[HN Gopher] "Twelfth Night Till Candlemas" - a 40-year book-ques...
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"Twelfth Night Till Candlemas" - a 40-year book-quest and its
remarkable ending
Author : ColinWright
Score : 98 points
Date : 2025-01-09 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (davidallengreen.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (davidallengreen.com)
| tunesmith wrote:
| What a wonderful story. I've also had an experience of someone in
| a writing community being able to name a story I read in my
| youth, it is really a unique feeling to have a distant hazy
| memory made real due to the wisdom of another. It's a similar
| feeling to finding the perfect word for an uncertain feeling
| you've never been able to give voice to.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Same for me, I couldn't recall the title or author of _Hit the
| Bike Trail!_, but someone on the /r/cycling subreddit had the
| thought of looking through _Publishing Weekly_ archives to
| identify it.
|
| Still much appreciated, gifted it to some cousins of mine who
| are the age I was when I read it.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "You will even notice how it neatly covers everything I could
| remember - giving equal weight to each data point and deftly
| joining them all together.
|
| And again, what ChatGPT here had to offer was utterly -
| absolutely - false.
|
| Like a fluent and practised (but unwise) liar it had contrived an
| account that fitted only the available information."
|
| A fundamental flaw in modern "AI" is that it has no model of
| reality against which it is checking its (or anyone else's)
| words. It isn't even lying; it has no concept of the difference
| between truth and lies, therefore it cannot be made to stop
| lying, because it isn't even lying, it's just spewing language
| that sounds good.
|
| This makes it a passable tool for sales, but an extremely poor
| tool for anything which requires accuracy of any kind. It's not
| that it is trying to be accurate and failing (in which case
| further work on it might be expected to improve it); it is not
| attempting to be accurate; indeed the concept of accuracy is not
| anywhere in its architecture. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, yes;
| accuracy or truth, no. It will not get better at being truthful
| as it is worked on, it will only get better at being persuasive.
| ben_w wrote:
| > A fundamental flaw in modern "AI" is that it has no model of
| reality against which it is checking its (or anyone else's)
| words. It isn't even lying; it has no concept of the difference
| between truth and lies, therefore it cannot be made to stop
| lying, because it isn't even lying, it's just spewing language
| that sounds good.
|
| For the early ones, the reality against which they were
| checking their words, was their training corpus. Now they've
| also got RAG and search.
|
| In the context of "find a story that fits this description",
| even the original training corpus was pretty effective. Not
| perfect, but pretty good... for stuff that was well
| represented.
|
| If all Transformer models could do was vocabulary, grammar, and
| syntax, they wouldn't have ever been usable as more than a very
| light form of autocomplete.
|
| Even word2vec got analogies (man is to woman what king is to
| queen, etc.).
|
| > it will only get better at being persuasive
|
| I kinda agree, unfortunately: it will _*also*_ keep getting
| better at being persuasive, and this is indeed a bad thing.
| "LGTM" is easier to test for than "correct" -- but to me,
| that's an example of _humans_ having limits on how well we can
| model reality, how well we can differentiate between truth and
| lies, etc.
| cschmidt wrote:
| I also had a science fiction book from my childhood that I kept
| trying to find. Eventually I did find the title and author
| through a chat with ChatGPT, unlike in this case. (It was
| Midworld by Alan Dean Foster, if anyone is curious. I'm not sure
| why that particular book stuck in my head.)
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| It's funny. As soon as he described his problem, I suspected
| ChatGPT would enter the picture. It's often significantly better
| than search engines for finding the name of even an obscure work
| from a description, so of course folks on book-finding subreddits
| would use it a lot.
|
| But the author's absolutely right to warn that it also regularly
| fails us, and the author's also right the celebrate the folks who
| are trained specifically in finding this sort of information in
| ways that the automated tools can't replicate yet.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| They were also pointing out an interesting point that ChatGPT
| does. It treats everything as relevant. Whereas the librarian
| who found the book. Systematically discarded possible 'facts'
| and substituted others (goblins->demons) to find out what was
| going on. Not sure any AI does this currently.
| ben_w wrote:
| ChatGPT does do that for me, when I'm using it for tasks like
| David Allen Green's book hunt.
