#vuurwerk

Veel meer vuurwerk Iets meer vuurwerk Eigenlijk hetzelfde Iets minder vuurwerk Veel minder vuurwerk Ik merk nooit zo veel van het vuurwerk dus ik weet het niet Ik woon niet in Nederland

I am always amazed by all the corners of life that have their own naming conventions. What makes a name sound like an heirloom apple, or a cookie, or a Pokemon?

Here’s one I had never thought much about: the names of fireworks. Bruce Preston spends the New Year in the Netherlands where fireworks are a big deal. He collected the names of over 3,000 fireworks from vuurwerkbieb.nl, ranging from “Important Pyro Show” to “Super 8 Cake Blue Star” to “Kinder Pakket Groot XXL” (some of the names are in Dutch, which just made it more interesting).

Now the reason people send me datasets like this is because I like to give them to algorithms called neural networks, which can learn to imitate the words they see. Without any direction from me, and without any prior knowledge of the words and what they mean (or even that they ARE words; they might be knitting patterns), the neural network (here, textgenrnn) produces its best imitation.

In this case, its best imitation of fireworks sounds a lot like, well, an artificial intelligence trying to imitate fireworks names.

Happiness Rockets Gold Mini wow Flaming Thundersplont Box Crackling Shapes Bright Blue Stoppers Soundd Box Red flashing cake Machine Blinking Display Code Rumble Smile Rockets Extreme maxied whistling None Star Thunder Excellent Rain What Crackling 16 Silver Pirate Counters

Some of the imitations are particularly poor. Or awesome, depending on how you look at it.

Pronk XL B2B Torch All-Dang Shark Whistler 1 Darner Box  Far Exploring Palm Black Moo Sheeperstrike Senior Fountain Just Timmy Hurricane Said Bang Shaming Bulls Big Doo Cake Spent on the Bun Stragfalmed

And some of its fireworks sound more like they’re from the post-human era where machines dimly remember what humans were like, and celebrate them with commemorative explosions.

Medium mushing box Green Event Shorts I just looked Definite Box Into Eggs Oh Fountain Event Badger One Assortiment Sneaking Veet Box 3 Black Hall is released Golden Strink is 4x Original Cat Pix Budget 2 Boom