_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI
jhbadger wrote 9 hours 38 min ago:
Herb Simon certainly was great, but it is weird that the site uses a
picture of what is obviously (despite his face being cut off) Claude
Shannon working on his robotic mouse Theseus.
URI [1]: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2018/08/23/shannons-mouse/
tekacs wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
I really enjoyed and have recommended to others this very short paper,
'Borges and AI' [1], that was also discussed on HN a couple years back
[2].
[1]
URI [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01425
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38693120
6stringmerc wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
Fascinating and very accessible read. While in jail I tried to get
through Sartreâs âBeing and Nothingnessâ (new translation) and
some of the big concepts are echoed in this dialogue.
An LLM trained on Sartre would be amazing because the logical
extensions of many of his positions and postulations would be
uncomfortable in polite society. Even as a human being he quite
frequently espoused concepts counter the grain of civility or notions
of what ethics are or should be. An unrestrained, uncensored LLM in
this vein could be scary and gut wrenching and yet a good reminder of
our less-than-ideal state of refinement of thought and behavior as a
species.
netsharc wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
Considering Borges' stories (some written as if they're reports of
actual events), I had to wonder for a long while if this is a
"reporting" of a "what if" scenario. It would've been a great homage to
him.
101008 wrote 23 hours 40 min ago:
Borges is totally recommended, of course, but after reading him in the
original language I think his English translations lack the poetry and
music of his writings. For once I am happy Spanish is my first
language.
Izikiel43 wrote 16 hours 48 min ago:
I had the same issue with Stephen King, reading it in English after
reading Spanish translations is a different world.
anthk wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
Which editions? The Iberian Spanish ones are not that different in
tone/speech to the original English ones.
jtmoulia wrote 18 hours 47 min ago:
The last few months I've been picking up Spanish language editions of
Borges's short stories and poems from used book stores. Two decades
ago during school I took two years of Spanish, so reading native
Borges would be way beyond my comprehension.
With AI tools, though, I can "read" Borges in his native language:
with my phone + OCR + translate I have an English language companion.
Or, using the voice interface I can try narrating the Spanish text
and ask clarifying questions whenever I'm confused.
An author like Borges makes it well worth the extra effort. And, his
puzzles often involve language, so the extra layer of mental
translation can mirror the work itself, e.g. in his poem La luna [1].
(though, I envy your native Spanish)
1.
URI [1]: https://www.gaceta.unam.mx/la-luna-un-poema-de-borges/
tgv wrote 8 hours 34 min ago:
My Spanish is more advanced (I was fluent in everyday Spanish, not
so much in the more formal use), and I'm reading El Aleph now. It
sure takes quite some effort. So many unknown words. And he can
turn a phrase quite concisely. But worthwhile.
101008 wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
Congrats on both of you for putting the effort! I am from Buenos
Aires, Argentina, so 100% same language as Borges. However, as
both of you already said, it isn't even easy for us to read
Borges. He has a complex sentence structure, and uses a lot of
not-so-common words, so you have to read it really carefully,
paying extra attention (not as I'd read any other text). But in
the end is really worthwile, everytime I read something by Borges
(new or not), I found it fascinating.
theshaper wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
Hey! Opino lo mismo!
(I agree!)
mentalgear wrote 1 day ago:
Is there an audio file of this interview? I'd prefer listening to the
original (in the background).
mrpsbrk wrote 6 hours 9 min ago:
This seems to be the version published in an Argentinian magazine:
URI [1]: https://borgestodoelanio.blogspot.com/2017/05/jorge-luis-bor...
gwern wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
I see no hint of an audio recording having been made, much less
surviving & digitized, in the original article's description: [1]
It's too detailed to be retroactive notes by Simon or Borges, so I
would guess Borges's secretary or a student simply transcribed it as
they went.
URI [1]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-histo...
benbreen wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
Gwern and others who have dug into it this far might be interested
by this footnote in the Crespo article: "I have tried to lay my
hands on the original version of the conversation, as I am sure
Simon did, too. I contacted Gabriel Zadunaisky, who, as the article
explains, participated in the meeting. He is a professional
translator. I asked him for the original version, and he replied on
WhatsApp: 'Mr. Crespo: I am very sick. Unfortunately, I am unable
to provide you with the information requested.' My hypothesis is
that Zadunaisky translated the conversation directly from the
recorded version and that this original version has been lost."
