updates
TITLE: TAKING A WALK WITH GPT-2
DATE: 2020-11-22 21:42:13
Here's a new project I'm working on!
Basically, I want to generate written descriptions of walks so that people can go on a walk via a website, since we are all stuck inside.
The core concept I'm adapting is the experience of reading a page in a choose-your-own-adventure story. Putting aside the mechanics of choose-your-own-adventure, I want to recreate the feeling of reading the short scene itself - a narrative designed to stand independent of whatever precedes or follows it.
Instead of giving the user choice (or at least, the illusion of choice), the user will only be able to proceed forward or end the "walk." Instead, descriptive scenes generated from a trained gpt2 model will be presented at random. The intent here is to mimic the spontaneity and unpredictability of a meandering walk, where one has no particular destination and instead simply walks for a period of time.
So, that's the overall concept! I'll probably finesse the mechanics when I get to the point of building the front end.
So far, my focus has been on preparing a corpus for gpt2 training. It took me a while to think of how I could amass text samples that modeled what I'm looking for, but after my nth hour googling "landscape description corpus" I realized that travelogues would provide something at least close to what I was hoping for.
This took me to Project Gutenberg, where I started with Audubon's diaries and ended up with a couple dozens similar travel …
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TITLE: THIS WEBSITE
DATE: 2020-11-19 19:58:44
I probably definitely could have easily installed wordpress or any other thing. But I did not, so here is the story of this website.
When I first started Being Online I used Blogger (Blogger was new), and I learned the then-very-current technologies of HTML4 and CSS2 and JavaScript Before Libraries to make custom templates for it, and I was content. But these newfangled blogging platforms are frankly overwhelming in their various add-ons and monetization tools and overly complex templating languages, if you ask me. It's a lot to learn about a system that is actually mostly about removing your creative control, if you think making websites that do things is about creative control.
SO. I built this myself, the way I want it, in Django, which I like because MVC is a good framework and I know Python better than most other languages.
(A brief aside: Django is really progressing nicely, speaking as someone who last used it when this website last existed, in 2016, and then had the fun of migrating the old code to Django 3.1 when I realized that the world had continued working on its software frameworks in the past four years. A funny thing about coding is how if you just wait a while it usually gets easier.)
Other than that this is not too fancy! I'm using the django-taggit package to do tagging because while Django 3.1's many-to-many implementation seems MUCH less hellish than previous versions I am also lazy. Right now it's …
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TITLE: NOW WITH DARK MODE
DATE: 2020-11-15 21:37:28
OK OK, I'll stop fiddling with this I swear. But now the website has dark mode and a new color scheme that works better with the overall concept of a dark mode.
Wanting to write a post explaining how I made this site / why I didn't just use Wordpress or whatever else gives me ideas for more things I must implement before I can write the post, so....
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TITLE: AT THE MOMENT
DATE: 2020-11-14 19:11:17
Here's a brief overview of what I'm working on (and planning to post about) currently:
This website
It is a terrible curse that continues to require tweaking and definitely needs content added. I also might want to change the color scheme.
Walk generator
I'm experimenting with natural language processing/ML text generation to create a game/app/website that will allow us all to go on interesting walks. :)
A class
I am teaching a class in the spring and putting just an absurd amount of effort into it.
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TITLE: OK EVERYTHING IS BASICALLY UP AND RUNNING
DATE: 2020-11-12 19:32:43
Skeleton site complete~!
The line spacing is bothering me but it's OK for now.
I'm reading to put this on the back burner for a bit so I can focus on using Python for literally anything else.