alt Hacker NewsA few honest answers, since the criticisms are reasonable.
On the domain: I bought vivianvoss.net in early 2026 without doing the homework CrociDB has now done for me. I had no idea about the previous owner, nor do I particularly care to find out, no more than I would investigate the previous tenant of a flat I had just moved into. I am still cleaning up after her in the search index, which has been a slightly absurd part of the launch.
On the editorial process: I am a German native speaker. The book is written in German, then translated and stylistically polished into English by Claude Opus, with my voice as the target and a great deal of back-and-forth on tone, idiom and rhythm. To me this is a tool, no different in function from the editorial pass any publisher runs on a manuscript, which equally shapes the final work. Five months on the book, paragraph by paragraph: re-read, re-arranged, rewritten, corrected. Up to three hours every morning on a single LinkedIn post or blog entry. A normal editorial process, with a faster collaborator than most.
On C. Lechat (Claudine le chat, ne pète pas): a French reading of 'ChatGPT' where 'chat' becomes the cat, and the parenthetical promises she does not, well, fart. The visual character on LinkedIn began as a separate decision. Every IT illustration the image generators produced was male, and my LinkedIn analytics matched, the audience was almost entirely men. So I insisted on a female developer in the artwork, headphones included. Somewhere along the way she merged with the editorial voice in the book and became C. Lechat. The follower demographics did shift in the direction I had hoped, for what it is worth. The framing is described in the introductory pages of the book; if you only saw the Amazon look-inside sample, you missed that section maybe.
On the six-month emergence: I was seriously ill at the end of 2025, and something had to change, rather drastically. I decided that if I had things worth saying after well over thirty years of doing this, I should probably write them down before I was no longer in a position to. I also live with chronic migraine and have functional days only two or three a week, which is one reason the GitHub footprint looks the way it does. I am not running a credibility farm. I am writing on the days I can, and on the others I would rather be at the creek with the dog. The conversation with readers has turned into a kind of recovery in its own right; as a former code monkey one rarely got that level of substantive engagement, and it is part of what is putting me back on my feet.
One aside, in genuine astonishment rather than complaint: it is striking how multifaceted a picture of a stranger can be drawn from a WHOIS record, an Amazon sample and a GitHub page. I have read it with more curiosity than dismay, and learned things about myself in the process.
On the photograph, while we are at it: it is a passport snapshot put through Affinity's AI background removal, which subtly altered the rest of the picture. It is still me, just very slightly improved. I was never the vain type, but I have come round to it.
Slop in the AI-slop sense it is not. Heavily edited and translated, yes. Authored, structured, fact-checked and re-read line by line by a man in Germany having rather more fun with this than he had expected, also yes.
This is also my first book. I am not a practised author, though I do have an eye for typography and the visual side, which mattered to me from the start: it had to please me and, with luck, the reader. I am aware it cannot be flawless, which is why I have deliberately set it up as an open book, with an issue link where anyone can contribute corrections or refinements, by name or pseudonym, credited in the next edition. A more interactive book that improves from version to version, with the community.
If you would rather I answered in German, you are welcome to ask. You will then run my German through some translator with an LLM in the back end, without the five months of stylistic calibration this one has had. Otherwise I will keep answering in the form that sits closest to my German.
Now it is up to you to dig further and keep me on my toes. Ask away. One small request: stay fair.
Replies
Hi Vivian. Thanks for coming up and explaining things. I apologize if I sounded too harsh, because I really want to be fair here. But I do think we have to push for a more conscious content consuming in the era of highly capable LLMs. There is a threshold where I can't really tell anymore if something is pure AI Slop or AI assisted, as pretty much everything is and will be from this point on. And I think that having that critical thinking is important before spending 60~90 bucks on a book.
Whoever owned your domain 10 years prior is not important to this matter, I was just pointing it out that it was very likely not you.
> One aside, in genuine astonishment rather than complaint: it is striking how multifaceted a picture of a stranger can be drawn from a WHOIS record, an Amazon sample and a GitHub page. I have read it with more curiosity than dismay, and learned things about myself in the process.
Well, in my opinion that's your fault entirely. All your descriptions are rather vague on all your networks, which makes this whole thing more suspicious.
> Slop in the AI-slop sense it is not. Heavily edited and translated, yes. Authored, structured, fact-checked and re-read line by line by a man in Germany having rather more fun with this than he had expected, also yes.
Thanks for being transparent with this. I didn't find any mention of that before in your site, so that's good to know.
> Now it is up to you to dig further and keep me on my toes. Ask away. One small request: stay fair.
Once again, I want to be fair and this is nothing personal. I'm not digging any further either. I did change my original comment from "This is 100% AI Slop" to "This seems AI Slop" minutes after I posted it, because I want to acknowledge that I might be wrong.
However, I want you to take my comment more like the one from a possible costumer (after all, I have huge interest in the subject and that was what drove me to do it) who wanted to do some research on an author before spending $90 on their book. This is a platform for discussions, I also raised that concern so other could chime in.
Assuming this is all true, at least for me personally, the level of generative AI involvement here still puts me off the project completely.
Even if it is only translation, I am not interested in reading LLM output in the context of a book, and I would feel betrayed if I learned that the translation was machine-generated if I had purchased a copy.
For the amount you’re charging, you could have hired a human translator. Either way, just like with a book translated by a human, you should disclose that the actual words in the book were not written by you. “Author: Vivian Voss, Translated By: Claude Opus” or whatever.
I’m sure others feel differently, and you may find success among that crowd.