Key word being tool. People get lost in a fantasy that the AI was responsible for decisions and not the human who chose to use it as a replacement for effort rather than a tool to enhance effort, then apply their bias to all AI use.

so much of AI is like, to me, used as was to generate basically dynamic applicaions. if we ever got anywhere with semantics, objects, etc, pushed html further, maybe we'd naturally have web clients that could take objects, natively search, collate, display, put on a map, graph, etc... but AI is like a text only shortcut to the end result we want.

I have a stupid AI app I use now for some bookkeeping which was previously, just an excel sheet. except it has a UI, it validates inputs, and does a bunch of other housekeeping stuff that makes it nice. Did the excel work? yes totally.

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...

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 I originally made this for my own use and got kind of obsessed with building it out once I started finding unfamiliar books I enjoyed using the semantic search and category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!

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 hand

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.

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.

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!").

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

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.

I can sniff out AI writing immediately but from what I hear AI writing is more popular than ever

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

This sounds like it's more down to how the individual uses the tool. I am not someone who has even been particularly good at reading > learning the thing. I've only ever been capable of learning by doing and with capability to interrogate on the points I don't get. LLMs allow that in a way that is just not feasible with any human being whose tolerance of me would diminish rapidly.

In most cases, I will be writing down my understanding as I would in isolation from a primary source, building flash cards and actively practicing what I have learned, only with more capability to interrogate on the points I have difficulty understanding or need clarity on. Effectively, I am doing the following in a capacity I personally never had via any other means:

> I seem to be doing a lot of integrating and reorganizing my thoughts.

If you are using it as a slot machine of knowledge, and going from receiving > doing with no intermediate step I see how outcomes could differ.

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.

> The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer.

back in the reasonably early days of the web (I would guess ~2000) I stumbled across a webpage that said "I used to collect random interesting snippets in a shoebox, here is the internet version of it". I was delighted enough that I actually wrote to the author to compliment them on helping keep the web interesting, and though I haven't thought about it in ages it clearly made enough of an impression on me that I remembered the author's name. and it's still up! https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ss44/cyc/index.htm

AIs are fantastic for discovery. Just today I asked Chatgpt to find blogs 1) about old school newspaper cartoons 2) that have been writing for more than 10 years and 3) are run by one or two passionate people rather than a team. Within seconds Chatgpt found 7 candidates. Within another handful of seconds it gave me RSS links to the ones I wanted.

This is incredible!

In your experience, how do you determine book slop? For me I don't really stray from authors and topics I like, and non-fiction isn't really my go to outside of sci-fi, and mystery/law books. Like on the stretch point, I can tell that in other media but not so much books.

This is sadly correct/true. This is one of the many reasons why I militantly reject carbon chauvinism. Most of the potshots people take against AI can be easily retorted with “have you seen how bad the average human is at X?”

They’ve used a pretty good filter for the human slop - prestigious awards.

> how ai slop is better vs book slop, at least with ai you can distill the idea

Why don't you just use whatever LLM you have on hand to summarize every book you could read instead of reading it? The idea that ai slop is 'better' because you can distill the idea is an insane point to me because it treats books as a pure consumption-based concept, where the goal is strictly to finish a book and move on.

I think even the worst book is more valuable than whatever garbage an LLM writes because you can at least learn from the intent. Where and why the author failed, where they got stuck, the points they failed to make. LLM writing is a void, there's nothing to be learned.

On a similar note: on Steam, the original Dark Souls game[1] is listed with the "souls-like" tag. That's not wrong, I guess, but just kind of a tautology. Grice's maxims[2] generally have such tautologies omitted in ordinary conversation as non-informative.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/570940/DARK_SOULS_REMASTE...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle

For embeddings based search I think this is unavoidable

Not really. Quality nonfiction books are a subset of quality books.

The article isn't even about AI slop other than the title for some reason

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.

The most sad part of all is to think how little of that knowledge is digitized and available to be referenced by ChatGPT. Digitizing old books is one of the highest things you can do as a human for “good for the world”.

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.