301–310 of 317 posts
Eric Nylund: Signal to Noise, A Signal Shattered
I remember reading and liking his books, but ... did they not make it to ebooks?
An old but excellent book (written in the 1920s in Soviet Russia) is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin I also like Solaris though I suppose everyone has heard of that one.
Re-reading Stanislaw Lem (i.e. The Cyberiad) in the era of LLMs has been a joy for me.
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Sweet thanks! I am going to work a ton this winter to improve topic/genre accuracy, as I think we have more on Mesopotamia but the system is struggling to tag it correctly. We are using an older NLP/ML system that isn't working as well as newer ones. Update coming soon.
Great to hear. Also, a very interesting topic for me since this is close to my masters degree and current job. For a niche topic like ancient mesopotamia I was surprised. Is there a blog post or something about how the site works behind the scenes?
I blog every 2 to 3 weeks here about building it: https://build.shepherd.com/
But I am not a developer, so it only goes into things lightly, like our topic system with NLP/ML and other topics. (hoping to be a dev in a few years enough to work on it as well)
Here are a few, are these interesting or too mundane? https://build.shepherd.com/p/a-big-focus-for-2024-improving-... https://build.shepherd.com/p/building-shepherd-updated-topic... https://build.shepherd.com/p/building-shepherd-topic-pages-n... https://build.shepherd.com/p/sneak-peek-at-genre-and-age-gro...
It is python / Django on the backend, nothing crazy I think.
One of "you may never heard of" sci-fi books I can recommend is The City & the City by China Miéville. Perhaps not traditional science fiction, but so original and strange, it's beautiful.
I enjoyed the book, but I'm still not sure how it's been classified as science fiction, despite clearly having been pigeonholed into the category. The book has very little to do with real or speculative science. It was also one of the most awarded "science fiction" books of the last couple decades, so isn't really obscure in any sense either.
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Great to hear. Also, a very interesting topic for me since this is close to my masters degree and current job. For a niche topic like ancient mesopotamia I was surprised. Is there a blog post or something about how the site works behind the scenes?
Very cool! What is your job? I blog every 2 to 3 weeks here about building it: https://build.shepherd.com/ But I am not a developer, so it only goes into things lightly, like our topic system with NLP/ML and other topics. (hoping to be a dev in a few years enough to work on it as well) Here are a few, are these interesting or too mundane? https://build.shepherd.com/p/a-big-focus-for-2024-improving-... https://build.s…
> Here are a few, are these interesting or too mundane?
Thanks, I'll have a look. It's quite interesting, even if it's not very technical, since recently I started thinking about building a book trade or selling network for close friends and their friends (invitation based).
> It is python / Django on the backend, nothing crazy I think.
A solid choice, I think.
Do you use something like openlibrary.org as well?
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Very cool! What is your job? I blog every 2 to 3 weeks here about building it: https://build.shepherd.com/ But I am not a developer, so it only goes into things lightly, like our topic system with NLP/ML and other topics. (hoping to be a dev in a few years enough to work on it as well) Here are a few, are these interesting or too mundane? https://build.shepherd.com/p/a-big-focus-for-2024-improving-... https://build.s…
Currently, I'm working as a Data Scientist on document retrieval/text matching, and I have a masters degree in a topic close to computer science and linguistics. > Here are a few, are these interesting or too mundane? Thanks, I'll have a look. It's quite interesting, even if it's not very technical, since recently I started thinking about building a book trade or selling network for close friends and their friends (i…
That is a very cool idea! I've been thinking about something like that to help fund the website, which is a network of book trades, and you get credit for a new used book for every trade. Although I was going to charge $10 a year or $1 a book to go 80% toward authors and 20% toward the website.
> Do you use something like openlibrary.org as well?
When I last looked in 2020, the data quality on open library was really bad, so I didn't use them. We created every book recommended in our system manually, as we needed to find high-quality cover images, and it was an easy way to start.
Eventually, we licensed data from the Nielsen API. It has not been a great experience, but it works "ok." I also looked at Ingram and Bokwer. Now things are 90% automated, but we still have to source a high quality cover for each book as the book APIs have such small images.
I am hoping to expand our book DB in 2025 to all books for a lot of the new features. I am going to look at Open Library again then, as it might work better for that limited functionality. I also could have been too pedantic back in 2020 when i looked at them :)
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Currently, I'm working as a Data Scientist on document retrieval/text matching, and I have a masters degree in a topic close to computer science and linguistics. > Here are a few, are these interesting or too mundane? Thanks, I'll have a look. It's quite interesting, even if it's not very technical, since recently I started thinking about building a book trade or selling network for close friends and their friends (i…
Nice! That is a very cool idea! I've been thinking about something like that to help fund the website, which is a network of book trades, and you get credit for a new used book for every trade. Although I was going to charge $10 a year or $1 a book to go 80% toward authors and 20% toward the website. > Do you use something like openlibrary.org as well? When I last looked in 2020, the data quality on open library was…
Sounds like a nice way to generate some funding, especially as you already have a number of users on your site to start with. I have no idea how much bureaucracy it takes to be able to take 5% of each transaction or so, so I'll probably leave mine completely free - if I ever get the time to implement it, that is.
> When I last looked in 2020, the data quality on open library was really bad, so I didn't use them.
> Now things are 90% automated, but we still have to source a high quality cover for each book as the book APIs have such small images.
Not great, since that would have been a starting point for me. ;) Cool though, that you can invest into a custom database, since you can tailor it to your task and aren't relying on potentially bad data.
> I am hoping to expand our book DB in 2025 to all books for a lot of the new features.
Is there a public roadmap somewhere for the features?
> I also could have been too pedantic back in 2020 when i looked at them :)
Maybe, maybe not. It takes huge effort to go back and improve a system relying on bad data, especially if it's already a certain size. I know from experience, as my company just did that with a large internal catalogue. Not fun.