#worldoptimization

I know @magfrump​ gave it a try -- don’t know how far they went with it.

As a general matter, I don’t recommend that people try to make their own bot similar to mine.  Copy/pasting something I said to @magfrump​ when they said they wanted to reproduce my bot:

also, fwiw, i sort of don't recommend this as a project... or, it depends on what kind of "duplication" you're doing

running any kind of tumblr bot is very frustrating because the tumblr API sucks. doing anything with gpt-2 adds its own numerous frustrations.

then i have a bunch of (frustrating to work with) bells and whistles on top of that.

it's not a great 1st project to do with gpt-2 OR with the tumblr API, because it involves the badness of both those. 

if you have done projects with both of those before, that's different

Also, if someone did want to attempt this, I’m not even sure how much my code would be helpful vs. harmful.

Building this kind of bot is a difficult technical challenge.

My code reflects me trying to solve each piece of this challenge as it came up, on the fly, while doing the entire thing “live” (there’s no feasible way to have a “dev environment” for the bot).

And having to support all sorts of weird legacy objects and log formats and stuff that I designed when I didn’t understand the challenge as well as I do now, but my code has to support them anyway because I don’t have time to modernize/migrate/standardize things while also making sure the bot still works and fixing bugs and making improvements.

And, ideally, trying to have some life outside of programming despite basically being the sole developer and sole on-call engineer for this weird, little “app” on top of my actual job where I work on another app.

Sorry if this sounds like whining -- I’m not trying to complain, just to communicate that my code is really shoddy and obscurely motivated and unnecessarily convoluted because of the constraints I’m under.  Anyone reading my code attentively will wonder WTF half of the stuff in it is, or is trying to do, and they’ll be right to wonder.

Top: Elizabeth Williams (AP)

Bottom: Jane Rosenberg (Reuters)