Thank you for sharing. This will come in handy for my research!
Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
131–140 of 265 posts
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I listen to audiobooks while I walk and hike, and sometimes when I recall some particular thing I've learned, I can also recall where I was hiking when I heard it. I think there's a lot to learn on how we really process information.
I once heard a lecture about „learning how to learn“. There are already a lot of well-researched things one can exploit about the way we process information. What you describe is known as retrieval cue. Our minds seem to be associative^1. It also seems a lot of the learning/processing happens after the actual learning process, which is why resting is important. Spaced repitition is a further method well-proven in pra…
Perhaps not the same one, but there's a fantastic course by Barbara Oakley by this name. I viewed it quite a while back, but the modern incarnation seems to be [0]. In a similar vein, the book "How we learn" by Stanislas Dehane is also very good!
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've only read Homage to Catalonia out of those, which is a personal retelling from Orwell, are the other books in the same style? What's the difference you'd say between the ones you list?
Paul Preston's "The Spanish Civil War" would be the poster child of the "quality non-fiction" category specified in this post's title. He is, in my opinion, the leading Hispanist historian [1], and I hold his work in the highest esteem. I can also very much recommend his book "A People Betrayed". Regarding the other two authors in my previous comment: Hugh Thomas was also a leading Hispanist historian [2], and Antony…
> Quick aside for the astute reader that noticed all of the recommended authors being non-Spanish: I find Spanish politics extremely polarized; the Spanish Civil War being perhaps the most polarizing topic. As such, I find outsider's perspectives to be more balanced and objective
Makes sense to me, even as someone who live in Spain. It's a hard subject to talk to people about, especially because it never really was addressed as a country, everyone (politicians) just agreed to pretend it never happened, sweep a bunch of stuff under the rug and hope for the best. Then everyone act surprised when things start to bubble again...
I think the approach makes sense, also why you probably don't want to read about US politics from people actively inside of US politics, and it's similarly polarized today. Seemingly, at some point, people just lose all head and reason, and just start backing into their side, regardless of what that means.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#134Fiction genre catching strays as usual
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#135But I get triggered by the em dashes. :(
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#136I 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…
I listen to audiobooks while I walk and hike, and sometimes when I recall some particular thing I've learned, I can also recall where I was hiking when I heard it. I think there's a lot to learn on how we really process information.
i read a school-assigned book during the loading portions of a certain computer game. the two stories are completely interlinked in my head.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#137Could you please add a link to the Goodreads page of each book?
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#138Not to be intentionally contrarian, but I have thought a lot about this:
I think good fiction is actually the antithesis of AI, fundamentally. LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output. This can give you some creative results, but it is ultimately kind of limited. I cannot imagine that prompting an AI a thousand times would give you something truly original in the way many high-quality fictional stories are. The magic and absurdity of life is a necessary thing to create such works.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#139I 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…
What you're describing is very close to what education theory calls "assimilation" and "accommodation". When we assimilate knowledge, it just fits into our schema of understanding. When we accommodate knowledge, we need to change our schema, and that is where the feeling of being challenged (and often the feeling of profundity) comes from.
For example, a child learns that "foreigner" means someone from outside their country. Then, when they're 11, they go on their first holiday abroad and realise "Wait! _I_ am a foreigner here!"
So, maybe one way to frame what you're saying, is that LLM output tends towards being easily assimilable.
Re: Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awesome, that's what I was going for. I originally made this for my own use and got kind of obsessed with building it out once I started finding unfamiliar books I enjoyed using the semantic search and category browsing. Glad to see it out in the world hopefully doing the same thing!
One thing that would make this information even more useful and searchable would be a JSON dump of your dataset. You could serve it statically on S3 or similar, to keep hosting costs to a minimum. Of course, having created a cool thing generates no obligation for further work on your part! I'm grateful that you did this work and made it available for free. Did you build your semantic search index based on the full te…
> statically on S3 or similar, to keep hosting costs to a minimum.
Oxymoron. S3 and its clones are one of the most expensive ways to host files.