Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

https://resobscura.substack.com/p/quality-non-fiction-books-are-the

by benbreen • 9 hours ago

36 17 9 hours ago

resobscura.substack.com

https://book-prize-index.vercel.app/

damnesian• 8 hours ago

[flagged]

dang• 1 hour ago

Can you please review the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and stick to them when posting? You broke several of them here.

"Don't be snarky."

"Omit internet tropes." (the stopped-reading-at bit)

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

Edit: it looks like your account has been posting quite a few flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments generally. Could you please not do that? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

northhex• 41 minutes ago

Thank you for sharing this.

I do think book prizes are a better-than-average signal but I previously volunteered with a book award. I will caution that pretty much every publisher mass-submits these books for consideration in every remotely relevant prize. It is a cost of doing business (similar to how photographers pay to enter photography competitions to try and win the "award winning photographer" title, or businesses submit dossiers with consideration fees on why they're one of Michigan's top 100 places to work).

There are often so many books and so few willing qualified readers that which books get an award can either be completely arbitrary, or comically easy.

For example, the NCR Book Award in your book corpus faced a big scandal when it was revealed that the judges did not read the books themselves. [1] The PROSE award is so comically large that an ordinary category finalist or win is usually overstated in prestige and value.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/may/19/literary-prize-...

TMWNN• 38 minutes ago

I read at night in bed. I love how, with ebooks (first Overdrive, now Libby), when I hear about an interesting book, I can within 30 seconds search for it across multiple libraries, borrow it, and send it to my Kindle.

DangitBobby• 35 minutes ago

At least one of the links on the post is still to localhost:3000 instead of the vercel page. I don't want to make a substack account to tell the author so hopefully this information finds its way over there.

adamddev1• 29 minutes ago

It's sad now to see a university library where students sit among endless shelves of amazing books, sitting on laptops, almost all of them with ChatGPT open. The library has become just a place to sit and open an LLM.

DubiousPusher2• 21 minutes ago

It's especially sad because on of the things those LLMs are best, almost purpose built for is to tell those students which books to go open, where to find nuggets people haven't bumped into for years, to make cross-connections that would take a PhD a decade to find.

Planktonne• 27 minutes ago

I think my issue with this project--and so many other similar ones--is that the provenance of the code does undermine the intention. If a project purports to be about quality, then knowing that the creator abdicated some of the responsibility for creating the thing they ostensibly care about makes it harder to put faith in them as having high standards elsewhere.

Perhaps I am just old-fashioned, and vibe-coding is something that can be done with full focus and care for high quality, but I remain unconvinced. This is a project that needs to be cared about sincerely to be trustable/meaningful/useful, and the approach taken casts doubt on that.

zahirbmirza• 26 minutes ago

Fascinated that the author shares an experience of discovery in libraries. The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer.

Libraries are certainly declining in their traditional form. I find it odd that everyone has a digital resources in their pocket yet libraries are squeezing out physical books to make way for more and more computers. Try to find paper copy of the Sony founder's book.... that will be £50 on amazon. Prohibitive. No library within a 10 mile radius has a copy.

I remember joyfully discovering Tony Royce's book in my library a few years ago. That enlightenment will never happen now. Primary knowledge is being lost, churned crude will forever lubricate the delusions of those who have no facility to collate the basis of our understanding.

DubiousPusher2• 23 minutes ago

My bona-fides here amount to little more than being a big time reader of non-fiction. But IMO, there's a nice synthesis here. Rather than going long rounds of asking LLMs about a subject, I usually end up asking it for book recommendations. It's much better than a google search and you can push it into some deep corners if you go past the surface level recs.

You can get quite specific. You can find texts you wouldn't discover unless you spent years studying the topic. Often these are completely approachable and give interesting perspectives they just get buried behind a wall of syllabi and listicles.

This is how I ended up reading Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' and Graves' 'Goodbye to all That' among others.

jeffreyrogers• 20 minutes ago

I would bet that how your brain stores information that you read from long-form text is very different from how it stores information you acquire from chatting with an LLM. When I read something challenging or new to me I spend a lot of time thinking about how what I'm reading matches my own experiences or knowledge. Although I'm a fairly fast reader, it often takes me a long time to get through difficult pages since I have to stop and think about what I'm reading. I seem to be doing a lot of integrating and reorganizing my thoughts. When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively and I don't think it gets integrated as well. Not sure why this is and its somewhat counterintuitive since I don't think I'd have the same experience with a human tutor.

adamtaylor_13• 13 minutes ago

On a related note, I was just noting to my co-founder, as we struggle to write good case studies for our website, that I find LLMs are astoundingly bad at writing good prose.

We all know the "AI-tics" that give away a sloppily AI-written piece, but even if you steer them, they still struggle to write consistently high-quality prose.

Somehow I feel that the work of a good copywriter has never been more noticeable.

mpalmer• 9 minutes ago

I've not really enjoyed finding out lately just how few people seem to notice what ought to be unmissable.

cyanydeez• 7 minutes ago

those people will also start adopting the AIsm and will become indistinguishable.

paxys• 7 minutes ago

Very neat site and write-up, but I found this part amusing:

There is really nothing “AI” about this aside from the tool that collected the data and coded it, and, crucially, semantic search […]

So really, everything about it is AI. And that’s not a bad thing! It’s okay to simultaneously preach the superiority of non-fiction books over AI generated garbage while also acknowledging the same AI as a valuable tool for other uses.

replatformradar• 4 minutes ago

Is it even possible to find one these days? I would love to see some real honest amazon kindle stats on the amount of ebooks added over the last 3 years. Even a honest pie chart to show people its not worth it to get them to stop posting them.

wackget• 2 minutes ago

Decries AI for producing slop Uses AI to produce website

Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

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