Similarly, I purchased a copy of "Bosch Automotive Handbook" [1]. For $65 it will literally walk you through every component of a vehicle, from the metals required, the fuel, to the electronics. It's presence on my bookshelf is meant to be aspirational.
If you're looking to be inspired to take the plunge into car repair, check out M359 Restorations YouTube channel[0]. It's a one-man shop in Frankfurt that specializes in BMW restorations. It's a good look into what it takes to do projects like this well: the tools, the space, the knowledge of the secondary market and parts suppliers, and when/how to repair a component rather than buying a new one. He does use repair manuals for some things, especially engine rebuilds, but a lot of what he does is based on "what looks right" to a person doing this for the last 10-15 years.
As a beginner looking to start with minimal infrastructure, he does some of his restorations outside his shop, often in borrowed personal garages of subscribers. Project Salt Lake City is a good example [1]. For someone looking to do a more advanced repair (arguably the most advanced possible) there are some good engine rebuilding videos, especially with Project Frankfurt[2].
One thing I find surprising is that he still uses a lot of 3rd party services. AC dis/charging, wheel alignment, tire mounting and balancing, dynamo measurement, block reconditioning, head and supercharger refreshes, and even car detailing (which he seems to be actively trying to avoid doing despite his instincts because it is a huge time sink). He is a dynamic, adaptable node in a fascinating, specialized capital network.
M359 Restorations is an absolutely fantastic channel, arguably the best car restoration channel on YouTube.
I also recommend ChrisFix, especially for new DIY driveway mechanics as the videos tend to be more general tutorials using hand tools (e.g. "how to do an oil change", "how to replace brake discs + pads").
I’m a fan of Vice Grip Garage for the everyday person. He routinely arrives to a broken down vehicle, performs on-site diagnostics and repairs, and then attempts to drive the vehicle 600+ miles back to his workshop. He has a hilarious wit and is quite knowledgeable, and he doesn’t really use fancy tools, techniques, or terminology, so it’s quite approachable and understandable for non-experts.
I really enjoyed John Muir pubs like How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. They are available for a handful of vehicles (the Subaru one is a favorite of mine). Available at a used bookshop or new.
Great drawings, useful for non-motor-heads. The Sub version has info like resuscitating a drowned lizard :)
Avoid if You hate R. Crumb style drawings and hippies.
Try entering 1566913101 as the search in Amazon, currently USD23.00
Edit, adding: you don't need a specific one to gain great knowledge.
Pretty sure my dad still has his. I still have memories of his working on our microbus at the time, back in the early '70s. Don't think I was even five, yet, but I remember lying underneath the thing with him, watching while he worked on the brakes(?). And another time, he and Mom working a couple of jacks to pull out the engine.
Yeah, that copy earned its keep. Think it still has some of the grime...
What about learning more about something you already own and use? It would give you an opportunity to have a more hands on, real world experience and if it does break you can fix it?
Thanks! Looks like a great book, and it's on libgen (11E). However, the English is positively atrocious. The next edition would be wise to invest in a competent editor. Very first page:
The International Convention on Road Signs and Signals [1] defines a motor or power-driven vehicle as a self-propelled road vehicle. Rail-borne vehicles and country-specifically mopeds which are not treated as motorcycles are exceptions. A second definition in this convention limits the term motor vehicle to those vehicles which are used for carrying persons or goods or for drawing on the road vehicles used for the carriage or persons or goods.
"Country-specifically" -> "jurisdiction-specific definitions of mopeds".
"in this convention" -> "in the convention"
"the term motor vehicle" -> "the term 'motor vehicle'"
The final sentence makes no sense to me and is certainly missing a comma.
A second definition in this convention limits the term motor vehicle to those vehicles which are used for carrying persons or goods, or for drawing on-the-road vehicles used for the carriage of [not or] persons or goods.
> For one thing, my kids were increasingly being asked to "do research" for their school projects. As far as I could tell, this meant just Googling materials, copying and pasting what they found, stealing photos on the internet, and generally neither digesting nor evaluating anything that popped up in search results.
