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’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.
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.
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.
This really is a study in AI slop. At least they had the good sense to change it.
a16z seems to view turning society into a dystopia as a goal, so that makes sense. Their portfolio includes:
- 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!
Wow, I just checked the doublespeed website and it is comically evil. The footer says — verbatim, and in huge letters — "never pay a human again." (I'm not selectively quoting; it's a full sentence, despite their weird capitalization.)
If Neal Stephenson tried to write a villain this on-the-nose, his editor would tell him to tone it down.
Can A16Z tell the difference? Insert that meme "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus, from the classic sci-fi novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus".
a16z and others like them never met a dystopian warning they didn't interpret as a titillating invitation to an uncomfortably exciting and inevitable future!
https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/93bc3abb04...
> opus descriptions in cursor, raw