Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield. Can Elizabeth vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry? Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
19mentions
18people
2010–2026years
79% neutral21% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Popular works regularly mine the (public domain) past. Disney animated movies like Cinderella did so. Seth Grahame-Smith did so with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. and so on. That is literally the benefit of copyright expiration, that other people can utilize and transform a published work.
- Having or not having a book is absolutely fuzzy. If you have a translation, do you have the book? Even if, like the Odyssey, there are hundreds of wildly varying translations? What about an abridged copy? What about the Sparknotes version? If you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, do you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice? Certainly more so than if you have neither.
- >If you have a translation, do you have the book?
No, you have a translation.
>Even if, like the Odyssey, there are hundreds of wildly varying translations?
Precisely why translations are not considered equivalent to the original text.
>What about an abridged copy? What about the Sparknotes version?
An abridged copy is not a copy of the unabridged version.
>If you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, do you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice?
No.
I'm honestly surprised these were the questions you chose to ask, when you could have asked what if you have 90% of the pages, or what if most of the pages are missing pieces because the book was shot with a shotgun, or what if the book was scanned and OCRed and all the "rn"s were replaced with "m"s and all the lower case Ls with ones. Hell, is a scan of the book close enough to having the book, or is it far enough that one can no longer be said to have the book anymore?
- I was never using the Socratic method. I was asking rhetorical questions, and then gave the (my) answer at the end.
We just have different opinions about what it means to have a book. I think that having a copy of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" is more like having a copy of "Pride and Prejudice", than having no book at all is like having a copy of that book. You disagree and that's fine.
- Ok, I've stopped reading half way because it is useless. Your reflection does not bring anything concrete, it is just you trying to play on semantic and loose the point.
For example, you just moved the definition problem to "novel". Do you even realise that?
You are claiming that there is an understanding because the model is able to do something in a novel situation where only deeper understanding of the situation will allow it to perform that well. The big problem is that you have no idea if this situation is "naturally easy to reach" or not.
For example, a system that is fitted on the electrostatics Coulomb's law will build, internally, a set of equations to generate realistic predictions. And then you take this system and put it in a totally novel situation: classical gravitational problems. Well, this system will be able to generate realistic predictions there too, because Newton's law works with equations that have the same form.
When you are discussing with a LLM in a "novel" subject, how do you know the LLM cannot directly use the fit and complex equations that it has created for the "non-novel" situations it has been trained on? For example, the LLM has been trained on "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and tons of other mash-ups. Even if asking a story of Keanu Reeves and the Supreme Court looks "novel" to you, it does not mean the generated text was not in fact super easy to generate based on the patterns that the LLM has seen in tons of examples.
Honestly, this whole conversation just convinced me that too many people who claim "GenAI does understand" are way above their head on the subject. If you want to continue talking, just talk to a LLM. Plenty of people have done so and convinced themselves they were geniuses when in fact they were not at all. Yet another example that LLM has no understanding, as it is very very often failing to distinguish between correct ideas and "things that look correct but that someone with real understanding will not encourage".
- Didn't you read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?
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