My read is that most likely, it was recorded on an old school
reel-to-reel tape recorder. It's entirely possible that the tapes
are still sitting on a shelf somewhere in Argentina, though the
chances of actually tracking them down are pretty low. I worked
with some reel-to-reel tapes that Alan Ginsberg made (now held at
Stanford) in the mid-60s (including one where he is talking to Bob
Dylan!) and they held up pretty well. Had to use audio editing
software to remove tape hiss, but they were not as badly preserved
as I expected.
gwern wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
That's unfortunate about Mr Zadunaisky, but it does suggest
there's no hope of a recording unless someone should stumble
across it in the Borges papers (although given how his estate has
been abused, little hope of that being useful, one way or
another) or the Argentine library archives...
Anyway, I uploaded the Simon book chapter at
URI [1]: https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1996-simon-2.pdf
benbreen wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
That's awesome, thank you for uploading.
kouru225 wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm a huge fan of his short story Funes the Memorious. Link:
URI [1]: https://ia801405.us.archive.org/10/items/HeliganSecretsOfTheLo...
f1shy wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
Which is in Borges words "a long allegory of insomnia" :)
jl6 wrote 1 day ago:
Hofstadter should have written Gödel, Escher, Bach, Borges.
I wrote about the connection between Borges, AI, Wikipedia, Kafka (the
messaging system, not the author), GPUs, and cryptography in the small
print on page 7 of this:
URI [1]: https://lab6.com/4#page=7
hybrid_study wrote 16 hours 45 min ago:
you beat me to this
ecocentrik wrote 23 hours 6 min ago:
Hofstadter was defiantly a fan of Borges' work.
URI [1]: https://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-1-borges-and-i...
kragen wrote 15 hours 47 min ago:
What, when did he stop being so?
ecocentrik wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
I didn't mean to imply that he stopped being a Borges fan.
karaterobot wrote 1 day ago:
> If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and
combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory
experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?
Hmm, what if you could recreate, word-for-word, the great works of an
author like Borges (or, say, Cervantes) by so thoroughly understanding
their life that the words themselves came out of you, not memorized and
recapitulated, but naturally and unbidden? What an interesting idea for
a story, maybe an LLM will be able to write that one day.
kjellsbells wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
I see what you did there...should your username be Pierre Menard,
perhaps?
raminism wrote 1 day ago:
ChatGPT, Author of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"
jhedwards wrote 1 day ago:
There already is a story like that in The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem.
One of the robot characters in the book decides to make a poet robot.
They reason that a poet is "programmed" by their culture, and a
culture is programmed by the previous culture, so the robot has to
simulate the evolution of the world from the beginning of time in
order to produce the AI poet. It's a wonderful and hilarious story.
awithrow wrote 23 hours 12 min ago:
It could be that Lem was influenced by Borges? The original poster
is referencing a specific Borges short story called "Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote" which he published in 1939. It influenced a
number of other notable authors
QuesnayJr wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
The joke the previous comment is making is that Borges already
wrote that story. "Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote."
uoaei wrote 1 day ago:
This reads exactly like the plot of a story Borges might write,
maybe someone more familiar with his ouevre can shine a light on
which stories of his touch on this kind of theme.
theobreuerweil wrote 1 day ago:
I think the comment is referring to âPierre Menard, Author of the
Quixoteâ.
dwringer wrote 1 day ago:
Yes indeed. This thread seems to indicate more people should read
more Borges!
integralof5y wrote 1 day ago:
Borges and Herbert Simons are two great minds, but their conversation
is not deep since is mostly shared view about the meaning of human and
machine intelligence. Today, with LLMs we have a tool to explore the
relation between intelligence and language, between number of
parameters, neural nets architectures and much more. So that
conversation give us no new insight but is delightful to share time
with such great people.
viccis wrote 1 day ago:
If anyone here hasn't read Borges, I'd strongly recommend him. Pretty
much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy
to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break. The common
recommendation would be to try out Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and see
if you like it. If so, it's part of Labyrinths, which is (in my
opinion) his best collection of short stories. The best edition in
English is probably Penguin's Collected Fictions.
