matt-bornstein's commits in that repo do often start off with ai-generated descriptions which he then edits down. there are notes on some commits that say things like "AI GENERATED NEED TO EDIT". the other contributors' changes don't have these tells.
while it should come as no surprise to have software written by llms, if these books are in fact just picked by llms then what's the point of this list?
I’d be curious what the point is even if it were written by humans with some evidence of non-zero effort, but posting something with no point and no effort is really puzzling.
That's almost more damning. The list was created by humans, who presumably read the books, but then couldn't be bothered to summarize the very books they read? Either the human is really lazy ("read" the book but can't be bothered to write a short summary) or really really lazy (didn't read the book but felt a summary was necessary). Either way, it makes this list less interesting, at the very least because it doesn't need to exist at all if someone can just ask an LLM "list and describe books that A16Z might think are valuable to read" and get the same quality output.
Stephenson doesn't just write sci-fi, he writes operating manuals for the future. His books predicted cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and distributed computing before most of us knew what TCP/IP stood for. Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.
This really is a study in AI slop. At least they had the good sense to change it.
a16z seems to view turning society into a dystopia as a goal, so that makes sense. Their portfolio includes:
- DoubleSpeed, a bot farm as a service provider, allowing customers to orchestrate social media activity across thousands of fake accounts to create artificial consensus on the topic of their choice. Never pay a human again!
- Cheddr, the TikTok of sports gambling, whose differentiating feature is allowing users under 21. Place live in-game bets with just a swipe!
- Coverd, a new type of credit card where you can wipe off bills by betting on your favorite gambling games in their app. No VPN required!
Wow, I just checked the doublespeed website and it is comically evil. The footer says — verbatim, and in huge letters — "never pay a human again." (I'm not selectively quoting; it's a full sentence, despite their weird capitalization.)
If Neal Stephenson tried to write a villain this on-the-nose, his editor would tell him to tone it down.
Can A16Z tell the difference? Insert that meme "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus, from the classic sci-fi novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus".
a16z and others like them never met a dystopian warning they didn't interpret as a titillating invitation to an uncomfortably exciting and inevitable future!
I wish I had as many positive experience as it seems some other HNers have with LLMs. I'm not saying I've had zero positive experiences but the number of negative experiences is so high that it's just super scary.
Yesterday, Thanksgiving, there was a Google Doodle. Clicking the doodle lead to a Gemini prompt for how to plan to have Thanksgiving dinner ready on time. It had a schedule for lots of prep the day before and then a timeline for the day of. It had cooking the dinner rolls and then said something like "take them out and keep them warm" followed by cooking something else in the oven. I asked "How do I keep them warm when something else is cooking in the oven?". It proceeded to give me a revised timeline that contradicted its original timeline and also, made no sense in and of itself. I asked it about the contradiction and the error and it apologized and gave a completely new 3rd timeline that was different than the first 2 and also nonsense. This was Google's Gemini Promotion!
All it really needed to do to my first query was say something like "put a towel over the rolls" and leave it on top of the oven.... Maybe? But then, it had told me be spread butter over the rolls as soon as they came out of the oven so I'd have asked, "won't the towel suck up all the butter?"
This is one example many times LLMs fail me (ChatGPT, Gemini). For direct code gen, my subjective experience is it fails 5 of 6 times. For stackoverflow type questions it succeeds 5 of 6 times. For non-code questions it depends on the type of question. But, when it fails it fails so badly that I'm somewhat surprised it ever works.
And yea, the whole world is running head first into massive LLM usage like this one using it for short reviews of authors. Ugh!!!
It seems to me, most LLM fans are impressed by glancing at a result ("It works!") and never really think about the flaws of the answer or look at the code in detail.
It's truly remarkable that Google put an absurd Wrong Answers Only generator in front of their primary cash cow 18 months ago, and in that time their share price has nearly doubled.
It's wrong nearly every time I search for anything. Ironically, in writing this comment, I tried asking it for the GOOG share price the day before AI Overviews launched, and it got that wrong too.
> I'm not saying I've had zero positive experiences but the number of negative experiences is so high that it's just super scary.
Just for shits and giggles I decided to let Copilot (whatever the default in vscode is) write a Makefile for a simple avr-gcc project. I can't remember what the prompt I gave it was, but it was something along the lines of "given this makefile that is old but works, write a new makefile for this project that doesn't have one" and a link to a simple gist I wrote years ago.
Fuuuuuuuuck me.
It's 2500 lines long. It's not just bigger than the codebase it's supposed to build, it's just about bigger than all the C files in all the avr-gcc projects in that entire chunk of my ~/devel/ directory. I couldn't even begin to make sense of what it's trying to do.
It looks mostly like it's declaring variables over and over, concatenating more bits on as it goes. I don't know for sure though.
