Very neat site and write-up, but I found this part amusing:
> There is really nothing “AI” about this aside from the tool that collected the data and coded it, and, crucially, semantic search […]
So really, everything about it is AI. And that’s not a bad thing! It’s okay to simultaneously preach the superiority of award winning books over AI-generated garbage while also acknowledging the same AI as a valuable tool for other uses.
Key word being tool. People get lost in a fantasy that the AI was responsible for decisions and not the human who chose to use it as a replacement for effort rather than a tool to enhance effort, then apply their bias to all AI use.
Worth stating that this is one of the success stories from AI. Someone who has domain expertise outside of programming is able to create a really useful piece of software because the barrier to entry has been significantly lowered. Really nice.
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 Pulitzer or National Book Award, no books show up, but I can find books with these awards by browsing.
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 I originally made this for my own use and got kind of obsessed with building it out once I started finding unfamiliar books I enjoyed using the semantic search and category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 text of the books, or just the reviews and descriptions?
Already tried to do this in a basic form. Advice from experts would be welcome as it's my first time trying to make data and an API available: https://book-prize-index.vercel.app/data
Also I just had to upgrade my Vercel plan due to traffic, which is very welcome and appreciated, but if anyone wants to donate, that would be really helpful! There's a Stripe link at the site: https://book-prize-index.vercel.app
On a related note, I was just noting to my co-founder, as we struggle to write good case studies for our website, that I find LLMs are astoundingly bad at writing good prose.
We all know the "AI-tics" that give away a sloppily AI-written piece, but even if you steer them, they still struggle to write consistently high-quality prose.
Somehow I feel that the work of a good copywriter has never been more noticeable.
I recently realized this as well and I think what I’ve discovered is that AI just produces mediocre content in all realms, but you don’t really notice it except in the realms where you have real expertise. With a lot of harness and prompting you can have it pump out something that’s pretty good but by default the next best token rarely produces anything of quality it seems like and if you think it does, perhaps you may want to recheck your assumptions on your expertise of the topic at hand
Random observation: Google's Gemma 4 models write so much nicer prose than ChatGPT or Claude.
Though this might be me as a British reader, simply preferring a rather less American turn of phrase.
I reckon the more transatlantic, english-as-international language DeepMind team have had a subliminal (or maybe deliberate) impact on the way it chooses to write.
Or perhaps small open weights models simply aren't under the same commercial pressure to be engaging and sycophantic and are therefore less likely to adopt the samey overly casual, upbeat, Californian sales assistant manner. (Don't get me wrong, I like this from real human Californians just fine!)
Either way, the default tone is much less showy. I would be interested to find out if you agree.
I am very much an LLM cynic. I am engaging because I must, and trying to learn fundamentals, but I would not say I am overly excited by any of this, just glad that small open weights models exist as a counterpoint.
I loathe the way ChatGPT writes, and the Claude-isms that are everywhere; it is actually quite enraging, especially when you start seeing it in internet comments from people who used to try to write out their own thoughts.
But in my experiments with open weights models I have found I am much less aggravated by summaries and outlines written by Gemma 4, so much that I am happy enough to read them, because they have fewer irritants that take me out of the reading flow.
Though this evening it told me very kindly that my photography is a bit "safe". How very dare it… understand me that well.
I gave Claude Fable $25 in Pangram API credits and, after hundreds of attempts, it was unable to produce a single readable original piece of writing that was not immediately identified as AI.
This seems to be a hard problem for LLMs, as passing would probably require good self-perception ("oh no, I am writing like an AI!") and fine-grained control over its own output ("let's write like a human instead!").
I wonder if it partially because "write like a human" is kind of a vacuous request. Like, it's the objective everyone including me has been saying that we want, but there's no one way to write like a human and and humans don't even have a good definition past "I know it when I see it."
There's a lot of work in the humanities about different aspects of good writing, but that's not quite the same thing. And anyway they tend to assume a pre-existing level of writing ability. Students are supposed to learn good writing through practice; there are rules and exercises but they're incomplete.
