We need this for technical books. I was a chapter into something the other day before deciding I’d been hoodwinked into reading someone’s ChatGPT output

I've noticed entire publishers on Amazon which are just fly-by-night AI slop, probably printed on-demand too.

For example, I stumbled on https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DT4TKY58 and had never heard of the author. Their page (https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B004LUETE8) suggested they were incredibly prolific in a huge number of areas which already felt off. No information about "Robert Johnson" was available either. The publisher, HiTeX Press (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=HiTeX+Press) has a few other authors with similarly generic names and no information available about them, each the author of numerous books spanning a huge array of topics.

It feels even more bewildering and disheartening to see AI slop come into the physical world like this.

Give yourself a treat as a reader: stop going to Amazon.

There are lots of other ebook stores and physical book stores that don't enable scams, mistreat workers, or do this weird AI junk.

Yeah I really need to. I do occasionally go through a bout of trying to take my business elsewhere. I am sort of a used book junkie and Amazon still owns that market. Though I do often get my used books from Alibris when I can.

Recommendations for alternatives would be very welcome.

For mainstream books, I use Bookshop ( https://bookshop.org ) or Kobo. Bookshop supports indie bookstores. Both of them will let you know if a given eBook has DRM or not.

(Now, when a book does have DRM, I buy it from Kobo! I'll leave it to the reader to speculate why :) )

Do you have recs? Particularly where I can buy epub without drm with a fairly rich catalogue across niche and more mainstream writings?

Sadly KDP Select makes that impossible. Preferential rates for authors in exchange for exclusivity. There’s a lot of (human) slop there, but enough stuff I want to read.

I recently saw this, and technical subjects that actually have 0 books written about them now have entire pages filled with books. Title sound good, and the page look decently good, but there's something slightly off, and when you look at it the "author" has been writing a book a week...

It's disheartening because now I will look much more into reputable publishers, and so filter off independent writers who have nothing to do with this.

I do think that publishers will become more a point of trust in the post-LLM world as a result.

Who’s gonna tell him?

Yeah. Rust compiles to machine code.

I thought it was a clever joke

Don’t you dare!

What I would have given to have had ChatGPT in college stuck reading Barthes.

I know what you’re trying to do. People say this about life in general. But that really is not what is going on here.

It made immediate sense to me it was Jen once I saw the code samples given

Depressing to see so many clearly vibe coded projects here.

Exciting to see so many clearly vibe coded projects here.

Not intended as a gotcha question but how is your a11y?

On web? Officially it’s good. I think they hope people won’t actually care to test accessibility. Well, I did test it and it was comically terrible.

Amen. I write Flutter at my day job and am working toward an exit ramp every day.

And here I am writing flutter as a hobby and dreaming I could do it as a day job! That sucks

I do both lol. Flutter is fun to play with and vibes very well with AI. But as a day job, things like dependencies, animations, design systems, and super customized things like Xiaomi are the bane of my day.

I was a strong user for years but I would now suggest https://www.hevyapp.com/. It has everything strong does but also a web app where you can create your programs on.

Most importantly for this crowd, you get a rest api to your data if you spring for the cheap premium plan. Csv export is free though I’m pretty sure

Quite like hevy app too

I have 128gb in PC (largely because I can) and android studio, a few containers and running emulators will take a sizable bite into that. My 18gb MacBook would be digging into swap and compressing to get there.