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Pre-2022 Books

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Re: Pre-2022 Books

#61

Post by idleplant »

YesBox wrote: post #36

You are not alone. I like to read Harry Potter fan fiction [1] and I have started checking the publication date when Im searching for something new to read. I started doing this passively and realized it after the fact. Have you ever met someone who could say all and do the right things but never made you feel anything, or your gut was sensing an ulterior motive? It's a magic trick we are all bewitched by at some poi…

With Harry Potter (and Star Trek, I believe) fanfiction, I think decline in quality has been typical for the last decade; the fanfiction from the 90s/early 00s is often of much better quality on average just due to the age + other factors affecting who was able to type up and post fanfiction online back then.

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#62

Post by mrandish »

I hate slop as much as anyone else and was, until recently, absolute in my zero tolerance of any LLM use in personal posts and correspondence. Now I've adopted a slightly more nuanced view because I sometimes use an LLM when writing but only in a couple very limited, narrowly focused ways. The first is trying to remember a specific turn of phrase I can't recall at the moment (when you get past 50 this happens a bit more often). The other is breaking up overly long sentences, which is a bad writing habit I've struggled with since high school.

I never let an LLM write or rewrite a post, or even a paragraph, for me. I want to write it myself and I want it to be in MY voice. I think I'm a pretty good writer and I like my writing. However, I suspect those who may be less confident in their writing use an LLM to "check" their rough draft but then succumb to the temptation of just pasting the LLM's output because it "sounds better", it's already finished and... writing is hard. This is always a mistake and no one should do it in a forum like HN. It's rude and we'd much rather hear your words and ideas as you express them.

The sad part is this ends up in an all or nothing between "Never use an LLM when writing a post" and "Have LLMs write posts for you."

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#63

Post by cindyllm »

vibcdingenjoyer wrote: post #60
fallat wrote: post #45

There has always been shit books - let that sink in. There will be _more_ shit books now, but that's the only difference. There will be probably a constant rate of "good" books.

The same happened to music when digital music production at home became more accessible. The hard part is separating the wheat from the ever growing larger share of chaff.

[dead]

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#65

Post by unknownian »

I’m vehemently anti-genAI in creative fields but even I think this metric is stupid and unfair to younger generations and generations to come, even if genAI writing gets better.

If you can’t trust a contemporary writer to not use genAI, then find another interest with true zero trust creative verification (like improv) because copying and cheating on writing has existed for decades.

However, my unpopular opinion is extremist in another way: societies should probably not tolerate AI in creative fields like creative writing at all, if Sora can be shut down, so can other useless and toxic parts of LLMs.

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#66

Post by julianeon »

This will work for a little while but this can't go on indefinitely: no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books.

We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#67

Post by mvkel »

The glasses are a little rose-colored here. As if anything written The issue with content >2022 isn't that it's ai-generated per se, it's that it's still slop.

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#68

Post by lambdaone »

coldtea wrote: post #58
raincole wrote: post #43

I feel that too. But the reasonable part of me knows that it's just one generation can't "get" the entertainment of the next generation. It has always been like that. There are mobile game ads on TV here. My father asked me what actually the players get from paying the game companies money. He still doesn't get it after I tried to explain how it works twice.

> one generation can't "get" the entertainment of the next generation. It has always been like that. Given the quality of 2026's entertainment, looks like they had a point. And likely they had one at 2006 and 1986 and 1966 too.

This is Sturgeon's Law: "ninety percent of everything is crap".

But the corollary to it is the fact 10% of everything isn't crap, and just as there always has been crap, there always has been excellence. Just less of it.

Re: Pre-2022 Books

#69

Post by eager_learner »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #3

It's one of the reasons I don't want to update my free book about Ruby: https://leanpub.com/rubyisforfun - written by a human, and will stay the same forever I think. The moment you touch it to update - immediately changes the date from 2022-05-26 to 2026 and all the value is gone

Thank you for your book. It was exactly what has been missing in Ruby landscape and what I wanted. BTW<, also, nice last name. :)
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