A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z
nealstephenson.substack.com
nealstephenson.substack.com
https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/93bc3abb04...
> opus descriptions in cursor, raw
> Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.
In commit e4d022[0], the wording changed to:
> Fair warning: most of these books famously don't have endings (they literally stop mid-sentence during a normal plot arc).
It's unclear what led to that change, as the commit message is just "stephenson".
It went through a few more minor edits to get to what's currently published.
https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/e4d022d592...
while it should come as no surprise to have software written by llms, if these books are in fact just picked by llms then what's the point of this list?
Low effort is the name of the game in the age of modern LLMs.
How do you do, fellow nerds?
Stephenson doesn't just write sci-fi, he writes operating manuals for the future. His books predicted cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and distributed computing before most of us knew what TCP/IP stood for. Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.
- DoubleSpeed, a bot farm as a service provider, allowing customers to orchestrate social media activity across thousands of fake accounts to create artificial consensus on the topic of their choice. Never pay a human again!
- Cheddr, the TikTok of sports gambling, whose differentiating feature is allowing users under 21. Place live in-game bets with just a swipe!
- Coverd, a new type of credit card where you can wipe off bills by betting on your favorite gambling games in their app. No VPN required!
If Neal Stephenson tried to write a villain this on-the-nose, his editor would tell him to tone it down.
> Coverd
Even worse, they're bringing Web 2.0 startup names back...
From that Wikipedia summary:
> Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency
> [THIS IS AI GENERATED, NEED TO EDIT] The manga that asked [...]
They do at least have "NEED TO EDIT" in there, but this prose was openly generated by AI as a starting point.
Used Claude to fact-check and fix errors that were likely introduced by Cursor.
The circle is complete.
Yesterday, Thanksgiving, there was a Google Doodle. Clicking the doodle lead to a Gemini prompt for how to plan to have Thanksgiving dinner ready on time. It had a schedule for lots of prep the day before and then a timeline for the day of. It had cooking the dinner rolls and then said something like "take them out and keep them warm" followed by cooking something else in the oven. I asked "How do I keep them warm when something else is cooking in the oven?". It proceeded to give me a revised timeline that contradicted its original timeline and also, made no sense in and of itself. I asked it about the contradiction and the error and it apologized and gave a completely new 3rd timeline that was different than the first 2 and also nonsense. This was Google's Gemini Promotion!
All it really needed to do to my first query was say something like "put a towel over the rolls" and leave it on top of the oven.... Maybe? But then, it had told me be spread butter over the rolls as soon as they came out of the oven so I'd have asked, "won't the towel suck up all the butter?"
This is one example many times LLMs fail me (ChatGPT, Gemini). For direct code gen, my subjective experience is it fails 5 of 6 times. For stackoverflow type questions it succeeds 5 of 6 times. For non-code questions it depends on the type of question. But, when it fails it fails so badly that I'm somewhat surprised it ever works.
And yea, the whole world is running head first into massive LLM usage like this one using it for short reviews of authors. Ugh!!!
It seems to me, most LLM fans are impressed by glancing at a result ("It works!") and never really think about the flaws of the answer or look at the code in detail.
It's wrong nearly every time I search for anything. Ironically, in writing this comment, I tried asking it for the GOOG share price the day before AI Overviews launched, and it got that wrong too.
Just for shits and giggles I decided to let Copilot (whatever the default in vscode is) write a Makefile for a simple avr-gcc project. I can't remember what the prompt I gave it was, but it was something along the lines of "given this makefile that is old but works, write a new makefile for this project that doesn't have one" and a link to a simple gist I wrote years ago.
Fuuuuuuuuck me.
It's 2500 lines long. It's not just bigger than the codebase it's supposed to build, it's just about bigger than all the C files in all the avr-gcc projects in that entire chunk of my ~/devel/ directory. I couldn't even begin to make sense of what it's trying to do.
It looks mostly like it's declaring variables over and over, concatenating more bits on as it goes. I don't know for sure though.
I won't be using it.
AI is eating the VCs.
He was an absolute hero of that era, possibly the most admired 'geek' back then. Young, with hair, with no hints of his future Dr. Evil emergence.
When he was first coding NCSA Mosaic, we were both pretty young, and doing workstation development, which took more of what HN would consider hacker spirit than the bulk of contemporary software development does. And we were also presumably Internet people, so I assumed he was like me.
