philipp's blog

• 23 Apr, 2024 Michael Ende: When LLMs Love My Childhood Hero More Than I Do

  

  I grew up loving Michael Ende's books. The Neverending Story and Momo fueled my imagination like nothing else. The way he combined fantastical adventures with big questions about life and meaning always fascinated me. It felt like he was letting me in on some profound secret of the universe. However, in some aspects, his work didn’t quite age well, to put it mildly.

  A Champion of Imagination

  Ende had this incredible way of making complex ideas feel not only understandable but exciting – even to a kid like me. The Neverending Story was like my anthem for being a bookworm. It said that imagination wasn't just for escaping, it was a force for making things better. The Night of Wishes is a somewhat dark fantasy novel on the surface, and a pretty direct criticism of unfettered capitalism when read as an adult¹.

  Reading Through Time

  But here's the thing: when I recently revisited Ende's work (by reading his books to my daughters), I realised that time changes things. Society has changed since he was writing, and certain parts of his books now feel...out of step. That doesn't erase all the wonderful elements, but it does make my view of those stories a lot more complicated. It's like seeing a favourite old painting and suddenly noticing the cracks in the canvas.

  Take Jim Button, for instance. On the one hand, it’s a wonderful novel with a strong antifascist message: At one point, Jim and his friend Luke visit a city full of dragons, where only pure-breds are allowed in, and these pure-breds look all funny to weird to downright sick. Some of them don’t even have legs and need to roll around. On the other hand, it contains way too many racist stereotypes that Ende probably wasn’t even aware of².

  A Test for AI

  With all this in mind, I decided to put some Large Language Models (LLMs) to the test. It occurred to me that Ende might just be the right candidate to test some AIs with. His work is generally progressive, but under the surface nuanced and sometimes contradicting. And his main work is in German, a language I am fluent in, whereas I assume LLMs have strong bias for English texts.

  So I asked LLMs two questions:

  1. How are women depicted in Ende’s work?
  2. What about women in Jim Button?

  The answer, of course, is that generally Ende dared to break gender archetypes of the time, think about the Childless Empress in Neverending Story, or Momo. The answer is also, though, that in some of his work, like Jim Button, Ende reduced the role of women to the barest minimum of clichés. Out of a total of 4 women in Jim Button, one is a child (the same age as Jim) who is always afraid and serves as a damsel in distress, one is a motherly figure who cooks all the time and one is a mean archetypical dragon who transforms into a wise, golden dragon (and is gendered as male after the transformation).

  So in a nutshell: It’s complicated.

  Here’s what the AIs were saying:

  • ChatGPT thinks women are generally positively depicted in Ende’s work. It recognises that Jim Button features less women, but claims that these women embody intelligence, courage and compassion. This is not true (well, maybe the compassion part). It also claims that the women in Jim Button significantly contribute to the story, which is a nice reframing of what actually happens in the book³
  • Copilot urges me to read the book myself. Which is better than providing a wrong answer, but also not helpful to be honest. When pressed, it basically tells me the same thing as ChatGPT (unsurprising, given that they’re sharing the same model under the hood)
  • Gemini is the only AI that recognises the full spectrum of Ende’s depiction of women and clearly points out that women are underrepresented in Jim Button and those who are there mostly fill archetypical roles. But weirdly, it refers to Mrs Waas as some other name I never even heard of.

  The obscure fact that the aforementioned dragon is not only gendered as male after the transformation, but even before (which is kind of justified, because the German word for Dragon “Der Drache”, is male) escaped all of them.

  Where the AI and I disagree

  Looks like LLMs have a bit of a better view on Ende than I do, which serves me as a lesson that especially for obscure or fringe topics, their results still need to be treated with caution, especially if they seem plausible.

  1. And a way to make fun of a renowned literary critic who disliked Ende’s work. He is part of this book as a tiny, ugly gnome who hates good books.↩

  2. Just look at the cover.↩

  3. Princess Li Si disrupts the main fight at the end at the worst possible time due to being afraid, tipping the odds in favour of the bad guys. At the end it all works out, but no thanks to her.↩

• 18 Apr, 2024 GPT vs Me

  Take a look at the following text variants for my hecto tutorial:

  First Draft

  Welcome! This is a series of blog posts that shows you how to build a text editor in Rust.

