The style of the blog post, with short, abrupt sentences does not captivate me. I’d like to think someone writing a book has a more interesting writing style. Or maybe LLMs have damaged me and I’m too critical of writing style now, whatever it is this doesn’t sell the book to me.
At this point I've become paranoid of my own writing.
The LLM style seems to have become worse with time, more formatted, having only a few syntactic template it forces everything to go through.
So that spurred me to write a lot more write-ups and blogposts that were laying around.
But now I'm reading my own lines wondering if that feels AI? The only thing I can be sure of are my ESL-isms, and my convoluted, unending, extremely hard to parse sentences that would just deter people from reading.
Ever read Hemingway? Short, abrupt sentences. Sometimes incomplete. Observations with invisibly attached emotions. Their rhythm. Reader's imagination completes the picture like no author could.
Two paragraphs in and I have no idea what they’re selling me. A timeline on how to write a book? A font? A solution to a problem? Just casual lording? AI slop at its finest.
I started to read the blog post and got lost trying to shoot down all these aliens falling down from space. It's really a nice game integrated in the webpage. I was able to double my canon and even get a bigger blue laser. I wonder how much more weapon upgrades there is. Awesome game inside this blog.
- All his other domains are recently registered too, the oldest one `byvoss.tech` is from May 2025.
- GitHub has way too little projects and contributions for someone with such experience. The first project dates on the same day as the domain registration: https://github.com/VivianVossNet?tab=repositories
- As other people mentioned, too many blog posts lately (almost one a day), and a very weird writing style. Which doesn't seem at all that's because it's English as a second language. It's just plainly vague and disconnected sentences.
upon further review, this is a complete LLM-driven attempt at trying to be AI Banksy
aside from the complete lack of background like he's Jobriath except without talent, it isn't hard to find festering boils like the UN link (https://www.un.org/en/observances/book-and-copyright-day) being a sham coming from Russia
This person appeared out of nowhere 6 months ago and started posting on linkedin. With 6k followers and so much experience I would expect a couple of recommendations.
Also gitlab and Github account appeared around the same time...
Maybe it's just my paranoia in the AI slop age.
Things do seem a little off. If you check both the website and the LinkedIn you'll notice a strange motif of AI-generated women with cat ear headphones.
I want to believe that Vivian made a bootcamp and turned herself from an elite business trained elite scort [0] into an elite greybeard, empowering her former "nerd" and tomboy spirit [0]
Have you considered that "very weird writing style" might be due to the fact that a German person is writing in English?
One post a day over the last short period of time does not seem unusual for someone who is suddenly interested in a least a part-time career as an author.
Your random online persona assassination aside, I am curious about the book. The Devil Book kept me occupied for years when I was in university; I'd like to see what I've missed since then.
I'm not sure I'd put it at full slop, but the book is clearly AI assisted. You can view samples on retailer websites, and it features 'interjections' from an AI avatar. Further, in the opening pages, the author feels it pertinent to point out that every fact in the book is verified. Not my cup of tea.
Counterpoint: most AI slop authors have multiple books/posts on random subjects. This is their only book on Amazon and their posts sound like draft chapters. Could this just be new author with an unconventional writing style and a disciplined daily schedule?
"Github has way too little projects"... I had PRs against stinkpad wireless drivers in 1999/2000 time frame - FreeBSD specific. Do I expect those to be around? No.
Do I think 20+ years of working for commercial companies means I have a splendid GH resume - absolutely not.
Using your logic for HN, 140 karma, ignore.
VV has been in the community awhile (I'm not active, but watch). AI slop isn't a thing, trolling for top of HN is.
I have had various servers over time running FreeBSD, both physically in my home, rented bare metal servers and rented VPSes.
So I’m not exactly a newcomer to FreeBSD, but I am wondering if this book might be relevant to me anyways.
My main issue with my servers that I would like to solve better, is how to organize the file system layout and ZFS “datasets” in a better way.
I generally don’t use separate disks for system and other things. Whatever number of disks are available, anywhere from a single disk or a pair of disks up to several handfuls of disks become a zpool where both the system is installed and all my data lives too.
