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Defend what? That reading and listening are two different skills?

There are many reasons why someone might want to improve their reading, and the only solution to that is to practice reading.

Audiobooks are someone else's (i.e. not your) interpretation of a work. Kind of like how you might go watch a play or a movie instead of reading a script. There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but they're not reading.

Look, it’s fine if audiobooks don’t work for you, and it’s fine to let your readers know why.

Listening to an audiobook is not the same as reading a book.

The whole point of the article was how to read more books, not how to have someone read books to you.

If your blog posts are one sentence or less, then they're not blog posts

Yes, many times. For the few months it was in my local arcade I practically lived in the seat of the Crazy Taxi machine and got to be decent at it.

How to you estimate the 'time and skill' that went into the creation of a random piece of art?

You don't. Unless that's the kind of thing you're into, I guess.

Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?

You can't quantify art that way. People work at different speeds. I can appreciate that something took some number of hours without knowing the precise number of hours.

As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.

Maybe, but I'm not qualified to make that comparison. Both are beyond my level of artistic ability (I've never studied art nor practiced much). I don't know why one thing or artist gets more popular than another while another who's just as talented (or maybe even moreso) languishes in obscurity. Skill is a factor, sure, but there's no formula that I'm aware of.

What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'

Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"

Creating art, even via using something like Photoshop, is a skill that takes years of learning and practice to do well. Most people who appreciate art appreciate not only the art itself, but the time and skill that went into its creation.

When someone short-circuits the whole creative process by putting a prompt into a machine and having it spit out an art, there's nothing to appreciate.

I dislike this dramatization in reporting of mundane facts.

Okay, but this isn't a news article, it's an opinion piece on some guy's substack.

Text-based browsers are also great for just reading hypertext documents. I've been using a combination of a text-based rss reader and web browser to keep up with the sites I care about, and I can tear through my collection of articles pretty quickly

My house has a problem with little black ants that pest control services never could quite take care of. Spiders kept trying to set up shop near a window, but I would always knock the web down. Once I relented and let the spiders do their thing my ant problem went away. All I need to do is clean up a few ant corpses in the fall, which is a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

His homepage says that he likes memorizing things. There is utility in doing something you enjoy for the sake of it.

I disagree with a notion that a page needs to work without javascript. It is only design choice of author.

Sure, I guess, but if a site that's primarily text doesn't work without Javascript then that's a design failure. I sometimes use a browser like links2 because eliminating everything but text can sometimes help me focus. If the site displays nothing, I'm probably not going to bother reloading it in a different browser just so I can render the text.

(It's a nonissue for this site, which appears to render fine in links2.)

I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.

You can still do that right now. I highly recommend it.

Hey team! I find journaling for a fictive audience to be more effective personally; since it forces me to try digest my thoughts for an external listener.

Okay, but I don't understand the benefit of writing to an entirely fictitious AI construct instead of writing to the ideal of the kind of reader you'd eventually like to have.

I mean, I get that it's frustrating to pour effort into writing something that effectively nobody reads (i.e. you never connect with a wider audience), but engaging with an entirely fictitious audience seems hollow to me.

There's a notice in the bottom-left corner on desktop that says: "This is a machine-learning-derived product. Errors may occur"

If I'm just jotting down personal notes, I use a pen and a notepad. If I need to transcribe anything into my long-term notes, then I can do that at the end of the day/week/whatever, when I review what I wrote down.

Like it can't think or reason about something without writing it out first.

LLM's neither think nor reason at all.

I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it.

RSS subscriptions aren't like Pokemon. You don't have to catch them all. One of the major selling points of RSS is that you can subscribe to sites that update infrequently so you get notified when they have a new update instead of checking the site manually and being disappointed that it hasn't updated in three weeks or whatever.

Adding a bunch of sites that update hundreds of times a day is a great way to DDOS your own attention span

over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble

Unless you're on a bunch of mailing lists, I can't even fathom having that much email, much less that much unread email. I'm fanatical about making sure that I'm at inbox zero as much as possible because the 'unread' counter is the enemy. It takes some effort to set up and adjust filters and actually unsubscribe from stuff, but it's completely worth it to have a mailbox that's actually usable.

I pronounce every one of those letters, to varying degrees

That must be fun any time you talk about Worcestershire (the sauce or the place).

I'm also glad I overbought RAM when I did my last PC upgrade in January, because who knows when I'll be able to do that again.

The 96GB kit I bought (which was more than I needed) was $165. I ended up buying another 96GB kit in June when I saw the price went up to $180 to max out my machine, even though I didn't really need it, but I was concerned where prices were going.

