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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

#81

Post by pxc »

plutokras wrote: post #16
pxc wrote: post #13

I read a book maybe a decade ago on the "digital humanities". I wish now I could remember the title and author. :( Anyway, it introduced me to the idea of using computational methods in the humanities, including literature. I found it really interesting at the time! One of the the terms it introduced me to is "distant reading", whose name mirrors that of a technique you may have studied in your gen eds if you went to…

> I wish now I could remember the title and author. LLMs are great at finding media by vague descriptions. ;)

After some digging, I think it was likely this one: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5346/Digital-Humanities

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

#82

Post by hecanjog »

You really know what a good interface should be like, this is really inspiring. So is the design of everything I've seen on your website!

I won't pile on to what everyone else has said about the book connections / AI part of this (though I agree that part is not the really interesting or useful thing about your project) but I think a walk-through of how you approach UI design would be very interesting!

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

#83

Post by liqilin1567 »

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…

When I saw that the trail goes through just one word like "Us/Them", "fictions" I thought it might be more useful if the trail went through concepts.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

pxc wrote: post #81
plutokras wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish now I could remember the title and author. LLMs are great at finding media by vague descriptions. ;)

After some digging, I think it was likely this one: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5346/Digital-Humanities

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by varenc »

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…

> Can you walk me though some of the insights you gained?

This made me realize that so many influential figures have either absent fathers, or fathers that berated them or didn't give them their full trust/love. I think there's something to the idea that this commonality is more than coincidence. (that's the only topic of the site I've read through yet, and I ignored the highlighted word connections)

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

#87

Post by guidoism »

Nice! I've been using Claude Code and ChatGPT for something similar. My inspiration is Adler's concept of The Great Conversation and Adler's Propædia. I've been able to jump between books to read about the same concept from different author's perspectives.

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

#89

Post by hecanjog »

smusamashah wrote: post #10

I dont understand the lines connecting two pieces of text. In most cases, the connected words have absolutely zero connection with each other. In "Father wound" the words "abandoned at birth" are connected to "did not". Which makes it look like those visual connections are just a stylistic choice and don't carry any meaning at all.

Yes, they look really good but they're being connected by an LLM.

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

#90

Post by electroglyph »

what-the-grump wrote: post #78
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…

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.

unrelated in any way? that's not normal. have you tested the model to make sure you have sane output? unless you're using sentence-transformers (which is pretty foolproof) you have to be careful about how you pool the raw output vectors
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