[HN Gopher] "Twelfth Night Till Candlemas" - A 40-year book-quest
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"Twelfth Night Till Candlemas" - A 40-year book-quest
Author : ColinWright
Score : 177 points
Date : 2025-01-09 17:07 UTC (1 days 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.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| That works for description searches id imagine, however I'm
| the type who'd remember "book with a boy who had a yellow
| ball" type things that only happen on one page of a book.
| 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
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I typed a reply and deleted it but I've had the same
| experience. Also you don't need to OCR with the phone app
| typically you can snap a picture.
|
| Beyond books, it's really awesome at finding movies even with
| super weird things I happen to remember - I assume it's
| trained on quotes, scripts and maybe fan knowledge from IMDb
| or something.
|
| Song lyrics it did the same thing. yes it was for a niche
| melodeath metal song but the lyrics are very distinct and
| Google/bing can't seem to do exact string searches anymore
| but GPT was confidently incorrect on what band it was.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I had a similar experience with OpenAI's Dall-e. I told it to
| make an image about public speaking without a microphone. It
| made one with a micrphone. I said, "that has a microphone in
| it. I don't want anything resembling a microphone" and it
| gave me an image of a microphone surrounded by a star of
| david that said public speaking no microphone.
| 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
| Null-Set wrote:
| I don't believe it mentioned Twinkle Twankle but your
| description reminded me of the old radio play The Cinnamon Bear
| where some kids eventually go to the North Pole looking for
| their Silver Star.
|
| https://youtu.be/0XIijKoRJ6A?si=zsXuaYNT60jtPt4f
| 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.
| Terretta wrote:
| Good lord. When you apologized it "doesn't quite fit" I had
| lowered expectations -- but then I was watching GP's
| description come alive!
|
| I can see the high collar getting misremembered as shoulder
| pads but the whole bit seems too dead on with the
| recollections to not be the match!
| inanutshellus wrote:
| The heirloom I have is a small rug and it has horses and
| riders on it, with pointy boots and shoulder pads. So I'm
| guessing that's where the overlap came in but yes, this is
| it! It's "The Magic Pony" and the English version is online
| too!
| inanutshellus wrote:
| HOLY MOLY THIS IS IT! You're my hero! Forever!
|
| The one I saw was dubbed in English but yes, this is it!
|
| I'd forgotten his flying horse and that's the title! HA!
|
| THE MAGIC PONY!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0pY1P8Cw5o
|
| I also didn't remember it as being an hour long. This is so
| exciting! Thank you!
|
| > EDIT: so, I just plugged your description into ChatGPT and
| it gave the exact same answer, including an identical
| timestamp! Weird.
|
| In my defense I pasted my post into chatgpt before posting it
| so that this wouldn't happen, and it suggested "The King's
| Daughter and the Three Cauldrons" and "The Three Brothers".
| romanhn wrote:
| Haha, you're very welcome. The ChatGPT thing is odd in how
| close the answer was to my comment, including specific
| words I used. Makes me wonder about the likelihood of it
| being scraped and processed by OpenAI in the 10-15 minutes
| between posting the comment and trying it in ChatGPT. Or
| perhaps our brains are just LLMs after all :)
| inanutshellus wrote:
| My email address is in my profile, send me your address
| and I'll send you a thank you gift :)
| romanhn wrote:
| Not necessary at all, but the thought is very much
| appreciated regardless. Have a good one!
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| The US Constitution is "written" but is essentially
| incomprehensible without a stack of Supreme Court decisions
| the size of Mount Everest. (Perhaps literally.) None of the
| words mean what you would think they mean.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| With the current court signalling a somewhat higher-than-
| normal willingness to overturn past decisions, those words
| not mean what many lawyers previously might have advised
| they meant.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Apart from the constitutional conventions which may be
| unwritten.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_conventions_o.
| ..
| 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!
| empath75 wrote:
| Somewhat hilariously, I just asked chatgpt 4o with web access,
| and it found this blog post, and then authoritatively repeated
| verbatim the same wrong answer he was given from ChatGPT on
| reddit.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/678061d1-7920-8000-9b72-0b2d7ea60e...
|
| I gave up trying to get it to fix its answer.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| For anyone who has a similar quest (trying to find semi-
| remembered media from one's youth, based on vague details),
| r/tipofmytongue on Reddit is a great resource. People there often
| succeed where AIs fail.
