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- Hacker News
- Worth stating that this is one of the success stories from AI. Someone who has domain expertise outside of programming is able to create a really useful piece of software because the barrier to entry has been significantly lowered. Really nice.by janalsncm
- 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.
- I can sniff out AI writing immediately but from what I hear AI writing is more popular than everby vmg12
- More noticeable to me is the lack of the work of a good copy editor which, sadly, we haven't had for a really long time. At least, not on the interwebs. Even the news sites reduced where their print copies were known for rigorous editing saw obvious issues with the various corporate overlords doing serious headcount reductions. The rush to be first to publish reduced even further the time any editors might have had, and then the wide spread use of CMS style articles that slammed output together with something as unintelligent as 'cat segmentFromAuthor1 segmentFromAuthor2 segmentFromAuthor3 > article' where you can tell where each segment started over again with the same basic information as if it was content meant to stand on its own.
Of course, the amount of self published work has also helped make the lack of a good copy editor noticeable. I can excuse self published blogs though. But the stuff released "professionally" has really become farcical.
by dylan604 - A lot of what would be the top "reference" works aren't even that good either, they were a successful marketing phenomenon or had cultural or social relevance at their time. So, you can get a lot of bad prose going by a number of somewhat logical, externally measurable parameters.by FranOntanaya
- I gave Claude Fable $25 in Pangram API credits and, after hundreds of attempts, it was unable to produce a single readable original piece of writing that was not immediately identified as AI.
This seems to be a hard problem for LLMs, as passing would probably require good self-perception ("oh no, I am writing like an AI!") and fine-grained control over its own output ("let's write like a human instead!").
by felipeerias - Random observation: Google's Gemma 4 models write so much nicer prose than ChatGPT or Claude.
Though this might be me as a British reader, simply preferring a rather less American turn of phrase.
I reckon the more transatlantic, english-as-international language DeepMind team have had a subliminal (or maybe deliberate) impact on the way it chooses to write.
Or perhaps small open weights models simply aren't under the same commercial pressure to be engaging and sycophantic and are therefore less likely to adopt the samey overly casual, upbeat, Californian sales assistant manner. (Don't get me wrong, I like this from real human Californians just fine!)
Either way, the default tone is much less showy. I would be interested to find out if you agree.
I am very much an LLM cynic. I am engaging because I must, and trying to learn fundamentals, but I would not say I am overly excited by any of this, just glad that small open weights models exist as a counterpoint.
I loathe the way ChatGPT writes, and the Claude-isms that are everywhere; it is actually quite enraging, especially when you start seeing it in internet comments from people who used to try to write out their own thoughts.
But in my experiments with open weights models I have found I am much less aggravated by summaries and outlines written by Gemma 4, so much that I am happy enough to read them, because they have fewer irritants that take me out of the reading flow.
Though this evening it told me very kindly that my photography is a bit "safe". How very dare it… understand me that well.
by dofm - I've not really enjoyed finding out lately just how few people seem to notice what ought to be unmissable.by mpalmer
- I recently realized this as well and I think what I’ve discovered is that AI just produces mediocre content in all realms, but you don’t really notice it except in the realms where you have real expertise. With a lot of harness and prompting you can have it pump out something that’s pretty good but by default the next best token rarely produces anything of quality it seems like and if you think it does, perhaps you may want to recheck your assumptions on your expertise of the topic at handby conception
- Thanks for this! I've been looking for a good book on the Spanish Civil War, in either Spanish or English. The one American book I was recommended by someone, I didn't like. I'd like to keep searching regardless of the book's language or what country it has won prizes in. Could you also include book awards from other non-english speaking countries?by gabriben
- +1 on this!by nsmog767
- Books on the Spanish Civil War I have read and can wholeheartedly recommend:
- "The Spanish Civil War" by Paul Preston
- "Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell
Books on the same topic on my reading list (and quite frankly can't wait to get hold of them):
- "The Spanish Civil War" by Hugh Thomas
- "The Fight for Spain" by Antony Beevor
by gorkaerana - The war by itself is a far less interesting affair than how it happened, and what made the country be OK with fighting. For that you need to start at the end of the previous dictatorship, and cover the entire 2nd republic. Then the war starts making sense.
So I'd read The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, by Stanley Payne. He was a journalist in Spain through the entire period, so most of what he does is provide a first hand account. He never claims to try to be impartial, but he's pretty nouanced, as he knew a lot of the players personally.
by hibikir - 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.by DangitBobby
- Can I make a feature request? I would love to be able to search by author. I recently started Caro's LBJ series (it's amazing so far) and I'm curious how many awards he's won. Anywho, I love non-fiction so I plan to visit this website often. Thank you and great work!
