Perplexingly Book-Learned Emacs

Summary

As I was whining yesterday, it’s perplexingly difficult to find a (semi-)programmatic way of determining whether an author has written a new book. Or even manually in some cases. The best advice is, like, “Follow them on Goodreads” or something?But I wondered whether I could finally find something useful for an LLM to do? Sure, LLMs are plagiarism machines that use all of the world’s energy, but what can it do for me? So I signed up for the Perplexity AI, and an hour later:Yes, I’m a prompt engineer now.I’ve gotta give it to Perplexity — signing up for the API, adding some money and getting it to spew some data at me was totally painless. I created a little library called perplexity.el (and put it on Microsoft Github), but it’s totally trivial: It just does a url-retrieve request with some headers set, and you get JSON back.So in the screenshot above, it’s listing all the books by David Sedaris it knows about, and also helpfully what kind of book it is.That’s OK, and it’s of course trivial to just use that to list books that are newer than the last book I have from him. So I guess I could use this to automatically get all new books from the authors I’m interested in.I also did a variation where I asked “list all the books by this author, but exclude books on this list:”, and then list all the books I already have by this author.And as you can see, that, er, kinda changed what it’s outputting? Now it’s including a lots of plays that it didn’t before?Typically enough, LLMs give different answers every time I ask, so this isn’t, you know, data to be relied on in any way. Sure, it’d be better if it was actual data instead of hallucinations and LLM navel lint, but it’s better than nothing.The response times from Perplexity are all over the place — sometimes it responds within a couple seconds, and sometimes it takes a minute, but whatchagonnado.Let’s test another author:Amy Hempel. She’s awesome. I hit the m command (to list “missing” books), and:All those three are book...