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 made by an actual human while trying to make the text flow better (less LLM-like).
https://github.com/a16z-infra/reading-list/commit/f8d149495a...
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 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.
This really is a study in AI slop. At least they had the good sense to change it.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.To a version that managed to typo his name.
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.
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!
> 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!
Keep this in mind if you _ever_ feel tempted to take A16Z seriously. Absolute charlatans and clowns.
Software is eating the world.
AI is eating the VCs.
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.
...and a conehead.
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 would have been really great to end the blog post mid-sentence.
I don't have any original ideas
Lol I was hoping for that too
um, it literally does
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.
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
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".
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)
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.
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
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”.
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
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.
Missed chance to end the article mid sentence
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
Stephenson’s endings are fine.
I thought it was a joke? Like the reviewer is saying, "I didn't finish these books".
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.
“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.
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.
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
“Literally” is commonly used as emphasis, but not as hyperbole. So it’s still a misleading misrepresentation just the same.
literally
Hard to believe this when it's such a cut and dry claim about text. What does exaggeration even imply in that context?
It's the same guys who get impressed if you are playing a video game while talking to them.
a16z is such a joke. Prototype of people with no taste and way too much money.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
— Maya Angelou
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.
Another hypothesis: https://xkcd.com/725/.
Could be some very dry humor? Confused LLM seems most likely though.
He should have ended this essay mid-sencence, because that would