| jnsie wrote:
| Lovely and well told story though I'm not sure what the following
| excerpt has to do with anything:
|
| > The second is that nowadays the real problem perhaps is not
| with Christmas decorations staying up too late, but with them
| going up too early, and with shops selling Christmas wares and
| playing Christmas music well before Advent, let alone Christmas
| dang wrote:
| I've got one of these too. When I was 6 or 7 I read a book in the
| school library in which the villains were "bone people" and the
| heroes were space explorers. The bone people could read minds, so
| they could tell everything the heroes were planning and thwart
| them.
|
| Eventually the heroes learn to keep their true thoughts in the
| back of their minds, where the bone people can't access them, and
| with this technique they defeat the bone people. It was the best
| book I'd ever read (up till then!) and I remember practicing
| keeping my thoughts in the back of my mind.
|
| I've been trying for years to find this book again. Anybody have
| ideas?
|
| Edit: it occurred to me that I should try an LLM, so I pasted the
| above text into O1 and, in a combination of anticlimactic and
| thrilling, it gave the answer straightaway. The book is
| https://www.amazon.com/Bone-People-Space-Science-Fiction/dp/...
| and the title is, er, "Bone People". Thanks ChatGPT!
|
| Edit 2: having now read the OP (and it's great), I see that the
| ChatGPT angle was already in there. But it produced an opposite
| result in my case.
| ddoeth wrote:
| Maybe the difference is that you used O1 that has access to the
| internet, and the other users might not have.
| pvg wrote:
| It seems like the biggest difference is that the book is
| about bone people and is actually called _Bone People_.
| dang wrote:
| A triumph of LLM literalism. It may never have occurred to
| me that that might literally have been the title. Googling
| "bone people" or "bone people children's book" doesn't
| work; the SERPs are flooded by a different novel that won
| the Booker in 1986, interesting no six-year-olds. But "bone
| people science fiction" does work!
|
| I read (er, reread) it last night using the book-borrowing
| feature of archive.org which got them existentially sued:
| https://archive.org/details/bonepeople0000unse/. The mind-
| reading business hardly figures in the action; it's there,
| but marginal. Actually the humans defeat the bone people by
| kicking one of them in the head (er, skull) and then by
| blasting them with an air gun. Literally an _air_ gun: it
| shoots air, and it turns out that air kills bone people.
| That was lucky!
|
| After all these years I remain of the opinion that
| defeating mind-readers by keeping one's thoughts in the
| back of one's mind is the only interesting thing about the
| book, so it's not surprising that was what stuck in my
| mind, though not all the way in the back. It's been in a
| trunk in the middle somewhere.
| titchard wrote:
| I am glad the book was found in the end, I had a similar case
| that took me years to track down. My great grandmother used to
| always send on christmas a Penguin Classic childrens book and 100
| brand new pennies in a handcherchief - for years I tried to track
| down one of the books describing wolves crowding round a dying
| explorers fire - which turned out to be White Fang by Jack
| London.
| rm445 wrote:
| It's interesting that the author is so disparaging of ChatGPT,
| when he himself had misremembered the title of the story as
| containing 'Michaelmas' and the importance of the goblins. What
| are these but hallucinations?
|
| Obviously, it's no good that tools are offering useless results
| and making searches harder. There's also how you use the tools -
| asking GPT to one-shot find something that may not have been in
| the training data is a risk of hallucination that's easy to be
| aware about, while using AI to assist a web and archive search
| might have produced the same end result as what happened, a smart
| librarian kindly doing some searching.
|
| Probably more fundamental breakthroughs are needed in how AIs
| 'know' stuff. But the gap between how humans and machines produce
| obscure half-remembered knowledge doesn't seem that big.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| A tool needs to complement its user. A tool that has the same
| weaknesses as its user isn't useful.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| I've found a great deal of use in working with other people,
| and they share my weaknesses far more than an LLM does. Even
| if I worked with exact duplicates of myself, I expect I (the
| one I, not the collection of clones) would still be more
| productive than if I worked alone- I routinely improve my own
| work when I read it back later after having lost context, so
| the context-free mes should be able to help in the same way.
| derbOac wrote:
| He even emphasizes this in the piece -- he extols the
| librarian as having the skills to recognize patterns in how
| people recall books, which includes imperfect memories.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It's worse than that. A hammer that shatters it's weak handle
| after normal use is a somewhat useful tool to the
| homebuilder. The hammer made out of painted cheese is only
| delaying construction of the house.
| wmlhwl wrote:
| I forgot the title of a Polish book I once read, but I remember
| many plot points. When I described them to gpt 4o, in five
| responses it gave me six books, three of which were English and
| one was Russian, but attributed all six of them to random Polish
| fantasy writers (even Polish ones had the wrong authors).
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Another great example how hallucination is the Achilles heel of
| AI. Never implicitly trust its output.
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