The degree to which my children's teachers actively don't care about this is hard to overstate. I was able to trivially catch this by googling phrases from papers my daughter had "written" and when I showed it to her English teacher the response was roughly: "Yeah, it sucks that all kids are doing that these days."
Saw the same daughter doing homework by using C-f to search the textbook for keywords in the question and pasting the answer. Sometimes this yielded nonsensical answers because the keywords appeared in multiple places. She got a high A in that class (including perfect scores on the homework).
> asked to "do research" for their school projects
What is the educational goal of such an assignment?
Certainly researchers and graduate students need to perform literature searches to understand the state of the art (as well as the research frontier) and also to uncover related work (so-called "novelty" being important for publication, etc.)
But for most of K-12, isn't the subject matter fairly well established and written up in a more useful, tutorial format, in textbooks?
I suppose there could be exceptions, perhaps current events or popular culture, or maybe developments in particularly fast-moving fields. But in this case I think students would be well served by a curated collection of sources rather than being cast off in the deep end without guidance. If the goal is to expose students to primary sources (which can be very interesting) I think a curated collection would also work well.
Encyclopedias are great though, for both random and focused reading. Both subject-based and alphabetic organization can be good for browsing and discovery.
Sure, the subject matter is in the textbook, but that's not necessarily the only thing being taught—research skills (source evaluation, comparison, synthesis, etc.) also need to (or should) be taught at some point. And teaching material in multiple ways (and having student participation) is beneficial for learning and retention.
Now some parts of the case mentioned above obviously aren't great, but there are absolutely good justifications for this from an educational perspective.
As you suggest with source evaluation, there is something to be said for trying to teach some methods of verifying whether something is true (for some definition of "true") including methods for assessing (to some extent) the accuracy of various sources of information, finding information that may have been omitted, identifying underlying assumptions and viewpoints, etc.
Unfortunately, as dang has noted, fact checkers tend to find facts that support their position and to ignore or discredit those that do not. It's even a problem for scientists and researchers.
I still like the idea of a curated collection of sources.
When I was growing up, my family always had World Book Encyclopedias. My grandfather was a salesman for them (and later a regional sales manager), so he always made sure we had a relatively recent complete set.
I would spend hours and hours on some nights, just reading through the books. They fascinated me.
By the time I was in sixth grade, I was reading at college level. The teachers didn’t know what to do with me. One time that year, I took Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy as my subject for a book report. I couldn’t understand why the other kids and the teachers didn’t feel the same way about those books.
By the time I was in high school, the dedicated bookcase for them got moved into my bedroom. I was well above average for my academic performance in high school.
In college, I helped pay my way through school by working at the main library on campus, shelving books and various other tasks. I ended up working there for over five years, as I took a lighter class load to try to help keep my grades up. And I was on the Dean’s List, with a GPA above 3.5, etc….
Encyclopedias taught me how to read, and how to study, and how to organize my writing.
I think I probably owe much of who and what I am today, to those encyclopedias.
Some teachers are spectacularly ignorant about internet things too; my students were given urls for movie editing on PCs and Macs. For the Mac the link for iMovie was not the Apple store but something like coolapps.ru.cn.cx/blah.
> Some teachers are spectacularly ignorant about internet things too
Nothing new; I remember when I was in high school, my geography teacher asked me if another student had plagiarised his assignment-she wasn’t sure, so she decided to ask the class “computer whiz”. He’d literally printed out Microsoft Encarta’s article on marijuana, stuck it to a piece of green cardboard, and used a green highlighter to colour in the photo of a marijuana leaf (he’d printed the article in black and white). He didn’t even bother to remove the “Copyright Microsoft Corporation” from the end of it, and yet still she was asking me whether or not it was plagiarised.
> At first they lived near a cemetery, and Mencius amused himself with acting the various scenes which he witnessed at the tombs. “This,” said the lady, “is no place for my son;”—and she removed to a house in the market-place. But the change was no improvement. The boy took to playing the part of a salesman, vaunting his wares, and chaffering with customers. His mother sought a new house, and found one at last close by a public school. There her child’s attention was taken with the various exercises of politeness which the scholars were taught, and he endeavoured to imitate them. The mother was satisfied. “This,” she said, “is the proper place for my son.”