Make is a great language, but very few people know it, or care about knowing it. The vast majority of makefiles are automatically written by garbage such as automake. They are exactly as you described - reams of repetitive nonsense. That's going to be the training data for the LLMs, so no wonder they write bad makefiles.
Yeah, that makes sense I guess. I'm used to small hand-written Makefiles for projects where people actually care about being reproducible. I'm not a fan of automake although I have used it.
We know that being a billionaire surrounded by yes-men all day causes brain damage, and we know that being on social media living in a delusion bubble all day causes brain damage, so really they were already cooked even before signing what was left of their brains over to the LLMs.
It's such an interesting arc. I starting university in Sept '94, super excited to try out Mosaic on a T1 class connection after suffering through my 14.4k home modem. And shortly after I arrived, Netscape dropped.
He was an absolute hero of that era, possibly the most admired 'geek' back then. Young, with hair, with no hints of his future Dr. Evil emergence.
I don't recall that fame at the time (from Mcom/Netscape, JWZ was more visible, in my circles), but I knew his name.
When he was first coding NCSA Mosaic, we were both pretty young, and doing workstation development, which took more of what HN would consider hacker spirit than the bulk of contemporary software development does. And we were also presumably Internet people, so I assumed he was like me.
In my mind, there was a default Internet person culture, which was very different than the tech industry culture of today. Curious, optimistic and wanting to bring Internet tech and culture to people, and a sense of responsibility for it. (Not affected platitudes, but innate and genuine; but also not tested by the potential of wealth, so you didn't really know how firmly held it was.)
Culturally, today, I seem to be closer than him to my early impression of early Internet people. (Though I changed my mind about trying to first become a professor and then do research commercial spinouts, rather than to grab the initial dotcom boom money right away. So I'd like a do-over.)
I don't know why he culturally seemed to go into the direction of libertarian manifestos and questionable crypto pumping.
Maybe he has in mind a version of OG Internet values, or some other vision, and he's trying to amass more wealth and power to make it happen?
There have been a few OG hackers in the VC space who you might have assumed would go one way if they had money, but then went a different way. Were they actually always like that? Did they learn something that changed how they think about the world? Were they changed by money/power circles, sycophants, or drugs? Did their business take on a life of its own, naturally maximizing profit, and they were just along for the ride?
Dear Neal Stephenson: thanks for actually ending your well-thunk writings with complete sentences/thoughts.
----
I just finished Dave Wallace's 520 page PhD thesis, his first novel The Broom of the System, which literally ends with a liar proclaiming:
>I am a man of my
( "word" is presumed to follow, but another DFW book which just [abruptly!?!] ends )
Like his other two novels (Infinite Jest & Pale King), Broom is an ensemble of disconnected characters, with no clear destination nor moral lessons navigated in a few-hundred-too-many pages — just raw human condition. Very powerful writing style, but with no executive function.
Now that I've read 2000+ pages of David Foster Wallace, I will continue NOT recommending his novels to anybody (this is the same review I gave after IJ and PK). DFW was definitely a powerful thinker/writer, but he should have stuck to his shorter non-fiction meanderings.
----
After writing all of the above, I clanked around with the topic of incomplete sentences ending books:
>Your sense that the mid-sentence ending and related choices feel like bullying is a legitimate aesthetic and emotional response, not a misreading or a sign you “don’t get it”
About half-way through I had to resist the urge to skip to the end to see if he did that. An opportunity lost.
I'll admit, of the few books of his I've read, I always felt like they ended a couple of chapters too soon or a couple of chapters too late — which has put me off reading more of his books despite some interesting premises. I suspect some of the deeper themes are lost on me in my bedtime readings. Just not my cup of tea at the end of the day, literally.
I don't appreciate these kinds of simple one-line referential jokes on HN, but your joke was to emulate perfectly the central issue of TFA, so I do agree that it brings into question who did and who did not read the article -- I know you read it.
I think it was a good enough joke or witty remark grounded in the crux of the article that it’s worth it. And it’s certainly interesting to see the “whoosh” past many of the commenters
Reminds me of Werner Herzog's autobiography. In the introduction, he muses on a life being cut short by a snipers bullet, and when he sees a bird flying past his window as he is writing his book makes him imagine it is a bullet and he thinks it would be a nice device to cut his final chapter short at that exact moment, so he is giving fair warning that the book will end abruptly.
And so it does, but in a totally Herzog moment he then almost immediately intones afterwards "and that is the end of the book as I indicated in the foreword".
Of course the irony ist that if a big corporation publishes a year-end reading list, it has the implicit message of "hey we are not just a group of boring corporate robots - we're people, with real feelings, and hobbies like reading, and taste."
And now we realize that this is just a PR charade. They might not be people with hobbies like reading, and taste.
