[HN Gopher] Fan is A Tool-Using Animal (2013)
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Fan is A Tool-Using Animal (2013)
Author : Tomte
Score : 60 points
Date : 2022-02-20 12:37 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (idlewords.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (idlewords.com)
| cyounkins wrote:
| Title was hard for me to grok, but the article is great. Where
| are the fandom communities today?
| TuringTest wrote:
| Killed by the walled gardens, where you're supposed to admire
| the flowers cultivated by the employees but you are not allowed
| to set up your own farm.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Yes, it was taken over by people like the Lucasfilm
| representative quoted:
|
| > We've been very clear all along on where we draw the line.
| We love our fans, we want them to have fun. But if in fact
| somebody is using our characters to create a story unto
| itself, that's not in the spirit of what we think fandom is
| about.
|
| > Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.
|
| Shudder.
|
| Brilliant article, kind of depressing in light of what's
| happened since.
|
| I've always taken a view that if someone's built something
| people value and they choose to sell out that's entirely up
| to them, I'd have done the same, no moral judgement. This has
| me questioning that a bit, when it comes to social phenomena.
| If you built the tech but your users made it into the thing
| they value, you have some sort of moral obligation not to let
| it be destroyed, don't you?
| skybrian wrote:
| They don't seem too hard to find starting from Reddit and
| following the links. Or at least, there is plenty of archived
| fan fiction to read.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Ao3 is still around
| sersi wrote:
| Ao3, fanfic.net (even though a lot of fans really dislike the
| site now), spacebattles, dreamwith, sufficient velocity and
| reddit as a discovery channel to find all of those.
|
| It didn't die yet :)
| TuringTest wrote:
| This is what the Web should be like, really. Swarms of users
| enjoying some realm of knowledge, and building a decentralized
| corpus by the mere act of using it and leaving trails, with a
| shared toolkit to exploit those trails.
|
| Unfortunately, the entire software industry has followed a
| business model in the manner of consumer goods production,
| guiding each individual's entire experience through packaged
| products and services.
|
| Rather, the capitalism inherent in unmediated peer-to-peer
| relationships could have taken the form of developers providing
| an open platform for users to create their own tools, and
| offering them the necessary training to get the most out of those
| tools.
|
| Instead there are huge proprietary platforms that promise in
| their advertising to empower users and enhance their creativity,
| but are designed to do the opposite, capping any activity that
| seems dangerous to them and limiting actions to a small, safe
| subset.
| phaedrus wrote:
| The part about users coming up with their own formats for tagging
| including using "word-dash-word" as a format reminded me of a
| story.
|
| When I was in high school I wrote chatbots. One of my earliest
| started out as a "mad libs" program that accepted three-word
| sentences and spit out a reply by randomly picking one remembered
| word from each "category" (of the three words).
|
| My intent was these three would usually be "Subject Verb Object",
| however in one of my first lessons in how users will use your
| software differently than you intend, I was surprised to find my
| classmates "tricking" the chatbot into learning sentences with
| more than three words.
|
| My simplistic parser merely looked for there to be exactly two
| spaces in the input sentence (along which to split it), and my
| friends blithely ignored this limitation by just putting dashes
| in the input like, "this-sentence has-more-than three-words." My
| first thought was you're using it wrong, the generated sentences
| won't make sense anymore, etc. But of course the result was
| _more_ funny and _more_ flexible.
|
| So I looked at what they were doing and thought, ok, how can turn
| this "abuse" into an intended feature? They're using dashes ('-')
| to join words together, and the program is using spaces (' ') as
| places to cut sentences apart. What if the program considered
| every space between words as both a place to join words and a
| place to cut a sentence apart?
|
| The second problem is that with three words and three columns in
| S-V-O order you know at all times, positionally, which bucket(s)
| you're throwing learned words into and which bucket(s) you're
| pulling from. How can I take this concept and divorce it from the
| dependence on fixed positions and fixed number of words?
|
| (Mind you I was 13-14 years old then, self-taught and family and
| school didn't have internet yet, so this was some deep abstract
| thinking to be doing without any guidance, experience or examples
| to go on.)
|
| So I thought ok in the three-word case, let's look at the middle
| word as it's the most symmetrical case. Assuming you've picked
| the middle word, now you want to pick the word before it from a
| list of words that can come before, and the word after it from a
| list of words that can come after. We can't rely on the absolute
| position to look up these lists, as it can vary. But we can key
| the "before" and "after" lists on what the middle word is. So
| every word gets its own unique list of words-before and list of
| words-after.
|
| So now we've got two key ideas: learn links between pairs of
| words (interpretation of what the dash was being used for) and
| choose from before and after lists (interpretation of what the
| space was doing). It could be trivially scaled to 2nd-order and
| higher as well: instead of just learning links between pairs of
| words, a program could learn links between links, and so on.
|
| Anyway that's how you invent a Markov chat bot from first
| principles (though I wouldn't learn the name until later). All
| because some users started putting-dashes to-make-compound-words.
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