[HN Gopher] I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model
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       I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model
        
       Author : zdw
       Score  : 45 points
       Date   : 2025-12-13 20:19 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (susam.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (susam.net)
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | now i wonder if you can compare vs feeding into a GPT style
       | transformer of a similar Order of Magnitude in param count..
        
         | 0_____0 wrote:
         | I thought for a moment your comment was the output of a Markov
         | chain trained on HN
        
           | bitwize wrote:
           | No mention of Rust or gut bacteria. Definitely not.
        
       | atum47 wrote:
       | I usually have this technical hypothetical discussions with
       | ChatGpt, I can share if you like, me asking him this: aren't LLMs
       | just huge Markov Chains?! And now I see your project... Funny
        
         | pavel_lishin wrote:
         | > _I can share if you like_
         | 
         | Respectfully, absolutely nobody wants to read a copy-and-paste
         | of a chat session with ChatGPT.
        
         | empiko wrote:
         | LLMs are indeed Markov chains. The breakthrough is that we are
         | able to efficiently compute well performing probabilities for
         | many states using ML.
        
           | famouswaffles wrote:
           | LLMs are not Markov Chains unless you contort the meaning of
           | a Markov Model State so much you could even include the human
           | brain.
        
           | cwyers wrote:
           | Yeah, there's only two differences between using Markov
           | chains to predict words and LLMs:
           | 
           | * LLMs don't use Markov chains, * LLMs don't predict words.
        
         | roarcher wrote:
         | ...are you under the impression that you have an exclusive
         | relationship with "him"? Everyone else has access to ChatGPT
         | too.
        
       | lacunary wrote:
       | I recall a Markov chain bot on IRC in the mid 2000s. I didn't see
       | anything better until gpt came along!
        
         | nurettin wrote:
         | Yes, I made one using bitlbee back in the 2000s, good times!
        
           | pavel_lishin wrote:
           | I made one for Hipchat at a company. I can't remember if it
           | could emulate specific users, or just channels, but both were
           | definitely on my roadmap at the time.
        
             | lloydatkinson wrote:
             | I'm hoping someone can find it so I can bookmark it but I
             | once read a story about a company that let multiple markov
             | chain bots loose in a Slack channel. A few days later
             | production went down because one of them ran a Slack
             | command that deployed or destroyed their infrastructure.
        
       | vunderba wrote:
       | I did something similar many years ago. I fed about half a
       | million words (two decades of mostly fantasy and science fiction
       | writing) into a Markov model that could generate text using a
       | "gram slider" ranging from 2-grams to 5-grams.
       | 
       | I used it as a kind of "dream well" whenever I wanted to draw
       | some muse from the same deep spring. It felt like a spiritual
       | successor to what I used to do as a kid: flipping to a random
       | page in an old 1950s Funk & Wagnalls dictionary and using
       | whatever I found there as a writing seed.
        
         | bitwize wrote:
         | Terry Davis, pbuh, did something very similar!
        
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