For example, this is the zpool setup of one physical bare metal rented server I have, consisting of ten disks all put into a single raidz3 grouping:
This particular server I’m underutilising in terms of total amount of space I am using va how much it can hold, so it’s due to be replaced by something with fewer disks. At the moment I use this server only for backup storage, and that will be the role of the server that replaces it too.
Another physical bare metal server I rent has only two disks, so I have them in a mirror setup:
I use ZFS send and recv to make backups of this server to the one with the many disks.
This server with the mirror pool runs some actual services like a couple of websites and a PeerTube instance etc, all in separate jails.
However, in spite of the goodness of having jails it’s still a bit of a mess I’ve made, that make it somewhat difficult (time consuming) to set up a new server with a similar setup to replace it one day when the disks give up and I have to restore from backup.
In particular I have a bit of config and other files spread out in the host system itself.
I am hoping that given that this book looks to be focused in part on practical examples, that perhaps if I buy this book I can get some inspiration for how I can better set up a new server and make it so that in the future that one in turn would be quicker to move between machines.
Also, the pool on the server with the mirrored disk setup has become extremely fragmented:
NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT
zroot 3.62T 3.18T 453G - - 48% 87% 1.00x ONLINE -
Which I am pretty sure is also the reason why sshing into it takes around 30 to 60 seconds to get to the shell.
What I really would like is to have it so that one ZFS “dataset” contains only the base system as it comes from a fresh install, and to have config changes I’ve added be separately stored and somehow overlaid on top of that. While at the same time having it so that when I install updates to the system, the default config files that are updated are not written out into the overlay but instead replace what’s below in the default install. If that makes sense.
And perhaps that instead of having many pkg installs for various tools in the host system that I add a sort of management jail where I can install various tools and edit files and manage the server, if possible.
Also I am wondering if running multiple instances of PostgreSQL server each in their separate jails is better, or having a single PostgreSQL server in a single jail that all the other jails share for services I have in jails where the services use PostgreSQL.
A few honest answers, since the criticisms are reasonable.
On the domain: I bought vivianvoss.net in early 2026 without doing the homework CrociDB has now done for me. I had no idea about the previous owner, nor do I particularly care to find out, no more than I would investigate the previous tenant of a flat I had just moved into. I am still cleaning up after her in the search index, which has been a slightly absurd part of the launch.
On the editorial process: I am a German native speaker. The book is written in German, then translated and stylistically polished into English by Claude Opus, with my voice as the target and a great deal of back-and-forth on tone, idiom and rhythm. To me this is a tool, no different in function from the editorial pass any publisher runs on a manuscript, which equally shapes the final work. Five months on the book, paragraph by paragraph: re-read, re-arranged, rewritten, corrected. Up to three hours every morning on a single LinkedIn post or blog entry. A normal editorial process, with a faster collaborator than most.
On C. Lechat (Claudine le chat, ne pète pas): a French reading of 'ChatGPT' where 'chat' becomes the cat, and the parenthetical promises she does not, well, fart. The visual character on LinkedIn began as a separate decision. Every IT illustration the image generators produced was male, and my LinkedIn analytics matched, the audience was almost entirely men. So I insisted on a female developer in the artwork, headphones included. Somewhere along the way she merged with the editorial voice in the book and became C. Lechat. The follower demographics did shift in the direction I had hoped, for what it is worth. The framing is described in the introductory pages of the book; if you only saw the Amazon look-inside sample, you missed that section maybe.
On the six-month emergence: I was seriously ill at the end of 2025, and something had to change, rather drastically. I decided that if I had things worth saying after well over thirty years of doing this, I should probably write them down before I was no longer in a position to. I also live with chronic migraine and have functional days only two or three a week, which is one reason the GitHub footprint looks the way it does. I am not running a credibility farm. I am writing on the days I can, and on the others I would rather be at the creek with the dog. The conversation with readers has turned into a kind of recovery in its own right; as a former code monkey one rarely got that level of substantive engagement, and it is part of what is putting me back on my feet.
