Pre-2022 Books

For example, there are multiple evidently AI-generated titles that come up on the front page if you search for "Rust programming", "cybersecurity book", etc. I guess I can't rule out that "Winston Knowles" is a real person, but I'm not gonna bet money on that: https://www.amazon.com/Cybersecurity-Career-Manual-Interview...

In addition to the obvious negative effect on learning curves, I'd argue this dearth of "long-form documentation" has a negative impact on programming language and app development, as well as software usability in general (isn't CONTROL+COMMAND+SHIFT+3 for a MAC screen capture intuitive?)..

AI has become the new "teacher of record" to fill this documentation void, but it's very individualized and narrowly focused. There's no longer a shared mental model, where everyone has read the same books and are working somewhat off the same page. Ironically, it's probably never been easier to write a good tech book, but there's likely zero money in it and the search and AI giants are likely to hover it up and start serving snippets of it up for free before you see a dime, making people very unlikely to buy your book, even if you've written a technical masterpiece!

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

https://wtfhappened2012.com/

Have you ever met someone who could say all and do the right things but never made you feel anything, or your gut was sensing an ulterior motive? It's a magic trick we are all bewitched by at some point in our lives. I suppose I filter by published year because I dont want think about if I am being tricked or not.

[1] There are some very talented writers[A] out there who (I assume) cannot do the world building part.

[A] Recent Favorite: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1134255/chapters/2292768

Of course there are no doubt people out there realising that a fair few of us do this, and are starting to edit posts to pre-date them as a sort of SEO trick…

Something about the industrialization of thinking makes it uninteresting. similar to frozen pasta from the shelves, heated and served.

We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.

I do have one freely downloadble Sci-Fi book from 2022 which took 10 years in total to write so it might safely pass all your standards, but if a fixed cut off date is your criteria for a good book then there really is no hope for writers like me continuing.

I tend to buy books from second hand book shops and eBay now and usually older or well used copies. A good sign of their authenticity.

Each person that put in the effort is one additional review point.

Thinking, Writing, Editing, Proofing, Publishing, Distributing, Selling...

At every step, a human had the opportunity to say "no, this is bad". And the fact that they didn't is a vote of quality and reputation.

These days presumably every step can be automated without a human in the loop at all, and it's up to the buyer to discover "no, this is bad", but at that point their money is already spent.

> Crafting Interpreters, by Robert Nystrom

> Re[Coding] America, by Jennifer Pahlka

> Systems Performance, by Brendan Gregg

https://lifearchitect.ai/books-by-ai/

You will still have gatekeepers and taste makers. Publishing houses will screen fiction for well-written and interesting fiction. Word-of-mouth, personal recommendations, and endorsements from people you respect will continue to outweigh algorithms, if you care.

For cheap reads, how much of a difference is there between James Patterson’s 734th beach read thriller and what an LLM with a 50m token context window can produce? Does it matter that it’s not written by six ghostwriters? Probably not to the median Hudson News buyer.

For non-fiction, it’s easier to gather research and related materials. If you were cherry-picking facts to make a narrative, yeah, that’s easier, but it’s not like we haven’t gotten really good at that anyway. Again, there will be cooling off periods for scholarship to be debated and coälesce.

What will get better is people asking questions and getting well-researched pieces on a specific niche or confluence of topics. AI is just-good-enough-to-be-dangerous now. It will get better. We’ll learn to harness it (literally) to iteratively fact check and cite sources. We will build repositories with heavily sourced facts for it to build upon. It will be pulling together “truths” that can be traced, then incrementally adding inference across those, which can then be verified and are a new fact.

I read a lot. I love, love, love new and original authorship. I deeply value writing as a craft. There will be a lot of garbage. More than there is now, at an incredible rate.

And we’ll figure it out.

It really put a sour taste in my mouth. At that volume (2 books per week) you’d think Amazon could identify and label that it’s AI generated.

There are mobile game ads on TV here. My father asked me what actually the players get from paying the game companies money. He still doesn't get it after I tried to explain how it works twice.

If you can’t trust a contemporary writer to not use genAI, then find another interest with true zero trust creative verification (like improv) because copying and cheating on writing has existed for decades.

However, my unpopular opinion is extremist in another way: societies should probably not tolerate AI in creative fields like creative writing at all, if Sora can be shut down, so can other useless and toxic parts of LLMs.

There will be _more_ shit books now, but that's the only difference.

There will be probably a constant rate of "good" books.

I never let an LLM write or rewrite a post, or even a paragraph, for me. I want to write it myself and I want it to be in MY voice. I think I'm a pretty good writer and I like my writing. However, I suspect those who may be less confident in their writing use an LLM to "check" their rough draft but then succumb to the temptation of just pasting the LLM's output because it "sounds better", it's already finished and... writing is hard. This is always a mistake and no one should do it in a forum like HN. It's rude and we'd much rather hear your words and ideas as you express them.

The sad part is this ends up in an all or nothing between "Never use an LLM when writing a post" and "Have LLMs write posts for you."

Has anyone? Now I'm curious if it's just my particular bubble.

The issue with content >2022 isn't that it's ai-generated per se, it's that it's still slop.

Pre-2022, when someone posts a Show HN, even if it's not something you would normally be interested in, there's a baseline understanding that _someone_ cared enough to spend time and effort to build it. So in a hypothetical future scenario if you do find yourself looking for that particular tool, there was value in you seeing that Show HN so you can revisit it.

Now, I just ignore all Show HN posts.

The liberal concept that the everyman should have their own original thoughts that others should consider is a historically a very new concept. And we start getting things that look a lot like C-c C-v quickly after the Renaissance.

See humans have the tendency to romanticize the past, and if this is allowed to compound they elevate really quite dismal people to the realm of literal godhood in some cases. If you asked someone a thousand years ago what they though life was like thousands of years in the past and what it will be like thousands of years in the future most would have said the past was better in all regards including health, strength, morals even technology; while the future would be viewed as the continual circling of the drain. Put yourself in their shoes, you go look at a Roman Colosseum, you can't build that, nobody you know can build that. If you asked Vitruvius during the construction of the Aqueducts he would tell you that he's maintain the knowledge of his ancestors, whom could have build such structures if they needed them or had the manpower, and the technical problems are just a trifle. If you pushed him, he might invoke Providentia and that if the gods stopped blessing you we'd fall even faster.

This kind of discovered then lost fits better narrative within the human psyche better than the unintuative truth is a constructed social conversation, that can be semi-formal and rigorous (the scientific method) or lax (common sense) depending on the setting.

Eventually artists will figure out how to use AI to make real art that is actually good, just like photographers did with photography, and that will be its own new thing. I don’t see much of that yet but with photography it took a while.