Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm)

Reading about how vacuous gpt5 is when trying to be literary — i remembered _why (why the lucky stiff) and his inspired nonsense/sense!

Twitter posts 20 years ago:

“i try to tan my bottom so if people tell me to cram somethinsomethin where the sun don’t shine i can say “oh ho but it does shine! it does!”

“my sister keeps her sandwich in a holder which, by all appearances, is itself a sandwich. would that everything had such a container.”

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#_why #WhyTheLuckyStiff

https://wandering.shop/@cstross/115128476448655512

Charlie Stross (@[email protected])

"The red recording light promised truth; the coffee beside it had already stamped it with a brown ring on the console. ... I adjusted the pop filter, as if I wanted to politely count the German language's teeth." GPT-5 is optimized to produce garbage that is evaluated positively by other LLMs. https://futurism.com/gpt-5-literary-outputs

The Wandering Shop
Sep 1, 2025 at 3:31pmWeb
Show threadStephen Bannasch (316 ppm)Sep 1, 2025

Or this insane and whimsical short story (which is definitely written by a real human) and starts with:

“(An octopus is busy chaining together air conditioners and, from the audience's perspective, he has piled air conditioners upwards, an endless tower which ascends right up into the zenith. A toy gun and an imaginary van lay in disarray on the floor to establish setting: a child's playroom.)”

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#_why #WhyTheLuckyStiff

https://viewsourcecode.org/why/five_minute_plays/withAnOctopus.html

_why's Estate - Octopus (a Five-Minute Play for Twins Who Don't Have Their Other Twin With Them and An Unlimited Supply of Animals)

Show threadStephen Bannasch (316 ppm)Sep 1, 2025

One of _why’s poems:

0.2
Sister, without you,

The universe would

Have such a hole through it,

Where infinity has been shot.

This cannot be, though.

There will always be room

For you--all of us are

Holding the way open.

https://viewsourcecode.org/why/quatrains/0.2.html

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#_why #WhyTheLuckyStiff #poem

_why's Estate - 0.2

Show threadStephen Bannasch (316 ppm)Sep 1, 2025

And the fun craziness of Ruby metaprogramming:

Seeing Metaclasses Clearly
If you're new to metaprogramming in Ruby and you'd like to start using it, perhaps these four methods could give you a bit more vision.
https://viewsourcecode.org/why/hacking/seeingMetaclassesClearly.html

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#_why #WhyTheLuckyStiff #Ruby #MetaProgramming

_why's Estate - Seeing Metaclasses Clearly

Show threadStephen Bannasch (316 ppm)Sep 1, 2025

A link to an archive of almost all of _why’s work!

“Hey, welcome to my collection of why the lucky stiff links. Everything _why has published on the internet should be accessible from here. It works sort of like a museum that sells maps. Many of his abandoned writings are mirrored locally here, and everything else is through external links.”

https://viewsourcecode.org/why/index.html

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#_why #WhyTheLuckyStiff #Ruby #MetaProgramming

_why's Estate