More noticeable to me is the lack of the work of a good copy editor which, sadly, we haven't had for a really long time. At least, not on the interwebs. Even the news sites reduced where their print copies were known for rigorous editing saw obvious issues with the various corporate overlords doing serious headcount reductions. The rush to be first to publish reduced even further the time any editors might have had, and then the wide spread use of CMS style articles that slammed output together with something as unintelligent as 'cat segmentFromAuthor1 segmentFromAuthor2 segmentFromAuthor3 > article' where you can tell where each segment started over again with the same basic information as if it was content meant to stand on its own.
Of course, the amount of self published work has also helped make the lack of a good copy editor noticeable. I can excuse self published blogs though. But the stuff released "professionally" has really become farcical.
AI adopted humanisms, we just weren’t used to seeing them at the same scale we do today.
Diversity of writing styles was part of that, but I’d point to vernacular exposure as the larger component. We’re going to go through a period where we try to adapt to a form of “Universal English” for those of us who read primarily English writing.
Other languages’ readers may be experiencing the same dissonance when they come across AI-generated prose in their native language (but I’ll let others validate /reject my hypothesis).
> we just weren’t used to seeing them at the same scale we do today.
I think there's also a lot of recency bias in it. The same thing that makes you suddenly notice how many people are driving the same model car you just looked at, or how many ads there are for Turbo Encabulators after you read an article about them. A lot of the "tells" people picked out in early AI are tells because they're also really common in the material that the AI was trained on and the styles it was made to emulate. But until everyone wanted "one quick trick" to pick out AI writings, people didn't have any particular reason to need to notice those tells and so they slipped under the radar.
It's like people learning a new language according to the book. Those people sound foreign to a native speaker. If AI was trained on school books for grammar, then they too will sound odd to a native speaker even if their output is technically fine or technically more proper. I known nothing of LLM training and how weighting is applied to educational content vs other sources, but it feels like they were weighted away from modern colloquial speak and towards book grammar. The whole thing reminds me of school literature classes where the teachers comments always felt like I was being guided to a more strained sound and less natural. But what do I know. Lit was my least favorite subject which is well evidenced by my grades compared to my math/science scores.
This is right. AI is using human speech, but just doing so in a consistently peculiar way. The em-dash in particular is frustrating, because it's all over high-quality, pre-2022 academic work. But now instead of proper and erudite it's seen as AI-slop. Well, maybe if they didn't use it — all — time — ! It's even an auto-replacement in Word and can be (by one's choice) in LibreOffice, replacing three dashes (and two is replaced by an en-dash).
But when I submit a novel with em-dashes, will sloppy agents and sloppy editors be able to tell that em-dash was deliberately put there by me?
This is wonderful. 30 seconds into trying the site and I’ve already found a couple of interesting books to read. The search I typed is ‘Stuff being made, how it was made, how history shaped its form’.
I do think book prizes are a better-than-average signal but I previously volunteered with a book award. I will caution that pretty much every publisher mass-submits these books for consideration in every remotely relevant prize. It is a cost of doing business (similar to how photographers pay to enter photography competitions to try and win the "award winning photographer" title, or businesses submit dossiers with consideration fees on why they're one of Michigan's top 100 places to work).
There are often so many books and so few willing qualified readers that which books get an award can either be completely arbitrary, or comically easy.
For example, the NCR Book Award in your book corpus faced a big scandal when it was revealed that the judges did not read the books themselves. [1] The PROSE award is so comically large that an ordinary category finalist or win is usually overstated in prestige and value.
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 I have to stop and think about what I'm reading. I seem to be doing a lot of integrating and reorganizing my thoughts. When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively and I don't think it gets integrated as well. Not sure why this is and its somewhat counterintuitive since I don't think I'd have the same experience with a human tutor.
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.
There's a podcast I listened to as it came out when I was a teenager. I'm now relistening to it over a decade later, and I distinctly remember walking home from the bus stop with it coming through wired earbuds from my ipod.
Same here. I always marvel at this. These recollections can even be years later, and the memory of the place in which I heard the remembered thing is vivid.
In college I used mathematica a lot while taking linear algebra. I ended up having to relearn a lot of that math later since I never really understood it at a deep level, although I was able to use it and apply it under class conditions. I feel like a lot of my LLM derived knowledge is similarly superficial.