That same kit was $600 a month ago, and is $930 today. The entire rest of the computer didn't cost that much

You're doing the thing I described: assuming it's all ultimately about personal benefit when they're telling you directly that it's not.

It doesn't matter how much astroturf I read, I can see what's happening with my own eyes.

The grievance is moral, not utilitarian.

Nope, it's both.

Businesses have no morals. (Most) people do. Everything that a business does is in service of the bottom line. They aren't pushing AI everywhere out of some desire to help humanity, they're doing it because they sunk a lot of resources into it and are trying to force an ROI.

There are a lot of people who have fully bought in to AI and think that it's more capable than it is. We just had a thread the other day where someone was using AI to vibe code an app, but managed to accidentally tell the LLM to delete the contents of his hard drive.

AI apologists insist that AI agents are a vital tool for doing more faster and handwave any criticism. It doesn't matter that AI agents consume an obscene amount of resources to do it, or that pretend developers are using it to write code they don't understand and can't test that they're shoving into production anyway. That's all fine because a loud fraction of senior developers are using it to bypass the 'boring parts' of writing programs to focus on the interesting bits.

It's not about their careers.

That's the thing, though, it is about their careers.

It's not just that people are annoyed that someone who spends years to decades learning their craft and then someone who put a prompt into a chatbot that spit out an app that mostly works without understanding any of the code that they 'wrote'.

It's that the executives are positively giddy at the prospect that they can get rid of some number their employees and the rest will use AI bots to pick up the slack. Humans need things like a desk and dental insurance and they fall unconscious for several hours every night. AI agents don't have to take lunch breaks or attend funerals or anything.

Most employees that have figured this out resent AI getting shoved into every facet of their jobs because they know exactly what the end goal is: that lots of jobs are going to be going away and nothing is going to replace them. And then what?

Pronouncing every single letter.

Now I want to know how you pronounce words like: through, bivouac, and queue.

I'm talking about managing two certificates so I can share a static site with a handful of friends. Each one takes about 10 minutes a year to update.

Adding automation means I have to set up a process that I have to check up on at least once every 6.5 weeks to make sure it's still working.

It's not about having time, it's about making time.

One thing that helps me is to actually schedule time to do the cool, fun stuff, put it on my calendar and treat that appointment as inviolable as missing work. Because it is work, and eventually it will become a habit.

I also recently read Time Management for System Administrators which has some other helpful suggestions: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/time-management-for/059...

the point is to force companies to automate renewal

Cool. I'm a small-time webmaster with a couple of hobby sites with no more than a handful of visitors. Why do I need to set up automation to renew certs every 45 days, too?

The reality is that it was told to run commands and just made a mistake.

The mistake is that the user gave an LLM access to the rmdir command on a drive with important data on it and either didn't look at the rmdir command before it was executed to see what it would do, or did look at it and didn't understand what it was going to do.

the main reason I liked computers was because we were all equals on the internet

You must have had access to a different internet than I did. That is not and has never been true.

The only way for everyone to be 'equal on the internet' (whatever that means) is to throw away or disregard everything that makes each of us unique, and all that leaves us with is a homogeneous beige sludge.

It's hard to describe the experience now, but Slashdot in the early 2000's was more of a community disguised as a tech blog. Sure the editors selected the stories from the queue, but everyone had a chance to submit something they thought was interesting, and then comment on what got through. Even the site editors would regularly participate in the discussions, and I got the feeling that everyone there (except maybe the trolls) were passionate about technology. It was easy to spend an entire day just going back and forth with someone in the comment sections about whatever the controversy of the day was. It was magical.

Once CmdrTaco sold the site to Dice, they tried to turn it into a business intelligence/job board, which turned off a lot of long-time users (they also tried a site redesign that was functionally useless and had to abandon it after a lot of complaining). Then Dice got tired of it and BizX bought it to add to their trophy case, but haven't done anything meaningful with it. The site has been on autopilot since the acquisition. The 'editors' are faceless interchangeable usernames who just load up a bunch of stories from the queue and let them auto-post throughout the day and almost never show up in the comment threads. The 'community' is barely there, most discussions get less than 50 comments. They turned off anonymous coward posting (unless you're logged in). The user poll hasn't been updated since April. And so on. It also didn't help that Hacker News came along and ate most of their lunch.

Basically, slashdot was hollowed out and the shell is all that's left. But the new owner can put 'COO of Slashdot Media' on his LinkedIn page, which is probably the most important thing.