Regarding the content of this interview:
>If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and
combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory
experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?
This is my Kantian way of thinking about epistemology, but I don't
think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge
would be necessary to create Borges out of a world without Borges.
In this interview, Simon's view feels much more like the way Hume
viewed people as mechanical "bundles of sensations" rather than
possessing a transcendent "self". This led to his philosophical
skepticism, which was (and still is I guess) a philosophical dead end
for a lot of people. I think such epistemological skepticism is
accurate when applied to machines, at least until some way of creating
synthetic a priori knowledge is established (Kant did so with
categories for humans, what would the LLM version of this be?)
Kiln6125 wrote 6 hours 11 min ago:
Somewhat relevant to this overall conversation is "pierre menard
author of the quixote". Which takes the concept of death of the
author in an amusing direction.
flobosg wrote 10 hours 58 min ago:
I first encountered Borges in high school, reading âThe House of
Asterionâ as an assignment. Probably not one of his most well known
short stories, but I would still recommend it.
frank20022 wrote 12 hours 56 min ago:
Reading Borges is anything but easy. It requires a certain state of
mind. I myself would pick Cortazar over Borges any day, buy I have
appreciated some of his writings.
aktau wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
I have the opposite experience. I find Cortazar impenetrable, but
the Borges stories "speak to me".
f1shy wrote 13 hours 28 min ago:
> Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's
really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch
break.
Yes, his writings are short, but man they are dense!
To anyone who cares, do this exercise: read short story by Borges,
probably the shorter the better. Then go ahead say, next day, and try
to write it down again in your own words. I tried a couple of times,
and I ended with at least twice the number of pages. Amazing.
viccis wrote 3 hours 58 min ago:
There's definitely a Pierre Menard joke in here somewhere
Lerc wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
>but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge.
Do you think that a LLM has the ability to identify a new a priori
knowledge?
It seems like it would be a lower threshold to meet but If you
combine that with a stochastic process then it seems inevitable that
it would be able to ruminate until it came up with new a priori
knowledge.
viccis wrote 4 hours 2 min ago:
I've said this in another comment but an example would be to train
an LLM on a corpus with ALL mathematic content removed. Nothing at
all. Then ask it what the shortest distance between two points is.
That's an example of synthetic a priori knowledge.
thrance wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
Highly recommend his Fictions too. Grabbed a worn copy for 1⬠on
the street months ago, and I still think about Uqbar from time to
time.
cvz wrote 1 day ago:
Tlön is one of my favorite short stories. Weirdly (and perhaps
appropriately) that's despite being unable to remember basically
anything about it once I've finished reading.
kunzhi wrote 1 day ago:
Did you ever read House of Leaves?
7thaccount wrote 1 day ago:
I've tried, but never made it all the way through. Cool to realize
the author's sister (Poe) made a hit song "Haunted" when inspired
by the same house iirc. There's my random fact of the day.
indoordin0saur wrote 6 hours 9 min ago:
I was interested in what this house looks like but after a quick
internet search it seems that her album was inspired by the novel
itself, not any particular house.
theshaper wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
Let me give you some probably bad advice. Skip the Johnny Truant
parts and skim past all the creative layout stuff. It's just
decoration, and decoration is often suspicious. Focus on the core
story. Itâs fantastic. Thereâs a shot at building a full-on
American mythology, Lovecraft-style, from that alone.
Sadly, almost no one talks about it. Ditch the form and embrace
the substance. â It also nods to the mystery behind The
Navidson Record.
I wish I had known this when I first read it.
internet_points wrote 12 hours 33 min ago:
I agree, I loved the story (I also did kind of enjoy the form,
but agree it can get in the way of enjoying the story).
The Navidson Record is on youtube if you dare =P
theshaper wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
OMG! ੧[â°oâ°]Ê
Thanks!
aorloff wrote 1 day ago:
URI [1]: https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Librar...
DIR <- back to front page