> When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively and I don't think it gets integrated as well.
This sounds like it's more down to how the individual uses the tool. I am not someone who has even been particularly good at reading > learning the thing. I've only ever been capable of learning by doing and with capability to interrogate on the points I don't get. LLMs allow that in a way that is just not feasible with any human being whose tolerance of me would diminish rapidly.
In most cases, I will be writing down my understanding as I would in isolation from a primary source, building flash cards and actively practicing what I have learned, only with more capability to interrogate on the points I have difficulty understanding or need clarity on. Effectively, I am doing the following in a capacity I personally never had via any other means:
> I seem to be doing a lot of integrating and reorganizing my thoughts.
If you are using it as a slot machine of knowledge, and going from receiving > doing with no intermediate step I see how outcomes could differ.
Seconded. At a minimum, you can literally tell the agent to guide you but not point you and only help when you are stuck if you're actively trying to learn something. It's been a help for me to bridge a couple of gaps I'd struggled to cross before (mainly hardware things).
Suggested additions: the Axiom Business Book Awards, Library Journal Best Books of the Year and Booklist Magazine's Editor's Choice Awards. There's also a few popular substacks that have big sideshows in regular book reviews, but I wouldn't even recommend my favourite for a public aggregator like this.
Original author/creator of the site here - thank you! Will add the Axiom one. I am on the fence about whether/how to add "book of the year" type lists as they are somewhat distinct from book awards, but I do think that would probably be the next step to get more books in the corpus.
And any other ideas that HN readers have for awards to add would be welcome. Currently it's probably too history-slanted since I'm a historian and knew those awards better.
It may be hard to parse the lists but if they're still available somewhere online under the current administration the past annual State Department, CIA bookshelf recommendation, Army Chief of Staff, Navy CNO and Marine Commandant reading lists may have some valuable additions. To my knowledge there aren't any analogues to them in the rest of the Anglosphere but some LLMs will probably point out ones I haven't thought of.
I can point out that the UN agencies' respective reading lists for their staffs' professional development are 99% internal UN papers of very limited interest to external audiences but I haven't had a professional reason to look at any EU agencies to confirm or deny value.
Additionally, the Financial Times has a second set of book awards along their main awards which you've not listed, the FT reader's best books list.
This is pretty nice, I might use this if I'm looking to learn more on a topic.
I'm always cautious when reading nonfiction because it's hard for me to tell if the author knows what they're talking about when I'm not an expert myself. Using awards is a good metric. Maybe.
I am curious what the "score" for each book means. Is it calculated by giving each award a certain weight and adding them up?
Is it even possible to find one these days? I would love to see some real honest amazon kindle stats on the amount of ebooks added over the last 3 years. Even a honest pie chart to show people its not worth it to get them to stop posting them.
At least one of the links on the post is still to localhost:3000 instead of the vercel page. I don't want to make a substack account to tell the author so hopefully this information finds its way over there.
Fascinated that the author shares an experience of discovery in libraries. The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer.
Libraries are certainly declining in their traditional form. I find it odd that everyone has a digital resources in their pocket yet libraries are squeezing out physical books to make way for more and more computers. Try to find paper copy of the Sony founder's book.... that will be £50 on amazon. Prohibitive. No library within a 10 mile radius has a copy.
I remember joyfully discovering Tony Royce's book in my library a few years ago. That enlightenment will never happen now. Primary knowledge is being lost, churned crude will forever lubricate the delusions of those who have no facility to collate the basis of our understanding.
> The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer.
back in the reasonably early days of the web (I would guess ~2000) I stumbled across a webpage that said "I used to collect random interesting snippets in a shoebox, here is the internet version of it". I was delighted enough that I actually wrote to the author to compliment them on helping keep the web interesting, and though I haven't thought about it in ages it clearly made enough of an impression on me that I remembered the author's name. and it's still up! https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ss44/cyc/index.htm
AIs are fantastic for discovery. Just today I asked Chatgpt to find blogs 1) about old school newspaper cartoons 2) that have been writing for more than 10 years and 3) are run by one or two passionate people rather than a team. Within seconds Chatgpt found 7 candidates. Within another handful of seconds it gave me RSS links to the ones I wanted.
