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Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

resobscura.substack.com

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Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#81

Post by marcus_holmes »

joeguilmette wrote: post #79
titanomachy wrote: post #43

Thank you for this. I sorted the "technology" and "science" sections and saw a few excellent books that I've read and a few that I would really like to read. This motivates me to start setting aside "reading time" again every day, since I've lost that habit. The recent "society & culture" books gave me some good book club ideas. Bug report: filtering by "award" appears to be broken for some awards. If I select Pulitz…

I recently did this! I fixed my phone habit and my TV habit, and I just read no, the family has silent reading parties instead of movie night. Here’s what I did: 1. Install Jomo on the phone. There are other apps, but basically it makes me wait 5s before I can open a brainrot app, and then I can only use it for 5min, and every time I do this I have to wait an additional 5s. It resets at midnight. This introduces the…

I bought a tiny e-reader [0] and carry that as well as my phone. When the temptation to doomscroll triggers, I pull out the e-reader instead and read a book.

I tried attaching the book to the phone as their marketing suggests, but that didn't click somehow. Having both out means I would check the phone and then not look at the book.

Working so far, but it's only been a couple of weeks, so let's see.

[0] after reading this HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662381

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#82

Post by narrator »

The antithesis of AI slop is when you've created a unique idea from first principles and AI keeps misunderstanding your idea and spell checking it back to something that's widely popular such that you have to write a whole extra alignment subsystem to check that it hasn't ignored half of what you've wrote in your first principles document and just thought you were talking about something distantly related in its training set.

To work on something truly original in non-fiction in the future against AI pushing everything to the mean of its training set and fighting against that when doing research, as opposed to generating a whole book of slop from familiar ideas, is going to be quite the unrecognized effort of writing those books.

Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

#89

Post by altmanaltman »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #12

I would bet that how your brain stores information that you read from long-form text is very different from how it stores information you acquire from chatting with an LLM. When I read something challenging or new to me I spend a lot of time thinking about how what I'm reading matches my own experiences or knowledge. Although I'm a fairly fast reader, it often takes me a long time to get through difficult pages since…

Any such bet would be grossly misguided given how different people acquire information differently. Just because you don't like using LLMs doesn't automatically extrapolate to a general realisation about the human brain or how one approaches knowledge.

Your subjective experience matters in this case. Almost completely.

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