In my mind, there was a default Internet person culture, which was very different than the tech industry culture of today. Curious, optimistic and wanting to bring Internet tech and culture to people, and a sense of responsibility for it. (Not affected platitudes, but innate and genuine; but also not tested by the potential of wealth, so you didn't really know how firmly held it was.)
Culturally, today, I seem to be closer than him to my early impression of early Internet people. (Though I changed my mind about trying to first become a professor and then do research commercial spinouts, rather than to grab the initial dotcom boom money right away. So I'd like a do-over.)
I don't know why he culturally seemed to go into the direction of libertarian manifestos and questionable crypto pumping.
Maybe he has in mind a version of OG Internet values, or some other vision, and he's trying to amass more wealth and power to make it happen?
There have been a few OG hackers in the VC space who you might have assumed would go one way if they had money, but then went a different way. Were they actually always like that? Did they learn something that changed how they think about the world? Were they changed by money/power circles, sycophants, or drugs? Did their business take on a life of its own, naturally maximizing profit, and they were just along for the ride?
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I just finished Dave Wallace's 520 page PhD thesis, his first novel The Broom of the System, which literally ends with a liar proclaiming:
>I am a man of my
( "word" is presumed to follow, but another DFW book which just [abruptly!?!] ends )
Like his other two novels (Infinite Jest & Pale King), Broom is an ensemble of disconnected characters, with no clear destination nor moral lessons navigated in a few-hundred-too-many pages — just raw human condition. Very powerful writing style, but with no executive function.
Now that I've read 2000+ pages of David Foster Wallace, I will continue NOT recommending his novels to anybody (this is the same review I gave after IJ and PK). DFW was definitely a powerful thinker/writer, but he should have stuck to his shorter non-fiction meanderings.
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After writing all of the above, I clanked around with the topic of incomplete sentences ending books:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/broom-ends-with-an-incomple...
>Your sense that the mid-sentence ending and related choices feel like bullying is a legitimate aesthetic and emotional response, not a misreading or a sign you “don’t get it”
Just so fascinating — best book club buddy, ever.
I'll admit, of the few books of his I've read, I always felt like they ended a couple of chapters too soon or a couple of chapters too late — which has put me off reading more of his books despite some interesting premises. I suspect some of the deeper themes are lost on me in my bedtime readings. Just not my cup of tea at the end of the day, literally.
And so it does, but in a totally Herzog moment he then almost immediately intones afterwards "and that is the end of the book as I indicated in the foreword".
And now we realize that this is just a PR charade. They might not be people with hobbies like reading, and taste.
(That isn't to say these aren't good books, I'm talking about their social function among a certain type of person, corporation or natural)
"Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland into the hills, I have come to"
These shitty VCs with their LLM-generated garbage need to be held accountable for their actions.
https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/f8d149495a...
Unfortunately, the meaning of the word “literally” has morphed into almost the opposite of “literally”. Most people just use it as an intensifier devoid of any true meaning. Makes sense that an LLM that doesn’t have any sense of truth would just stuff that in there.
As it turns out, that phrase was most likely added in a human review-edit. Along with the typo.
This is not an argument against LLMs lacking a sense of truth -- just that humans are pretty incompetent as well.
It turned out that the LLM-runner's default setting for handling queries that were too long was to silently delete the middle of the query. So the LLM saw the beginning of my ask, and the tail end of the code context, and nothing else.
is “Inhuman Centipede” to describe the slop-eating-its-own-tale future we all dread an established term, or an invention of the author? I hope it becomes the term we all use, like slop and clanker.
For those of us writing original words that are consumed by LLMs without our consent, at least we get to be the front of the Inhuman Centipede.
It was also used as the title for this post by Cory Doctrow discussing the same problem: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshit...
Sorry. Just grumpy, cause I always love the first 80% of his books and then they somehow... just disintegrate.
I mean, Dune does in fact end mid-story, which is probably worse.
I know this because I read them in the 90s and didn't realise that Frank Herbert was dead for quite some time after reading Chapter House.
The snippet appears to be constructed by a LLM. I don’t have any evidence of that, just some turns of phrase that a human wouldn’t use when discussing his works.
I love the theory that the LLM might think that his books are fragmented is due to the fragmentation of his corpus by spammers of a certain era.
All of the books I have read on this list (which is nearly all of them) are entirely worth reading.
But I'm always looking for more and better stuff to read, so please give us a few examples that you believe should be included.
— Maya Angelou