This website needed an about page, I asked ChatGPT to write one. The first attempt was too upbeat, so I asked for it with a more cynical British tone.
This is the result.
So, you've stumbled upon my little corner of the internet—a concept-tracking website, if you will. Chuffed to bits? Well, you should be. This platform aims to catalog those topics that somehow seem to crop up in every other non-fiction book, as if there's a memo going around telling authors what to write about.
You know how you'll read a dozen books and realise they're all harping on about the same old topics? Moore's Law here, 'Pareto Distribution' there, and let's not even get started on 'Effective Altruism.' As a relentless consumer of non-fiction, even I've had my fill of déjà vu. So I thought, why not lump these repetitive pearls of wisdom together and make it easier for the rest of us to roll our eyes in unison? Thus, this website was born.
I've fed the text of an eye-watering number of non-fiction books—6,000 and counting—into a Solr search engine. When one of these overly familiar topics catches my eye, I stash the relevant search results in a PostgreSQL database. Why? Because life's too short to keep reinventing the wheel. And, for the record, I've hoarded snippets on a rather staggering 2,238 concepts so far.
For each beaten-to-death topic, you'll find thumbnails of book covers, so you'll know exactly which books to avoid—or embrace, depending on your level of masochism. Whether you're a professor, a dilettante, or just someone with too much time on their hands, you might find something here that tickles your fancy.
For those of you who enjoy this sort of thing, the site's been cobbled together with Python and some of its sidekicks: Flask, SQLAlchemy, lxml, and Jinja2. Don't know what those are? Frankly, you're not missing much.
Browse at will, but don't say I didn't warn you. If you're lucky, you might discover a topic so overdone that it wraps around to being interesting again.
Enjoy, or don't. Your call.