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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 o
by 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 agoI 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 agoIt's a free book, he's not selling you anything.
- LeCompteSftware 6mo agoBeing 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 agoI'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.
- icedchai 6mo agoYep. It's not the best intro to C, for sure. I learned C when I was a teenager, from K&R C second edition, and several Amiga-specific books ("Amiga C for Beginners", for one.)