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Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

trails.pieterma.es

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Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#141

Post by djeastm »

pixelsmithy wrote: post #135

Speaking of offloading thinking… I asked Gemini 3.0 Pro what it thought of this concept and criticisms in the comments: What are your thoughts on this project? Note criticisms in the comment section and tell me if you agree with any of them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46567400 This project, titled "Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books," is an attempt to use an LLM (Claude) t…

I might be in the minority, but I don't really want to come to HN to see what an LLM has to say about the topic.

Perhaps you might instead provide your own TL;DR after reading it yourself?

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#142

Post by djeastm »

While I don't think the section titles or one-sentence summaries accurately reflect the rather tenuous textual connections, I did find it strangely intriguing to scroll through the paragraphs of the books and just catch different bits of ideas from these writers.

It's like grabbing a half-dozen books off the library shelf, opening to a random page in each, then flit through them, kind of like a "engineering nerd book sample platter".

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#143

Post by only-one1701 »

znnajdla wrote: post #136
only-one1701 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t speak well towards your literary education, candidly.

We should try posting this on a literary discussion forum and see the responses there. I expect a lot of AI FUD and envy but that’ll be evidence in this tools favor.

lol yes that’s the only reason anyone could find this uh literary analysis less than compelling

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#144

Post by rtgfhyuj »

eloisius wrote: post #94
rtgfhyuj wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

give it a more thorough look maybe? https://trails.pieterma.es/trail/collective-brain/ is great

It’s any interesting thread for sure, but while reading through this I couldn’t help but think that the point of these ideas are for a person to read and consider deeply. What is the point of having a machine do this “thinking” for us? The thinking is the point.

so consider them deeply. Why does the value diminish if discovered by a machine as long as the value is in the thinking?

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#146

Post by golemotron »

durch wrote: post #23
glemion43 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm carrying a thought around for the last few weeks: A LLM is a transformer. It transforms a prompt into a result. Or a human idea into a concrete java implementation. Currently I'm exploring what unexpected or curious transformations LLMs are capable of but haven't found much yet. At least I myself was surprised that an LLM can transform a description of something into an IMG by transforming it into a SVG.

Format conversions (text → code, description → SVG) are the transformations most reach for first. To me the interesting ones are cognitive: your vague sense → something concrete you can react to → refined understanding. The LLM gives you an artifact to recognize against. That recognition ("yes, more of that" or "no, not quite") is where understanding actually shifts. Each cycle sharpens what you're looking for, a bit…

That's true, but it can be a trap. I recommend always generating a few alternatives to avoid our bias toward the first generation. When we don't do that we are led rather than leading.

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#148

Post by fudged71 »

rhgraysonii wrote: post #113

You might enjoy my tool deciduous. It is for building knowledge trees and reference stuff exactly like this. The website tells a bit more http://notactuallytreyanastasio.github.io/deciduous/

Interesting. Was this inspired by the "Context Graphs" concept discussed on X?

Re: Show HN: I used Claude Code to discover connections between 100 books

#149

Post by pcrh »

rtgfhyuj wrote: post #92
drakeballew wrote: post #70

This is a beautiful piece of work. The actual data or outputs seem to be more or less...trash? Maybe too strong a word. But perhaps you are outsourcing too much critical thought to a statistical model. We are all guilty of it. But some of these are egregious, obviously referential LLM dog. The world has more going on than whatever these models seem to believe. Edit/update: if you are looking for the phantom thread be…

give it a more thorough look maybe? https://trails.pieterma.es/trail/collective-brain/ is great

I had a look at that. The notion of a "collective brain" is similar to that of "civilization". It is not a novel notion, and the connections shown there are trivial and uninspiring.
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