|
| This has yet to help. If it can find it, it (so far) has not
| needed to change the details I provided; if it doesn't know,
| it will change them to something thematically similar but
| still not find what I wanted (and if I insist on requiring
| certain story elements that it had changed, it will say
| something along the lines of "no results found" but with more
| flowery language).
| jcutrell wrote:
| I suspect that, given a reasonable prompt, it would
| absolutely discard certain phrases or concepts for others. I
| think it may find it difficult to cross check and synthesize,
| but "term families" are sort of a core idea of using multi-
| dimensional embedding. Related terms have low square
| distances in embeddings. I'm not super well versed on LLMs
| but I do believe this would be represented in the models.
| mrob wrote:
| I think a more robust approach would be to restrict the
| generative AI to generating summaries of book texts. First
| summarize every book (this only has to be done once), and then
| use vector search to find the most similar summaries to the
| provided summary. Small mistakes will make little difference,
| e.g. "goblin" will have a similar embedding to "demon", and
| even entirely wrong information will only increase the number
| of books that have to be manually checked. Or better yet,
| develop an embedding model that can handle whole books at once
| and compare the vectors directly.
|
| Perhaps somebody with more compute than they know what to do
| with could try this with Project Gutenberg as a proof of
| concept.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| It's also interesting that years of trying on Twitter and
| Reddit failed, but asking on Bluesky succeeded. I'm certainly
| not claiming that Bluesky is some kind of great leap forward
| compared to Twitter. But it _could_ be that being a new service
| it just isn 't as crowded with bots, spam, and BS -- thus
| allowing the signal to come through.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I was sent a photo of a page from a book with a great piece of
| writing. He didn't know the book. I ocr'd the page and pasted
| it into ChatGPT. It lead me on a merry dance where it started
| unequivocally that it was a book it couldn't have been. It then
| started making up books from similar authors. Every time I
| said, 'there is no such book', it appologised and then made up
| a new book. It was like talking to a salesman, trying to
| bullshit it's way through a pitch.
|
| I put a short piece of it into Google books and it found it! I
| asked ChatGPT about the actual book and it claimed to know it!
|
| It was a book called Blood Knots by Luke Jennings. I bought it,
| and before I read it I saw the friend who sent me the excerpt,
| and gave it to him. A year later I saw the same book, shelf
| soiled, in an independent store. It was worth the wait, it was
| a great read.
|
| I also saw David Allen Green (author of the above) ask his
| question on Bluesky on my first day using it. Somehow I feel
| part of this story
| jjulius wrote:
| Reminds me of an old radio broadcast or some kind of audio
| recording that I've been trying to find for ~25 years. My mom had
| listened to it when she was younger, and had somehow managed to
| get it onto cassette tape for us to listen to when we were kids.
| It was some kind of Christmas story we'd listen to while
| decorating cookies, a kind of crazy tale that you never heard
| anywhere else, involving the towns of "Twinkle Twankle" and
| "Twonkle Twonkle" and other crazy wordplay like that.
| Unfortunately, that's the only unique bit that I remember, save
| for recalling a melody or two here and there and the timbre of
| the narrator's voice, neither of which help in tracking it down.
|
| I'd love the satisfaction of tracking it down some day just like
| this person did.
| Reubachi wrote:
| You'd be happy to know that googling "Twankle Twonkle Twonkle"
| will yeild the result you're looking for :) I just found a few
| that look to be exactly what you describe.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| I am not the OP but nothing Google served up to me resembled
| an old radio show. , even after instructing Google to search
| for the exact phrase.
| jjulius wrote:
| No it doesn't[1]. Dropping the quotes just yields a bunch of
| results with those words, but nothing resembling what I'm
| looking for. I was very confident when I posted my initial
| comment that this was the case - after all, those four words
| are the only thing I recall, and therefore are what I have
| frequently Googled for. :)
|
| [1]https://imgur.com/a/BYM3d1r
| inanutshellus wrote:
| I have one of these "40 year quests" too, but it's a cartoon.
|
| Maybe you clever folk will be more ingenious than I've been.
