gortok

I feel the need to be clear; I have no reason to suspect the author of using AI; and am even a bit irritated for the author that I have to entertain these suspicions writ large now. It is unfair to the author who hasn’t done anything to warrant that suspicion, but it’s the world we live in at the moment.

I vocalize this feeling I have, not because the author has done anything to warrant it, but here, in this forum, we commonly have folks saying “so what if it’s AI?”, and by bringing up these feelings we have around the industry, we can have the conversation and (hopefully) have other folks think twice about whether they would use AI to write their book.

I want to read this book and have added it to my list of things to read; and your vouching for the author does help. One underlying issue I have (that is a me problem) is that I know nothing about this particular area, and therefore know nothing about the experts in this area, so I rely on human vouching.

There are a few issues if it’s AI-written/edited/drafted:

1. AI generated text works off of whatever model it came from, whatever prompt was used, and probabilities. It’s been described as a “next token predictor” and that, for the purposes of this answer, is how I’m describing it as well. First problem: it’s only as good as the above.

2. Because of the above, its accuracy relies on probabilities. It can confidently give me wrong information, and as someone who would read this book to learn a topic I don't already know, I have no frame of reference to know whether I’m being fed accurate information.

3. Since it greatly speeds up the time it takes to physically write material, there is a possibility the author didn’t closely vet the information provided by the LLM as a next token predictor. That means it could be wrong in subtle ways, and the only way for me to know is to rely on knowledge I don’t have.

4. Had AI not been used, I could conceivably go on the past work of the author, rely on the person who has the expertise who wrote the forward, or the fact that physically writing a book takes prohibitively long enough that the dopamine from having written a book doesn’t outweigh the amount of time it takes, and if you are going to take months to years to write a book, you’re going to not want that effort to be in vain. You’re going to do your diligence and not just “wing it”.

AI makes it relatively trivial to appear knowledgeable and to get that dopamine rush from saying “I’m an author” and appearing to be an expert in a field without being an expert in a field. For some, that temptation is too great and there’s no way to know without the passage of time. Time for folks to review the book who know the subject matter. Time for reviews. Time for folks to put signs up that say “don’t trust this material.” In the meantime we still have that content out there, further infecting new AI models and people into believing it’s accurate.

That’s why the use of AI is dangerous, and is especially dangeorus without disclosure.

A problem I didn’t even conceive of a year ago was whether or not a book was written by a human.

This author has done nothing to deserve that scrutiny, but I can’t escape the feeling now of having to be guarded when I see a new book online with a relatively short history (spring 2026 is the earliest version of this text), as I can’t be sure it’s either “AI-enhanced” or AI-written.

I don’t like this feeling and it dampers any enthusiasm I once had for being excited about stuff like this.

That aside, if the author did write this themselves without AI, kudos to them and their acheivement!

I agree with you from our perspective it is ridiculous. I also agree that getting the consumer market to willingly pay for AI to the point where it sustains such an amount of revenue is not going to happen. (The knock on effects of folks using AI, and turning others off to AI because they used AI instead of writing emails themselves, for example).

But.

They may peak at 500B before this bubble bursts, simply because other major industry players are betting on AI as a means to get folks to believe in their own stock.

It’s belief all the way down, until you get to the point where “the market” starts asking where the return on investment is, and why they haven’t seen it yet. By that time, the investors have gotten their return and cashed out, and it’s the pension funds and the retail traders that are holding the bag.

And of course, at some point AI’s promise will be delivered in a form or fashion as yet unknown to us, but that is still years away, and until folks recognize that LLMs as they exist to day are not the path to that, they’ll continue to believe in this valuation.

I was there as well, and while I was really impressed; I was also weirdly weirded out that this wasn’t a bigger deal to all the folks in attendance. And so that made me doubt that what I saw was that impressive, as surely other folks in the audience would know better than I would.

In what is undoubtedly a fantasy world worth working towards, I envision this happening across various industries, where tiny businesses rise up against the continuing worsening of quality and rising prices, and seek to produce quality goods and services that may be more expensive than their competition, but are worth the cost.