Southern California. I'd estimate the median household income at my kid's elementary school (which is the most local) to be over $200k. The public secondary schools cover the entire area, so are more economically diverse.
People can have many different priorities. In some affluent neighbourhoods, the priority is McMansions and cars; in others, the golf course and its dues; or a marina; or bridle paths[0] and a covered jumping ring.[1]
In other neighbourhoods —maybe (perhaps often?) not so affluent— the priority is education, and people tend to move there with either the explicit or implicit idea that in paying a premium for their house, they are helping to guarantee that the parents[2] of their children's likely friends, having paid a similar premium, also value education.
Maybe things have changed; I haven't been in the Old Country for a couple of decades, but in the XX the easy way to spot "the good district" was that all the real estate ads (by way of explaining the premium on the ask) explicitly mentioned "${DISTRICT} schools".
[0] the least interested person in her children's education I knew was a horsy friend, but even she hoped, that upon finishing their senior year and should they have learned nothing else, her children would be capable of reading and understanding a contract.
[1] southern california examples, which may be horribly dated (cf supra): Thousand Oaks, Westwood, Newport Beach, Rancho Mission Viejo
That's the same thought I had --- if humans are doing no better than LLMs, it won't be long before they'll be replaced with one. I've seen many similar instances with much older humans (adults), unfortunately.
This article reminded me that many years ago I used to make PDF compilations of related Wikipedia articles using some tooling developed by PediaPress, and then read those offline on my laptop or iPad. I recently encountered one such compilation of cryptography & security related articles in my EBooks folder, and noticed the PediaPress metadata on the PDF. Apparently PediaPress is still around, and its tooling is still open source:
I also Google'd around a bit on this topic and it looks like there is an alternative set of tooling, wiki2book, focused on doing the same thing, but generating EPUBs that look good on e-reader devices. It also smartly doesn't require a modified/extended MediaWiki server, handling the quirks of the live Wikipedia instance specifically. Here is the info on that:
I used to take advantage of the browser's "work offline" functionality. This started to work less and less reliably, even by the early 2000s, but Wikipedia still worked nicely. I would dial up at night when everyone was asleep and click through to all the pages surrounding some topic, like internal combustion engines. Then the next day I'd work offline and digest it all. I was sad when I clicked a link that hadn't been cached, but somehow having only the limited amount available meant I actually did read it all. Nowadays it's all available and lots of people don't seem to read anything ever. Sigh...
There is an app for Android called Kiwix that lets you download the whole of Wikipedia for viewing offline. I keep meaning to do it but never got around to it, though.
On Android, the official Wikipedia app is surprisingly good at marking articles for offline reading, organizing them into collections, and downloading them, including related assets like images. When I'm traveling I install the app on my "travel phone" (which is Android / Google Fi) and take advantage of it along with Kindle app offline reading for Lonely Planet guides, and the Google Maps offline maps feature.
Instead of maps.me I suggest to use https://organicmaps.app/, the privacy-respecting fork, since maps.me was sold to a payment processor. OrganicMaps is a fork from the original founders.
Try Kiwix. It's an offline reader, you can download the entire English-language Wikipedia, complete with media, in about 100GB. They also have a bunch of other collections like Project Gutenberg. There are also less heavy subsets.
> We had just bought an emulator to teach them to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? They loved it, but wanted to quickly look up clues --- quick, he drove off in a car with a blue and yellow flag! And which country uses pesos?
Conversely, I spent years convincing my parents to buy a computer precisely so I could read Wikipedia. It was pretty much my main hobby between the ages of 14 and 16.
Wikipedia is one of the major positive use cases for the internet*.
As long as they can keep up with curation, that is.
Paper encyclopedias may be fun, but let's point out that he bought one for the kids to play a 20 year old game in an emulator. So they only need information from 20 years ago.