It's definitely written by an AI. The end description of hitchhikers guide is "[...]the meaning of life. Which turns out to be an integer." No one would bother writing that.
All of the descriptions on that reading list give me strong LLM vibes. Which, given the source, seems like it should be expected. This post could have stopped after hypothesis 1.
I agree it is not really controversial, I don't think any other explanation is credible. And it really calls into question their assertion that at least one person there has read every book on the list. They love these books, yet no one there cared enough to write a few sentences about them?
The trick is that this list of books amounts to nerd shibboleths. It's not important to have read them so much as be able to use them as a marker of being a smart person.
(That isn't to say these aren't good books, I'm talking about their social function among a certain type of person, corporation or natural)
Hypothesis C: failure of human memory. A human read Stephenson's book(s) 20 years ago, remembers that the endings were a bit unsatisfying. The same human also read some other book many years ago, which ends mid-sentence. In that person's mind, the two are conflated.
If I was writing a book review for my company (big famous VC who cares about their reputation) - I would’ve probably at least popped the book open and read a few chapters if it’s been years since I read it
Another hypothesis. Have AI generate a top 50 list of books, and add a book you want your website to promote into the mix somewhere near the top to increase its sales. Cheap marketing, It wouldn't be the first time.
> A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.
The list is clearly mostly machine generated but the name typo is an unlikely error for LLM to make. I'm guessing the "general editing pass" that introduced it was done by an actual human while trying to make the text flow better (less LLM-like).
> I had to read this over a few times to believe that I was seeing it. If it didn’t include the word “literally” I’d assume some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whatever, wrote this.
Unfortunately, the meaning of the word “literally” has morphed into almost the opposite of “literally”. Most people just use it as an intensifier devoid of any true meaning. Makes sense that an LLM that doesn’t have any sense of truth would just stuff that in there.
I've seen LLMs claim that a text cuts off mid-sentence before in cases where it in fact doesn't, and I think this might be an artifact of them being presented with a truncated version by some unclear software process, perhaps to fit into a context window. In this case, however, it's unlikely that the LLM was presented the text directly, and rather it is recounting things it “knows”.
I was trying out an IDE plugin for local LLM integration, but it would just make totally insane edits instead of what I asked for.
It turned out that the LLM-runner's default setting for handling queries that were too long was to silently delete the middle of the query. So the LLM saw the beginning of my ask, and the tail end of the code context, and nothing else.
He needs to sue A16Z for libel. Or maybe he already is in the process of doing that, given this sentence from the article: “This is a factual assertion that is (a) false, (b) easy to fact-check, and (c) casts my work ethic, and that of my editors, in an unflattering light.”
These shitty VCs with their LLM-generated garbage need to be held accountable for their actions.
“A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.”
is “Inhuman Centipede” to describe the slop-eating-its-own-tale future we all dread an established term, or an invention of the author? I hope it becomes the term we all use, like slop and clanker.
For those of us writing original words that are consumed by LLMs without our consent, at least we get to be the front of the Inhuman Centipede.
I strongly suspect that the term alludes to "human centipede", which is a dutch horror film and involves the titular centipede literally eating his own shit.
There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HumancentiPad (which is almost surely an homage to the movie) which was 2011 and tied in all kinds of tech-aspects like licensing and iPads.
In these modern times of ours, the word literally has taken on a new meaning, which is "not literally but with emphasis." This seems like the most likely explanation.
Even if that's the intended meaning of literally, it is still a reckless exaggeration. I'm pretty sure that Stephenson's endings are no more abrupt than some of Shakespeare's (check out Hamlet and Macbeth) or some of Frank Herbert's (see Dune and Children of Dune), and I never hear anyone go out of their way to describe either of them as being unable to write endings.
Everything from Stephenson after Anathem is an unremitting slog. He needs an editor who won't back down from telling him he needs to cut a third of his pages.
No, no it doesn't. Are you talking about the recent movies that split the first novel into two movies? The novel Dune ends after Paul defeats his enemies and becomes emperor.
I know that, I've read them too. In the SP, and in this thread we're discussing endings to novels. No one is complaining about a series that isn't finished due to the author's death.
I interpret the sense of "literally" here in the opposite way, i.e. without it the sentence may be taken to mean that the books metaphorically stop mid-sentence, but with it, they're saying that it's non-metaphorical and they really do. It would be bizarre wording otherwise.
These modern times that literally began in 1769. Oxford English Dictionary, “literally (adv.), sense I.1.c,” June 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9189024563.
How is it misuse? This is how words are used - people use turns of phrase and metaphors, and then popular metaphors become secondary meanings. Very popular secondary meanings can even become grammar pieces - like "very", which has become the most standard intensifier, but used to be a normal adverb, like literally and truly.
The most likely option of all was the article was written without that much effort by a random employee. This is a lot of work over one throwaway sentence lol.
