For a while, the open web made tech books obsolete, as any information in a book could be found for free on the web.

Now, Gen AI is making the free tech article web utterly worthless, almost every page is obvious AI slop with no useful information, and the only way to actually get any information is a book.

But slowly the tech book world is being taken over by AI as well, and there's a noticeable lack of human editing at play in many of them, even prestige brands like O'Reilly.

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ABrockwell

@rodhilton I've also noticed this degradation of tech articles, extending beyond tech to sciences in general (which I notice more due to my mathematical background).

For instance, Google's "AI summary results" on mathematical topics are often close, but sufficiently sloppy to be dangerous to aspiring mathematicians.

It seems to me that books and articles time-stamped before 2024 will be increasingly valuable as time goes by. I already have my snapshot of early 2024 Wikipedia.

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2mo
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