One aside, in genuine astonishment rather than complaint: it is striking how multifaceted a picture of a stranger can be drawn from a WHOIS record, an Amazon sample and a GitHub page. I have read it with more curiosity than dismay, and learned things about myself in the process.
On the photograph, while we are at it: it is a passport snapshot put through Affinity's AI background removal, which subtly altered the rest of the picture. It is still me, just very slightly improved. I was never the vain type, but I have come round to it.
Slop in the AI-slop sense it is not. Heavily edited and translated, yes. Authored, structured, fact-checked and re-read line by line by a man in Germany having rather more fun with this than he had expected, also yes.
This is also my first book. I am not a practised author, though I do have an eye for typography and the visual side, which mattered to me from the start: it had to please me and, with luck, the reader. I am aware it cannot be flawless, which is why I have deliberately set it up as an open book, with an issue link where anyone can contribute corrections or refinements, by name or pseudonym, credited in the next edition. A more interactive book that improves from version to version, with the community.
If you would rather I answered in German, you are welcome to ask. You will then run my German through some translator with an LLM in the back end, without the five months of stylistic calibration this one has had. Otherwise I will keep answering in the form that sits closest to my German.
Now it is up to you to dig further and keep me on my toes. Ask away. One small request: stay fair.
Assuming this is all true, at least for me personally, the level of generative AI involvement here still puts me off the project completely.
Even if it is only translation, I am not interested in reading LLM output in the context of a book, and I would feel betrayed if I learned that the translation was machine-generated if I had purchased a copy.
For the amount you’re charging, you could have hired a human translator. Either way, just like with a book translated by a human, you should disclose that the actual words in the book were not written by you. “Author: Vivian Voss, Translated By: Claude Opus” or whatever.
I’m sure others feel differently, and you may find success among that crowd.
mplanchard, that is a fair position, and I do not propose to argue you out of it.
A book is partly for the writer, and this one was largely for me: an ode to FreeBSD that I needed to write, partly to put years of practice into something durable, partly to have the conversation with myself before time ran out. If reading it is a problem because of how it was made, that is your call to make and a perfectly defensible one.
For what it is worth, I share serious concerns about AI in some directions: video that erases the line between record and fabrication, automated profiling pipelines that make consequential decisions about people without anyone being able to inspect them. Those are not theoretical worries. Where I differ from your line is on a translator-editor whose every paragraph I read, push back on, rewrite and re-read until it sits the way I want it. That is closer to a publishing-house edit pass than to generative output, in my experience.
I would not ask you to read it. The book is going to be what it is, and you are going to be where you stand, and those two facts can coexist without much fuss.
The style of the blog post, with short, abrupt sentences does not captivate me. I’d like to think someone writing a book has a more interesting writing style. Or maybe LLMs have damaged me and I’m too critical of writing style now, whatever it is this doesn’t sell the book to me.
At this point I've become paranoid of my own writing. The LLM style seems to have become worse with time, more formatted, having only a few syntactic template it forces everything to go through. So that spurred me to write a lot more write-ups and blogposts that were laying around. But now I'm reading my own lines wondering if that feels AI? The only thing I can be sure of are my ESL-isms, and my convoluted, unending, extremely hard to parse sentences that would just deter people from reading.
Ever read Hemingway? Short, abrupt sentences. Sometimes incomplete. Observations with invisibly attached emotions. Their rhythm. Reader's imagination completes the picture like no author could.
A powerful style, merely sixty years old.
Peak HN moment: comparing AI-generated text to Hemingway.
You can ask your favorite LLMs to imitate Hemingway; I suppose they'd be comparably successful.
What you see as "AI-generated" looks more like translation, or written in English by a non-native speaker. The author is German, it appears.
> I suppose they'd be comparably successful.
Yes, so, not particularly.
Two paragraphs in and I have no idea what they’re selling me. A timeline on how to write a book? A font? A solution to a problem? Just casual lording? AI slop at its finest.
The author is quite prolific. Basically a blog post per day for the last couple of months!
To me, that actually screams LLM. At the very least much LLM assisted.
