5 ms·

This is a huge book! I would like to know if a LLM was involved in the writing process or if this is the product of a human.

esseph 6mo ago
"The English version is the original and authoritative version of the book. The Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish editions were translated using AI and have not yet undergone a full human technical review. They are published to make the material accessible to more readers, but they may contain translation mistakes, awkward wording, or technical inaccuracies introduced during translation. If something in a translated edition seems unclear, inconsistent, or technically questionable, please refer to the English version as the source of truth. Help with reviewing and improving the translations is very welcome (see Contributing below)." --- This doesn't directly answer your question though.
- inatreecrown2 6mo ago
  Yes I saw that too.
rvz 6mo ago
Even if it was, the author is not a random person and is part of the FreeBSD team and I'd rather trust them to write the book than someone else outside of the organization. So I would expect that they would thoroughly check the book for inaccuracies, errors and issues before releasing it after proof-reading, otherwise it would say a lot about how they use LLMs and not checking over it would hurt their own reputation.
- LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
  I guarantee they didn't read a single word of this book. Look at the introduction to C and tell me that a) it's a good introduction to C b) a human read any of it https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapters/part1/chapter-04.md https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapte... This book is a dishonest AI scam.
  - cinntaile 6mo ago
    It's a free book, he's not selling you anything.
    - LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
      Being LLM slop in particular, this book cost way more of my time than it should have. It really does look superficially competent, until you realize that competence is paragraph-to-paragraph, not section-to-section. The scam is not stating up front "this was written by an LLM and I haven't read it." The dishonesty is claiming this book will teach you such-and-such when the author actually has no idea. It really is a scam. Even if he's not making anything directly, he's already earned 150 stars in the GitHub pseudoeconomy, plus good word-of-mouth from people who are lazy and thoughtless like he is, people who assumed that 4,500 pages about FreeBSD from a lead FreeBSD maintainer must be worth something and didn't bother to check if it was written by an LLM... even though it's 2026. This book has negative value. It is actively destructive to FreeBSD, even if in the short term it boosts the author's public profile.
      - ruslan 6mo ago
        > This book has negative value. It is actively destructive to FreeBSD, even if in the short term it boosts the author's public profile. I won't be that radical, the book still has value. There are many useful code samples with descriptions and explanations of concepts I did not know before. But to get to them one has to dig through a forrest of useless tokens. Someone has to pass it through an LLM and publish distilled edition. :-)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6mo ago
    I'm not reading that whole thing right now (that is a lot of text), but I read as far as "What Is a Variable?" and nothing stands out as bad or AI-written. What problems do you see?
  - ruslan 6mo ago
    > This book is a dishonest AI scam. Indeed! I read through a couple of paragraphs. Each begins with a bloated introduction where each sentence repeats same idea many times in different words. Lot's of bullets repeating same statement. That's exactly how LLM scam looks like. The whole book is full of water. It can be reduced in size by a factor of 5.
AbbeFaria 6mo ago
There is nothing wrong with using an LLM so long as a human takes ownership for the artefact (be that books, code etc). I would rather the author automate the mundane and focus on conveying their ideas clearly. As an aside, is there a Linux version for this ?
- LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
  There is something wrong with it because LLMs are really not capable of writing a useful book, and this book is 100% LLM slop. Look at this totally useless """introduction""" to C: https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapters/part1/chapter-04.md https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapte... First of all this is an entire book, it's 76,000 words. But look at the first nontrivial example of C after "hello world," under "Bonus learning point about C return values" exec_map_first_page(struct image_params *imgp) { vm_object_t object; vm_page_t m; int error; if (imgp->firstpage != NULL) exec_unmap_first_page(imgp); object = imgp->vp->v_object; if (object == NULL) return (EACCES); #if VM_NRESERVLEVEL > 0 if ((object->flags & OBJ_COLORED) == 0) { VM_OBJECT_WLOCK(object); vm_object_color(object, 0); VM_OBJECT_WUNLOCK(object); } #endif error = vm_page_grab_valid_unlocked(&m, object, 0, VM_ALLOC_COUNT(VM_INITIAL_PAGEIN) | VM_ALLOC_NORMAL | VM_ALLOC_NOBUSY | VM_ALLOC_WIRED); if (error != VM_PAGER_OK) return (EIO); imgp->firstpage = sf_buf_alloc(m, 0); imgp->image_header = (char *)sf_buf_kva(imgp->firstpage); return (0); } This teaches nobody anything. I am sorry but this project is completely useless and there's no way Brandi read a single word of it. This entire book is a dishonest AI scam. I hate LLMs. It is hard to think of another computer technology that has done so much damage for so little good. Edit: I mean look at the intro to for loops. This is supposed to be for total beginners. Example 1: for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { printf("%d\n", i); } >> Start at i = 0 >> Repeat while i < 10 >> Increment i each time by 1 (i++) Example 2: for (i = 0; n > 0 && i < IFLIB_MAX_RX_REFRESH; n--, i++) { struct netmap_slot *slot = &ring->slot[nm_i]; uint64_t paddr; void *addr = PNMB(na, slot, &paddr); /\* ... work per buffer ... \*/ nm_i = nm_next(nm_i, lim); nic_i = nm_next(nic_i, lim); } >> What this loop does >> * The driver is refilling receive buffers so the NIC can keep receiving packets. >> * It processes buffers in batches: up to IFLIB_MAX_RX_REFRESH each time. >> * i counts how many buffers we've handled in this batch. n is the total remaining buffers to refill; it decrements every iteration. >> * For each buffer, the code grabs its slot, figures out the physical address, readies it for DMA, then advances the ring indices (nm_i, nic_i). >> * The loop stops when either the batch is full (i hits the max) or there's nothing left to do (n == 0). The batch is then "published" to the NIC by the code right after the loop. >> In essence, a for loop is the go-to choice when you have a clear limit on how many times something should run. It packages initialisation, condition checking, and iteration updates into a single, compact header, making the flow easy to follow. Total garbage. This has literally zero educational value. I assume Brandi is just trying to make a quick buck, he truly has not even glanced at the output. He should be ashamed of himself.
rbanffy 6mo ago
I am pretty sure he's been working on this book since before LLMs were a thing. He's also not the kind of person who'd just delegate his passion to a machine.