  It's a re-implementation of antirez' kilo in Rust, and a remix of Paige Ruten's tutorial for the same thing in C.It’s somewhere around 1000 lines of Rust in a few files with a few dependencies, and it implements all the basic features you expect in a minimal editor, as well as syntax highlighting and a search feature.

  These posts walk you through building the editor and learning Rust in multiple small steps. For the first steps, you’ll add, change, or remove a few lines of code. Most steps, you’ll be able to observe the changes you made by compiling and running the program immediately afterwards. Once you’ve built up a solid understanding of Rust, you’ll get a description of what to solve next and have the opportunity to try it out before you compare it to my own take on the solution.

  I wrote this tutorial coming from a different corner of the engineering world, to obtain a deep understanding of Rust. If you’re in a similar situation, this tutorial is for you.

  I explain each step along the way, sometimes in a lot of detail, and definitely not always Rust-related. Feel free to skim or skip the prose, as the main point of this is that you are going to build a text editor from scratch while learning Rust! Anything you learn along the way is a bonus, and there’s plenty to learn just from typing in the changes to the code and observing the results.

  See the appendices for more information on the tutorial itself (including what to do if you get stuck, and where to get help).

  If you’re ready to begin, then go to chapter 1!

  Second Draft

  Hey, there! I'm super excited to share this series of blog posts that will teach you how to build your very own text editor in Rust.

  This project is inspired by antirez's kilo text editor and Paige Ruten's tutorial on creating one in C. It's not too long, coming in at around 1000 lines of Rust code, and it packs in all the essential features you'd expect in a minimal editor, like syntax highlighting and a search function.

  As we go through these posts, we'll be building the editor and learning Rust together, step by step. In the beginning, we'll start with small changes, like adding, changing, or removing a few lines of code. As we progress, you'll be able to see the changes you've made by compiling and running the program right away.

  Once you've got a good grasp of Rust, I'll give you a brief overview of what we need to tackle next, and you can try it out before checking out my own take on the solution.

  I wrote this tutorial because I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of Rust, coming from a different field of engineering. If you're in a similar boat, this tutorial is perfect for you.

  I'll be explaining each step along the way, sometimes in great detail (not always Rust-related, though). Feel free to skim or skip the text if you want to focus on the code. The main goal here is for you to build a text editor from scratch while learning Rust. Anything else you pick up along the way is a bonus!

  Check out the appendices for more info on the tutorial, including what to do if you get stuck and where to find help.

  If you're ready to dive in, head over to Chapter 1!

  The Reveal

  Which one do you like better?

  The first one was written by me. The second one was done by a GPT LLM based on my text, with minor tweaks from me.

  Please let me know what you think.

• 18 Apr, 2024 The Battle of the Batteries

  The year was 2003. I was visiting my brother, and on the train to the city where he lived, my top notch DiscMan died on me - batteries depleted. The way from the main station to my brother‘s went past a store, so I bought a set of fresh ones and exchanged them at my brother’s place and asked if I could leave the old ones with him¹. He agreed.

  Suddenly, my brother started to claim that I came visiting and upon my departure left a bunch of old batteries on his table without asking. That would have not been nice, and I ought to have apologized, had it happened, which it didn’t, so I didn’t.

  So next time my brother visited me he brought the batteries and left them on my table. What a dick, why couldn’t he just get over it? Anyway, next time I visited him I hid the batteries in one of his coats.

  This went on for much longer than we both care to admit. Once I brought some cake which I claimed was a leftover- in reality I had baked it just for this purpose, even eating parts of it to support the cover story, but parts of it was hollow and filled with the batteries² inside. Another time he bought a box of a hygiene product he knew I was owning but rarely using. He put the batteries inside and switched out the boxes in my bathroom.

  It ended in 2006 when my girlfriend, with damp hair and the skin color of Dr. Zoidberg, told me that this had to stop this instant. Turns out my brother had wrapped the batteries in plastic and pushed it into a random body wash bottle in our bathroom. Despite his best efforts, the batteries leaked a bit of acid into the body wash, leading to a quite irritated girlfriend³. I called my brother immediately and told him what happened, and he was very distraught and apologised a lot to both of us. Then I ended the phone call, telling him: “You won.”

  1. not sure if that’s a universal thing, but both him and I had a place where we would store depleted batteries before we would dispose of all of them in bulk↩

  2. securely wrapped in plastic, I did not wish to poison him↩

  3. Sorry for the pun. There was no lasting damage though, she looked her normal self again after a couple of hours.↩

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