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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   640 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 3, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Glad someone noticed.

The main takeaway? The competition was an absolute pain in the ass. Reading hundreds of thousands of tokens of AI generated prose and creating a working agentic harness + scaffolding was exhausting. It took dozens of cycles of iteration to find the right balance.

Funnily enough, what really made all the difference is that I ended up sharing a large corpus of my own text for reference - and it shows. The story I'm the most proud of is "The Bowl" (which is not nonsensical, at least to anyone who has or had a Labrador), but both my entries have clear self_made_human fingerprints. The Bowl made me sob while reading it for the first time, and I knew I wasn't going to get anything better than that. That's more than most human literature can ever say.

To the chagrin of people complaining about my use of AI assistance, at times, I know what I'm doing. Gwern, Roon, Alexander Wales and a few others think I know what I'm doing, and liked the output. Is it a surprise that I'm tired of arguing with idiots here when I could be off making money? $500 just about covers the effort, though I would have liked the full 10k. Ah well, I introduced myself as a dark horse candidate who might be worth giving a few hundred dollars in tokens just to see what he could do. And it worked.

Here's a public conversation I had with Gwern:

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/QiMdeD3OkG

I have plenty of additional thoughts, tips and things learned through trial and error plus bitter experience. Unfortunately, they're proprietary. Anybody who wants them better pay me for the privilege.

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