I did this too. I bought the 2021 version of World Book, specifically. When my kids ask questions, we use the encyclopedia to find the answer. My oldest taught me how to use the subject index. It fits in two milk crates. I find it comforting, as I grew up with a set, too. Except, the set I had growing up was much older.
Before my younger daughter headed off to college, I put her through a mini library studies class. It was designed to teach her how to identify authors with different positions on a topic, write summaries, and write brief analyses. It was very loosely based on a required prep school class I took in the early 1980s. She absolutely hated it. Not sure how much good it did her given her lack of interest in the lessons.
To this day I am grateful I had to take the library studies class. And while I was not the biggest fan of Mr. Hickock, he helped prepare me to learn better. We spent a ton o' time using encyclopedias and the card catalogue.
I am a huge fan of printed books. There's nothing quite like them and they almost magical way they work.
I'm curious, did you explain to your daughter why you were putting her through it, like you've described it here? If I don't sufficiently understand the "why", the task becomes a chore.
I did explain it. She didn't understand before but by the end, with some reinforcing chats with librarians, she understood.
The why: Knowing how to research and assess points of view, axes to grind, etc. is essential for the kinds of college work she was going to be doing. And, it would help her in life.
Thankfully it's nice to know that someone knows how important encyclopedias are and how much prior knowledge is taken for granted as the basis for a functioning society. Consumerism has become so accustomed to acquiring new goods and ideas that it is almost losing its ability to retain the very knowledge of intelligible information-sifting capability. People are not able to think critically to pass down the value of doing so, to tell whether a flood of AI non-sense is real, and no longer knows what to think, because the new products aren't encouraging that at all. I have read that AI is creating a selective pressure, but there's so much a human can do against millions of bots.
I still have my 1979 World Book set (plus the 1980 Year Book!). I part-exchanged a 1952 set I'd inherited from an older cousin - many of the articles hadn't changed in the interim.
It still serves as an excellent stabilizer for a set of freestanding bookselves.
> (They are still expensive, so I recommend second-hand purchases. Many libraries still refresh their volumes every few years, putting older ones up on eBay).
If you actually can't afford one, I wholeheartedly endorse this. But if you can afford a new set, please buy a new set. They only still print them because a minimum number of people buy them new. I can't imagine this will last forever, so, support World Book.
I recently purchased a Britannica 15th Edition 32 Volume Complete from a yard sale. I'm not a doomsayer so to speak but if the grid ever gets hit with a big enough solar flare, I'll have plenty to read.
I have a two or three volume encyclopaedia-like work from the XIX that, as far as I can tell, was directed to factory owners. Its articles cover things like roofing that lets in natural light, how best to build private rail spurs into your factory, or even cheap and cheerful ways to provide worker housing in your company town, etc. etc.
Supplement that with The Chemical Rubber Company Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulas, for when we don't even have digital computers! We shall rise again!
The timelines for encyclopaedia article contributions, editing and publishing are such that I highly doubt that an encyclopaedia bought in 2024 has much if any LLM generated content.
I wouldn't want to make that bet for an encyclopaedia published in 2027 though.
This is funny to me because the value of buying physical books is enhanced by the fact that publishers and authors have strong incentives to fact check what they put out. GP thinks this means little protection against LLM slop. While another commenter claims they think physical publications are too slow to keep up with current rates of change.
Two opposite and equally nonsensical reasons to dismiss physical books. The more confused people get the higher the value of clarity of mind.
Knowledge of and use of AI tools in non-tech industries is still pretty low. I wouldn’t expect a publisher of encyclopedias to implement AI tools for years.
Publishing an encyclopedia is a considerably more lengthy process than publishing papers in journals.
I also don't think you actually read the articles you linked to. The first one says that the publisher is planning on using AI, it doesn't say that they have already. As I said in the initial comment:
> I wouldn’t expect a publisher of encyclopedias to implement AI tools for years.
Meaning, an encyclopedia bought today won't be using these tools. Which is what the grandfather comment was about.
My interest in Wiley is that my late uncle helped them to "go digital" decades ago, and remained remotely as a proofreader, editor and fact-checker for physics titles. He would be spinning in his grave if he weren't cremated. Honestly depressing to see it happen.
