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

No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

zerokspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 180 posts

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#132

Post by nottorp »

phantasmish wrote: post #98
falcor84 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option might be that people are increasingly using LLMs to write the books.

This is it. I know of too many companies (in nonfiction, specifically) trying to offload as much as possible to LLMs, damn the quality. Zero chance I buy any nonfiction written after 2021 or so unless it comes with strong recommendations from sources I trust. No more on-a-whim purchases because something looks interesting and is on sale or whatever. That’s over.

But even before LLMs, how many of those nonfiction books were any better than an assembly of random blog snippets?

Damn few of them.

I'm thinking the "industry" will contract a lot, but there will always be a niche for deep "real books" on a subject. It will just be much smaller.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#133

Post by nottorp »

jcynix wrote: post #94
camdenreslink wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs and still want some sort of curated/guided learning experience through material to understand some subject. There is the problem of "I don't know what I don't know" that a course can solve for you. An LLM can sort of do that, but you have to take its word for it, and it does it pretty much strictly worse at the moment (but is much more fle…

> My hypothesis is people will get burned out on this unguided learning via LLMs [...] I'm less optimistic. Already 20+ years ago many people complained if you pointed them to books which answered their questions in depth. The standard reply was "just tell me how to solve this particular problem" instead.

StackOverflow... they made a business out of that.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#134

Post by pjbk »

tjr wrote: post #53
riffic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

loaded questions.

Maybe a bit depressing, but I'm not sure loaded. I was just talking to someone (in person!) a few days ago, who purported that online courses were basically dead, because people can learn from LLMs instead. And then, it seems to be a real issue amongst some people to ask, "why should I learn X, when LLMs already know it?" Not unlike, "why should I learn to divide, when we have calculators?" but on a grander scale.

Statements like these always brings me to memory the opening line of Hamming's Numerical Methods book: The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. It is very easy to get carried away and forget that - in particular today when processing power grows exponentially. Even more when we know there are a myriad of problems that are uncomputable, literally, and human common sense and intuition (insight) are as relevant now as ever.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#135

Post by bogomipz »

1313ed01 wrote: post #43
mindcrash wrote: post #21

For me one of the best ways until now to get good quality IT books is (believe it or not): Humble Bundle ( https://www.humblebundle.com/ ) The past year they featured bundles from (quickly out of my head): O'Reilly, MIT Press, Manning, Pearson, Pragmatic Programmers and No Starch Press. Oh, and Packt. But I left that one out because the quality of most Packt books is total shit (IMO). It's the next best thing besides…

Back when I subscribed to O'Reilly I had a bookmark set up to search there with Packt excluded. Otherwise no matter what I searched for the results were clogged up with Packt-slop.

I think this is precisely the Packt strategy though - to always overwhelm the search results, whether its O'reilly, Amazon, etc. They do this by their sheer volume of low quality titles. Everything about that company and their content is complete shit.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#136

Post by schainks »

O'Reilly's mobile app is always a moment of zen: You open it to read a book to enhance your professional skills, but alas, the app is obviously poorly written despite being created by people in your profession (who seem to have not read the books?)

Anyway, the web experience has been pretty good for a while, so I use that now.

Re: No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me

#137

Post by lazystar »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #111
Mistletoe wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes sense, "enough" of the old technical info is in the AI brains now and easily accessed via a query.

A lossy compressed version of it, at least. But a lot of is also in blogs and (video) tutorials. As well as Stack Overflow. And all very searchable. The old brick-of-paper approach to tech manuals just isn't a thing any more. I don't particularly miss it. It was, if you think about, usually a slow and inefficient way to present information - often better at presenting what was possible than how to do make it happen.

> often better at presenting what was possible than how to do make it happen.

that, i feel, is the chilling aspect to this situation. does the lack of new books explaining what's possible, imply that our society's opportunites for growth are dwindling?

Post reply on HN