Perplexingly Book-Learned Emacs

https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2025/04/17/perplexingly-book-learned-emacs/

by tmseidman • 1 year ago

71 15 1 year ago

lars.ingebrigtsen.no

Scarblac2• 1 year ago

Is there really not some API out there that knows about all published books? Paid, if necessary?

I think there are, the author says so, but according to author they don’t make clear if a book is a new edition, translation, etc of a previously published book. So getting a list of published works wherein “A Book Title” is a single result and “A Book Title 2nd edition”, “A Book Title 3rd edition”, etc are not listed in addition to “A Book Title”, doesn’t exist. I would think it’s possible to write a layer of logic that takes a list of published books and removes extra editions, translations, etc to get what the author wants but perhaps the problem is more difficult than I realize

Y_Y• 1 year ago

When is a book the same as another?

paulwarren2• 1 year ago

we built this "work-level" catalog at Margins [1] -- 12mo+ of work -- book data is the messiest data I've worked with in my 10+ years of building things with data

[1] iOS app to track and discover books: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6737528718

wredcoll3• 1 year ago

There is absolutely not such an api. For one thing, nobody actually knows because nothing stops random people from publishing a book at any time.

For another, the major book publishers like amazon want to prevent anyone else from having their data.

Beyond that, book metadata is probably the least standardized thing I have ever seen in my entire life.

Titles, subtitles, editions, editors vs authors, series...

Scarblac2• 1 year ago

I thought ISBN numbers might be somewhat centralized. But I don't know anything about the domain.

precompute• 1 year ago

It'd probably be easier to scrape wikipedia or goodreads.

b5n• 1 year ago

`gptel` supports perplexity, among many others.

https://github.com/karthink/gptel

xhevahir• 1 year ago

The author believes that LLMs are toys and sets out to show that you can get some useless results if that's what you're looking for. Tiresome polemical exercise, but it does have the virtue of brevity.

dullcrisp• 1 year ago

We may need to start putting trigger warnings on articles that mention LLM skepticism.

signa11• 1 year ago

they are not ?

michaelcampbell• 1 year ago

Recognized the domain; Lars' documentation of the Ding! NNTP reader in emacs from... 30(?) years ago was one of the few pieces of doc that had me audibly laughing as I read it.

Perplexingly Book-Learned Emacs

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