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

trails.pieterma.es

71–80 of 159 posts

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

#71

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. It's all fun and game 'till someone loses an eye/mind/even-tenuous-connection-to-reality. Edit: I'd mention that the themes Claude finds qualify as important stuff imo. But they're all pretty grim and it's a bit problematic focusing on them for a lo…

Don't believe Claude, let's put it that way.

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

#72
post #38

Can someone break this down for me? I'm seeing "Thanos committing fraud" in a section about "useful lies". Given that the founder is currently in prison, it seems odd to consider the lie useful instead of harmful. It kinda seems like the AI found a bunch of loosely related things and mislabeled the group. If you've read these books I'm not seeing what value this adds.

I guess the lies were useful until she got caught?

Why lie if it isn’t useful? Lying is generally bad, why do a generally bad thing if there isn’t at least a justification, a “use” if you will.

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

#73

"There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you're even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there's the other way:…

I am not familiar with the source of this quote, but I don't disagree, it is just incredibly reductive. Gilles Deleuze him-/her-self was not born and did not live in a vacuum. They were influenced and mimetically reproduced ideas they were exposed to, like we all do. I don't find the point of this project meaningless myself. The opposite in fact. But the results are not accurate for anyone who has actually read any of these texts.

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

#75

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…

Sounds a lot like Bertopic. Great library to use.

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The one that you thought of in the shower has a much greater chance of being right, and also of being relevant to you.

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

#78

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…

Build a rag with significant amount of text, extract it by key word topic, place, date, name, etc.

… realize that it’s nonsense and the LLM is not smart enough to figure out much without a reranker and a ton of technology that tells it what to do with the data.

You can run any vector query against a rag and you are guaranteed a response. With chunks that are unrelated any way.

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

#79

Can someone break this down for me? I'm seeing "Thanos committing fraud" in a section about "useful lies". Given that the founder is currently in prison, it seems odd to consider the lie useful instead of harmful. It kinda seems like the AI found a bunch of loosely related things and mislabeled the group. If you've read these books I'm not seeing what value this adds.

Thanos is the comic book villain snapping his fingers.

Theranos is the fraud mentioned in the piece.

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