[bambax]

The complaint that too many books are being written and that most of them are useless nonsense is indeed as old as time -- or at least, as old as books.

Montaigne (1533-1592) famously said il y devroit avoir quelque coerction des loix contre les escrivains ineptes et inutiles ("there should be laws against stupid and useless writers").

This was about just a hundred years after the invention of the printing press.

[jakderrida]

I remember wondering what books on the stock market would have been like before like the 50s as a curiosity. I've taken 2 CFA exams and have a Finance degree and noticed that none of the major concepts introduced seem to go back further than the 70s and market was definitely older than that.

So I searched on Google Books and limited the timeline... What I found were the pretentious ramblings of an old man that thought way too highly of himself for getting lucky at a time that a little luck could make you a fortune to last a lifetime. He wrote a bunch of books on the market. It was like 1910s or something. They were so worthless, but I did find them hilarious to read.

[djkivi]

Here's a couple of well known ones. Not sure if they were what you found:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscences_of_a_Stock_Opera...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor

[jakderrida]

Nah, those are different. Especially the second one. lmao. It also happened to have few sales till a bit later on. I think my goal back then was to see what someone would find if they were just trying to learn about it at the library. Reason why is because the ROI using the Fama-French data back then would suggest someone could have rapidly become a millionaire and billionaire off of a thousand dollars if they performed even the most basic value investing formula back then to bifurcate the market or, better yet, divide it into deciles based on (book equity)/(market equity). Only in the past 10 years, you'd actually underperform the market return.

So, considering a very simple formula could have been so effective, I wondered what they'd find at the library and if even that simple concept would have been available. What wouldn't be available is SEC data. But, as your second suggestion made clear, you could get the information for ratings agencies.

[jterrys]

I mean, comparatively speaking you were looking for programming books in an era where hardly anyone even knew what a computer was. The market changed so drastically at the turn of the century that it really only shaped into our current recognizable form in the 50s and 60s. There's many reasons for that.

[jakderrida]

To be clear, I expected NOT to find anything that would help accomplish that task. Because the vast opportunities would imply it didn't exist. So, yeah, what I expected to find is crap and what I found was hilarious crap. The dude did have a way with words, though. It's just hilarious how pretentious the books were considering they didn't really impart any useful knowledge.

[yencabulator]

GenAI is not making a qualitative change in spam & junk content, it's making a quantitative change. Previously, you had to wade through some noise to get to the signal, but with everyone making scammy content with genAI you'll have to wade through 100x noise to find the 1x signal.

Just like existence of email didn't create the concept of spam, it just made sending it much, much, cheaper.