Allison Parrish @aparrish@friend.camp

the main trade-off of training a VAE is reconstruction fidelity vs. structure of the latent space, and the epoch 3 version of this model was much "better" at reconstructing arbitrary inputs. at epoch 12, it reconstructs inputs to appear more like the training data, which I kind of prefer? here's smashmouth again with reconstructions from this model https://gist.github.com/aparrish/d356dcfa7fddd57d4ffddf4f75f69399

picking a random point in the latent space, then doing greedy decoding from various randomly selected nearby points (essentially generating variations on a line)—

greedy decoding from random samples at epoch 12, just at the right point before the model started to collapse. these are actually sorta... breathtaking?

now training a variational autoencoder neural network on the gutenberg poetry corpus but with pre-trained subword embeddings—it's MUCH better at reconstructing inputs now—here's a reconstruction of a little number you might know

i don't know why people say software engineering is difficult. just get the code cube to unlock the area leading to the boss. even kirby understands the basics

me: [literally orders a single pair of shoes]

marketing email, running to catch up with me, desperate, breathing heavily:

hiked up to some pretty waterfalls on mount timpanogos today

COCO captions have to be the weirdest corpus commonly used in machine learning. just normal people describing normal things

computational poetics pedagogy 2k19 imo

I have new poems out in Andreas Bülhoff's sync² zine series today: http://sync.abue.io/ for the series, or here's a direct link to the PDF: http://sync.abue.io/issues/190705ap_sync2_27_compasses.pdf

I've posted prototypes of some of these poems here—"compass" shapes with real words on the points and interpolated words (generated from a seq2seq model I trained) between. a few excerpts:

in 1985 Ben Fong-Torres wrote an article about Amy Tan's Kaypro User Group, and I'm not sure why this fact is so amusing and surreal

(from Kirschenbaum's _Track Changes_, p. 65)

experimenting with RNN text generation using pre-trained byte-pair embeddings (https://nlp.h-its.org/bpemb/)—output below shows results at various temperatures after five epochs with a minimalist architecture on a small corpus (A.E. Waite's _Pictorial Key to the Tarot_). it's not gpt-2 but it's not bad for 10mins of training on my macbook air either

hard to imagine poetry more phonetically perfect than this snippet from Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

(quoted in C.D. Wright's introduction to Robert Hass, and Paul Ebenkamp, editors. Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology. Counterpoint, 2014, p. 3.)

part of what I showed last night at the Creative Machine Learning Meetup: a little riff on rich text editors, using the spelling/phonetics sequence-to-sequence model I've been working on

lucky fella tbh https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/nyregion/manson-whitlock-typewriter-repairman-dies-at-96.html?_r=0

just noticed that this new concrete/sound poetry generator I'm working on inadvertently produced some Captain Planet fanfiction

the fluid, abstract, almost hallucinatory character forms in these textual talismans from "Scripture on the Rites of the Vajra-Being of Impure Traces for Exorcising the Hundred Transformations" are really beautiful—to my eye they're mimicking both the form of individual characters and the form of blocks of characters? (from from Robson, James. “Signs of Power: Talismanic Writing in Chinese Buddhism.” History of Religions, vol. 48, no. 2, 2008, pp. 130–169.)

when you choose too small a multiplier for your tsne coordinates and end up making a writhing mass of genesis 1:1

what I actually say: "This is wonderful, friend! Thank you for sharing your work with me."
what I want to say:

how do you do fellow kids