3 posts tagged “terry-pratchett”
2026
2024
I like the lies-to-children motif, because it underlies the way we run our society and resonates nicely with Discworld. Like the reason for Unseen being a storehouse of knowledge - you arrive knowing everything and leave realising that you know practically nothing, therefore all the knowledge you had must be stored in the university. But it's like that in "real Science", too. You arrive with your sparkling A-levels all agleam, and the first job of the tutors is to reveal that what you thought was true is only true for a given value of "truth".
Most of us need just "enough" knowledge of the sciences, and it's delivered to us in metaphors and analogies that bite us in the bum if we think they're the same as the truth.
2022
Is the AI spell-casting metaphor harmful or helpful?
For a few weeks now I’ve been promoting spell-casting as a metaphor for prompt design against generative AI systems such as GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion.
[... 990 words]
Comment
My comment on Terry Pratchett's Study — Hacker News
Terry Pratchett once wrote about the concept of "horizontal wealth". Vertical wealth is where you spend money on rich people stuff - yachts and suchlike. Horizontal wealth is where you spend more money on the things you liked before you got rich: https://chibuikeani.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-price-of-happin...
(Original source is his book A Slip of the Keyboard - this linked blog post quotes that bit.)
# 7th November 2026, 7:34 pm / hacker-news, terry-pratchett