Promise of AI: All text will be generated
Result: No text will be read by anyone except AI
What's happening to reading?
111–120 of 334 posts
Re: What's happening to reading?
#112I don't begrudge them their ability to make a living, but it is a bit ironic that I can't read an article about reading without a subscription or archival service. I get that isn't really the point of the article, but I do think that news/magazines inability to find a way to successfully move beyond the heavily subsidized advertising-supported model (and so the current clunky experience in general) cannot help inspire more people to read. Not claiming it actively reduces readers as a whole, just that it's one less avenue for increasing the desire to do so.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#113From the article: "About midway through my graduate program, I had to sit for a general exam—an hours-long cross-examination conducted by three professors. The exam was based on a reading list, distributed a year in advance, that spanned nearly the whole of English literature, from Beowulf to “Beloved,” and included items like “Joyce, Ulysses,” and “Yeats, Poems.” I read day and night; to persevere without eyestrain, I had to buy a special lamp, and a magnifying glass on a stand."
And get off my lawn.
Actually, young people are writing more. Before the Internet, many people out of school never again wrote a full paragraph. Now they write a few every day.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like it “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizz…
It's moderately dense literature, as muddy and gloomy as the portrayal of london, but I would expect the majority of people to be able to read this?
The study itself [1] contains transcript fragments of students talking through what they think the passage means.
In fact I feel I should remind you before you start reading it, even though the study also starts with this, that the subject of this study is not the population at large but specifically English majors in college. Not the most elite colleges, but still, I expect better. In the normative sense of "expect", not the descriptive sense... I'm well aware my expectations grossly exceed the reality, but I'm not moving them.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
there was software called Copernic Summarizer ~25 years ago that was so useful for taking huge articles and condensing them into a paragraph. I have no idea how it worked. At some point i lost access to several pieces of software i bought in that era, also including ambrosia software's catalog which i had purchased. I think i lost my gte email address or something, can hardly remember. I haven't used chatgpt (or what…
They also had Copernic desktop search which was really good until they enshittified it slowly.
thankfully "everything.exe" is everything i need. not affiliated, it's just really nice on windows. On linux, mlocate and the like are fine, although i find myself doing a `find / -name foo` most often. I don't use Mac, but i have an understanding that spotlight/sherlock or whatever isn't as good as it was in the past.
Someday i'll actually put all my documents into a document database so i can search stuff inside the documents. Did Copernic desktop search do that? Windows ~98 could; it was real slow back then. I have so many "documents" that even if windows still allows searching within files (it probably does) i reckon it'd kill my hard drives eventually.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#116did they really just paywall an article about how nobody reads things anymore?
Re: What's happening to reading?
#117I haven't read the story yet, but found it ironic that when I went to the site, a story about reading was locked behind a paywall that managed to leave the audio version of the story available to listen to instead.
There are few youtube channels where host reads lot of publications on a particular current topic and gives his opinion summarizing the articles. This way news publications don't get monetary benefits but the youtube channel does. People who are just lazy to read will invariably gravitate to such methods of consuming news. I remember there was an article where one account was shared among the whole institution. It's…
I don't see how they can crack down on this. Summaries don't infringe copyright, from what I can tell.
Re: What's happening to reading?
#118tldr
Re: What's happening to reading?
#119"There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop."
Ironically straight after reading this was an inline video advertisement, and this page crashes constantly (2.6 GB memory usage for an article?)
Re: What's happening to reading?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> New modalities of presentation will make media more accessible to a wider audience, so they can benefit and learn from it, even if some of the magic is lost in translation. I think a flaw in your argument here is that you're dismissing the possibility that specific expression of an idea is the modality. Consider, for example, summarizing a poem. You aren't just losing some magic. You're losing the entire point .
Most people aren't getting the point anyway. The surface idea was always enough for them. It's a hard-knock life when you realize you're staring into the blank face of a man for whom science fiction is just war in space with cooler guns and aliens. In the US, it's a culture of point missing. From Punisher Skull tattoos on our police to racist Star Trek fans, missing the point is mostly what the people around you are…
One of the beautiful things about the human experience is that there can be multiple points. The greatest works of art can be appreciated in many ways, and the viewer's perspective can add a lot of richness that goes beyond the original intent. Even in a standard white collar work environment where we want to make single points very crisply there is a real art to framing things and choosing the right words to motivate different individuals with different contexts to do the right things to row the boat in the same direction.
I think AI is useful for sifting through high volumes of data to get the gist, but I don't really count it as it's own modality. It is by definition a watered down version of the training data that produced it, it lacks the human spark that makes content worthy of attention and analysis.