Everything about this blog and author screams AI-generated. See below comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929213 (it's downvote-brigaded)
I started to read the blog post and got lost trying to shoot down all these aliens falling down from space. It's really a nice game integrated in the webpage. I was able to double my canon and even get a bigger blue laser. I wonder how much more weapon upgrades there is. Awesome game inside this blog.
What blog?
Totally awsome game!!!! What was the site about?
Came for the FreeBSD content. Stayed for the game. I am easily distracted.
VV pubished the site a couple weeks back on L*nkedin. It was a distraction for me as well.
yeah holy shit this game owns i have no idea what the article is about
No unencumbered epub, no sale.
This was surprisingly hard to read. Not in terms of sentence structure but in terms of coherence and meaning.
Also the book is $60 on Kindle and $80 for paperback? Who's the target audience?
Here's a link to a few sample chapters https://vivianvoss.net/assets/files/integrated-by-design-pre... I enjoyed reading them - they presented a very clear arguement to select FreeBSD over Linux
please give a epub as i'm used to read using icloud books.
I ordered the hard copy, but for those with Kindle Unlimited....it's available there.
KU is for escape not text for me, so I'll wait for the book.
Unrelated to the article, the game on the website is very addictive )) Had to get to the top of the leaderboard.
The page about the earnings[0] is interesting. The Amazon share for kindle edition is higher than I expected.
[0]:https://vivianvoss.net/print/integrated-by-design
This looks AI Slop. At first the style of the site and the cover of the book were a bit suspicious, but then digging a bit further:
- Domain was registered in February this year: https://www.whois.com/whois/vivianvoss.net
- Web archive has only a couple snapshots before this year, and it seemed to belong to an "Elite Escort": https://web.archive.org/web/20160515000000*/https://vivianvo...
- All his other domains are recently registered too, the oldest one `byvoss.tech` is from May 2025.
- GitHub has way too little projects and contributions for someone with such experience. The first project dates on the same day as the domain registration: https://github.com/VivianVossNet?tab=repositories
- As other people mentioned, too many blog posts lately (almost one a day), and a very weird writing style. Which doesn't seem at all that's because it's English as a second language. It's just plainly vague and disconnected sentences.
LinkedIn profile picture is oddly smooth and has the OpenAI signature yellow hue, although it could just be an odd touch-up.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vvoss/
upon further review, this is a complete LLM-driven attempt at trying to be AI Banksy
aside from the complete lack of background like he's Jobriath except without talent, it isn't hard to find festering boils like the UN link (https://www.un.org/en/observances/book-and-copyright-day) being a sham coming from Russia
This person appeared out of nowhere 6 months ago and started posting on linkedin. With 6k followers and so much experience I would expect a couple of recommendations. Also gitlab and Github account appeared around the same time... Maybe it's just my paranoia in the AI slop age.
Things do seem a little off. If you check both the website and the LinkedIn you'll notice a strange motif of AI-generated women with cat ear headphones.
> - Web archive has only a couple snapshots before this year, and it seemed to belong to an "Elite Escort": https://web.archive.org/web/20160515000000*/https://vivianvo...
Other red flags aside, we can't actually hold the actions of a previous domain owner a decade ago against the current owner
I want to believe that Vivian made a bootcamp and turned herself from an elite business trained elite scort [0] into an elite greybeard, empowering her former "nerd" and tomboy spirit [0]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150223124354/http://www.vivian...
Have you considered that "very weird writing style" might be due to the fact that a German person is writing in English?
One post a day over the last short period of time does not seem unusual for someone who is suddenly interested in a least a part-time career as an author.
Your random online persona assassination aside, I am curious about the book. The Devil Book kept me occupied for years when I was in university; I'd like to see what I've missed since then.
I'm waiting on my physical copy, but, yes the writing style from a native German can be odd at times (the ex was german).
The poster is trying to get karma being "contrairian".
I'm not sure I'd put it at full slop, but the book is clearly AI assisted. You can view samples on retailer websites, and it features 'interjections' from an AI avatar. Further, in the opening pages, the author feels it pertinent to point out that every fact in the book is verified. Not my cup of tea.
