>The simplest way to do this—without writing my own graphics code—is to use a 3D scatter plot. There aren’t any good plotting libraries for Common Lisp, so I used Python’s matplotlib, and used a CSV to transfer the data.
>Plotting is always tedious, but happily I was able to use ChatGPT to write most of the plotting code. I asked it to generate a simple example of a scatterplot with labeled points—that is, stars. Then I modified the presentation a bit, changing colours and font sizes, but the static plots have the problem that the perspective makes it hard to know where places really are.
>So I showed ChatGPT my plotting code, and asked it to rewrite it to create an animation where the entire plot is rotated about the vertical axis. It rewrote the script, preserving bit-for-bit identical output, and added animation support. I got an inscrutable error, showed it to ChatGPT, and it suggested a fix. I’m really happy with this approach.
Forget the turing test, conquering matplotlib is the real feat of machine intelligence.
And I really enjoyed the story, and the other one in the same universe:
>This is the noocene: 10^30 immortal souls scattered over a billion stars, across a disk eight thousand light years in diameter. And a pantheon of some seven hundred gods, who have changed the face of nature. Most leave them a wide berth: the stars around Sadalmelik are not settled.
>And when gods die, grave-robbers flock to them and dig a quarry out of their bodies. This is the crew of the Epiphany: explorers who sift through the middens of collapsed civilizations and rob the graves of the gods, searching for beautiful things. This is the Epiphany: a treasure ship, laden to the gunwales with precious things from every world and every age, and the burial hoards of the gods.
>Plotting is always tedious, but happily I was able to use ChatGPT to write most of the plotting code. I asked it to generate a simple example of a scatterplot with labeled points—that is, stars. Then I modified the presentation a bit, changing colours and font sizes, but the static plots have the problem that the perspective makes it hard to know where places really are.
>So I showed ChatGPT my plotting code, and asked it to rewrite it to create an animation where the entire plot is rotated about the vertical axis. It rewrote the script, preserving bit-for-bit identical output, and added animation support. I got an inscrutable error, showed it to ChatGPT, and it suggested a fix. I’m really happy with this approach.
Forget the turing test, conquering matplotlib is the real feat of machine intelligence.
And I really enjoyed the story, and the other one in the same universe:
https://borretti.me/fiction/maker-of-rivers
>This is the noocene: 10^30 immortal souls scattered over a billion stars, across a disk eight thousand light years in diameter. And a pantheon of some seven hundred gods, who have changed the face of nature. Most leave them a wide berth: the stars around Sadalmelik are not settled.
>And when gods die, grave-robbers flock to them and dig a quarry out of their bodies. This is the crew of the Epiphany: explorers who sift through the middens of collapsed civilizations and rob the graves of the gods, searching for beautiful things. This is the Epiphany: a treasure ship, laden to the gunwales with precious things from every world and every age, and the burial hoards of the gods.