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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   5546 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 24, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is it just me, or is the market for computer books dying?

I usually check libgen when I need to research a new topic, and it looks like the usual suspects like O'Reilly, Manning, Wiley and Apress just don't bother publishing anything anymore. A lot of the books haven't been updated since 2017 or so, even though the latest major version of the software in question was released in 2020.

Have piracy and Packt killed the market for good computer books for good? Will I have to read random Medium articles for the rest of my career to stay up-to-date?

These days I mostly dive straight into the technical documentation or the source code of whatever I am reading up on.

In the past these would have been reference books. But freely published technical documentation is better since they can be easily updated.

I do feel this state of things is sad since it removes a straight forward source of monetization for good technical writers, despite being objectively better.

In the absence of good docs or easily readable source code I start looking up blogs. Now, depending on the domain you may end up with a lot of blogspam, but as long as you search via HN, lobste.rs or a relevant subreddit you can do fine.

Textbooks/Research papers still have their place for more theoretical topics that do not become outdated as fast, but it is less than it was in the past.

SBF was right about books. Sorry bookworms, but they’re obsolete. Every good book should have been either a blogpost or a video lecture.

  • -11

Sorry articleworm, but you're wrong. You can't truly develop a good knowledge base without books.

See, aren't low-effort dunks fun?

Its IQ all the way down

Hmm so if you have a 130 IQ person raised by wolves, and a 120 IQ person who reads books throughout their childhood, I wonder who would be more intelligent?

IQ is important, but it's not literally everything.

By definition the 130 IQ person.

So are you saying that IQ literally equals intelligence in a 1:1 parallel? I'm trying to get across that while IQ is an important and useful concept, it is not g.

Even in the boring homogeneous environments we study, IQ changes as you age, with only something like r=.66 between adult and child IQs IIRC. So it wouldn't be completely surprising if the "130 IQ person" (scored 130 on a children's test before being handed over to the wolves for some reason) turned out to be a 119 IQ person after growing up, even assuming the wolves had no effect!

OP's wording implies they were tested as adults.

OP's wording seems to imply that "130 IQ person" and "120 IQ person" are referring to time-invariant concepts. Hence "reads books throughout" (ongoing) instead of "read books" (past tense, appropriate for someone tested as an adult) or "then reads" (future, for someone tested as a child). @TheDag can correct me, but in context it seemed that the intent of the question was "I wonder how much extreme environments could change the intelligence of someone who would have been 130 IQ in a typical environment", not "I wonder whether the higher scorer on an intelligence test would score higher on an intelligence test". Basic Gricean Maxims, isn't that? If you find a statement seemly implying something trivial or nonsensical, look for alternative possible interpretations.

Maybe. On the other hand, books offer convenient access to information with zero continued effort or resource expenditure on the part of the author/publisher. What do I mean by this? Consider the phenomenon of linkrot. There are a few causes of linkrot - an org may revamp their website, someone may lose interest in the subject and stop maintaining the site, someone might die and not have made arrangements for the continuation of a site, among others.

With a book, none of these are a problem. Yes, it comes with other issues of course.

Maybe this is simply a weird perspective from someone focused on a niche-ish hobby, but I would almost rather have the reference material in book form than online, simply because I don't think it'll stay online eternally. Whereas no one is going to take my copy of FN Browning Pistols offline.

Hardest of disagrees. Books and physical media are more necessary than ever. Digital content can be patched to be censored, edited or even removed, and there's not much you the end user can do about it. Digital book burnings are much easier than physical ones. If the powers that be want to, for instance, hide any evidence that they ever advocated treatment X for condition Y now that it's been found to cause horrible side effects, they can just do it.

and there's not much you the end user can do about it.

Yeah other than downloading it -____-

If you're allowed. And if your app won't auto-update it anyway next time it connects to the internet somehow...

There are 3 kinds of books:

  • Fiction novels
  • Textbooks
  • The rest

Fiction Novels entertain & enlighten. Textbooks educate. If your textbook can be condensed into a blog it isn't a good text book. If your Novel can be enjoyed just as easily in a video, then it isn't a good Novel. A book should be borne out of necessity, not narcissism. Sometimes you are desperate to express an idea or tell and story, and every medium falls short. Books are the last resort. But they work.

Growing up, I thought I was immature not not being able to enjoy non-fiction. But, I've since realized that non-fiction books are prime candidates for blog-i-zation. If the cliff notes for a book is no better than reading the book itself, then that's a gross failure.

The best non-fiction is either sufficiently fictionalized to be fiction novel, or sufficiently dense to be a textbook. There are no other types of books.

There's a contingent of people out there (including, I suspect, sbf) who see fiction as low status and generally not worth your time, ignoring the deep connections between human thought and fictional stories.

I’d say among very smart people, non-fiction in general is lower status than fiction. The archetypal midwit reads very little fiction but has a bookshelf full of Pinker, Dawkins, Harari, various biographies of businessmen and presidents and so on.

Most very smart people I've met limit their reading to technical literature.

Unless they’re extremely autistic I find it hard to believe someone only reads textbooks and journal articles.

Lots of people like this in STEM.

I think that there's an understated risk to reading a lot of fiction. Because it's all made up it can teach false lessons and prop up self serving narratives.

Non fiction has the advantage that you can learn true things from true events, even if the author is completely out to lunch.

With fiction, you know the author is making it up.

With nonfiction, nobody will believe you that the author is making it up unless they don't like the conclusions. There's no compulsion to report "true events" in nonfiction - compare Zinn's A People's History with A Patriot's History. Both chock full of "true events" narrowly defined, but which true things can you learn? Better never to begin.

Hey, what fiction have you read that wouldn't have been better as a six-paragraph blog post?

Well, there was that meta-porno in the other thread…

That one would have been better compressed to zero paragraphs.

Six paragraphs?! @FiveHourMarathon got War and Peace down to three words and I now demand all fiction in that format.

"I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."

It's actually amazing how much seethe he generated with such a simple set of words.

It's an A tier bait. Second only to S tiers like "Its okay to be white" and "Islam was right about women"

Video content is easier to monetize. Also software tends to be more of an evergreen model these days with constant changes. It's hard to keep a large book up to date, and hard to convince customers to buy something that will soon be out of date.

Are you talking about hardware or software books ?

Software books are.. meh?

It's like you don't need a whole ass book for 1 package unless you plan on becoming a maintainer for that package or something. Documentation is usually enough to get using it within a day or two.

I'm not talking about packages, but larger software like Kafka or a similar-sized Apache project.

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