Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

trails.pieterma.es

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 159 posts

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

#61

Post by gchamonlive »

timoth3y wrote: post #52
pmaze wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The connections are meaningful to me in so far as they get me thinking about the topics, another lens to look at these books through. It's a fine balance between being trivial and being so out there that it seems arbitrary. A trail that hits that balance well IMO is https://trails.pieterma.es/trail/pacemaker-principle/ . I find the system theory topics the most interesting. In this one, I like how it pulled in a sect…

Can you walk me though some of the insights you gained? I've read several of those books, including Kitchen Confidential and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and I don't see the connection that the LLM (or you) is trying to draw. What is the deeper insight into these works that I am missing? I'm not familiar with he term "Pacemaker Principle" and Google search was unhelpful. What does it mean in this context? What…

> we are given random connections and asked to do the mental work of inventing meaning in them

How is that different from having an insight yourself and later doing the work to see if it holds on closer inspection?

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

#62

Post by only-one1701 »

nephihaha wrote: post #59
miracoli wrote: post #49

wow I hope the bubble pops soon.. now that you discovered books with AI that was illegally trained on them, how about reading them?

I'm not sure I understand what the connections are exactly, or whether they go much deeper than certain words and phrases.

I'm really not trying to be mean, but one of the things we learn in the humanities is that basically any two texts can be connected via extremely broad statements (e.g. "Perfect is the enemy of the good"). This is like the joke on twitter about how every couple of years someone in tech invents the concept of public transportation.

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

#63

Post by ct0 »

johnwatson11218 wrote: post #50

I did something similar whereby I used pdfplumber to extract text from my pdf book collection. I dumped it into postgresql, then chunked the text into 100 char chunks w/ a 10 char overlap. These chunks were directly embedded into a 384D space using python sentence_transformers. Then I simply averaged all chunks for a doc and wrote that single vector back to postgresql. Then I used UMAP + HDBScan to perform dimensiona…

This sounds amazing, totally interested in seeing the approach and repo.

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

#64

Post by delusional »

gchamonlive wrote: post #61
timoth3y wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you walk me though some of the insights you gained? I've read several of those books, including Kitchen Confidential and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, and I don't see the connection that the LLM (or you) is trying to draw. What is the deeper insight into these works that I am missing? I'm not familiar with he term "Pacemaker Principle" and Google search was unhelpful. What does it mean in this context? What…

> we are given random connections and asked to do the mental work of inventing meaning in them How is that different from having an insight yourself and later doing the work to see if it holds on closer inspection?

Don't ask me to elaborate on this, because it's kinda nebulous in my mind. I think there's a difference between being given an insight and interrogating that on your own initiative, and being given the same insight.

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

#65

Post by Aurornis »

timoth3y wrote: post #25

What meaningful connections did it uncover? You have an interesting idea here, but looking over the LLM output, it's not clear what these "connections" actually mean, or if they mean anything at all. Feeding a dataset into an LLM and getting it to output something is rather trivial. How is this particular output insightful or helpful? What specific connections gave you, the author, new insight into these works? You c…

I like design that highlights words in one summary and links them to highlights in the next. It's a cool idea

But so many of the links just don't make sense, as several comments have pointed out. Are these actually supposed to represent connections between books, or is it just a random visual effect that's suppose to imply they're connected?

I clicked on one category and it has "Us/Them" linked to "fictions" in the next summary. I get that it's supposed to imply some relationship but I can't parse the relationships

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

#66

Post by chromanoid »

> A fun tendency is that Claude kept getting distracted by topics of secrecy, conspiracy, and hidden systems - as if the task itself summoned a Foucault’s Pendulum mindset.

I really appreciate you mentioning this. I think this is the nature of LLMs in general. Any symbol it processes can affect its reasoning capabilities.

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

#67

Post by gchamonlive »

delusional wrote: post #64
gchamonlive wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are given random connections and asked to do the mental work of inventing meaning in them How is that different from having an insight yourself and later doing the work to see if it holds on closer inspection?

Don't ask me to elaborate on this, because it's kinda nebulous in my mind. I think there's a difference between being given an insight and interrogating that on your own initiative, and being given the same insight.

I don't doubt there is a difference in the mechanism of arriving at a given connection. What I think it's not possible to distinguish is the connection that someone made intuitively after reading many sources and the one that the AI makes, because both will have to undergo scrutiny before being accepted as relevant. We can argue there could be a difference in quality, depth and search space, maybe, but I don't think there is an ontological difference.

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

#70

Post by drakeballew »

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 between texts, believe me that an LLM cannot achieve it. I have interrogated the most advanced models for hours, and they cannot do the task to any sort of satisfactory end that a smoked-out half-asleep college freshman could. The models don't have sufficient capacity...yet.

Post reply on HN