I'm working on my scifi novel. I had started writing it when LLMs started taking off - I had been doing AI for two decades and I was well-placed to be in a good position to profit with the rise of LLMs, but I ended up gaining nothing much and I was depressed about it - so I started writing instead. Been picking at it for about a year before befriending an editor who encouraged me to keep writing. He's helped me developmentally edit it to a point I am now ready to work on my second draft.
It's a hard scifi novel with mild existential horror tones that is borne mostly of maths jokes. At one point the main character tries to escape the matrix (reality). But the matrix is defective, so the best way out was to orthogonalize the subspace and reduce the matrix to its eigenbasis instead. Most of the scenes are based on similar maths jokes.
Tentative name is Diagonalization of the Meta (I had previously called it The Metaverse).
At this point I'm writing mostly for myself. GTM strategies for novels... that's an interesting way to think about things. I've not thought about it just yet. Happy to hear if you have any ideas tho.
I told a variant of the original Little Mermaid story as part of a school outreach program. The kids came to the conclusion that God wasn't a fair being because he didn't give mermaids souls. I walked away satisfied that my little counterprogramming against catholic school indoctrination might have worked. I wasn't invited back (at least for school year 2024).
In some novel, the author discussed Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac [0] as not a test of Abraham by God, but a test of God by Abraham.
As in, 'I am about to murder my only son on your orders. If you are indeed the kind of god who would order me to do such a thing, then we'll see where that leaves us...'
That interpretation always struck me as truer to Old Testament tone.
At the time, child sacrifice was apparently common, enough that if a country was in trouble, the populace would demand the king sacrifice his kid to save the country (even shown in scripture … see 2 kings 3:27 though later in time). This was a very _public_ display that this God does not want that.
In short, it wasn’t really a test of either one, it was a public declaration that child sacrifice is bad.
Sounds like Dan Simmons' Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. I think that particular bit was in the second book, but Sol spent a lot of time grappling with Abraham in both.
Leaving the classroom, I tip my fedora and chuckle to myself. As I smile at my own cleverness I wonder how much karma this story is going to get when I post it on the atheism subreddit later.
I wouldn't blame anyone for assuming God is a being. It's hard to reconcile the idea that God is both an abstract entity, like a force in the universe, but it also can become fully human as Jesus Christ.
That framing is a bit of a stretch given the widespread tendency of the religious to anthropomorphize God in terms like having human-grokkable preferences and communicating them to us.
I'd say that argument has itself preemptively "retreat[ed] onto ever-shrinking intellectual turf. Defining God as something akin to the entire existence of the universe is something that essentially cannot be proved or disproved. Stick to that definition strictly, and yes there is nothing that an atheist can take logical issue with. But that strict definition also yields no conclusions/advice/insight either, so it's not very interesting. Hence seemingly no one ever being able to adopt such a definition and actually stick to it.
Any metaphysical framing of ‘why existence’ is a bit of a stretch and can never be proved or disproved. I’ve also wondered whether a logical atheist would care if they were logical considering time is zero sum :) Also, these ideas are harder to grok in the modern mindset of reductionism (also unprovable), but this conception of God and being is millenia old.
I mean the framing of an abstract non-entity God is a stretch from how basically everyone actually invokes God. Sure, that conception of God has been around a long time - however I've yet to come across any religion that sticks to that conception. Instead it's generally used as part of a Motte and Bailey setup - such an abstract conception of God cannot be disproved, and so one has to agree that such a God may exist. But then having established that, the general feeling that there is some kind of higher power is used to give weight to a whole bunch of assertions of what a completely different conception of a higher power supposedly wants us to do.
Maybe in some circles, but the abstract idea of God being love (assuming one has faith that consciousness and free will exists in reality) go back millennia. The abstractions predate the Simpson’s ‘beard in the sky’ by a few years ;)
Most LLMs out there are very American in their writing mannerisms. The article even alludes to this:
> The AI did, however, try to sound like someone. It was folksy and upbeat, talky and pretend-excited
I've not seen an LLM, even when fine tuned that doesn't actually do that (Chinese LLMs excepted). There's something just inherently American about the instruction datasets that these LLMs are instructed with.
I got the AI to write excellent Romanian, both standard and rural dialects and styles. It wasn't hard. The standard remaining was a default, and I was able to dial in a rural character in less than 10 rounds of back and forth conversation about the area and background of the person and some of their speech mannerisms. These are broad strokes that the AI kind of filled in for me, not teaching it from scratch.
So just prompt it a little bit and spend maybe 300 to 800 words talking in the style you want it to emulate. And have an extended conversation where you nail in the style.
I bet you can do this to make it write in British, Australian, or Indian English styles. But I'm perhaps not really equipped to judge, since I don't know those styles natively.
I've been running GolangSyd for about 8 years now, and previously Sydney Python for about the same amount of time. I found finding sponsors to be one of the hardest things. One of the last Sydney Pythons in which I gave a talk on machine learning had ~250 people attending (PyConAU at that time had roughly as many people I think). So large that the pizza bill was way more than the host (who was the sponsor as well) had anticipated, so we were no longer welcome at that venue. And said host is a well known billion dollar Aussie company.
Thankfully for GolangSyd, my cohosts have been extremely talented with finding sponsors. This gives us a lot more opportunity to do weirder things like https://gogogogogo.casa .
Running meetups are hard work, full stop. On the other hand, I've gotten to know some people very well and some of my best collabs have been thru these meetups. Running a meetup was a way for me to overcome my own reluctance to socialize.
I've hosted the Thessaloniki Python meet up for the past ten years. I had a relevant discussion in the latest meet-up, two weeks ago:
Some of the members were asking why I don't find sponsors, get some food and drinks, a bigger venue, and try to grow the meet up. I realized at that moment that I don't want to.
I don't like the business part of technology, I'd rather have a meet up of twenty people building cool random things with Python, than two hundred job-seeing networkers. I know it's a bit of a false dichotomy, but I've found that sponsors turn the event businessy quickly.
This is all to say that, if you're organizing a meet up, you should decide what you want from it. I don't want a large meet up, I want a small group of people who know each other and have fun while presenting topics interesting to them. Maybe you want the biggest meetup in the country, with everyone there finding exciting jobs. That's OK too, it just makes the approach very different, which means it's hard to give general advice.
I once bought pizza for all the PyCon sprinters on the first day of the sprints. High quality pizza, too (Lou Malnati's in Chicago). Spent over $900 on it. As I was handing out pizza, I realized "I just spent more on pizza than I did on my first car."
Not really - the NY Tech Meetup / DC Tech Meetups would regularly have hundreds of attendees, and a few others like the Data Community DC ones had quite a few. Even in those larger numbers, sponsors are flighty and often unappreciative.
Current organizer of Data Community DC here. It's a lot of work to get a sponsor, and they tend to churn after a year or two when the individual advocate moves on.
The best sponsors know the value of long term community engagement. Bad sponsors are more transactional, and want to really see the short term value they get.
It's a hard scifi novel with mild existential horror tones that is borne mostly of maths jokes. At one point the main character tries to escape the matrix (reality). But the matrix is defective, so the best way out was to orthogonalize the subspace and reduce the matrix to its eigenbasis instead. Most of the scenes are based on similar maths jokes.
Tentative name is Diagonalization of the Meta (I had previously called it The Metaverse).
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