esseph 6mo ago

"The English version is the original and authoritative version of the book. The Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish editions were translated using AI and have not yet undergone a full human technical review. They are published to make the material accessible to more readers, but they may contain translation mistakes, awkward wording, or technical inaccuracies introduced during translation. If something in a translated edition seems unclear, inconsistent, or technically questionable, please refer to the English version as the source of truth. Help with reviewing and improving the translations is very welcome (see Contributing below)." --- This doesn't directly answer your question though.

inatreecrown2 6mo ago
Yes I saw that too.

rvz 6mo ago

Even if it was, the author is not a random person and is part of the FreeBSD team and I'd rather trust them to write the book than someone else outside of the organization. So I would expect that they would thoroughly check the book for inaccuracies, errors and issues before releasing it after proof-reading, otherwise it would say a lot about how they use LLMs and not checking over it would hurt their own reputation.

LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
I guarantee they didn't read a single word of this book. Look at the introduction to C and tell me that a) it's a good introduction to C b) a human read any of it https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapters/part1/chapter-04.md https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapte... This book is a dishonest AI scam.
- cinntaile 6mo ago
  It's a free book, he's not selling you anything.
  - LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
    Being LLM slop in particular, this book cost way more of my time than it should have. It really does look superficially competent, until you realize that competence is paragraph-to-paragraph, not section-to-section. The scam is not stating up front "this was written by an LLM and I haven't read it." The dishonesty is claiming this book will teach you such-and-such when the author actually has no idea. It really is a scam. Even if he's not making anything directly, he's already earned 150 stars in the GitHub pseudoeconomy, plus good word-of-mouth from people who are lazy and thoughtless like he is, people who assumed that 4,500 pages about FreeBSD from a lead FreeBSD maintainer must be worth something and didn't bother to check if it was written by an LLM... even though it's 2026. This book has negative value. It is actively destructive to FreeBSD, even if in the short term it boosts the author's public profile.
    - ruslan 6mo ago
      > This book has negative value. It is actively destructive to FreeBSD, even if in the short term it boosts the author's public profile. I won't be that radical, the book still has value. There are many useful code samples with descriptions and explanations of concepts I did not know before. But to get to them one has to dig through a forrest of useless tokens. Someone has to pass it through an LLM and publish distilled edition. :-)
- yjftsjthsd-h 6mo ago
  I'm not reading that whole thing right now (that is a lot of text), but I read as far as "What Is a Variable?" and nothing stands out as bad or AI-written. What problems do you see?
- ruslan 6mo ago
  > This book is a dishonest AI scam. Indeed! I read through a couple of paragraphs. Each begins with a bloated introduction where each sentence repeats same idea many times in different words. Lot's of bullets repeating same statement. That's exactly how LLM scam looks like. The whole book is full of water. It can be reduced in size by a factor of 5.

