I'm a fan of the book. Love the topic and the thoughtful approach! I wouldn't have hassled the author.
But since the author has already been hassled in vague terms, I'll add some objective specifics from a quick review of chapter 9:
* Type face imbalance: italics appear to be in a smaller font than the roman text AND italics appear to be rendered from a different baseline.
* The text body is 90-characters wide (want <70 in a non columnar print layout)
* hyphenated words -- yet still ragged right!!!
* inadequate negative space around introduction -- combined with the imbalanced italics, the body text changes font size 3 times in the first three sentences.
* in a bound work, margins should slightly alternate between even and odd pages to honor the origin of the binding
The italics is an unacceptable flaw in the main body font -- it's uncannily distracting -- when I first read it something felt off, but I couldn't put my finger on it. You could manually adjust the glyphs with a tool like font forge, but it would be easier to select a different font that the publisher has already licensed.
Typographers typically target a maximum line length of 66 characters. This number is an empirical sweet spot for human ergonomics and comprehension, but if you must exceed it, you want to accommodate by slightly increasing the leading (inter-line spacing.) If you're exceeding it to try and save paper, consider a columnar layout.
Ragged-right is an acceptable professional choice when lines are too short to sensibly justify them. But above 40 characters-per-line, you can reliably justify the text cleanly to both sides with hyphenation and stretching the inter-word spacing[1]. This rendering enables hyphenation (a compromise on comprehension) without realizing the benefit of this trade off!
The margins of a bound work should slightly alternate between left and right pages (not a requirement for a PDF.)
One positive note: the layout does appear to have widow and orphan management. And the chapter headings in a classy font.
Somewhat more subjectively, Subsection titles are aligned into the margin. The reasoning is likely "helps you scan to a subsection quickly" but if I were the editor I'd refer you to works [0] where the Chapter headings are to the left but the subsection headers are aligned with the text.
To the author: You write well and clearly enjoy the topic. You deserve a better layout editor than you had this round.
[2]: Analog Devices has some of the best type-set datasheets in the industry. You'll find 66-character columns, coherent letterface choices, adequate whitespace, and they do a great job of bending the rules to accommodate full-page tables. A great reference if you're also laying out both text and diagrams. https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data...
It's my honest opinion - visually it stood out to me as bad looking. I think you know better than to accuse me of hurting people, when merely I present opinion about how a book looks! It's a harsh world out there, there is far worse being said.
There's a difference between having an opinion and sharing it in a hurtful way.
> I think you know better than to accuse me of hurting people
No, I actually really don't. You saw something and posted something that was clearly meant to hurt the person who created it, with absolutely no upside for anyone involved.
Yeah, I think this is interesting independently of how it was made, because it reveals a kind of "what could have been" alternative history. It's fun to imagine a past where the Speccy got a desktop, and it's fun to see what it could have looked like running on real hardware (or on an emulator).
They can obviously do whatever they want, but realistically, having five different engines that are all 70% complete is not helpful. That's not providing more options. Instead, having one that's 99% complete would be providing more options.
Came here to say the same thing. Models used to rely heavily on world knowledge from their training data. They are now much better at tool use and deciding when to research a topic, rather than just answering from memory.
I wonder how much that extends to using LLMs for programming. I assume most knowledge of programming language syntax still comes from training data.
I find they generally do ok, but a few lines in an AGENTS.md or manual prompting to verify stuff against current docs/source, and check for current version of software helps a lot.
> SWE-2 is free to use for users like yourself for the next month, and almost all usage should be supported via our CLI (https://docs.devin.ai/cli)
Thanks for pointing that out; I wouldn't have found out about it otherwise. I bought the 20$ subscription and have been using SWE-2 for a few days now, and it's actually good. I don't think it's Fable-class, but SWE-2 Max feels substantially better than K3 and on par with Opus 5 Max.
That won't be a problem for long. The native Europeans are swinging to the authoritarian right, the newly naturalized are very selectively for liberal democracy - aka the parts that directly benefit them, not the parts that make it liberal, and the liberal democrats are straight out refusing to have kids.
So in 50 years Tukey will border authoritarian regime either way.
It's interesting to me that people generally see Europe's regulations as interfering with entrepreneurship, while they see American decisions that give more power to multinational corporations at the expense of smaller companies as a normal part of a free market.
Starting a company is not the hard part of staring a company in any country. Many many companies do exist in the EU. It might be annoying but it's obviously hardly insurmountable.
Yes, I saw one just recently where the poster made obviously false statements about starting a company in Germany.
(Before you downvote this comment, please note that I have started multiple companies in the EU. I'm speaking from personal experience, not from something I've read on Hacker News.)
That's unfettered capitalism at work—"free" implies no bounds. Multinational corporations have never been more powerful now than at anytime in history.
And that hurts the free market. A free market should be transparent, have low barriers to entry, and not be dominated by monopolies or cartels. There's nothing free about American capitalism.
Your implied premise is that private companies cannot impede others' freedom, which isn't true. In unfettered capitalism, only the largest corporations have the power and money to be free.
A hallucination in the context of LLMs is generally understood as an incorrect answer presented as factual. If you claim that "x can't hallucinate" in the context of LLMs, you're saying that x always gives accurate answers. It does not matter whether the answer is type safe. If its value is incorrect, it's a hallucination.
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