Sometimes. I think this is partly because search engines are so poor nowadays. I have asked AI for certain websites that I know exist but it can't find them.
On a similar note: on Steam, the original Dark Souls game[1] is listed with the "souls-like" tag. That's not wrong, I guess, but just kind of a tautology. Grice's maxims[2] generally have such tautologies omitted in ordinary conversation as non-informative.
I participate book club for several years with friends, we casually navigate certain topics, and i can tell you human slop in literature is a real thing.
- almost every book try to stretch core idea into book size format
- unique ideas are rare people attack them under different angels
- a later phenomena : their believes almost predict entire book, outcomes etc, brainwash impact is real
so not sure, how ai slop is better vs book slop, at least with ai you can distill the idea, with the book, you have to spend 10-40 hours to digest average, absolutely non fresh ideas, that author brought in just to sell that book, otherwise it would be magazine article worth.
This is sadly correct/true. This is one of the many reasons why I militantly reject carbon chauvinism. Most of the potshots people take against AI can be easily retorted with “have you seen how bad the average human is at X?”
In your experience, how do you determine book slop? For me I don't really stray from authors and topics I like, and non-fiction isn't really my go to outside of sci-fi, and mystery/law books. Like on the stretch point, I can tell that in other media but not so much books.
I think my issue with this project--and so many other similar ones--is that the provenance of the code does undermine the intention. If a project purports to be about quality, then knowing that the creator abdicated some of the responsibility for creating the thing they ostensibly care about makes it harder to put faith in them as having high standards elsewhere.
Perhaps I am just old-fashioned, and vibe-coding is something that can be done with full focus and care for high quality, but I remain unconvinced. This is a project that needs to be cared about sincerely to be trustable/meaningful/useful, and the approach taken casts doubt on that.
My bona-fides here amount to little more than being a big time reader of non-fiction. But IMO, there's a nice synthesis here. Rather than going long rounds of asking LLMs about a subject, I usually end up asking it for book recommendations. It's much better than a google search and you can push it into some deep corners if you go past the surface level recs.
You can get quite specific. You can find texts you wouldn't discover unless you spent years studying the topic. Often these are completely approachable and give interesting perspectives they just get buried behind a wall of syllabi and listicles.
This is how I ended up reading Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' and Graves' 'Goodbye to all That' among others.
I read at night in bed. I love how, with ebooks (first Overdrive, now Libby), when I hear about an interesting book, I can within 30 seconds search for it across multiple libraries, borrow it, and send it to my Kindle.
It's sad now to see a university library where students sit among endless shelves of amazing books, sitting on laptops, almost all of them with ChatGPT open. The library has become just a place to sit and open an LLM.
The most sad part of all is to think how little of that knowledge is digitized and available to be referenced by ChatGPT. Digitizing old books is one of the highest things you can do as a human for “good for the world”.
It's especially sad because on of the things those LLMs are best, almost purpose built for is to tell those students which books to go open, where to find nuggets people haven't bumped into for years, to make cross-connections that would take a PhD a decade to find.
"Omit internet tropes." (the stopped-reading-at bit)
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Edit: it looks like your account has been posting quite a few flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments generally. Could you please not do that? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Very neat site and write-up, but I found this part amusing:
> There is really nothing “AI” about this aside from the tool that collected the data and coded it, and, crucially, semantic search […]
So really, everything about it is AI. And that’s not a bad thing! It’s okay to simultaneously preach the superiority of award winning books over AI-generated garbage while also acknowledging the same AI as a valuable tool for other uses.
Key word being tool. People get lost in a fantasy that the AI was responsible for decisions and not the human who chose to use it as a replacement for effort rather than a tool to enhance effort, then apply their bias to all AI use.
Worth stating that this is one of the success stories from AI. Someone who has domain expertise outside of programming is able to create a really useful piece of software because the barrier to entry has been significantly lowered. Really nice.
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 Pulitzer or National Book Award, no books show up, but I can find books with these awards by browsing.