AbbeFaria 6mo ago

There is nothing wrong with using an LLM so long as a human takes ownership for the artefact (be that books, code etc). I would rather the author automate the mundane and focus on conveying their ideas clearly. As an aside, is there a Linux version for this ?

LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
There is something wrong with it because LLMs are really not capable of writing a useful book, and this book is 100% LLM slop. Look at this totally useless """introduction""" to C: https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapters/part1/chapter-04.md https://github.com/ebrandi/FDD-book/blob/main/content/chapte... First of all this is an entire book, it's 76,000 words. But look at the first nontrivial example of C after "hello world," under "Bonus learning point about C return values" exec_map_first_page(struct image_params *imgp) { vm_object_t object; vm_page_t m; int error; if (imgp->firstpage != NULL) exec_unmap_first_page(imgp); object = imgp->vp->v_object; if (object == NULL) return (EACCES); #if VM_NRESERVLEVEL > 0 if ((object->flags & OBJ_COLORED) == 0) { VM_OBJECT_WLOCK(object); vm_object_color(object, 0); VM_OBJECT_WUNLOCK(object); } #endif error = vm_page_grab_valid_unlocked(&m, object, 0, VM_ALLOC_COUNT(VM_INITIAL_PAGEIN) | VM_ALLOC_NORMAL | VM_ALLOC_NOBUSY | VM_ALLOC_WIRED); if (error != VM_PAGER_OK) return (EIO); imgp->firstpage = sf_buf_alloc(m, 0); imgp->image_header = (char *)sf_buf_kva(imgp->firstpage); return (0); } This teaches nobody anything. I am sorry but this project is completely useless and there's no way Brandi read a single word of it. This entire book is a dishonest AI scam. I hate LLMs. It is hard to think of another computer technology that has done so much damage for so little good. Edit: I mean look at the intro to for loops. This is supposed to be for total beginners. Example 1: for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { printf("%d\n", i); } >> Start at i = 0 >> Repeat while i < 10 >> Increment i each time by 1 (i++) Example 2: for (i = 0; n > 0 && i < IFLIB_MAX_RX_REFRESH; n--, i++) { struct netmap_slot *slot = &ring->slot[nm_i]; uint64_t paddr; void *addr = PNMB(na, slot, &paddr); /\* ... work per buffer ... \*/ nm_i = nm_next(nm_i, lim); nic_i = nm_next(nic_i, lim); } >> What this loop does >> * The driver is refilling receive buffers so the NIC can keep receiving packets. >> * It processes buffers in batches: up to IFLIB_MAX_RX_REFRESH each time. >> * i counts how many buffers we've handled in this batch. n is the total remaining buffers to refill; it decrements every iteration. >> * For each buffer, the code grabs its slot, figures out the physical address, readies it for DMA, then advances the ring indices (nm_i, nic_i). >> * The loop stops when either the batch is full (i hits the max) or there's nothing left to do (n == 0). The batch is then "published" to the NIC by the code right after the loop. >> In essence, a for loop is the go-to choice when you have a clear limit on how many times something should run. It packages initialisation, condition checking, and iteration updates into a single, compact header, making the flow easy to follow. Total garbage. This has literally zero educational value. I assume Brandi is just trying to make a quick buck, he truly has not even glanced at the output. He should be ashamed of himself.

rbanffy 6mo ago

I am pretty sure he's been working on this book since before LLMs were a thing. He's also not the kind of person who'd just delegate his passion to a machine.