Item — HN Reader

I would rather care whether there is a book at all and whether it is useful.

> I write a book about a subject I just told you I'm clueless about

Use AI. Even if you use AI, it's still a lot of work. Or write a book about why people shouldn't let AI write their books.

1 comments

I'm also concerned whether it is useful! That's why I'm not gunnuh read it after receiving a strong contrary indicator (which was less the use of AI than the dishonesty around it). That's also why I try to avoid sounding off on topics I'm not educated in (which is too say, why I'm not writing a book about Zig).

Remember - I am using AI and publishing the results. I just linked you to them!

> I'm also concerned whether it is useful!

So you could do everyone a favour by giving a sufficiently detailed review, possibly with recommendations to the author how to improve the book. Definitely more useful than speculating about the author's integrity.

I'm satisfied with what's been presented here already, and as someone who doesn't know Zig it would take me several weeks (since I would have to learn it first), so that seems like an unreasonable imposition on my time. But feel free to provide one yourself.

Well, there must have been a good reason why you don't like the book. I didn't see good reasons in this whole discussion so far, just a lot of pedantry. No commenter points to technical errors, inaccuracies, poor code examples, or pedagogical problems. The entire objection rests on subjective style preferences and aesthetic nitpicking rather than legitimate quality concerns.

I don't see what else I can say to help you understand. I think we just have very different values and world views and find one another's perspective baffling. Perhaps your preferred AI assistant, if directed to this conversation, could put it in clearer terms than I am able to.