Nov 29, 2017 · 57m · y-combinator
Microbes, Robots, and Ambition - Robin Sloan on His Novel Sourdough · Y Combinator
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Author Robin Sloan joins hosts Craig Cannon and Kat Manalac to discuss his novel Sourdough, exploring machine learning applications in writing, digital ephemerality, kitchen automation, and the evolving culture of Silicon Valley.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The partners as informed peer 2.7 Guest teaching 2.7 Guest disagreement 0.9 The partners pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is the partners, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 21:40 Sloan forcefully rejects the 'story vessel' platitude
Robin Sloan directly attacks a conventional piece of creative writing advice, telling the audience that anyone saying a story seeks its own vessel is 'full of shit' because form precedes content.
Hardest push from the partners ▶ 30:50 Craig challenges the premise of leaving no permanent digital traceCraig Cannon pushes back against Robin Sloan's argument that preserving conversations is weird and antisocial by noting that he intentionally records, transcribes, and indexes his entire life.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 43:20 Sloan demonstrates how neural networks should be integrated into writing toolsRobin Sloan educates the hosts on moving past simple command-line neural network generation, explaining how he designed a live interactive tab-completion workflow in Atom to keep the human in the loop.
The partners hold their own ▶ 40:30 Craig demonstrates technical grasp of Magenta and style transfer pitfallsCraig Cannon displays deep familiarity with creative AI tooling by referencing Google Magenta and explaining why simplistic neural style transfer alienated visual artists.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The partners as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The partners pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Machine Learning and the Fictional Music of Sourdough | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Craig Cannon sets up the conversation by asking about Robin Sloan's machine learning audio experiments. Sloan provides a detailed technical breakdown of training SampleRNN in Torch on Croatian Klapa music to synthesize fictional singing for the Sourdough audiobook. | |
| Researching Robotic Arms & Technical Accuracy in Fiction | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Craig brings up Spike Jonze rejecting technical advisors on film sets, contrasting it with technical accuracy in fiction. Sloan explains his research into robotic arms and why organic kitchen manipulation remains a difficult robotics problem. | |
| Inspiration for Sourdough and Bridging Tech with Traditional Crafts | 2 | 3 | 2 | 0 | Kat Manalac asks why Sloan focuses on the intersection of tech startups and traditional crafts like breadmaking. Sloan reframes the conflict, passionately rejecting the narrative that new technology must replace ancient crafts. | |
| Genre Classification: Sci-Fi Literary Fiction and Optimistic Futures | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Craig and Kat discuss the modern prevalence of dystopian narratives like Black Mirror versus Sloan's optimistic sci-fi literary fiction. Sloan argues that writing characters people want to spend time with offers a necessary alternative to bleak cynicism. | |
| Children's Literature and Microbiome Research Influences | 2 | 4 | 3 | 0 | When Craig asks if Sloan ever considered building an app alongside his book, Sloan bluntly rejects the common industry dogma of finding the 'right vessel' for a preexisting story. He then illustrates the fragile impermanence of apps compared to physical books through his lost iOS project Phish. | |
| Preserving Digital Culture and Auto-Deleting Tweets | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 | The conversation shifts to digital archiving, code preservation, and Sloan's practice of auto-deleting his tweets. Sloan likens Twitter to an ephemeral cafe conversation rather than a permanent congressional record, while Craig humorously notes he indexes his entire life. | |
| The Golden Age and Decline of Blogging | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Kat asks about Sloan's early blogging work on Snarkmarket and whether social platforms killed it. Sloan reminisces about the mid-2000s blog ecosystem, RSS curation in Google Reader, and the lost craft of daily public thought. | |
| Reflections on Twitter: 280 Characters and Interface Design | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Craig asks about the controversial expansion of Twitter to 280 characters. Sloan recounts an early college lesson about UI changes on the New York Times site and defends 280 characters for allowing users to construct dialectical thoughts. | |
| Machine Learning as an Interactive Tool for Creative Writing | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Craig and Sloan discuss generative ML tools, with Craig citing Google Magenta and the limits of style transfer. Sloan outlines his philosophy of building interactive, human-in-the-loop ML tools by detailing his custom Atom text editor autocomplete plugin. | |
| The 'Child of Hogwarts' Quote and Books as Social Objects | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Craig brings up Sloan's popular 'child of Hogwarts wanting to be sorted' line from Sourdough. Sloan discusses how isolated book quotes function as viral social media objects while maintaining that deep reading remains insulated from fast-paced online behavior. | |
| Epic 2014: Retrospective on an Early Viral Flash Video | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Craig asks about the origins of Sloan's 2004 viral Flash video Epic 2014. Sloan describes building the media-future mockumentary with Matt Thompson at Poynter and the grassroots global web mirroring required to distribute video before modern platforms. | |
| Shifting Tech Narratives from Penumbra to Sourdough | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | Kat asks how changing tech journalism tone influenced the writing between Mr. Penumbra and Sourdough. Sloan explains toning down pure techno-optimism to reflect the darker realities of startup labor while intentionally steering clear of lazy nihilism. |
Statements from this episode (19)
Robin Sloan: Audiobooks are huge and growing rapidly across publishing
“First of all, it's actually interesting to know for folks that aren't totally plugged into the publishing industry, audiobooks are huge. It's like, they're growing like gangbusters.”
