Hypothesis C: failure of human memory. A human read Stephenson's book(s) 20 years ago, remembers that the endings were a bit unsatisfying. The same human also read some other book many years ago, which ends mid-sentence. In that person's mind, the two are conflated.
Another hypothesis. Have AI generate a top 50 list of books, and add a book you want your website to promote into the mix somewhere near the top to increase its sales. Cheap marketing, It wouldn't be the first time.
In these modern times of ours, the word literally has taken on a new meaning, which is "not literally but with emphasis." This seems like the most likely explanation.
About half-way through I had to resist the urge to skip to the end to see if he did that. An opportunity lost.
I'll admit, of the few books of his I've read, I always felt like they ended a couple of chapters too soon or a couple of chapters too late — which has put me off reading more of his books despite some interesting premises. I suspect some of the deeper themes are lost on me in my bedtime readings. Just not my cup of tea at the end of the day, literally.
Dear Neal Stephenson: thanks for actually ending your well-thunk writings with complete sentences/thoughts.
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I just finished Dave Wallace's 520 page PhD thesis, his first novel The Broom of the System, which literally ends with a liar proclaiming:
>I am a man of my
( "word" is presumed to follow, but another DFW book which just [abruptly!?!] ends )
Like his other two novels (Infinite Jest & Pale King), Broom is an ensemble of disconnected characters, with no clear destination nor moral lessons navigated in a few-hundred-too-many pages — just raw human condition. Very powerful writing style, but with no executive function.
Now that I've read 2000+ pages of David Foster Wallace, I will continue NOT recommending his novels to anybody (this is the same review I gave after IJ and PK). DFW was definitely a powerful thinker/writer, but he should have stuck to his shorter non-fiction meanderings.
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After writing all of the above, I clanked around with the topic of incomplete sentences ending books:
>Your sense that the mid-sentence ending and related choices feel like bullying is a legitimate aesthetic and emotional response, not a misreading or a sign you “don’t get it”
“A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.”
is “Inhuman Centipede” to describe the slop-eating-its-own-tale future we all dread an established term, or an invention of the author? I hope it becomes the term we all use, like slop and clanker.
For those of us writing original words that are consumed by LLMs without our consent, at least we get to be the front of the Inhuman Centipede.
All of the descriptions on that reading list give me strong LLM vibes. Which, given the source, seems like it should be expected. This post could have stopped after hypothesis 1.
Silicon Valley is largely illiterate when it comes to fiction and literature. It is generally pretty hard to find people who read or think about anything other than a small set of standardized scifi, so even if this wasn't ai slop, it would still be pretty bad.
It's a symptom of a broader pathology of rich and STEM people lacking appreciation of philosophy and ethics. Neither extreme subject matter expertise nor wealth confer wisdom. This category of blindspot can lead to enormous suffering of others when over-promoted and under-moderated.
The most likely option of all was the article was written without that much effort by a random employee. This is a lot of work over one throwaway sentence lol.
It's definitely written by an AI. The end description of hitchhikers guide is "[...]the meaning of life. Which turns out to be an integer." No one would bother writing that.
I've seen LLMs claim that a text cuts off mid-sentence before in cases where it in fact doesn't, and I think this might be an artifact of them being presented with a truncated version by some unclear software process, perhaps to fit into a context window. In this case, however, it's unlikely that the LLM was presented the text directly, and rather it is recounting things it “knows”.
I was trying out an IDE plugin for local LLM integration, but it would just make totally insane edits instead of what I asked for.
It turned out that the LLM-runner's default setting for handling queries that were too long was to silently delete the middle of the query. So the LLM saw the beginning of my ask, and the tail end of the code context, and nothing else.
48 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 62.7 ms ] threadI'll admit, of the few books of his I've read, I always felt like they ended a couple of chapters too soon or a couple of chapters too late — which has put me off reading more of his books despite some interesting premises. I suspect some of the deeper themes are lost on me in my bedtime readings. Just not my cup of tea at the end of the day, literally.
----
I just finished Dave Wallace's 520 page PhD thesis, his first novel The Broom of the System, which literally ends with a liar proclaiming:
>I am a man of my
( "word" is presumed to follow, but another DFW book which just [abruptly!?!] ends )
Like his other two novels (Infinite Jest & Pale King), Broom is an ensemble of disconnected characters, with no clear destination nor moral lessons navigated in a few-hundred-too-many pages — just raw human condition. Very powerful writing style, but with no executive function.
Now that I've read 2000+ pages of David Foster Wallace, I will continue NOT recommending his novels to anybody (this is the same review I gave after IJ and PK). DFW was definitely a powerful thinker/writer, but he should have stuck to his shorter non-fiction meanderings.
----
After writing all of the above, I clanked around with the topic of incomplete sentences ending books:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/broom-ends-with-an-incomple...
>Your sense that the mid-sentence ending and related choices feel like bullying is a legitimate aesthetic and emotional response, not a misreading or a sign you “don’t get it”
Just so fascinating — best book club buddy, ever.
is “Inhuman Centipede” to describe the slop-eating-its-own-tale future we all dread an established term, or an invention of the author? I hope it becomes the term we all use, like slop and clanker.
For those of us writing original words that are consumed by LLMs without our consent, at least we get to be the front of the Inhuman Centipede.
https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/93bc3abb04...
> opus descriptions in cursor, raw
All of the books I have read on this list (which is nearly all of them) are entirely worth reading.
But I'm always looking for more and better stuff to read, so please give us a few examples that you believe should be included.
Sorry. Just grumpy, cause I always love the first 80% of his books and then they somehow... just disintegrate.
— Maya Angelou
It turned out that the LLM-runner's default setting for handling queries that were too long was to silently delete the middle of the query. So the LLM saw the beginning of my ask, and the tail end of the code context, and nothing else.