|
| The story goes like this:
|
| An old king's life is upended one day when a beautiful,
| mysterious woman appears and says she'll grant youth and her hand
| in marriage to the man that completes some challenges. The only
| challenge I remember was that she sets up 3 cauldrons: One had
| boiling oil. One had milk. The last had ice-cold water.
|
| The king wants to see it work first so he points to a random
| little boy and orders him to jump into the cauldrons or he'd be
| put to death.
|
| The boy leaps into each cauldron and there's a terrible delay on
| the last one. The cold water cauldron even freezes over.
|
| The boy breaks out of the last cauldron and has been transformed
| into a strapping young man.
|
| The king, seeing proof that it works, decides to jump into the
| cauldrons. However, when he hops out, he's still an old man.
|
| The woman announces that the magic only works once, and she and
| the stable boy walk away together, arm-in-arm.
|
| ...
|
| I've searched for it online a fair bit but I've never found it.
|
| Some details from my memory: * The cartoon was
| very short (less than 30 minutes. probably closer to 10 or 15)
| * It had no dialog, only sound effects and music. * A
| woman's voice narrated it. I can still hear her. * Now that
| I'm grown, I see it having a Slavic or Russian aesthetic. *
| The woman had black hair and a long white dress. * The king
| was very short with a big white beard. * The boy, when he
| turns into a man, has pointy boots and shoulder pads. :) *
| Probably made between 1975 and 1985 * Part of an anthology
| (many cartoons on one VHS tape... ours had been run so much that
| it started to skew and stretch the image)
|
| ...
|
| In my mind, it's aesthetically very similar to an heirloom that
| my grandmother made and I assume that's why I've always wanted to
| find it.
|
| ChatGPT and the intertubes in general haven't been very useful.
| brazzy wrote:
| > Now that I'm grown, I see it having a Slavic or Russian
| aesthetic.
|
| Maybe it was in fact produced in Russia or one of the former
| Warsaw Pact countries? They had their own animation tradition,
| and some of it was translated in the West (like The Little Mole
| from Czech is), but I can easily see how such works could be
| very obscure to English-language searches.
| niccl wrote:
| This sounds slightly familiar. Were you in the UK at the time?
| There was a series on BBC during the children's watching time
| (pre-6:00 pm, I'd guess, about the same time that Belle and
| Sebastian [0] showed) that had Slavic fairy/folk tales. Not
| quite cartoons, but definitely a cartoonish vibe. A little like
| The Story Teller [1], but much earlier.
|
| Sadly, I can't recall any more about it than that, but maybe
| it'll help that you're not alone. And of course this could be
| nothing at all related to what you're after.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_and_Sebastian_(1965_TV_s...
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storyteller_(TV_series)
| romanhn wrote:
| Oh hey, that totally sounded familiar :) Pretty sure this is
| from Konyok Gorbunok (The Little Humpbacked Horse), a 1975
| Soviet cartoon based on a famous Russian fairy tale. The bit
| you're describing is at 1:07:30 of
| https://youtu.be/fKc22eSL1gA.
|
| This doesn't quite fit several of the points you remember (very
| much in line with the post!), so perhaps it was some other
| edition of that same story.
|
| EDIT: so, I just plugged your description into ChatGPT and it
| gave the exact same answer, including an identical timestamp!
| Weird.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Sidenote: David Allen Green, the author of this blog, is a
| brilliant writer on constitutional law in the UK. It is quite a
| subject since Britain doesn't have a written constitution. He was
| a wonderful guide through the Brexit chicanery.
| freedomben wrote:
| For people like me wondering how it's possible not to have a
| written constitution:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...
|
| tldr: it is actually (literally) "written", but not all in the
| same place. It's scatterred throughout various places.
| chrisguilbeau wrote:
| I'll add my experience to the mix. I was in Thailand in the early
| 2000s and we were eating at a night market and I heard a song
| that sounded like something by the Beatles or another 60s band. I
| started looking for what it might have been when I got back to
| the states a year later; did it say doctor Jones? Friends and
| google were no help. Anyway, 20 years later I asked ChatGPT and
| it come back with "New York Mining Disaster 1941" by the Bee
| Gees... Simply incredible. I suppose there will be fewer of these
| decade long searches now!
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