Top all-time · #6353
Marcin Wichary
Personal blog · mwichary.medium.comhistorywriting
Marcin Wichary's personal blog at mwichary.medium.com covers history and writing. Since 2021, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times, most often “Stanisław Lem's short story about GPT-like system”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Marcin Wichary's Medium posts on Stanisław Lem, including translation comparisons and ChatGPT-era Lem writing, and a piece tracing the building used for the Sneakers movie's toy company.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /seduced-shaggy-samson-snored-725b5a8086d94 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-03-16
- Stanisław Lem's short story about GPT-like system3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-12-08
- What I learned about languages just by looking at a Turkish typewriter3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-17
- /stanislaw-lem-on-google-s-homepage-aedc9aaec44d2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-08-16
What Hacker News says?
Marcin Wichary translated one of Lem's stories from Polish to English, and wrote an article about the translation process. https://mwichary.medium.com/translating-a-stanislaw-lem-stor... >Marcin Wichary: This is a backstory of why I translated Stanisław Lem’s short story One hundred and thirty-seven seconds. >Translations of [Lem’s] works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic…
Comment linking /stanislaw-lem-on-google-s-homepage-aedc9aaec44d
on “The Truth, by Stanisław Lem (1964)”Submitted A Hacker’s Guide to Bending the Universe (2016) as a story · 12 points
HN discussionStill one of my all time favourite movies. Be sure to check out this delightful article about a guy trying - and succeeding - to find the actual building of the "toy company" from the movie: https://mwichary.medium.com/toy-company-my-ass-421842476d06
Comment linking /toy-company-my-ass-421842476d06
on “Happy 30th anniversary to ‘Sneakers,’ a cult classic that was ahead of its time”Submitted What I learned about languages just by looking at a Turkish typewriter as a story · 8 points
HN discussionYou might like to read a page[1] which allows you to compare Kandel's version with a literal translation of the > poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter S!! which was duly delivered by Trurl's Electrobard in the same story. 1: https://mwichary.medium…
Comment linking /seduced-shaggy-samson-snored-725b5a8086d9
on “The Beautiful Mind-Bending of Stanislaw Lem (2019)”Submitted What I learned about languages just by looking at a Turkish typewriter as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMichael Kandel's translation to English of Stanisław Lem's original Polish: https://mwichary.medium.com/seduced-shaggy-samson-snored-725...
Comment linking /seduced-shaggy-samson-snored-725b5a8086d9
on “What makes a translation great?”Submitted Turkish typewriters didn't have number “1” as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSee, that's the thing: It incorrectly guessed the wrong story from Cyberiad with me too! Twice! Then it incorrectly guessed it was in a different real book of fictitious reviews of non-existent stories, Imaginary Magnitude, even though it was a real story! So I asked it to write a fictitious review of the fictitious story it was hallucinating was a real story in a different real book of real stories, and it did. "Th…
Comment linking /stanislaw-lem-on-google-s-homepage-aedc9aaec44d
on “Story-driven adventure set in a hard sci-fi world by Stanisław Lem”Submitted Stanisław Lem's short story about GPT-like system as a story · 1 points
HN discussionStanislaw Lem's robots are timeless! Marcin Wichary made the Google Doodle about Stanislaw Lem: 60th Anniversary of Stanislaw Lem's First Book Publication: https://doodles.google/doodle/60th-anniversary-of-stanislaw-... See the interactive version here: https://www.google.com/logos/lem/ He also co-created the first interactive Google Doodle -- Pac-Man, 2010. Lem's Cyberiad has at least two Sallys that matter to hack…
Comment linking /translating-a-stanislaw-lem-story-6c2446632bd8
on “AI Is a Harsh Mistress”- 5- · 2022-12-08
Submitted One hundred and thirty-seven seconds as a story · 1 points
HN discussion Lem has a book about almost any subject related to science/philosophy you can imagine. Here he writes about ChatGPT :) https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-sec... Here as well: https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tr... And here about Ebooks and Audiobooks: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1024
Comment linking /one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-seconds-2a0a3dfbc59e
on “Stanisław Lem's vision of artificial life”Submitted The stenographer whom nobody wants as a story · 1 points
HN discussionLem is great. Here's his story about ChatGPT from 1976: https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-sec...
Comment linking /one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-seconds-2a0a3dfbc59e
on “Solaris by Stanislaw Lem on BBC 4 Radio Full-Cast Drama (2007)”Cyberiad appreciator checkin https://mwichary.medium.com/seduced-shaggy-samson-snored-725...
Comment linking /seduced-shaggy-samson-snored-725b5a8086d9
on “New GPT-3 model: text-DaVinci-003”notes: https://mwichary.medium.com/stanislaw-lem-on-google-s-homepa... https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/doodles/lem/
Comment linking /stanislaw-lem-on-google-s-homepage-aedc9aaec44d
on “Stanisław Lem Doodle (2011)”> Imagine a newsroom where you have to produce a daily newspaper and you suddenly stop getting feeds from the outside world. https://mwichary.medium.com/one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-sec...
Comment linking /one-hundred-and-thirty-seven-seconds-2a0a3dfbc59e
on “The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget”Stanisław Lem’s "Cyberiad" is a great book that predicted machine learning and various modern technologies, although credit for this particular poem should probably go to Michael Kandel for his brilliant English translation. It's very different in other languages: https://mwichary.medium.com/seduced-shaggy-samson-snored-725...
Comment linking /seduced-shaggy-samson-snored-725b5a8086d9
on “New tool from curl creator – trurl – for URL parsing and manipulation”
