Name: The Dragon Reborn
ISBN: 9781857231175

The Dragon Reborn

The Dragon Reborn—the leader long prophesied who will save the world, but in the saving destroy it; the savior who will run mad and kill all those dearest to him—is on the run from his destiny. Able to touch the One Power, but unable to control it, and with no one to teach him how—for no man has done it in three thousand years—Rand al'Thor knows only that he must face the Dark One. But how? Winter has stopped the war—almost—yet men are dying, calling out for the Dragon. But where is he? Perrin Aybara is in pursuit with Moiraine Sedai, her Warder Lan, and Loial the Ogier. Bedeviled by dreams, Perrin is grappling with another deadly problem—how is he to escape the loss of his own humanity? Egwene, Elayne and Nynaeve are approaching Tar Valon, where Mat will be healed—if he lives until they arrive. But who will tell the Amyrlin their news—that the Black Ajah, long thought only a hideous rumor, is all too real? They cannot know that in Tar Valon far worse awaits... Ahead, for all of them, in the Heart of the Stone, lies the next great test of the Dragon reborn....

What Hacker News says

tnecnivSep 2023

To add: the heron-marked blade is used pretty well in other ways as well.

For context for the unfamiliar readers perusing this thread: heron marks indicate a blade master — a titled earned by defeating one in single combat or by undergoing a rigorous training process over years. Rand is a farm boy given such a blade by his dad when he sets out on his journey, and he is surprised when he learns his father was a blade master because he was just a simple farmer that served in a war 20 years beforehand to satisfy his own desire for adventure.

Rand feels he does not deserve to carry the sword but does it to honor his father. Even though he trains quite a bit, it is more a crash course than a proper pedagogy. He kills a blade master at one point but there are no witnesses so by tradition he feels he can’t claim the title. He carries this imposter syndrome across many of the books and obsesses over training with the sword. This continues until he is maimed in a way that hinders his ability to fight with the blade and, at roughly the same time a character points out that it doesn’t matter if anyone saw him defeat the blade master, he earned the title and should feel confident about it.

In a lot of ways, this arc is a microcosm for his internal conflict about being the Dragon Reborn (the chosen hero of prophecy). He goes from not believing he could possibly be the Dragon, to obsessively trying to prepare himself mentally for his final confrontation with evil (he repeatedly says he must make himself as hard as steel), to eventually realizing that his own perception of what makes a Dragon / blade master is immature — both are just a men, with their own strengths and weaknesses even though they have dedicated their life to a purpose.

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CSMastermindJul 2023

There's a few prompts that I use with every model to compare them. One of the simplest ones is:

> When does the bowl of the winds get used in the wheel of time books?

LLaMA2 fails pretty hard:

> The Bowl of the Winds is a significant artifact in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. It is first introduced in the third book, "The Dragon Reborn," and plays a crucial role in the series throughout the rest of the books. The Bowl of the Wines is a powerful tool that can control the winds and is used by the Aes Sedai to travel long distances and to escape danger. It is used by the male Aes Sedai to channel the True Power and to perform various feats of magic.

For what it's worth Bard is the only model that I've seen get this question correct with most others hallucinating terrible answers. I'm not sure what it is about this question that trips LLMs up so much but they produce notably bad results when prompted with it.

> Please write a function in JavaScript that takes in a string as input and returns true if it contains a valid roman numeral and false otherwise.

Is another test that I like, which so far no LLM I've tested passes but GPT-4 comes very close.

Here LLaMA2 also fails pretty hard, though I thought this follow up response was pretty funny:

> The function would return true for 'IIIIII' because it contains the Roman numeral 'IV'.

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anderspitmanJun 2020

Heh, I just started The Dragon Reborn on my 3rd read-through. I have noticed the chapters aren't right, but it hasn't really bothered me. What does your workflow look like when fixing these? Is there a way to share chapter corrections so others can apply them to their files?

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brandoncordellDec 2018

This year has been a year of fiction for me. I haven't hit my goal yet but I've got some time still!

Annihilation (Book one of the Southern Reach trilogy) - Jeff Vandermeer

Authority (Book two of the Southern Reach trilogy) - Jeff Vandermeer

Acceptance (Book three of the Southern Reach trilogy) - Jeff Vandermeer

Artemis - Andy Weir

The Breach (Book one of the Travis Chase trilogy) - Patrick Lee

Ghost County (Book two of the Travis Chase trilogy) - Patrick Lee

Deep Sky (Book three of the Travis Chase trilogy) - Patrick Lee

Runner - Patrick Lee

Signal - Patrick Lee

Dark Matter - Blake Crouch

The Atlantis Gene - A.G. Riddle

The Eye of the World (Book one of The Wheel of Time) - Robert Jordan

The Great Hunt (Book two of The Wheel of Time) - Robert Jordan

The Dragon Reborn (Book three of The Wheel of Time) - Robert Jordan

The Shadow Rising (Book four of The Wheel of Time) - Robert Jordan

The Fires of Heaven (Book five of The Wheel of Time) - Robert Jordan

The Way of Kings (Book one of the Stormlight Archives) - Brandon Sanderson

The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

I'm currently reading Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. Book two of the The Stormlight Archives.

I'd say the biggest surprises for me would be Patrick Lee. I DEVOURED these books. The Breach, Ghost County, and Deep Sky are a trilogy. They reminded me of X-files crossed with Navy Seals but that doesn't really begin to really describe the books.

I can't believe I got through so much of The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. The first book was so-so but the story really picked up in the second book. I'm getting to the part of the overall story that people say gets tedious and boring but I haven't experienced this at all yet.

I just finished The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson a few days ago. It's definitely one of my favorite books of all-time. It may be my favorite fantasy book but I won't know until I try to re-read it. I re-read The Hobbit every year. I never seem to get sick of it. It's going to be hard to knock this off it's thrown but damn is The Way of Kings close!

This is also the first year I've ever read so many works of the same author over and over. I probably won't do it again next year. Except for maybe Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan. I found it was _usually_ harder to get into the writing once I got such a familiar feel of their style and storytelling. This didn't hold true for Sanderson and Jordan they are still blowing me away.

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