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 text of the books, or just the reviews and descriptions?
Already tried to do this in a basic form. Advice from experts would be welcome as it's my first time trying to make data and an API available: https://book-prize-index.vercel.app/data
Also I just had to upgrade my Vercel plan due to traffic, which is very welcome and appreciated, but if anyone wants to donate, that would be really helpful! There's a Stripe link at the site: https://book-prize-index.vercel.app
Oh awesome, you're way ahead of me!
The JSON downloads quickly and had all the info I needed.
Donated happily. Long-time book lover and am always looking for my next favorite read.
Thank you for building this!
On a related note, I was just noting to my co-founder, as we struggle to write good case studies for our website, that I find LLMs are astoundingly bad at writing good prose.
We all know the "AI-tics" that give away a sloppily AI-written piece, but even if you steer them, they still struggle to write consistently high-quality prose.
Somehow I feel that the work of a good copywriter has never been more noticeable.
I recently realized this as well and I think what I’ve discovered is that AI just produces mediocre content in all realms, but you don’t really notice it except in the realms where you have real expertise. With a lot of harness and prompting you can have it pump out something that’s pretty good but by default the next best token rarely produces anything of quality it seems like and if you think it does, perhaps you may want to recheck your assumptions on your expertise of the topic at hand
It tends to the mean. You can get it to do that less, but it's an inherent bias
Random observation: Google's Gemma 4 models write so much nicer prose than ChatGPT or Claude.
Though this might be me as a British reader, simply preferring a rather less American turn of phrase.
I reckon the more transatlantic, english-as-international language DeepMind team have had a subliminal (or maybe deliberate) impact on the way it chooses to write.
Or perhaps small open weights models simply aren't under the same commercial pressure to be engaging and sycophantic and are therefore less likely to adopt the samey overly casual, upbeat, Californian sales assistant manner. (Don't get me wrong, I like this from real human Californians just fine!)
Either way, the default tone is much less showy. I would be interested to find out if you agree.
I am very much an LLM cynic. I am engaging because I must, and trying to learn fundamentals, but I would not say I am overly excited by any of this, just glad that small open weights models exist as a counterpoint.
I loathe the way ChatGPT writes, and the Claude-isms that are everywhere; it is actually quite enraging, especially when you start seeing it in internet comments from people who used to try to write out their own thoughts.
But in my experiments with open weights models I have found I am much less aggravated by summaries and outlines written by Gemma 4, so much that I am happy enough to read them, because they have fewer irritants that take me out of the reading flow.
Though this evening it told me very kindly that my photography is a bit "safe". How very dare it… understand me that well.
I gave Claude Fable $25 in Pangram API credits and, after hundreds of attempts, it was unable to produce a single readable original piece of writing that was not immediately identified as AI.
This seems to be a hard problem for LLMs, as passing would probably require good self-perception ("oh no, I am writing like an AI!") and fine-grained control over its own output ("let's write like a human instead!").
I wonder if it partially because "write like a human" is kind of a vacuous request. Like, it's the objective everyone including me has been saying that we want, but there's no one way to write like a human and and humans don't even have a good definition past "I know it when I see it."
There's a lot of work in the humanities about different aspects of good writing, but that's not quite the same thing. And anyway they tend to assume a pre-existing level of writing ability. Students are supposed to learn good writing through practice; there are rules and exercises but they're incomplete.
More noticeable to me is the lack of the work of a good copy editor which, sadly, we haven't had for a really long time. At least, not on the interwebs. Even the news sites reduced where their print copies were known for rigorous editing saw obvious issues with the various corporate overlords doing serious headcount reductions. The rush to be first to publish reduced even further the time any editors might have had, and then the wide spread use of CMS style articles that slammed output together with something as unintelligent as 'cat segmentFromAuthor1 segmentFromAuthor2 segmentFromAuthor3 > article' where you can tell where each segment started over again with the same basic information as if it was content meant to stand on its own.
Of course, the amount of self published work has also helped make the lack of a good copy editor noticeable. I can excuse self published blogs though. But the stuff released "professionally" has really become farcical.