Ten bucks says there's LLM-generated content in encyclopedias today because LLMs have been mainstream for a few years now, and even prominent scientists and experts have been caught out "writing" with LLMs.
Why wouldn't there be LLM-generated content in encyclopedias today if it's been (ab)used for several years now? Seems a little naive, especially when even Wiley (wow) is openly embracing AI now with a sudden heelturn.
Again, because publishing to an online-only journal is not the same as publishing a paper encyclopedia. The former has far, far less resources required and processes required in order to publish it. The journals shut down were not particularly well-regarded ones and they were known as paper mills prior to them using AI. The Dummies series is hardly a paragon of excellence either.
As I said, I wouldn't be surprised if these companies start using LLMs in the near future, but as I said in another comment, I think the average tech person vastly overestimates how much the average person keeps up-to-date on the latest LLM developments. They also tend to overhype how much society will be transformed by tech, largely because getting VC dollars depends on that hype.
These things are still in their infancy and I'd expect them to be used soon, but the people running encyclopedias are not so up-to-date on the latest LLM developments to have already incorporated them into publications planned years ago.
I don’t think that’s true. Traditional publishing is much more time consuming and expensive and doesn’t have the instant publishing model that online journalism does.
In general tech workers on HN tend to overestimate how familiar with technology non-tech workers are.
That's my intention too. As soon as we're done moving houses, I will buy the latest print edition of the French Encyclopædia Universalis, from 2012.
A childhood memory I have is that my friends who had one at home had a much easier time doing their homework. I had to go to the library, and was never sure to find information on the topic I was looking for, whereas they had everything at their fingertips.
(Thinking back, I'm not sure why the library did not have an encyclopedia...)
> Thinking back, I'm not sure why the library did not have an encyclopedia...
Different libraries often have very different collections, depending on the community they're serving.
A university library might have 10 copies of the same undergraduate introductory physics textbook, a copy of a few dozen other undergraduate introductory physics textbooks, and a load of more advanced texts in the same area.
A community library might have a large selection of children's books and romance novels, crime novels, mystery novels, some popular science, audio books, travel guides, local history, but no college-level physics books.
A high school library might have plenty of young-adult novels and high-school-level textbooks, but no children's books or advanced physics texts.
Perhaps you were in a community library and they didn't get many kids doing homework?
(Of course, libraries can almost always get any book you ask for on inter-library loan so that community or high-school library could get an advanced physics textbook if someone asked for one)
USA is deeply different. Looks like antigeneralizationism.
I live in Spain and I lived in Limerick and libraries are mostly similar, both university and municipal ones.
Do your municipal libraries carry journals? I can't imagine how that works.
In Canada, neighborhood libraries are a tiny fraction of the size of university research libraries, so they can't possibly carry anything remotely approximating the content of a university research library.
We do have a central public library, with perhaps a million odd books, but is not a replacement for research library in any sense, and isn't intended to be one. Compare that to the library in my alma mater university which contained about 2.5 million books.
For what it's worth, for most of my life, I've had the option of visiting my local university library so that I could crawl through the shelves looking for particular journal articles, or searching through the 3 feet of shelves on other side of a relevant book that I found in the card stacks. Sadly, that's no longer the case. The vast majority of content in modern university libraries is now available only in digital form, accessible through terminals that are not usable by members of the public, which provide access to otherwise-paywalled journals. And the last time I visited my local university library, they no longer allowed members of the general public to enter. For most of the my lifetime, one of the conditions of government funding for university libraries was that they had to provide at least limited access to the general public. I'm not sure what happened.
Thankfully, there are now other ways to access research material. Pre-prints are often available, and open-access journals are increasingly prevalent. And for those that are desperate, there are, of course, various dubiously legal sources.
That is very strange. Local libraries subscribe to Elsevier journals, for example? What would be the point in that? If not, then they are not similar, since that’s the main purpose of a university library
Maybe they wanted you to search for the purpose of learning how to search for information. To be honest, this would make sense, but I suspect the real answer is something stupid that doesn't make sense
Completely agree with the author of the article; the excess of screens added to the rise of generative AI is leading to a generation without critical thinking. For some time, I have been discussing with my family and friends about the resurgence of encyclopedias, reliable sources of information commonly accepted by everyone.