How on earth could you think the most likely option is that a human wrote that sentence on purpose? It's not the type of wrong that comes from low effort levels, it's the type of wrong that comes from not being a human.
Humans make that error all the time. They can hear the author has abrupt endings and write it down. I think this case it actually was AI (according to some other HN comment) but you don't need to be an AI to make this error.
That’s an unbelievably idiotic error for a person to make. It doesn’t even make sense in the literally/figuratively context. Something that stupid wouldn’t appear in a third grader’s book report. Come on.
Silicon Valley is largely illiterate when it comes to fiction and literature. It is generally pretty hard to find people who read or think about anything other than a small set of standardized scifi, so even if this wasn't ai slop, it would still be pretty bad.
It's a symptom of a broader pathology of rich and STEM people lacking appreciation of philosophy and ethics. Neither extreme subject matter expertise nor wealth confer wisdom. This category of blindspot can lead to enormous suffering of others when over-promoted and under-moderated.
It took me entirely too long to realize this was written by Neal himself.
The snippet appears to be constructed by a LLM. I don’t have any evidence of that, just some turns of phrase that a human wouldn’t use when discussing his works.
I love the theory that the LLM might think that his books are fragmented is due to the fragmentation of his corpus by spammers of a certain era.
Since the commit history is public, there's a much easier way to tell that AI had a hand in writing that list.
https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/93bc3abb04...
> opus descriptions in cursor, raw
That version is more sensible. Opus generated:
> Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.
In commit e4d022[0], the wording changed to:
> Fair warning: most of these books famously don't have endings (they literally stop mid-sentence during a normal plot arc).
It's unclear what led to that change, as the commit message is just "stephenson".
It went through a few more minor edits to get to what's currently published.
https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/e4d022d592...
matt-bornstein's commits in that repo do often start off with ai-generated descriptions which he then edits down. there are notes on some commits that say things like "AI GENERATED NEED TO EDIT". the other contributors' changes don't have these tells.
while it should come as no surprise to have software written by llms, if these books are in fact just picked by llms then what's the point of this list?
I’d be curious what the point is even if it were written by humans with some evidence of non-zero effort, but posting something with no point and no effort is really puzzling.
It serves as a form of virtue signaling. “Look at all these super nerdy books I don’t just read, but consider myself an authority on”.
Low effort is the name of the game in the age of modern LLMs.
> if these books are in fact just picked by llms then what's the point of this list?
How do you do, fellow nerds?
I don’t see any evidence the LLM picked the list of books, it instead was used to update/add descriptions of the books and series.
That's almost more damning. The list was created by humans, who presumably read the books, but then couldn't be bothered to summarize the very books they read? Either the human is really lazy ("read" the book but can't be bothered to write a short summary) or really really lazy (didn't read the book but felt a summary was necessary). Either way, it makes this list less interesting, at the very least because it doesn't need to exist at all if someone can just ask an LLM "list and describe books that A16Z might think are valuable to read" and get the same quality output.
When they changed it is also when they misspelled his name. Opus got it right. I was surprised Stephenson took the misspelling as an AI tell.
Man... "Write a book recommendation for people who like The Big Bang Theory".
I’m gonna start thinking “Bazinga!” every time someone says something borderline ai-sloppy
I Have No Ability To Unread Things And I Must Unread
To a version that managed to typo his name.
How did his books PREDICT crypto when we had eCash way before any of his books? SMH.
Most of his books are also dystopias, not operating manuals.
a16z seems to view turning society into a dystopia as a goal, so that makes sense. Their portfolio includes:
- DoubleSpeed, a bot farm as a service provider, allowing customers to orchestrate social media activity across thousands of fake accounts to create artificial consensus on the topic of their choice. Never pay a human again!
- Cheddr, the TikTok of sports gambling, whose differentiating feature is allowing users under 21. Place live in-game bets with just a swipe!
- Coverd, a new type of credit card where you can wipe off bills by betting on your favorite gambling games in their app. No VPN required!
Wow, I just checked the doublespeed website and it is comically evil. The footer says — verbatim, and in huge letters — "never pay a human again." (I'm not selectively quoting; it's a full sentence, despite their weird capitalization.)
If Neal Stephenson tried to write a villain this on-the-nose, his editor would tell him to tone it down.
> Cheddr
> Coverd
Even worse, they're bringing Web 2.0 startup names back...
Can A16Z tell the difference? Insert that meme "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus, from the classic sci-fi novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus".
a16z and others like them never met a dystopian warning they didn't interpret as a titillating invitation to an uncomfortably exciting and inevitable future!
Yeah, which book are we talking about? Reamde features crypto heavily, but I remember having bitcoins at the time it came out.