I've not really enjoyed finding out lately just how few people seem to notice what ought to be unmissable.
those people will also start adopting the AIsm and will become indistinguishable.
AI adopted humanisms, we just weren’t used to seeing them at the same scale we do today.
Diversity of writing styles was part of that, but I’d point to vernacular exposure as the larger component. We’re going to go through a period where we try to adapt to a form of “Universal English” for those of us who read primarily English writing.
Other languages’ readers may be experiencing the same dissonance when they come across AI-generated prose in their native language (but I’ll let others validate /reject my hypothesis).
> we just weren’t used to seeing them at the same scale we do today.
I think there's also a lot of recency bias in it. The same thing that makes you suddenly notice how many people are driving the same model car you just looked at, or how many ads there are for Turbo Encabulators after you read an article about them. A lot of the "tells" people picked out in early AI are tells because they're also really common in the material that the AI was trained on and the styles it was made to emulate. But until everyone wanted "one quick trick" to pick out AI writings, people didn't have any particular reason to need to notice those tells and so they slipped under the radar.
It's like people learning a new language according to the book. Those people sound foreign to a native speaker. If AI was trained on school books for grammar, then they too will sound odd to a native speaker even if their output is technically fine or technically more proper. I known nothing of LLM training and how weighting is applied to educational content vs other sources, but it feels like they were weighted away from modern colloquial speak and towards book grammar. The whole thing reminds me of school literature classes where the teachers comments always felt like I was being guided to a more strained sound and less natural. But what do I know. Lit was my least favorite subject which is well evidenced by my grades compared to my math/science scores.
This is right. AI is using human speech, but just doing so in a consistently peculiar way. The em-dash in particular is frustrating, because it's all over high-quality, pre-2022 academic work. But now instead of proper and erudite it's seen as AI-slop. Well, maybe if they didn't use it — all — time — ! It's even an auto-replacement in Word and can be (by one's choice) in LibreOffice, replacing three dashes (and two is replaced by an en-dash).
But when I submit a novel with em-dashes, will sloppy agents and sloppy editors be able to tell that em-dash was deliberately put there by me?
I can sniff out AI writing immediately but from what I hear AI writing is more popular than ever
This is wonderful. 30 seconds into trying the site and I’ve already found a couple of interesting books to read. The search I typed is ‘Stuff being made, how it was made, how history shaped its form’.
Thank you for sharing this.
I do think book prizes are a better-than-average signal but I previously volunteered with a book award. I will caution that pretty much every publisher mass-submits these books for consideration in every remotely relevant prize. It is a cost of doing business (similar to how photographers pay to enter photography competitions to try and win the "award winning photographer" title, or businesses submit dossiers with consideration fees on why they're one of Michigan's top 100 places to work).
There are often so many books and so few willing qualified readers that which books get an award can either be completely arbitrary, or comically easy.
For example, the NCR Book Award in your book corpus faced a big scandal when it was revealed that the judges did not read the books themselves. [1] The PROSE award is so comically large that an ordinary category finalist or win is usually overstated in prestige and value.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2013/may/19/literary-prize-...
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 I have to stop and think about what I'm reading. I seem to be doing a lot of integrating and reorganizing my thoughts. When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively and I don't think it gets integrated as well. Not sure why this is and its somewhat counterintuitive since I don't think I'd have the same experience with a human tutor.
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.
There's a podcast I listened to as it came out when I was a teenager. I'm now relistening to it over a decade later, and I distinctly remember walking home from the bus stop with it coming through wired earbuds from my ipod.
Same here. I always marvel at this. These recollections can even be years later, and the memory of the place in which I heard the remembered thing is vivid.
> When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively
It's... almost an oxymoron, and very different from my experience.
In college I used mathematica a lot while taking linear algebra. I ended up having to relearn a lot of that math later since I never really understood it at a deep level, although I was able to use it and apply it under class conditions. I feel like a lot of my LLM derived knowledge is similarly superficial.
> When interacting with LLMs it feels a lot more like I'm just receiving knowledge passively and I don't think it gets integrated as well.
