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by coetry 3598 days ago
That actually is incredibly beautiful. It's crazy to think that the machine that generated it was devoid of the emotions behind this assembly of words.
2 comments

Generating in the loosest sense.

Code up the format of a villanelle and find Twitter posts to fit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villanelle

> VillanelleBot, created by Felix Jung, is a bot that composes villanelles using random posts from Twitter. Each line corresponds to a full post on Twitter

If you click on the line it goes through to the tweet e.g.

> i ate curly fries and shaker fries

https://twitter.com/ahtaebvh/status/757935083135258626

Well is it? At some point, either we become like machines, or the machines become like us. There is a limit to how many times we can redraw the lines.
The common distinction between machine and life seems arbitrary. Suppose for instance you had essentially infinite resources to design a machine that self-replicates by stealing blood from mammals, etc etc. You would end up with something very much like the mosquito. Why is it a machine only when man designs it?

This is perhaps more apparent with viruses. They aren't living per se, but are halfway there. The assertion that the virus is not a machine seems to be a difference without a distinction.

The expression is "a distinction without a difference"
Oh yes! Thanks.