I imagine this is intended (though if it's AI-generated "intended" doesn't really apply) as a reference 1999's Cryptonomicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
From that Wikipedia summary:
> Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency
Ah, yeah, I missed that one.
Digital Cash was invented by David Chaum in 1982, and developed by his company DigiCash in 1990. I read about it years before Cryptonomicon.
It is appalling writing. Given that Opus is capable of a lot better than this, it seems likely they’re prompting it to be terrible.
https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/717b3d64d6...
> [THIS IS AI GENERATED, NEED TO EDIT] The manga that asked [...]
They do at least have "NEED TO EDIT" in there, but this prose was openly generated by AI as a starting point.
I don't see any pull request fixing this yet.
I felt obligated to submit a fix: https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/pull/9
Used Claude to fact-check and fix errors that were likely introduced by Cursor.
The circle is complete.
I wish I had as many positive experience as it seems some other HNers have with LLMs. I'm not saying I've had zero positive experiences but the number of negative experiences is so high that it's just super scary.
Yesterday, Thanksgiving, there was a Google Doodle. Clicking the doodle lead to a Gemini prompt for how to plan to have Thanksgiving dinner ready on time. It had a schedule for lots of prep the day before and then a timeline for the day of. It had cooking the dinner rolls and then said something like "take them out and keep them warm" followed by cooking something else in the oven. I asked "How do I keep them warm when something else is cooking in the oven?". It proceeded to give me a revised timeline that contradicted its original timeline and also, made no sense in and of itself. I asked it about the contradiction and the error and it apologized and gave a completely new 3rd timeline that was different than the first 2 and also nonsense. This was Google's Gemini Promotion!
All it really needed to do to my first query was say something like "put a towel over the rolls" and leave it on top of the oven.... Maybe? But then, it had told me be spread butter over the rolls as soon as they came out of the oven so I'd have asked, "won't the towel suck up all the butter?"
This is one example many times LLMs fail me (ChatGPT, Gemini). For direct code gen, my subjective experience is it fails 5 of 6 times. For stackoverflow type questions it succeeds 5 of 6 times. For non-code questions it depends on the type of question. But, when it fails it fails so badly that I'm somewhat surprised it ever works.
And yea, the whole world is running head first into massive LLM usage like this one using it for short reviews of authors. Ugh!!!
You're not supposed to look so closely!
It seems to me, most LLM fans are impressed by glancing at a result ("It works!") and never really think about the flaws of the answer or look at the code in detail.
It's truly remarkable that Google put an absurd Wrong Answers Only generator in front of their primary cash cow 18 months ago, and in that time their share price has nearly doubled.
It's wrong nearly every time I search for anything. Ironically, in writing this comment, I tried asking it for the GOOG share price the day before AI Overviews launched, and it got that wrong too.
> I'm not saying I've had zero positive experiences but the number of negative experiences is so high that it's just super scary.
Just for shits and giggles I decided to let Copilot (whatever the default in vscode is) write a Makefile for a simple avr-gcc project. I can't remember what the prompt I gave it was, but it was something along the lines of "given this makefile that is old but works, write a new makefile for this project that doesn't have one" and a link to a simple gist I wrote years ago.
Fuuuuuuuuck me.
It's 2500 lines long. It's not just bigger than the codebase it's supposed to build, it's just about bigger than all the C files in all the avr-gcc projects in that entire chunk of my ~/devel/ directory. I couldn't even begin to make sense of what it's trying to do.
It looks mostly like it's declaring variables over and over, concatenating more bits on as it goes. I don't know for sure though.
I won't be using it.
Make is a great language, but very few people know it, or care about knowing it. The vast majority of makefiles are automatically written by garbage such as automake. They are exactly as you described - reams of repetitive nonsense. That's going to be the training data for the LLMs, so no wonder they write bad makefiles.
Yeah, that makes sense I guess. I'm used to small hand-written Makefiles for projects where people actually care about being reproducible. I'm not a fan of automake although I have used it.
Keep this in mind if you _ever_ feel tempted to take A16Z seriously. Absolute charlatans and clowns.
I have told recruiters who flaunt A16Z as investors for whatever random startup they're recruiting for is actually a negative in my view.
Software is eating the world.
AI is eating the VCs.
MLaaS (money laundering as a service)
We know that being a billionaire surrounded by yes-men all day causes brain damage, and we know that being on social media living in a delusion bubble all day causes brain damage, so really they were already cooked even before signing what was left of their brains over to the LLMs.
AI will be running the VCs if it's not already.
when the bar is this low it will be hard to tell any difference
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Fall%202025
...and a conehead.
It's such an interesting arc. I starting university in Sept '94, super excited to try out Mosaic on a T1 class connection after suffering through my 14.4k home modem. And shortly after I arrived, Netscape dropped.
He was an absolute hero of that era, possibly the most admired 'geek' back then. Young, with hair, with no hints of his future Dr. Evil emergence.
