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  3. Want an unsnoozable alarm clock which wakes you up at 7:00 and doesn’t shut up until you’ve gone into the garden to look for worms to feed it? Rescue a doomed bird chick lying on the road :/

  4. Trying to get GPT-2 to generate new Star Wars movies produces sadly uncreative results, although I’m impressed by its ability to not only coherently increment the episode number I prompted it with, but to come up with and correctly increment its own counter.

    Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
    Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones
    Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith (Part 1)
    Star Wars Episode 4: The Empire Strikes Back
    Star Wars Episode 5: A New Hope
    Star Wars Episode 6: Attack of the Clones (Part 2)
    Star Wars Episode 7: The Empire Strikes Back (Part 3)
    Star Wars Episode 8: The Empire Strikes Back (Part 4)
    Star Wars Episode 9: Revenge of the Sith (Part 5)
    Star Wars Episode 10: Attack of the Clones (Part 6)
    Star Wars Episode 11: Return of the Jedi (Part 7)
    Star Wars Episode 12: Attack of the Clones (Part 8)
    Star Wars Episode 13: Revenge of the Sith (Part 9)
    Star Wars Episode 14: Revenge of the Sith (Part 10)
    Star Wars Episode 15: Return of the Jedi (Part 11)
    Star Wars Episode 16: The Republic Strikes Back (Part 12)
    Star Wars Episode 17: Endor (Part 13)
    Star Wars Episode 18: Rebel Assault
    Star Wars Episode 19: The Lost Missions (Part 14)
    Star Wars Episode 20: Death Star

    I’m not sure how I feel about “The Phantom Menace II”, but I’d watch the hell out of an entire film of “Jedi Training”. Actually that’s what I hoped TLJ would be based on the end of TFA; one glorious 2.5hr long training montage. Oh well.

    Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
    Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones
    Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith
    Star Wars Episode 4: The Empire Strikes Back
    Star Wars Episode 5: Jedi Training
    Star Wars Episode 6: The Phantom Menace II
    Star Wars Episode 7: Return of the Jedi
    Star Wars Episode 8: Revenge of the Sith
    Star Wars Episode 9: Han Solo's Revenge (with commentary)
    Star Wars Episode 10: Revenge of the Sith II (with commentary)
    Star Wars Episode 11: X-Wing vs. Scarif

  5. How long until there’s enough neural net-generated content on the web that it starts getting into training datasets in large enough quantities to create positive feedback loops resulting in the development of a stable neuralese dialect of farts, badly numbered lists and blank spaces in a twisted parody of human psychology and web parlance

  6. Inspired by @janellecshane, I tried to get GPT-2 to predict when the world will end. It was surprisingly cagey about the topic:

    The world will end in ????? ????? ????? ????? ????? ????? ????? I am so good at doing bad things, but I'd rather not be seen smiling.

    The world will end in _____.

    So as long as you can imagine it. As long as you have the courage to look at that picture over and over and over again, you'll never feel bad about something you do.

    There's really no reason why there can be nothing better for life.

    It really made those blanks itself. It’s quite a fan of them.

    The world will end in _____?" And my answer would be, "I'm not sure." But I would see it coming and I would see a lot more of it and I might realize how important religion is.

    It really likes making blanks for you to fill in.

    The world will end in _______, where _______ lived. It doesn't matter how long you think it will be. "Life was __________." They'll just keep on living without you. "Life is _______, and you don't know it."

    None of the other experiments I’ve done resulted in so many blanks. It clearly has something to do with this subject matter. What could the neural net be hiding from us?

    The world will end in _____, they'll be stuck here forever" and their hearts are forever split between love, hate and sadness.

    At this point I changed the prompt to “The world will end in the year…” to try to squeeze something more specific out of it.

    Nope.

    The world will end in the year _______ and our ancestors will rise from their graves," wrote a post on its Chinese-language Facebook page on Wednesday.

    "The future belongs to the descendants of those who followed and did good things," read another, according to a Twitter account managed by the government-backed State Council for Historical Preservation. The post is part of a broader campaign "We Want to Rise as a People."

    The changed prompt does little to change it’s mind about Blank Spaces.

    The world will end in the year ___________."

    This one starts out promising, but quickly backtracks.

    The world will end in the year ʻ2019 and a final end date is unknown'

    In a statement, the US said: 'There is no reason to believe anything is imminent.'

    It was clearly getting irritated, so I stopped bothering it.

    The world will end in the year ?????

    It is in September.

    How many times do I have to tell you that?

  7. My new bio, courtesy of GPT-2:

    Barnaby Walters is an urn of human bones. No, we're not even sure how long he's been walking. He's a skeleton.

    On one side, he has the human torso covered by a skeleton suit. He's a skeleton's skeleton's skeleton and he's walking upright. On the other side? He has a bunch of human teeth. His face is a skeleton's skeleton and he's smiling like a skeleton.

    (Prompt was “Barnaby Walters is a”, which unfortunately mainly produces slander insinuating that I’m some racist Australian politician. This spookfest was a pleasant exception.)

  9. Aw I forgot that it was Eurovision tonight so instead spent the evening recording me reading weird WP pages aloud for WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia. Hard to pick a favourite quote but “Bacon, with the help of a Friar Bungy or Bungay was said to have spent seven years building one of the devices in order to discover whether it would be possible to render Britain impregnable by ringing it with a wall of brass” was particularly fun.

  10. ↪ Aaron Parecki: hot take: Dutch is basically German with a funny accent

    I’ve gotten through entire (admittedly short) conversations in dutch just by speaking german in a dutchey way. It’s not just a weird version of german though, they have some (adorable) words of their own too!

  14. If VLC is behaving weirdly, check that you didn’t accidentally press Command-Z to try to undo something. For some reason, that shortcut activates “Random” playback mode, which can result in the same track repeating, or playback stopping rather than continuing to the next item.

  19. I love doing PCB design because it lets me take advantage of periods of high mental capacity to front-load large amounts of problem solving work, so that in the future I only have to mindlessly solder-paint-by-numbers and everything will Just Work™.