We are witnessing the natural outcome of pursuing higher profits at the expense of everything else; at some point it becomes “as crappy as the market will bear”, and we all lose out. For some of us it may manifest as having to get our car serviced every few thousand miles because the parts are of poor quality (but cheap!). For some of us it may manifest as no longer desiring sweets because they’re now poorly made with substandard ingredients created in a lab somewhere.

It can also manifest in ways that are a threat to public safety; like rollercoaster rides that weren’t properly designed or tested because schools now pursue profits above learning; or because manufacturers somehow rely on regulators to do their job for them.

However it manifests, it’s hard to point to higher prices and lower quality goods and services and say this is the best that capitalism has to offer. If this is it, if this is the capitalist system working as intended, it’s no wonder movements like the Democratic Socialists of America are taking hold.

Ok, great. What about in a mixed ecosystem like I’m using?

This is the issue.

I can’t adopt Passkeys if I’m not certain they’re going to work as well as my password manager and Authenticator app, which is to say 100% of the time.

When sites ask to set up passkeys, it’s usually native passkeys (especially on iOS). And figuring out how to get the flow to set up a LastPass key by default seems unusually difficult.

I also use a MacBook, windows desktop, an iPhone and iPad. I use Firefox, edge, brave across these devices.

When I say “passkeys are a trap” they are a usability trap where no one can attest with certainty that I won’t wake up in a painful situation because I decided to adopt passkeys.

We are sitting in an uncanny valley regarding law.

Once independent agencies are no longer independent, partly due to the expansion of the unitary executive viewpoint in both the Supreme Court and the current executive branch, and the rather obsequious Congress we have that instead of being “jealous to protect its power” is kowtowing to anything the Trump administration wants.

The supreme courts ruling on presidential immunity, chevron deference, and the dismantling of the ideas of an independent agency have all come together to create a dangerous situation for all of us.

The Supreme Court, whether because the of their own alignment with partisanship or some other more nefarious reason, have gutted the idea of an independent agency (except for the Federal Reserve, which is special, but not for any legal reason, but rather because even conservative SCOTUS is not willing to risk the fallout of logically applying their unitary executive view of government to the Fed).

So Congress put a lot of regulatory power in these once independent and non-partisan agencies, and that’s gone. Combine that with a president that is overtly partisan and vindictive, and you have a problem where SCOTUS has created a situation that has elevated the whims of a president above the law Congress created.

We will be feeling the affects of this decision for generations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the catalyst for the failure of the American form of government.

Our system cannot sustain when coequal branches of government kowtow to politics.

Not everyone is using baidu?

To avoid this becoming a “tail wags the dog” scenario, folks who have money would need to spend it. We told people for 20 years to “learn to code”. Technology is, outside of healthcare, the leading profession for upward economic mobility.

What happens when the adoption of AI destroys the middle 60% of the bell curve of programmers and technologists? How will the middle class of people spend money on products/services if they don’t have a job?

We can’t both create wealth and destroy jobs with nothing to replace them.

America has little to no manufacturing base.

Technology and finance has been its differentiator economically speaking for job creation. Both are at risk from AI adoption. Businesses have to sell to someone, and at the moment it’s not clear — if the stated goals of revenue are to be believed, how that can happen.

No, Election Day is not a paid holiday, or even a recognized holiday. Public schools are generally out (at least the ones used as voting precints) but folks have work, and typically most "in person" votes are cast after 5pm (after folks traditionally leave work).

Mail in voting has been something that the elderly, infirmed, workers, and folks in the military have done for decades. It's remarkably secure and quite auditable. The issue the right has with it is that the folks that vote by mail (the military notwithstanding) are typically democrats.

Vibe-coded projects, where the intent is to replace editing source code as the means of change with editing prompts as the means of change, is one of those situations where the intent of how the project incurs change conflicts with how socially-coded open-source projects have traditionally incurred change.

From that perspective, it makes sense to limit "vibe-coded" projects, since they don't fit in that traditional paradigm.

Now, there are big feelings around vibe-coding and a strong aversion to change, so I can imagine this is a rather jarring experience for folks that want to vibe-code and want to have the dopamine hit of sharing that with other folks in a forum that obstensibly is meant for folks to edit code together.