This sounds like it's more down to how the individual uses the tool. I am not someone who has even been particularly good at reading > learning the thing. I've only ever been capable of learning by doing and with capability to interrogate on the points I don't get. LLMs allow that in a way that is just not feasible with any human being whose tolerance of me would diminish rapidly.
In most cases, I will be writing down my understanding as I would in isolation from a primary source, building flash cards and actively practicing what I have learned, only with more capability to interrogate on the points I have difficulty understanding or need clarity on. Effectively, I am doing the following in a capacity I personally never had via any other means:
> I seem to be doing a lot of integrating and reorganizing my thoughts.
If you are using it as a slot machine of knowledge, and going from receiving > doing with no intermediate step I see how outcomes could differ.
Seconded. At a minimum, you can literally tell the agent to guide you but not point you and only help when you are stuck if you're actively trying to learn something. It's been a help for me to bridge a couple of gaps I'd struggled to cross before (mainly hardware things).
Suggested additions: the Axiom Business Book Awards, Library Journal Best Books of the Year and Booklist Magazine's Editor's Choice Awards. There's also a few popular substacks that have big sideshows in regular book reviews, but I wouldn't even recommend my favourite for a public aggregator like this.
Original author/creator of the site here - thank you! Will add the Axiom one. I am on the fence about whether/how to add "book of the year" type lists as they are somewhat distinct from book awards, but I do think that would probably be the next step to get more books in the corpus.
And any other ideas that HN readers have for awards to add would be welcome. Currently it's probably too history-slanted since I'm a historian and knew those awards better.
It may be hard to parse the lists but if they're still available somewhere online under the current administration the past annual State Department, CIA bookshelf recommendation, Army Chief of Staff, Navy CNO and Marine Commandant reading lists may have some valuable additions. To my knowledge there aren't any analogues to them in the rest of the Anglosphere but some LLMs will probably point out ones I haven't thought of.
I can point out that the UN agencies' respective reading lists for their staffs' professional development are 99% internal UN papers of very limited interest to external audiences but I haven't had a professional reason to look at any EU agencies to confirm or deny value.
Additionally, the Financial Times has a second set of book awards along their main awards which you've not listed, the FT reader's best books list.
This is pretty nice, I might use this if I'm looking to learn more on a topic.
I'm always cautious when reading nonfiction because it's hard for me to tell if the author knows what they're talking about when I'm not an expert myself. Using awards is a good metric. Maybe.
I am curious what the "score" for each book means. Is it calculated by giving each award a certain weight and adding them up?
Is it even possible to find one these days? I would love to see some real honest amazon kindle stats on the amount of ebooks added over the last 3 years. Even a honest pie chart to show people its not worth it to get them to stop posting them.
At least one of the links on the post is still to localhost:3000 instead of the vercel page. I don't want to make a substack account to tell the author so hopefully this information finds its way over there.
Fascinated that the author shares an experience of discovery in libraries. The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer.
Libraries are certainly declining in their traditional form. I find it odd that everyone has a digital resources in their pocket yet libraries are squeezing out physical books to make way for more and more computers. Try to find paper copy of the Sony founder's book.... that will be £50 on amazon. Prohibitive. No library within a 10 mile radius has a copy.
I remember joyfully discovering Tony Royce's book in my library a few years ago. That enlightenment will never happen now. Primary knowledge is being lost, churned crude will forever lubricate the delusions of those who have no facility to collate the basis of our understanding.
> The internet, in its early days felt like that. Of course, no longer.
back in the reasonably early days of the web (I would guess ~2000) I stumbled across a webpage that said "I used to collect random interesting snippets in a shoebox, here is the internet version of it". I was delighted enough that I actually wrote to the author to compliment them on helping keep the web interesting, and though I haven't thought about it in ages it clearly made enough of an impression on me that I remembered the author's name. and it's still up! https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ss44/cyc/index.htm
AIs are fantastic for discovery. Just today I asked Chatgpt to find blogs 1) about old school newspaper cartoons 2) that have been writing for more than 10 years and 3) are run by one or two passionate people rather than a team. Within seconds Chatgpt found 7 candidates. Within another handful of seconds it gave me RSS links to the ones I wanted.
This is incredible!