I don't recall that fame at the time (from Mcom/Netscape, JWZ was more visible, in my circles), but I knew his name.
When he was first coding NCSA Mosaic, we were both pretty young, and doing workstation development, which took more of what HN would consider hacker spirit than the bulk of contemporary software development does. And we were also presumably Internet people, so I assumed he was like me.
In my mind, there was a default Internet person culture, which was very different than the tech industry culture of today. Curious, optimistic and wanting to bring Internet tech and culture to people, and a sense of responsibility for it. (Not affected platitudes, but innate and genuine; but also not tested by the potential of wealth, so you didn't really know how firmly held it was.)
Culturally, today, I seem to be closer than him to my early impression of early Internet people. (Though I changed my mind about trying to first become a professor and then do research commercial spinouts, rather than to grab the initial dotcom boom money right away. So I'd like a do-over.)
I don't know why he culturally seemed to go into the direction of libertarian manifestos and questionable crypto pumping.
Maybe he has in mind a version of OG Internet values, or some other vision, and he's trying to amass more wealth and power to make it happen?
There have been a few OG hackers in the VC space who you might have assumed would go one way if they had money, but then went a different way. Were they actually always like that? Did they learn something that changed how they think about the world? Were they changed by money/power circles, sycophants, or drugs? Did their business take on a life of its own, naturally maximizing profit, and they were just along for the ride?
It would have been really great to end the blog post mid-sentence.
Dear Neal Stephenson: thanks for actually ending your well-thunk writings with complete sentences/thoughts.
----
I just finished Dave Wallace's 520 page PhD thesis, his first novel The Broom of the System, which literally ends with a liar proclaiming:
>I am a man of my
( "word" is presumed to follow, but another DFW book which just [abruptly!?!] ends )
Like his other two novels (Infinite Jest & Pale King), Broom is an ensemble of disconnected characters, with no clear destination nor moral lessons navigated in a few-hundred-too-many pages — just raw human condition. Very powerful writing style, but with no executive function.
Now that I've read 2000+ pages of David Foster Wallace, I will continue NOT recommending his novels to anybody (this is the same review I gave after IJ and PK). DFW was definitely a powerful thinker/writer, but he should have stuck to his shorter non-fiction meanderings.
----
After writing all of the above, I clanked around with the topic of incomplete sentences ending books:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/broom-ends-with-an-incomple...
>Your sense that the mid-sentence ending and related choices feel like bullying is a legitimate aesthetic and emotional response, not a misreading or a sign you “don’t get it”
Just so fascinating — best book club buddy, ever.
I don't have any original ideas
About half-way through I had to resist the urge to skip to the end to see if he did that. An opportunity lost.
I'll admit, of the few books of his I've read, I always felt like they ended a couple of chapters too soon or a couple of chapters too late — which has put me off reading more of his books despite some interesting premises. I suspect some of the deeper themes are lost on me in my bedtime readings. Just not my cup of tea at the end of the day, literally.
um, it literally does
This is brilliant, but people don't get it :)
Clearly you’re ending “um, it literally doesn’t” halfway through a word.
I'm really curious whats going on here. Is this a joke? Are you ok?
did you even read the article??
I don't appreciate these kinds of simple one-line referential jokes on HN, but your joke was to emulate perfectly the central issue of TFA, so I do agree that it brings into question who did and who did not read the article -- I know you read it.
[flagged]
E-mail the staff (link in the footer). Either dang or tomhow will reply, and they take these seriously and can take action.
no,it quite literally doesnt...
The central complaint of TFA is the exact same as what ruined is doing. It is very obviously a joke. Not something I appreciate on HN, but still.
I think it was a good enough joke or witty remark grounded in the crux of the article that it’s worth it. And it’s certainly interesting to see the “whoosh” past many of the commenters
It was flagged and I vouched it for similar reasons. I downvote such comments though.
a remarkable assertion from nchmy
whoosh
Lol I was hoping for that too
Reminds me of Werner Herzog's autobiography. In the introduction, he muses on a life being cut short by a snipers bullet, and when he sees a bird flying past his window as he is writing his book makes him imagine it is a bullet and he thinks it would be a nice device to cut his final chapter short at that exact moment, so he is giving fair warning that the book will end abruptly.
And so it does, but in a totally Herzog moment he then almost immediately intones afterwards "and that is the end of the book as I indicated in the foreword".
Of course the irony ist that if a big corporation publishes a year-end reading list, it has the implicit message of "hey we are not just a group of boring corporate robots - we're people, with real feelings, and hobbies like reading, and taste."
And now we realize that this is just a PR charade. They might not be people with hobbies like reading, and taste.
It's definitely written by an AI. The end description of hitchhikers guide is "[...]the meaning of life. Which turns out to be an integer." No one would bother writing that.
