'"Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”
“Snap ending.” Mildred nodded.
“Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”
Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down.
Beatty ignored her and continued: “Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought."'
I agree with Elon. Likewise this Bill Withers song could also be much shorter. Here, I've cue'd it up to explain the point. He just says "I know" over and over. How inefficient. A LLM could nicely summarize the song with a single "I know" (0:50)
I thought the absurdity of saying Bill Withers says "I know" too many times in "Ain't no sunshine when she's gone" would make the flip nature of the post clear.
@futurebird@golgaloth that wasn't what I asked about. I pointed out the first part of your first sentence.
The fact that you agree with Elon, that creep, who destroyed Twitter and killed the bird, making features paid that used to be free and his really bad decisions and bad moderation.
"One way Newspeak reduces the role of language in thinking is by restricting vocabulary. Any words that could be used to question or criticize the party are removed, and the semantic meaning behind certain words has slowly been removed."
Yep. I love the sheer ignorance of failing to understand that LLMs (autocomplete on steroids) cannot possibly "know" what the most salient points of a given book are, because no cognitive analysis of the meaning of any of the content is occurring. At all.
@golgaloth As a service I let Claude write Moby Dick for Musk. Everything is in there I hope that‘s not too long for the genius Musks thinks he is:
Call me Ishmael. I sail on whaling ship Pequod under Captain Ahab, who seeks vengeance on a giant white whale, Moby Dick, that bit off his leg. Ahab's quest for revenge consumes him. In the end, Moby Dick sinks the ship. I alone survive.
@golgaloth Summaries can be useful but if a summary by an LLM is to be useful, somewhere in its data someone else must have already summarized that book. This use case will always only ever be a regurgitation of a regurgitation.
Why ask for a machine's third hand recount which might be full of hallucinatoons? If you are that disinterested, do you even want to know?
@golgaloth I started to post an image comparing a book summary from a LLM model to the Wikipedia page and to go through the effort to highlight the differences.
Then the LLM answered me and I decided not to bother. It gives me one ultra-short one paragraph response unworthy of a book jacket. Meanwhile the Wikipedia article explains the deeper symbolism, the underlying events of the times, etc and it hit me.
The real problem is this dude just is too impatient to read worth anything.
Ahahahaha! My local library didn't have a book that I wanted, but they had an abridged edition, so I checked it out. It was obvious AI. Complete gibberish. Sentences that would start out clearly talking about one character and devolve into being about one of the other characters, but you couldn't tell which one
It was seriously like you had chopped to the book into confetti, selected 5% of the pieces at random, and glued them together
@golgaloth I fucking hate my industry so much. We went from visionary to the shame on society so quickly. Or maybe slowly. Or maybe we were always there and I didn't realize it.
@sstrader I met both Ian Livingstone's, back in the day. Definitely visionary. But then in came the money men and fucked both of them over. It's not the industry, it's those who want to take advantage of everything and everyone.
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