Comment by kidnoodle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kidnoodle | Hacker News Reader

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A few things - it checks the books it suggests actually exist is maybe the most important (I was really bummed to discover some Claude suggested for me did not). My main reason for building it was to hep me find stuff from the library, so there’s that as well. It also tries to do a little better than more of author X, by using the llm’s ‘understanding’ of the books and what actually mattered to you about them to build up a little profile of your taste and find maybe slightly unusual things that would work for you.

Oh, and it definitely does not pat itself on the back for suggesting books for you.

(You can see the profile it makes and correct it - it did a pretty good job on me)

ChatGPT always has a good sounding justification for the books it suggests, the issue is that I really didnt like the result.

I think theres a lot of work to be done in the recommendation engine space sadly.

Oh for sure. I think there’s a lot of potential in llms for this (lot more sophisticated approaches possible than what I have here). Ultimately it should be like one of those fantasy setting librarians or book sellers who looks you up and down and then just hands you the right book for the moment.

Edited to add - or just a really good real life one, it would be awesome if everyone had access to a librarian or bookseller with like an hour to sit and talk with you about books and then help you find some.

I find that theres usually a frontloaded benefit to most recommendation engines. I remember signing up for Netflix and the first 4 things it recommended were bang on. What it had trouble with was finding new interesting things for me on an ongoing basis once those low hanging fruit had been accessed. Spotify was the same. Once I had explored the initial new artists it showed me, further recommendations were worthless.

I suppose potentially the upside with books is it takes a while to exhaust the shallow wins compared to music and movies because the investment of time is that much greater.

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