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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but why are things moving so quickly now that books are outdated quickly? I believe it's because of the superior information speed delivery of the tutorials, blog posts, etc.

And I believe the same thing will happen with AI. Writing tutorials, blog posts, etc will be snail-pace slow compared to having AI tell you about something. It will be able to read the code and tell you about it, and directly answer the questions you have. I believe it will be orders of magnitude more efficient and enjoyable than what we have now.

Tutorials, blog posts, etc will have too long time-to-market compared to AI generated information, so the same will happen, and those things will stop being written, just like books have.

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No, it’s the superior patch speed.

It used to cost infinity dollars or be nearly impossible to patch software, so it was extensively tested and designed before shipping; now you ship it and if it breaks patch it anyway ship a new feature and a UI redesign quick!

Books can still be made but they take too long, and as you note most people don’t want to learn the tools they just want to get on with their task.

Patches are not necessarily good.

This is a massive issue with soft dev today.

That being said, the books can still exist - dynamically updated, well versioned books with frequent updates, and low cost distribution methods such as websites or module print formats.

The problem with frequent updates is the lack of rigor, which is partly why we don't see as much of this...

My personal impression is that modern software is a lot less buggy than 1980s software.

I'm not convinced.

Most software I use today is awful, but then again it is so much more complicated. It is rare thought that I use something that had one purpose and does it well.

Interacting with a computer has never been more frustrating imo. It might be a lot of small niggly things but it feels like death by a thousand cuts.

They are not. We just killed all the fast-moving formats in favor of the internet.

Books about new things were always outdated before they got distributed, and information circulated in magazines, booklets, journals, etc. We got a short time window when books became faster, and people tried to use them that way, but as the experience showed, fast books are still not fast enough.

I don't really understand what you mean by "We just killed all the fast-moving formats in favor of the internet." The internet is the delivery medium for the fast moving information. Prior to this, it was even slower because books, magazines, articles etc had to be printed on paper and shipped in the physical world.

But considering book (e-book) and blog post etc delivery on the internet, think about how fast a blog post is compared to a book. Maybe a few days to create instead of a year? Depends of course, some are longer some are shorter, but that makes blog posts about 100 times faster at disseminating information than books.

AI can generate a blog post of information in maybe a minute. Compared to human written, it's maybe 5,000 times faster, a full order (and a half) of magnitude faster. And this is still early days!

You don't think AI is going to disrupt blog posts in the same way they did books?

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