- More generally, just sort by any of the column headers (year, title, publisher, author, score, ...) by clicking on it. In some views it works, in some it doesn't. A bit unintuitive.
The toggle between "traditional" text and "semantic" search is cool and new, but maybe the toggle could stay visible (it's there on the home tab, but then not anymore on the books tab).
by FabHK - The history section of the book price index is incredibly america-biased. History of america, american natives, japan after ww2 and vietnam in the last century.by abrezas
- And the irony of it is that the U.S. is actually quite history-poor, when compared to Europe, North Africa, Middle-East, Persia, China, Central Asia and India.by diego_moita
- That is what Sells. The USA has a lot of people so selling to us is going to make money even in a niche subject like history.
Historians who are not trying to sell mass market books have a much broader set of books. You won't see them in a normal bookstore.
by bluGill - The article resonates, there is great serendipity in somewhat random exploration of books. But then the web app seems to be the antithesis of this? I clicked a few categories and the top ranked books all had the “popularity contest” smell, sort of the antithesis of random exploration.
- Suggested additions: the Axiom Business Book Awards, Library Journal Best Books of the Year and Booklist Magazine's Editor's Choice Awards. There's also a few popular substacks that have big sideshows in regular book reviews, but I wouldn't even recommend my favourite for a public aggregator like this.by OgsyedIE
- Original author/creator of the site here - thank you! Will add the Axiom one. I am on the fence about whether/how to add "book of the year" type lists as they are somewhat distinct from book awards, but I do think that would probably be the next step to get more books in the corpus.
And any other ideas that HN readers have for awards to add would be welcome. Currently it's probably too history-slanted since I'm a historian and knew those awards better.
by benbreen - Thank you for this. I sorted the "technology" and "science" sections and saw a few excellent books that I've read and a few that I would really like to read. This motivates me to start setting aside "reading time" again every day, since I've lost that habit.
The recent "society & culture" books gave me some good book club ideas.
Bug report: filtering by "award" appears to be broken for some awards. If I select Pulitzer or National Book Award, no books show up, but I can find books with these awards by browsing.
by titanomachy - I recently did this! I fixed my phone habit and my TV habit, and I just read no, the family has silent reading parties instead of movie night.
Here’s what I did: 1. Install Jomo on the phone. There are other apps, but basically it makes me wait 5s before I can open a brainrot app, and then I can only use it for 5min, and every time I do this I have to wait an additional 5s. It resets at midnight. This introduces the necessary friction.
2. Paper books. The house is now full of paper books. Book seems interesting? Buy it. Books everywhere. Real books.
3. The actual habit. I stack habits. Right now I have a daily workout routine. First thing I leave the house and either run or go to the gym. I bring my book, and afterwards go to the cafe across the street for a coffee. At night, I read before going to bed. Once you finish a few books this way, you’re in. TV now is actually hard to pay attention to, and I feel kind of… dirty doomscrolling now (like eating junk food, it tastes good but you feel gross during the experience).
If you want something to start with: https://bookshop.org/p/books/true-grit-charles-portis/5ac454...
by joeguilmette - Awesome, that's what I was going for. I originally made this for my own use and got kind of obsessed with building it out once I started finding unfamiliar books I enjoyed using the semantic search and category browsing. Glad to see it out in the world hopefully doing the same thing!by benbreen
- 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.
- Any such bet would be grossly misguided given how different people acquire information differently. Just because you don't like using LLMs doesn't automatically extrapolate to a general realisation about the human brain or how one approaches knowledge.
Your subjective experience matters in this case. Almost completely.
by altmanaltman - > When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively
It's... almost an oxymoron, and very different from my experience.
by raincole - What you're describing is very close to what education theory calls "assimilation" and "accommodation". When we assimilate knowledge, it just fits into our schema of understanding. When we accommodate knowledge, we need to change our schema, and that is where the feeling of being challenged (and often the feeling of profundity) comes from.
For example, a child learns that "foreigner" means someone from outside their country. Then, when they're 11, they go on their first holiday abroad and realise "Wait! _I_ am a foreigner here!"
So, maybe one way to frame what you're saying, is that LLM output tends towards being easily assimilable.
by nimonian - I listen to audiobooks while I walk and hike, and sometimes when I recall some particular thing I've learned, I can also recall where I was hiking when I heard it.
I think there's a lot to learn on how we really process information.
by m463