Thanks for pointing out. So close to buying it. Would appreciate more disclosure regarding the use of hostile technology.
What makes the technology (apparently the use of LLMs) hostile? Asking unironically; I try to understand fellow humans better.
Why would you listen to some fool’s baseless speculation?
I did not see any based counterargument that addresses my concern.
Counterpoint: most AI slop authors have multiple books/posts on random subjects. This is their only book on Amazon and their posts sound like draft chapters. Could this just be new author with an unconventional writing style and a disciplined daily schedule?
I'll look into this a bit. But...
"Github has way too little projects"... I had PRs against stinkpad wireless drivers in 1999/2000 time frame - FreeBSD specific. Do I expect those to be around? No.
Do I think 20+ years of working for commercial companies means I have a splendid GH resume - absolutely not.
Using your logic for HN, 140 karma, ignore.
VV has been in the community awhile (I'm not active, but watch). AI slop isn't a thing, trolling for top of HN is.
“The community” - which community? Where? This is a brand new website, there’s next to no online presence for the name (all seemingly unrelated).
It reads like using LLMs to fake some credibility
Hardcover not available on .co.jp, shame
I have had various servers over time running FreeBSD, both physically in my home, rented bare metal servers and rented VPSes.
So I’m not exactly a newcomer to FreeBSD, but I am wondering if this book might be relevant to me anyways.
My main issue with my servers that I would like to solve better, is how to organize the file system layout and ZFS “datasets” in a better way.
I generally don’t use separate disks for system and other things. Whatever number of disks are available, anywhere from a single disk or a pair of disks up to several handfuls of disks become a zpool where both the system is installed and all my data lives too.
For example, this is the zpool setup of one physical bare metal rented server I have, consisting of ten disks all put into a single raidz3 grouping:
This particular server I’m underutilising in terms of total amount of space I am using va how much it can hold, so it’s due to be replaced by something with fewer disks. At the moment I use this server only for backup storage, and that will be the role of the server that replaces it too.Another physical bare metal server I rent has only two disks, so I have them in a mirror setup:
I use ZFS send and recv to make backups of this server to the one with the many disks.This server with the mirror pool runs some actual services like a couple of websites and a PeerTube instance etc, all in separate jails.
However, in spite of the goodness of having jails it’s still a bit of a mess I’ve made, that make it somewhat difficult (time consuming) to set up a new server with a similar setup to replace it one day when the disks give up and I have to restore from backup.
In particular I have a bit of config and other files spread out in the host system itself.
I am hoping that given that this book looks to be focused in part on practical examples, that perhaps if I buy this book I can get some inspiration for how I can better set up a new server and make it so that in the future that one in turn would be quicker to move between machines.
Also, the pool on the server with the mirrored disk setup has become extremely fragmented:
Which I am pretty sure is also the reason why sshing into it takes around 30 to 60 seconds to get to the shell.What I really would like is to have it so that one ZFS “dataset” contains only the base system as it comes from a fresh install, and to have config changes I’ve added be separately stored and somehow overlaid on top of that. While at the same time having it so that when I install updates to the system, the default config files that are updated are not written out into the overlay but instead replace what’s below in the default install. If that makes sense.
And perhaps that instead of having many pkg installs for various tools in the host system that I add a sort of management jail where I can install various tools and edit files and manage the server, if possible.
Also I am wondering if running multiple instances of PostgreSQL server each in their separate jails is better, or having a single PostgreSQL server in a single jail that all the other jails share for services I have in jails where the services use PostgreSQL.
forums.freebsd.org may be a good place to discuss these sort of questions.
A few honest answers, since the criticisms are reasonable.
On the domain: I bought vivianvoss.net in early 2026 without doing the homework CrociDB has now done for me. I had no idea about the previous owner, nor do I particularly care to find out, no more than I would investigate the previous tenant of a flat I had just moved into. I am still cleaning up after her in the search index, which has been a slightly absurd part of the launch.
