--- publish: true --- - User: U01S6422AG3 - Date: 2023-07-20 10:23:29 i'm feeding claude entire books, and asking it to provide supporting citations for certain claims i'm making, and holy shit...  this is a game changer... This is quite spot on, and the original text is quite dense, plus only a small section of everything I pasted into it. Absolutely nuts  it's not exhaustive, and you gain a lot by reading yourself of course, but it's so useful for follow up either note taking, but I can assume in 5 months when I look at my reading notes and I'm like "what was this stuff about?" Here is the original part that relates to the inevitabilism critique of the communist manifesto. Keep in mind that those are a fraction of the 65kB chapter I pasted   IT means for example that I can take a footnote, the chapter in which the footnote was added, and then paste the entire original source and ask it to me point to where the point in the footnote is made... --- - User: U0KH3U319 I found something similar very useful with chatgpt when I had 2 books that I thought had some interlinking ideas and got it to summarise how they fitted together. It's pretty useful. In my case there was enough already on the internet for chatgpt to do a good job I guess, very cool that claude can eat an entire book I also then asked how those ideas might relate to Don Quixote, and it did a fantastic job :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing: --- - User: U01S6422AG3 the whole book thing is nuts, because it means I don't have to be clever about prompt engineering, at least for this one use (which makes up a *significant* amount of my life), which is processing literature and literature notes. --- - User: U4XRLSZQW I’d love to be able to ask these questions in my Kindle app, of the books that I have in my library --- - User: U01S6422AG3 that's literally what i just did, from the epub into claude. i was half hoping it would "just work well" and on the other hand it just gibberishing stuff together i'm amazed, the value to postprocess my reading notes and especially i can see for recall down the road (or some spaced repetition kind of stuff)... wild My stuff looks like this which I then convert into obsidian which usually leads to me writing full ramble essays and then creating zettelkasten notes out of it. But the context of each of those is sometimes hard to retrace (I got better at it) --- - User: U4XRLSZQW I don’t tend to take notes from books, but occasionally I’ll remember a quote that I want to locate when I’m putting together a blog post or presentation This would make that way easier --- - User: U0KH3U319 looking forward to being able to pipe all the books AND all my notes in --- - User: U01S6422AG3 there goes my morning, i have to mess with this now <@U4XRLSZQW> do you have any kind of PKM? --- - User: U4XRLSZQW No, I’m blessed/cursed with a good memory So I’ve never found myself needing to build one Which presumably means when I lose my mind I won’t have any coping mechanisms. Yay --- - User: U01S6422AG3  haha yeah, i forget literally everything, so getting a good PKM flow going (took a while) is life changing gonna use this thread to screenshot the stuff i'm messing with that seems important enough absolutely impressive....  this allows me to create quote cards like these now: <https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Quotes/QUOTE+-+Friedrich+Engels+-+The+proletariat+is+that+class+of+society+which+lives+exclusively+by+its+labour+and+not+on+the+profit+of+any+kind+of+capital|https://publish.obsidian.md/manuel/Quotes/QUOTE+-+Friedrich+Engels+-+The+proletariat+i[…]+by+its+labour+and+not+on+the+profit+of+any+kind+of+capital> moving on to some technical material, let's see what this baby packs it's not fast, that's for sure, once you start badgering it mindblow  this is all spot-on  --- - User: U0KH3U319 wow that's impressive --- - User: U01S6422AG3 yep, and useful. i couldn't write such a concise overview. some chapters i would phrase a bit differently. i still want to see where it starts breaking down. like how much of the above is just "obvious" corpus training regurgitation, etc... this is entirely hallucinated :blob-rofl:  no mention even of sys:%top-frame or any of that, nor is there a show-cstack i could find on the internet. all looks temptingly plausible. LLM hallucinations are fun so often i found myself thinking "well i guess i should just write this, shouldn't i. looks really useful" semi hallucinated. there is a definition in chapter 6 that is later revised, but neither of those correspond to the actual definition  the thing is, i think these frictions and the fact that you have to really read through the "looks good enough" i think is agreat thing when processing literature and new content. It forces you to really think about the matter, instead of just skimming over it. In a sense it's better to have a wrong resource that you need to question than something you trust on authority to wit, this is the definition from the book in chapter 6: ``` (defun replace-?-vars (exp) "Replace any? within exp with a var of the form ?123." (cond ((eq exp '?) (gensym "?")) ((atom exp) exp) (t (reuse-cons (replace-?-vars (first exp)) (replace-?-vars (rest exp)) exp)))) ``` no idea what the heck it's confabulating  looks like an interpreter snippet i suspect the route is "replace-?-vars" gets "compressed" to the more frequent "replace-vars", which has strong semantic meaning as "replacing variables" (human language), which then matches the gazillion variable lookup in interpreters in countless references around the internet however the gensym (create a new interned symbol) is not something you'd see in an interpreter, and that actually comes from the chapter itself. all pretty decent      less decent  ok, now trying with a book i never read Ursula Franklin - The Real World of Technology. I literally know nothing about the book, just saw it recommended on mastodon I guess it sounds plausible enough :blob-rofl: I'll read the book this weekend using this as a guide, and see how much value I get out of it  game changer for teaching i think, as well   brainstomring some ideas of what you can do with this: • in code reviews, provide on point feedback with concise explanations of why something is important and not • same for anything design discussion based, as a sidenote or complimentary document. Take your context, add a book or two related to the topic, and out come arguments and further references • examine design decisions under different contexts by prompting them with entire books, say "which patterns out of "Patterns of Enterprise Architecture" could be used for $sourcecode?" the thing to leverage here is the succinct and clear language that comes out for free, and use that to communicate deep ideas that you gained through experience and studying, and make them more bite-sized for the context at hand some additional articles: • <https://medium.com/llamaindex-blog/testing-anthropic-claudes-100k-token-window-on-sec-10-k-filings-473310c20dba> • <https://blog.gopenai.com/how-to-speed-up-llms-and-use-100k-context-window-all-tricks-in-one-place-ffd40577b4c> • <https://twitter.com/cwolferesearch/status/1658192029409484811> • <https://twitter.com/DimitrisPapail/status/16580913556321894401>