But people don't understand what I'm talking about; they are so used to the pre-digested information from traditional media that they don't question how much truth there is in a news story. The funny thing about this is that a couple of years ago I contacted a very prestigious publisher in my country to ask for information on how to get their encyclopedia, and well, the salesperson almost treated me like I was crazy.
Anyway, let's see what this new rise of AI brings, and I'll keep trying to find an encyclopedia XD.
I grew up in a no internet home. I learned so much from the 2001 set of World Book my parents bought. I'm confident I read every single page in the whole set.
I read the entire thing, and I'm still not sure why he bought an encyclopedia. It seems like the stated main reason is so he can talk to his kids about how different sources are written and constructed. A noble goal, but it seems like a paper encyclopedia is pretty incidental to that goal.
Quite frankly, it seems like the real reason is the author has nostalgia for his encyclopedia growing up, and wants his kids to experience what he experienced as a child.
Our information literacy project must start somewhere, preferably far enough from the meandering blather of generative systems that when we encounter them, we have the tools under our belt to evaluate their results.
And that, ultimately, is why I bought an Encyclopedia.
But at the start of the article he claims his kids are getting information from wikipedia and youtube videos. Neither of which are generative AI (well i guess it depends which youtube video).
So he bought an encyclopedia to prevent his kids from using generative AI even though they weren't using it in the first place? It makes no sense.
You don't think Wikipedia isn't being inundated with LLM-generated shite? And you haven't seen the AI-generated slop on YT with fake voices reading bunk info over slideshows?
Agreed. I think at one point I either saw that you could get an offline kindle-esque Wikipedia device or I contemplated what it would take to make one and saw it wouldn't be terrible. If I didn't hallucinate that product I'd expect it to be the better answer. The world changes so rapidly (unless all you need to know is stuff from an old game) that I don't ever consider using printed materials as reference anymore.
Yes, there was at least one physical Wikipedia device (the Wikireader, released in 2009 and discontinued in 2014), but these days a more practical solution is to put an offline Wikipedia app like Kiwix on an old phone.
One of Kiwix subprojects is a Raspberry Pi image creator. Once set up, it acts as a simple server you can connect to over WiFi with any device that has a web browser (and Kiwix serves pretty basic HTML so even very old stuff works fine).
This article is mostly fluff. There's garbage in encyclopaedias as well and little possibility of finding errata. It also teaches the kids that you should trust one canonical source of information, which is bad.
Teaching kids to run down citations when they need more detailed information more than makes up for possible shortcomings of Wikipedia (if any, in actual practice). The greatest value of Wikipedia is that it is a launching point. That wasn't an option with our family copy of the World Book Encyclopedia. And Brittanica isn't really any better.
"Though anti-Semitism has been unmasked and discredited, it is to be feared that its history is not yet at an end."[2]
That's just a quote mine. If you read the whole article [1] It mentions other times where antisemitism was regarded as a "ephemeral craze" which later entered mainstream politics and agitation (duels between antisemites and jews and mob violence). It mentions revivals of organized antisemitism as recently as 1907. Nobody would read this article and come away with the impression that antisemitism was "a passing phase in the history of culture" unless they were talking about a thousand years in the future.
Furthermore the entire article is extremely biased in the jews' favor (particularly noticeable when the article glosses over widespread investment banking fraud but calls antisemitism a "barbarian movement" and calls out popular antisemites by name and accuses them of fraud and having "evil notoriety". You also have the fact that most readers would consider Europe in the late 1800s to be more or less the same enlightened and liberal continent as it is now. So that particular section about antisemitism being a passing fad is just wishful thinking which would be picked up by most readers.
Also it's well known that you can't predict the future, to my knowledge the 11th doesn't predict WW1 which is generally considered as being influential in the rise of the Nazis. People buy encyclopedias for their information not as an oracle.
https://www.sae.org/publications/books/content/bosch10/