News, briefly

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

Appointment today, went well. It turned out I was mistaken about having to have my birth certificate available on account of having been registered for jobseeking assistance in the past. But it is still useful to have.

Meanwhile the jobhunting itself continues to not go well. Hopefully one I am qualified for will turn up soon.

Back using laptop, which fortuitously turned out to have a problem only in the AC adaptor cord and not the machine itself. That ended up being cheap to replace and hopefully this cord will be amenable to not twisting itself up and breaking. Still intending to get backup information storage soon and later (but much less urgently) a new machine entirely. Battery still not fixed, RAM still meagre relative to operating system, else not so cheap to be using again.

Other things elsewhere.

Automated* story generation

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

I like writing stories. You like reading stories. Do you like my stories enough to keep reading them?

This is not intended as a personal question. The 'I' is generic, so is the you.

Automated story generation. It is an idea I first picked up from 1984, where stories were mass-produced by machines to keep the proles sedated. Since about then I've considered such story generation a plausible, likely sort of eventuality. Included it in some stories no one yet has read. I don't see why there couldn't such production of stories unless we turn out to be living in a dualist or otherwise supernatural sort of universe.

Typically I see it as a bit of a personally bleak prospect. Writers as a set of humans obsoleted by an equivalent or superior source of fiction. Today I wondered about parochialism, and maybe for some time people would prefer stories written by humans because of the sort of prejudices that lead them to say only humans can make stories worth reading, humans have creativity, humans have something ineffable that sets them apart. Maybe some would like reading the stories of those they knew or liked. I wonder in such a scenario how likely it is human authors would still develop a following.

*meaning here stories made by (nonhumans made by humans to some degree of antecedence)