by brailsafe | 2025-11-07 00:37:44+00:00
In some sense, it seems to work well, but the results are sort of nothing special and that's not what I'd personally hope for. I put in three books that are unrelated and got results that compare to a standard book store, either from the same series or other meme startup tech bro recommendations that I'd often literally see on the same shelf. I can't say it's not good, because obviously that's how people browse books and that's what you'd get from reviews, which is perhaps why I never consult reviews for anything.

I put in Thinking in Systems and got a bunch of engineering management stuff which I don't care about. Deep work of course gave me all the rich dad poor dad, steve jobs bio, tim ferriswheel crap which shouldn't surprise me at all. Girl with the dragon tattoo gave me the rest of the series.

Thematic similarity + popularity just seems boring, I'd like something that surfaces unusual deep cuts that I wouldn't necessarily find at the book store on the same shelf, but maybe that I could find if I went to a great library and might be out of print, or that I could find on libgen.

With these:

- Thinking In Systems: A Primer

- Paddle to the Amazon: The Ultimate 12,000-Mile Canoe Adventure

- The Elements of Typographic Style

I was kind of hoping to at least get "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" or something, but mostly got Alchemist, Zen', Into the Wild, almost comically mainstream cuts that of course in some cases I've already read or could find in a Cupertino trash can, not that any of them are not worth reading necessarily, but very typical.

An option to surface rarer choices that combine signals from all the books on the list would be neat, like in the above case, the least read real adventure book that somehow touches on the economics of places travelled through with musings about signage or that just happens to use a similar prose that Robert Bringhurst used to make print design theory not dull. Recommendations that only someone with a real sweaty and weird venn diagram of genuine personal deep interests might conjure up, and that a normal person might say "why the hell would I ever read that" but that otherwise amazing books that are just slept on and might never have found a market, or maybe thematically dissimilar+ conceptually similar in aggregate + unpopular. I'd like to be able to input a seed of inspiration that I haven't been able to find the next deeper step in, rather than all the books on how to start a startup in the garage I don't have. If it's James Hoffman's book on brewing coffee at a high level, I wouldn't want another YouTubers book on brewing coffee at a high level, I'd want the Physics of Filter Coffee, or something in an adjacent sphere grid / tree branch that gives me a way to pursue depth AND breadth but not necessarily the same book by someone else, or the same book with different characters. If I've found a seedling or a mushroom, I'd like to explore the root system of that fruiting body, and then at a certain point find a new seedling based on what I've learned so far, or the one video with 50 views that's somehow the best explanation of how to handle back-pressure in highly concurrent systems after I've realized that I don't know shit about concurrency, but not so deep in the stack that I can't bridge the gap; make the series for me.

Granted, my take here might just be an indictment of reviews in general, or at least those sourced from a generic site like goodreads/amazon which is all about popularity and armchair criticism.