On the editorial process: I am a German native speaker. The book is written in German, then translated and stylistically polished into English by Claude Opus, with my voice as the target and a great deal of back-and-forth on tone, idiom and rhythm. To me this is a tool, no different in function from the editorial pass any publisher runs on a manuscript, which equally shapes the final work. Five months on the book, paragraph by paragraph: re-read, re-arranged, rewritten, corrected. Up to three hours every morning on a single LinkedIn post or blog entry. A normal editorial process, with a faster collaborator than most.
On C. Lechat (Claudine le chat, ne pète pas): a French reading of 'ChatGPT' where 'chat' becomes the cat, and the parenthetical promises she does not, well, fart. The visual character on LinkedIn began as a separate decision. Every IT illustration the image generators produced was male, and my LinkedIn analytics matched, the audience was almost entirely men. So I insisted on a female developer in the artwork, headphones included. Somewhere along the way she merged with the editorial voice in the book and became C. Lechat. The follower demographics did shift in the direction I had hoped, for what it is worth. The framing is described in the introductory pages of the book; if you only saw the Amazon look-inside sample, you missed that section maybe.
On the six-month emergence: I was seriously ill at the end of 2025, and something had to change, rather drastically. I decided that if I had things worth saying after well over thirty years of doing this, I should probably write them down before I was no longer in a position to. I also live with chronic migraine and have functional days only two or three a week, which is one reason the GitHub footprint looks the way it does. I am not running a credibility farm. I am writing on the days I can, and on the others I would rather be at the creek with the dog. The conversation with readers has turned into a kind of recovery in its own right; as a former code monkey one rarely got that level of substantive engagement, and it is part of what is putting me back on my feet.
One aside, in genuine astonishment rather than complaint: it is striking how multifaceted a picture of a stranger can be drawn from a WHOIS record, an Amazon sample and a GitHub page. I have read it with more curiosity than dismay, and learned things about myself in the process.
On the photograph, while we are at it: it is a passport snapshot put through Affinity's AI background removal, which subtly altered the rest of the picture. It is still me, just very slightly improved. I was never the vain type, but I have come round to it.
Slop in the AI-slop sense it is not. Heavily edited and translated, yes. Authored, structured, fact-checked and re-read line by line by a man in Germany having rather more fun with this than he had expected, also yes.
This is also my first book. I am not a practised author, though I do have an eye for typography and the visual side, which mattered to me from the start: it had to please me and, with luck, the reader. I am aware it cannot be flawless, which is why I have deliberately set it up as an open book, with an issue link where anyone can contribute corrections or refinements, by name or pseudonym, credited in the next edition. A more interactive book that improves from version to version, with the community.
If you would rather I answered in German, you are welcome to ask. You will then run my German through some translator with an LLM in the back end, without the five months of stylistic calibration this one has had. Otherwise I will keep answering in the form that sits closest to my German.
Now it is up to you to dig further and keep me on my toes. Ask away. One small request: stay fair.
Assuming this is all true, at least for me personally, the level of generative AI involvement here still puts me off the project completely.
Even if it is only translation, I am not interested in reading LLM output in the context of a book, and I would feel betrayed if I learned that the translation was machine-generated if I had purchased a copy.
For the amount you’re charging, you could have hired a human translator. Either way, just like with a book translated by a human, you should disclose that the actual words in the book were not written by you. “Author: Vivian Voss, Translated By: Claude Opus” or whatever.
I’m sure others feel differently, and you may find success among that crowd.
mplanchard, that is a fair position, and I do not propose to argue you out of it.
A book is partly for the writer, and this one was largely for me: an ode to FreeBSD that I needed to write, partly to put years of practice into something durable, partly to have the conversation with myself before time ran out. If reading it is a problem because of how it was made, that is your call to make and a perfectly defensible one.
For what it is worth, I share serious concerns about AI in some directions: video that erases the line between record and fabrication, automated profiling pipelines that make consequential decisions about people without anyone being able to inspect them. Those are not theoretical worries. Where I differ from your line is on a translator-editor whose every paragraph I read, push back on, rewrite and re-read until it sits the way I want it. That is closer to a publishing-house edit pass than to generative output, in my experience.
I would not ask you to read it. The book is going to be what it is, and you are going to be where you stand, and those two facts can coexist without much fuss.