If I may ask, what stack do you use for the inline interactive elements and would you choose anything different after having done it this way?
I got about half way through, then I had 2 more kids. Then AI happened, and I started questioning the whether there was too much slop out there to bother writing a book.
I’ll still probably finish it when the new baby is a little older.
I skimmed various sections. I found the animations pleasant, the text readable, and the content clearly not slop.
The historical context of the telegraph was interesting, and the treatment of bandwidth vs. latency was thoughtful.
I think it’s too long; I don’t think many people who don’t already know most of this material will read it, but I enjoyed the parts I read. Nice work!
I actually like this post. It looks good, the explanations are clear, and the AI-generated animation widget actually helps me understand things. What's the problem exactly? Is using AI for visualization considered a bad practice?
Some people just assume that anything "AI" has touched is automatically "slop" because ... AI! Probably at least partly due to how much actual "AI slop" is out there produced by people "holding the tool wrong". When used judiciously and properly, some of these language models can really be a useful tool and help create some quality stuff, but they're no substitute for a knowledgable human using the tool correctly to achieve the desired result (which is why so many people who misuse it to do all their thinking and work for them (without doing any of their part) inevitably produce the typical "slop" result).
Put the visualization and a short explainer, then have additional content show up if the reader drills in.
I don't think there is anything wrong with the content being run through an LLM. Networking is crazy complicated.
https://fazamhd.com/mental-models/software/
That's 100+ pages of in-depth technical writing in a matter of days. Amazing, really amazing. Also, not something that a human can do.
And FWIW, Pangram classifies vast swathes of "your" article as entirely AI-generated. Yes, I know the tool is not perfect, but between your superhuman productivity, and all the subjective tells, and the output from that tool, it goes onto my mental "AI slop" pile.
What I can't understand is why people can't just own it that they used a chatbot and that it was more than just "for review".
At HN, there should be some tag explaining the project is vibe coded.
If the author can't be bothered to even clean up behind their AI its not worth reading even the first paragraph.
The term itself seems to have lost its real meaning however.