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Reading across books with Claude Code

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Re: Reading across books with Claude Code

#2

Post by jszymborski »

This is all interesting, however I find myself most interested in how the topic tree is created. It seems super useful for lots of things. Anyone can point me to something similar with details?

EDIT: Whoops, I found more details at the very end of the article.

Re: Reading across books with Claude Code

#7

Post by gjm11 »

gulugawa wrote: post #6

[flagged]

I agree that we should be reading books with our eyes and that feeding a book into an LLM doesn't constitute reading it and confers few of the same benefits.

But this thing isn't (so far as I can tell) even slightly proposing that we feed books into an LLM instead of reading them. It looks to me more like a discovery mechanism: you run this thing, it shows you some possible links between books, and maybe you think "hmm, that little snippet seems well written" or "well, I enjoyed book X, let's give book Y a try" or whatever.

I don't think it would work particularly well for me; I'd want longer excerpts to get a sense of whether a book is interesting, and "contains a fragment that has some semantic connection with a fragment of a book I liked" doesn't feel like enough recommendation. Maybe it is indeed a huge waste of time. But if it is, it isn't because it's encouraging people to substitute LLM use for reading.

Re: Reading across books with Claude Code

#8

Post by imdsm »

gjm11 wrote: post #7
gulugawa wrote: post #6

[flagged]

I agree that we should be reading books with our eyes and that feeding a book into an LLM doesn't constitute reading it and confers few of the same benefits. But this thing isn't (so far as I can tell) even slightly proposing that we feed books into an LLM instead of reading them. It looks to me more like a discovery mechanism: you run this thing, it shows you some possible links between books, and maybe you think "h…

commenter above probably didn't read the post, ironically

Re: Reading across books with Claude Code

#10

Post by hungryhobbit »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #5

In several years, IMO the most interesting people are going to be the ones still actually reading paper books and not trying to shove everything into a LLM

I don't think the Venn diagram of those people and everyone else is as separate as you imagine.

I'm a Literature major and avid reader, but projects like this are still incredibly exciting to me. I salivate at the thought of new kinds of literary analysis that AI is going to open up.

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