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Comment by mtlynch | Hacker News Reader

That version is more sensible. Opus generated:

> 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...

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matt-bornstein's commits in that repo do often start off with ai-generated descriptions which he then edits down. there are notes on some commits that say things like "AI GENERATED NEED TO EDIT". the other contributors' changes don't have these tells.

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?

I don’t see any evidence the LLM picked the list of books, it instead was used to update/add descriptions of the books and series.

That's almost more damning. The list was created by humans, who presumably read the books, but then couldn't be bothered to summarize the very books they read? Either the human is really lazy ("read" the book but can't be bothered to write a short summary) or really really lazy (didn't read the book but felt a summary was necessary). Either way, it makes this list less interesting, at the very least because it doesn't need to exist at all if someone can just ask an LLM "list and describe books that A16Z might think are valuable to read" and get the same quality output.

> if these books are in fact just picked by llms then what's the point of this list?

How do you do, fellow nerds?

I’d be curious what the point is even if it were written by humans with some evidence of non-zero effort, but posting something with no point and no effort is really puzzling.

It serves as a form of virtue signaling. “Look at all these super nerdy books I don’t just read, but consider myself an authority on”.

Low effort is the name of the game in the age of modern LLMs.

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