• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 年前
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Cake day: 2023年7月14日

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  • Ah, gotcha. Nothing had been using them yet because I’d only just gotten the API key configured the day prior. But I already had Traefik running several dozen self hosted services that I use all the time, so the only “new” piece was adding API key support to Traefik.

    One of my planned projects is an all-in-one, self-hostable, FOSS, AI augmented novel-planning, novel-writing, ebook and audiobook studio. I’m envisioning being able to replace Scrivener, Sudowrite, Vellum, and then also have an integrated audiobook studio, but making it so that at every step you could easily import or export artifacts to / from other tools.

    Since I also run a tabletop RPG, and there’s a lot of overlap in terms of desirable functionality with novel planning and ttrpg planning, I plan to build it to be capable in that regard, too.

    In both cases, the critical AI functionality that I want to implement (that afaik hasn’t been done well), is how to elegantly handle concepts from the world building section. For example:

    • Automatic State tracking, where a scene following the outline is written or generated, and the changes to state are calculated based off the text.
      • Example: the MC started with $100 and spends $5 buying a magazine. Now MC has a magazine and $95
      • Example: a character leaves the scene, heading to another location
      • Example: a minor character overhears a secret conversation about the villain’s plan
      • Example: a character is killed
    • Manual State tracking
      • Example: MC left the Macguffin with their mentor, but off page the mentor was killed and the Macguffin was stolen by the villain
      • Example: MC thinks something happened, but they misinterpreted it, so the user edits the automatically calculated state with a clarification: this is what MC thinks; this is what actually happened
    • Syncing state changes with timelines.
      • Example: a scene in chapter 8 is a flashback to before the start of the book, so nothing that’s happened since then has happened yet
      • Example: after having written the first draft, you realize you should have introduced the Macguffin much earlier, so you edit a scene in chapter 3 to include a mention of it. The timeline is updated to incorporate that information.
      • Example: you move a scene from chapter 7 to chapter 4 for the sake of pacing. This causes the state at the start of scene to be analyzed and the changes in the scene to be propagated and for any conflicts to be noted, both in this scene and any following ones, e.g., MC had $95 in chapter 4 and $60 in chapter 7, and lost their wallet in this scene, so now MC should have lost a wallet containing $95 and won’t be able to make the purchases they made between this scene and chapter 7
      • Example: You add a new scene in chapter 5 after having already written chapters 6-20. The changes in state due to this scene are propagated out and any resulting conflicts are noted
    • Information concealing
      • Example: MC doesn’t know that the Macguffin has been stolen, and neither does the reader. But if you tell the LLM that it’s been stolen at this point, the generated text will often immediately give this away

    Another critical feature is to have versioning, both automated and manual, such that a user can roll back to a previous version, tag points in time as Rough Draft, Second Draft, etc…

    I’d also like to build an alpha / beta reader function - share a link and allow readers to give feedback (like comments in particular sections, highlights, emoji reactions, as well as reporting on things like reading behavior - they reread this section or went back after reading this section - that could be indicative of confusing writing), and also enable soliciting the same sort of feedback from AIs, and building tools to combine and analyze the feedback.

    I could go on about the things I’d love to build in that app, but then I’d be here all day.

    I don’t have that tool built yet, obviously, but it has a need to integrate with everything I’ve worked on - LLMs, embeddings, image generation, audio generation - heck, even video generation could be useful, but that’s a whole different story on its own.

    That app will need to be able to connect to such services from the browser or the backend directly, depending on the user’s preferences and how the services are configured.

    In the meantime, having API key support means I can use my self hosted services with other tools.

    • the FOSS NotebookLM clone supports that.
    • I still haven’t touched N8N, but I’d been (and still am) planning to.
    • I’d been toying with subbing to Novelcrafter, which allows you to connect to an ollama instance.
    • I learned about PlotBunni around the time of this comment and spun up my own instance, then forked the project and added support for API keys and made some other bug fixes… I started adding support for storing data on the server and synchronizing it but never fully got that working before having to set the project aside to focus on my day job.
    • I can now use the Comfy UI Remote app outside of my own network (I think I was already able to do this before by configuring a service user in my auth provider and enabling basic authentication with a base64 encoded username/password as the Bearer token) which is nice because Comfy is a pain to use on a phone
    • Likewise with Kokoro - there is (or was - unsure if it’s been fixed) a bug in the web client that means only Chrome browsers can use it, but because I added API key support to the server, I can expose the service and access it from outside my network with a different client running on my phone

    I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t really touched any of this in over a month now, but it’s certainly not for lack of use cases.




  • You have it backwards.

    • Day 2 Purchase
    • Day 1 “Theft”

    Chronologically, the “theft” comes first. And you can easily purchase something you previously stole.

    Theft is in scare quotes because piracy isn’t theft and I’m assuming OP isn’t going to actually steal someone’s Steam Deck, Switch, or Switch game cartridge… but maybe I’m wrong.

    (Also you could “steal” it after purchasing it by buying on one platform and pirating it on another, but that’s a separate matter.)



  • You don’t need to put 20% down to buy a home, either.

    Homebuyers can get a conventional mortgage for 5% down (technically as low as 3% down, but that would limit their options for lenders and require a much better credit score) or an FHA loan for as low as 3.5% down.

    There are USDA loans that require 0% down, though they have income maximums and for homes in rural areas. I read that they also have square footage maximums (1800 square feet?), but the USDA property requirements doc I read didn’t list them.

    For veterans, VA loans can also be 0% down.




  • Summary of my comment: the study showed that the AI tool in question was an effective tool for the task, nothing more.

    I didn’t read this particular article, but I recently read a different one about the same study. I also clicked into the study itself and read the abstract and everything else that was freely available. The study was paywalled, but as far as I could tell:

    • Performance immediately displayed a sustained increase of 24% relative to baseline while using the AI tool in question
    • Immediately after the tool was taken away (after using it for three months), performance was 20% lower than the baseline
    • The study did not check to see what level performance returned to after three months without it, nor when it returned to baseline levels
    • The study also did not compare performance drops after returning from a three month vacation
    • The study did not compare performance drops when losing access to other tools

    This outcome is expected if given a tool that simplifies a process and then losing access to it. If I were writing code in Notepad and using _v2, _v3, etc for versioning, was then given an IDE and git for three months, then had to go back to my old ways with Notepad, I’d expect to be less effective than I had been. I’ve been relying on syntax highlighting, so I’m going to be paying less attention to the specific monochrome text than I used to. I’ll have fallen out of practice from using the version naming techniques that I used to use. All of the stuff that I did to make up for having worse tooling, I’m out of practice with.

    But that doesn’t mean that I should use worse tools.



  • By chance did you make her unintentional malapropism a canon part of the history of the company’s name? Like Google’s backstory (it may be an urban legend, but I heard they’d intended to name it “googol” but didn’t know how to spell the word, and misspelled it as “Google” when submitting their application).

    Strange, I suddenly want to have an Italian-inspired, high class restaurant in my game called “Bone Apple Tea”


  • I still wouldn’t call a car an “investment” or anything, but 100% agreed. The whole “cars lose 50% of their value when you drive off the lot” thing might have been true before the Cash for Clunkers program, but it isn’t anymore. Or maybe it’s true if you’re trying to trade-in the vehicle.

    If I wanted to buy the (fairly popular) car I’ve been driving for over 6 years with the same mileage, it’d cost me over 2/3rds what it cost new When I bought it, new cars were less expensive than used cars (i.e., like less than two years old with less than 25k miles) thanks to how much better the interest rates were on the loans. A couple years later, I was getting offers for more than I paid for it. And none of that is a unique experience.