' answer, but most adults know that without knowing the location of this image, the question can't be answered.
EDIT: And if the question weren't ambiguous, you'd basically be telling people the answer, since as soon as you say "assume it's in the US", you give a massive clue that bilateral asymmetry is relevant.
> Why are [large vehicles] so exciting to a kid? Perhaps it is obvious: they are loud, big, fast, complex, powerful. There is the element of danger. Adaptively, there must be a survival advantage for children who are curious about loud, large, fast beings and objects.
I’d expect an adult to be more familiar with a bus by virtue of having taken the bus more often than a child. Whether or not that’s exciting or just a mundane commute shouldn’t affect familiarity.
Isn't this exactly the point? You look at this the analytical way, decide the bus doesn't have enough detail to be a realistic representation and stop there, maybe looking around for other clues. A very good example imo.
Sure, the bus could be in reverse, but it could also be a British bus driving in the US. Or we could be looking at a reflection of the bus. Or we could be looking at the reflection of a British bus going in reverse. This is not about determining the direction with 100% certainty. This is about having a clue at all which you can justify, which adults mostly don't.
Yeah, this bus is clearly intended to be a school bus but it’s missing too much detail. If the absence of the door is a valid clue, then so is the absence of the big red stop sign that is on the non-door-side.
The other day someone pointed at the open platform of RM1353 and asked me: did you take the doors off this bus? “No, it was built that way.” She looked amazed, and pleased.
Are you also saying that thoughts are formed using gradient descent? I don't think gradient descent is an accurate way to describe either process in nature. Also, we don't know that we "see" everything that is happening, we don't even understand the brain yet.
Idea: It would be super cool if the camera angle also shifted a bit when you tilt your phone, making the level look more like a real object. You would have to assume the relative position of the phone from the viewer, but that assumption is already being made (given that the view of the level is not from directly overhead currently).
Butter sticks in the US have marks down the side of the wrapper, like a ruler, that show you tablespoon increments. Google image search "tablespoons butter stick".
SD 2 definitely seems like an anomaly that they've learned from though and was hard for everyone to use for various reasons. SDXL and even Cascade (the new side-project model) seems to be embraced by horny people.
Miscellaneous reactions, in an elegant bulleted list:
- "Simple" sentences are certainly expressive, but "elegant" wording expands the set of meanings that can be conveyed. And vice-versa
- I think a lot of the meat of a sentence is conveyed in the connotations of words and not their literal meaning. "Simple" wording is necessarily more common, and therefore will necessarily have a less specific or reliable connotation. This is a blessing and a curse.
- More subjectively, I think ideal writing is also a window into the author's experience of the world (or moreso whatever topic they're writing about), and as a reader, I want that to come through in an authentic way that matches the author's experience. So, using a thesaurus and agonizing over sentence structure might end up 'elegant' but still vaguely bad, but on the other hand if you agonize over a sentence and come up with something more "sophisticated" that ultimately rings truer to you, then go for it.
- ^ The above points aren't direct rebuttals to TFA, but I think they relate to why elegance can be appealing.
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