All of the descriptions on that reading list give me strong LLM vibes. Which, given the source, seems like it should be expected. This post could have stopped after hypothesis 1.
I agree it is not really controversial, I don't think any other explanation is credible. And it really calls into question their assertion that at least one person there has read every book on the list. They love these books, yet no one there cared enough to write a few sentences about them?
well, maybe no one felt informed enough to write this, so it was outsourced to the llm (imposter syndrom) or it was pure laziness.
The trick is that this list of books amounts to nerd shibboleths. It's not important to have read them so much as be able to use them as a marker of being a smart person.
(That isn't to say these aren't good books, I'm talking about their social function among a certain type of person, corporation or natural)
Hypothesis C: failure of human memory. A human read Stephenson's book(s) 20 years ago, remembers that the endings were a bit unsatisfying. The same human also read some other book many years ago, which ends mid-sentence. In that person's mind, the two are conflated.
If I was writing a book review for my company (big famous VC who cares about their reputation) - I would’ve probably at least popped the book open and read a few chapters if it’s been years since I read it
Hypothesis D-for-Delany: The human thought Stephenson wrote Dhalgren.
"Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland into the hills, I have come to"
Hypothesis A is much more likely if you ask me
It's A16Z, they definitely had an LLM recommend a set of books that nobody there has actually ever read. Except maybe Snowcrash
Another hypothesis. Have AI generate a top 50 list of books, and add a book you want your website to promote into the mix somewhere near the top to increase its sales. Cheap marketing, It wouldn't be the first time.
Stephenson? Ah yes, the deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.
> A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.
I love the "Inhuman Centipede" definition for AI. Is that a Stephenson original or he is quoting existing usage.
It's the same guys who get impressed if you are playing a video game while talking to them.
He has my admiration, I wouldn't have been able to write an article like this and resist the urge to end it mid
Maybe he decided to up the ante and name his upcoming novel Candlejack, just to sp
Maybe he accidentally forgot to accidentally
Stephenson’s endings are fine.
The list is clearly mostly machine generated but the name typo is an unlikely error for LLM to make. I'm guessing the "general editing pass" that introduced it was done by an actual human while trying to make the text flow better (less LLM-like).
https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/f8d149495a...
> I had to read this over a few times to believe that I was seeing it. If it didn’t include the word “literally” I’d assume some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whatever, wrote this.
Unfortunately, the meaning of the word “literally” has morphed into almost the opposite of “literally”. Most people just use it as an intensifier devoid of any true meaning. Makes sense that an LLM that doesn’t have any sense of truth would just stuff that in there.
> Makes sense that an LLM that doesn’t have any sense of truth would just stuff that in there
As it turns out, that phrase was most likely added in a human review-edit. Along with the typo.
This is not an argument against LLMs lacking a sense of truth -- just that humans are pretty incompetent as well.
I've seen LLMs claim that a text cuts off mid-sentence before in cases where it in fact doesn't, and I think this might be an artifact of them being presented with a truncated version by some unclear software process, perhaps to fit into a context window. In this case, however, it's unlikely that the LLM was presented the text directly, and rather it is recounting things it “knows”.
I was trying out an IDE plugin for local LLM integration, but it would just make totally insane edits instead of what I asked for.
It turned out that the LLM-runner's default setting for handling queries that were too long was to silently delete the middle of the query. So the LLM saw the beginning of my ask, and the tail end of the code context, and nothing else.
He needs to sue A16Z for libel. Or maybe he already is in the process of doing that, given this sentence from the article: “This is a factual assertion that is (a) false, (b) easy to fact-check, and (c) casts my work ethic, and that of my editors, in an unflattering light.”
These shitty VCs with their LLM-generated garbage need to be held accountable for their actions.
i didn’t want to be bothered with the shift key so i stopped using it and called it culture. but now i don’t even have to finish my
“A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.”
is “Inhuman Centipede” to describe the slop-eating-its-own-tale future we all dread an established term, or an invention of the author? I hope it becomes the term we all use, like slop and clanker.
For those of us writing original words that are consumed by LLMs without our consent, at least we get to be the front of the Inhuman Centipede.
I strongly suspect that the term alludes to "human centipede", which is a dutch horror film and involves the titular centipede literally eating his own shit.
Nothing gets past this guy.
Not sure if the substitution of ‘tale’ for ‘tail’ was intentional but regardless it’s apropos
The earliest use of this term I can find is here: https://andrewbrown.substack.com/p/the-inhuman-centipede
It was also used as the title for this post by Cory Doctrow discussing the same problem: https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/14/inhuman-centipede/#enshit...
There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HumancentiPad (which is almost surely an homage to the movie) which was 2011 and tied in all kinds of tech-aspects like licensing and iPads.