Robin Sloan: Sourdough is first audiobook with machine learning creative output
“And to my knowledge, it's the first time that like the creative output of a machine learning system has been included in an audio book.”
Cannon: Spike Jonze rejected technical advisors on 'Her' to avoid reality constraints
“And Spike Jones explicitly said, we don't want a technical advisor because I don't want to be bounded by reality. I just want to go for it.”
Sloan: Robotic kitchen automation is extremely difficult outside modular fast food
“But in fact, it's really challenging because that kitchen space is in fact really chaotic and unbounded. It's not one of these spaces that's sort of at least a normal kitchen, like a restaurant kitchen or a, Or home kitchen. McDonald's obviously is kind of is …”
Sloan: New technology accumulates alongside old crafts rather than replacing them
“Instead of the new thing replacing the old thing, it all just piles up in this, like, multi-car crash non-violent crash glorious crash, where everything is just kind of like, and the mountain is getting higher and higher and higher, and I don't know, I find th…”
Cory Doctorow and Annalee Newitz avoid both dystopia and naive optimism
“I think people like Cory Doctorow Annalee Newitz here in San Francisco is amazing science fiction writer. They don't write dystopias. They don't write those sort of, you know, naive Panglossian features either.”
Robin Sloan: Good creative work begins with a format, not a story
“I, you know, there's that thing you hear where people say, like, Okay, you have to come up with a story, and then you find the right vessel for that story. Like, does this story want to be a book, or a video game, or a HBO series, whatever. I think that is wro…”
Robin Sloan: Digital software experiments inevitably break compared to durable physical books
“You make these digital things, and unlike a book where once you bind it up and put it on a shelf, even if it gets forgotten, even if it gets damaged, or, you know, whatever, it's like still, It boots somehow. You can, like, compile and run that printed book ba…”
Sloan predicts Facebook updates and Instagram photos will be gone by 2050
“I would not bet against everything that we're pouring into kind of the vast digital box, you know, like everything, the Facebook updates, the Instagram photos, all of it basically being gone in 2060, 20, 50. Like, I hope that's not the case, and I mean, it see…”
Sloan discloses he regularly deletes his tweets to keep Twitter ephemeral
“My very tiny kind of lever against that, that system and my way of kind of keeping it something like a cafe conversation with the words just fading away is to delete my tweets on the regular and oh, I can report that it feels great.”
Blogging was essential cross-training for writers to develop ideas publicly
“Because I think people who kind of came up during that time, not only as bloggers, but kind of as writers more broadly, because it was this amazing way to kind of cross train and just force yourself to, like, write something in public every day, even if you di…”
Twitter and Facebook killed the independent era of blogging
“There's no question. It was killed by Twitter and Facebook, and just really the sense that People moved on.”
Shutting down Google Reader put a nail in blogging's coffin
“The loss of Google Reader was another true, I mean, truly, it was one of the nails in the coffin of blogging.”
Twitter's 280-character limit allows users to put ideas in dialogue
“Someone made the point that with 280 characters, it actually gives you enough space. It's not that much space, but it gives you enough space to do something you almost never could with a 140 characters on their own, which is to Present one idea, kind of, like,…”
Robin Sloan is writing a novel incorporating machine learning-generated text
“I'm in the process of trying to write a novel that has as kind of part of its text, the product of some of these machine learning systems.”
Sloan: Google Magenta is one of few groups doing creative AI right
“I actually think, I think they're one of the sort of the few people slash groups that are doing it right. People on the podcast should know I'm making air quotes, doing it right. And that's only to say they're super competent technically and interested in kind…”
Sloan: Human curation is as important as generative AI output
“The core interesting thing is the weird sort of wonderful output of this machine, right? But at the same time, you acknowledge that having a human kind of curate it and shape it and form it and just Be in the loop and be learning how to use it is just as impor…”
Robin Sloan: Social media has not yet reshaped long-form fiction
“I don't really think so, not yet, and I think that's for a couple reasons if I had to kind of just guess. One is the truth is that the readership for books I mean, it's obviously diverse, and like, there's a lot of young people who read books. There's also a l…”
Public sentiment toward Silicon Valley began darkening by summer 2012
“That particular shift, that sort of darkening almost of the tint was happening even as I was kind of wrapping up the manuscript for Penumbra, and I remember very vividly the last few passes in the summer of 2012 before it came out that fall, going through and …”