Sometimes. I think this is partly because search engines are so poor nowadays. I have asked AI for certain websites that I know exist but it can't find them.
Is it only me or the titles of top books from History, Nature, and Politics sound very click-baiting? I'm really taken off by these titles.
possibly a bug - I searched for "writers like lewis thomas" and the top two results were by thomas himself.
On a similar note: on Steam, the original Dark Souls game[1] is listed with the "souls-like" tag. That's not wrong, I guess, but just kind of a tautology. Grice's maxims[2] generally have such tautologies omitted in ordinary conversation as non-informative.
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/570940/DARK_SOULS_REMASTE...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
I participate book club for several years with friends, we casually navigate certain topics, and i can tell you human slop in literature is a real thing.
- almost every book try to stretch core idea into book size format
- unique ideas are rare people attack them under different angels
- a later phenomena : their believes almost predict entire book, outcomes etc, brainwash impact is real
so not sure, how ai slop is better vs book slop, at least with ai you can distill the idea, with the book, you have to spend 10-40 hours to digest average, absolutely non fresh ideas, that author brought in just to sell that book, otherwise it would be magazine article worth.
This is sadly correct/true. This is one of the many reasons why I militantly reject carbon chauvinism. Most of the potshots people take against AI can be easily retorted with “have you seen how bad the average human is at X?”
They’ve used a pretty good filter for the human slop - prestigious awards.
In your experience, how do you determine book slop? For me I don't really stray from authors and topics I like, and non-fiction isn't really my go to outside of sci-fi, and mystery/law books. Like on the stretch point, I can tell that in other media but not so much books.
Business books are 99% slop.
I think my issue with this project--and so many other similar ones--is that the provenance of the code does undermine the intention. If a project purports to be about quality, then knowing that the creator abdicated some of the responsibility for creating the thing they ostensibly care about makes it harder to put faith in them as having high standards elsewhere.
Perhaps I am just old-fashioned, and vibe-coding is something that can be done with full focus and care for high quality, but I remain unconvinced. This is a project that needs to be cared about sincerely to be trustable/meaningful/useful, and the approach taken casts doubt on that.
I've gotten AI to write things that made me teary eyed --- it manipulated me
The title is tautological. Quality is the opposite of slop, AI or not.
Not really. Quality nonfiction books are a subset of quality books.
My bona-fides here amount to little more than being a big time reader of non-fiction. But IMO, there's a nice synthesis here. Rather than going long rounds of asking LLMs about a subject, I usually end up asking it for book recommendations. It's much better than a google search and you can push it into some deep corners if you go past the surface level recs.
You can get quite specific. You can find texts you wouldn't discover unless you spent years studying the topic. Often these are completely approachable and give interesting perspectives they just get buried behind a wall of syllabi and listicles.
This is how I ended up reading Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' and Graves' 'Goodbye to all That' among others.
I read at night in bed. I love how, with ebooks (first Overdrive, now Libby), when I hear about an interesting book, I can within 30 seconds search for it across multiple libraries, borrow it, and send it to my Kindle.
> Decries AI for producing slop
> Uses AI to produce website
The article isn't even about AI slop other than the title for some reason
It's a clever title because it's FREE MONEY on HN. There is a small but rabid group that upvotes everything that denigrates AI, sight unseen.
It's sad now to see a university library where students sit among endless shelves of amazing books, sitting on laptops, almost all of them with ChatGPT open. The library has become just a place to sit and open an LLM.
The most sad part of all is to think how little of that knowledge is digitized and available to be referenced by ChatGPT. Digitizing old books is one of the highest things you can do as a human for “good for the world”.
It's especially sad because on of the things those LLMs are best, almost purpose built for is to tell those students which books to go open, where to find nuggets people haven't bumped into for years, to make cross-connections that would take a PhD a decade to find.
This is a very good point. If it should be used as anything, it is as a pointer to other things.
[flagged]
Can you please review the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and stick to them when posting? You broke several of them here.
"Don't be snarky."
"Omit internet tropes." (the stopped-reading-at bit)
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Edit: it looks like your account has been posting quite a few flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments generally. Could you please not do that? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.