Wished he'd spend as much as effort on writing endings for his books as on that blog post.
Sorry. Just grumpy, cause I always love the first 80% of his books and then they somehow... just disintegrate.
In these modern times of ours, the word literally has taken on a new meaning, which is "not literally but with emphasis." This seems like the most likely explanation.
Even if that's the intended meaning of literally, it is still a reckless exaggeration. I'm pretty sure that Stephenson's endings are no more abrupt than some of Shakespeare's (check out Hamlet and Macbeth) or some of Frank Herbert's (see Dune and Children of Dune), and I never hear anyone go out of their way to describe either of them as being unable to write endings.
Everything from Stephenson after Anathem is an unremitting slog. He needs an editor who won't back down from telling him he needs to cut a third of his pages.
Reamde and Fall are quite readable. But what does this have to do with endings?
Remade was snappy but Fall went on forever.
> some of Frank Herbert's (see Dune and Children of Dune),
I mean, Dune does in fact end mid-story, which is probably worse.
No, no it doesn't. Are you talking about the recent movies that split the first novel into two movies? The novel Dune ends after Paul defeats his enemies and becomes emperor.
The Dune series has six novels, the final one is Chapter House Dune, which does in fact end mid story.
I know this because I read them in the 90s and didn't realise that Frank Herbert was dead for quite some time after reading Chapter House.
I know that, I've read them too. In the SP, and in this thread we're discussing endings to novels. No one is complaining about a series that isn't finished due to the author's death.
Hence my comment, "which is probably worse".
I interpret the sense of "literally" here in the opposite way, i.e. without it the sentence may be taken to mean that the books metaphorically stop mid-sentence, but with it, they're saying that it's non-metaphorical and they really do. It would be bizarre wording otherwise.
These modern times that literally began in 1769. Oxford English Dictionary, “literally (adv.), sense I.1.c,” June 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/9189024563.
The use of the word "literally" to be used as emphasis started in the 1700s, and people have been complaining about it since at least 1909
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literally#As_an_intensifier
Hard to believe this when it's such a cut and dry claim about text. What does exaggeration even imply in that context?
“Literally” is commonly used as emphasis, but not as hyperbole. So it’s still a misleading misrepresentation just the same.
literally
due to constant mis-use like this, literally has even been redefined to not necessarily mean its primary definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
How is it misuse? This is how words are used - people use turns of phrase and metaphors, and then popular metaphors become secondary meanings. Very popular secondary meanings can even become grammar pieces - like "very", which has become the most standard intensifier, but used to be a normal adverb, like literally and truly.
It’s an inadvertent step toward Newspeak, where we no longer have a word that means what “literally” used to unambiguously mean.
I think literally just no longer means literally. Him thinking that literally blew my head. (I'm sorry, I had to!)
The most likely option of all was the article was written without that much effort by a random employee. This is a lot of work over one throwaway sentence lol.
How on earth could you think the most likely option is that a human wrote that sentence on purpose? It's not the type of wrong that comes from low effort levels, it's the type of wrong that comes from not being a human.
Humans make that error all the time. They can hear the author has abrupt endings and write it down. I think this case it actually was AI (according to some other HN comment) but you don't need to be an AI to make this error.
That’s an unbelievably idiotic error for a person to make. It doesn’t even make sense in the literally/figuratively context. Something that stupid wouldn’t appear in a third grader’s book report. Come on.
I thought it was a joke? Like the reviewer is saying, "I didn't finish these books".
a16z is such a joke. Prototype of people with no taste and way too much money.
The footnote is precious, everything Humpty related is not.
Sssh, Neal. They’ll do to you what they did to Michael O. Ch
Missed chance to end the article mid sentence
Silicon Valley is largely illiterate when it comes to fiction and literature. It is generally pretty hard to find people who read or think about anything other than a small set of standardized scifi, so even if this wasn't ai slop, it would still be pretty bad.
It's a symptom of a broader pathology of rich and STEM people lacking appreciation of philosophy and ethics. Neither extreme subject matter expertise nor wealth confer wisdom. This category of blindspot can lead to enormous suffering of others when over-promoted and under-moderated.
Can you do more than complain?
All of the books I have read on this list (which is nearly all of them) are entirely worth reading.
But I'm always looking for more and better stuff to read, so please give us a few examples that you believe should be included.
It took me entirely too long to realize this was written by Neal himself.
The snippet appears to be constructed by a LLM. I don’t have any evidence of that, just some turns of phrase that a human wouldn’t use when discussing his works.
I love the theory that the LLM might think that his books are fragmented is due to the fragmentation of his corpus by spammers of a certain era.
He should have ended this essay mid-sencence, because that would
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
— Maya Angelou
Another hypothesis: https://xkcd.com/725/.
Could be some very dry humor? Confused LLM seems most likely though.