Yep, signals are signals, but I think it's quite complicated now. (In any case, this is still the embryonic era of LLMs).
An interesting point to consider: an author that goes out of their way to hide any LLM influence may actually be degrading the signal. Because in that case, you'll not see the LLM's etchings, and misattribute skill to the author under the belief an LLM was not involved. Complicated times.
So nice to see this get picked up, and honestly surprised to see the interest in what I think of as an extremely esoteric area. Few things:
- Just released an Edition 1.1 that fixed some small errors, amended a few chapters content, and removed some general bluster. I'm going to try and, well, version these.
- New things are coming to Git, and I suspect I'll be talking about Git Futures or A Post-Git World soon enough.
- I'll have a couple more highly practical chapters coming soon, focused on pragmatic organizational adoption, e.g., on wrapping the git CLI to best practices
"Shame" is a strong word to describe a free ebook written for the general good. Happy to have a live conversation with you anytime to discuss Git and its internals to ensure your trust; I have some experience with it.
Thanks for the kind words, and checking out the book here.
I'd written this piecemeal over the last year or so (originally a series of blog posts), and was happy to release it all for free in a single edition, and under CC.
I'll release an Edition 1.1 soon with some errata, adjustments. There's already a free PDF for the on-the-go -> https://gitperf.com/pdf.html
Regarding the cherry-picking of fragments of an LLM: of course an LLM (in fact several!) were used to stitch together those disparate blog posts into a more coherent whole. And they certainly left an imprint in places. Otherwise, as a solo writer with a full-time job putting together a 200-page book, I'd have to pay an editor, or work with O'Reilly (did this in 2010 on a Redis book; never again!); and perhaps the book wouldn't be free!
LLMs will continue to leave imprints in our work. Some words will, over time, be edited and whittled away. Other words, when the LLM writes well enough to convey a useful point, will be kept.
"some book some java dudes wrote 20 years ago" — If you're referring to "Design Patterns", the Gang of Four were writing about C++, it was 1994, and Java wasn't out yet.
The comparison with Torvalds is bizarre. Linus has done an enormous amount of self-promotion (warranted as it is), and even admits to having an ego the size of Joe's biceps. So I don't know what point you're trying to make there.
Next and most importantly. While you (a bastard love-child of Kernighan perhaps) may find this feature banal, a decent number of C programmers aren't familiar with this method; and if they are, they haven't done shit with it. So hating on someone for actually writing free code that makes a bunch of dev's lives easier is, well, just kinda jealous.
Lastly. If a comment like your comment, does, in fact, generate a large number of 'U Mad' replies -- well, that is strong evidence that you are, in fact, mad.
(btw, Joe is not 20 years old. "20" actually refers to the number of women Joe sleeps with in a typical night.)
An interesting point to consider: an author that goes out of their way to hide any LLM influence may actually be degrading the signal. Because in that case, you'll not see the LLM's etchings, and misattribute skill to the author under the belief an LLM was not involved. Complicated times.