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Similar to other commenters I disagree. You can definitely read without parsing and just “move on”.

Or accept a superficial understanding and fail to see the deeper point. Philosophy might be a good domain to see this happen with - read the words but don’t parse the meaning.


> Similar to other commenters I disagree. You can definitely read without parsing and just “move on”.

What do you disagree with? Nobody said that reading makes you immune to moving on without understanding.

What they said was that while reading it is possible to pause if you don't understand something and move on when you are ready to move on. That's harder to do in videos or lectures. Do you disagree with this?


Parent said:

“if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step”.

I disagree that you can not move on. You definitely can. So your statement about what “nobody said” contradicts what was actually said.


I should have been more careful with my phrasing. What I meant is I am much more aware of my own understanding, gaps and shortcomings and more actively involved in learning and processing information when I am reading. And I honestly cannot think of even consuming certain books with audio medium. As I commented elsewhere, "Gravity's rainbow" is one such book, in which for me, even a single page cannot be consumed using audio medium.


Or.. USB naming schemes..


Guess they have usage statistics to know a lot of their users are still on M1.

My partner and I are both still on M1 (our personal machines) and don’t really see the need to upgrade.


Fair, but not on the same “something else” so Trump still had the majority share.

I guess I’m more surprised by the low voter turnout. If you voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all, you are partly responsible for the mess being created lol.

Choosing not to pick a side is a choice in itself - not the absence of choice.


No. Trump had the largest share, not the majority.


Long time coming. The only one in my social group who still used it was my wife - and just for the function to call regular phones. Calling family in the US/MX from EU was pretty cheap with the Skype credit option.


Came to post the same. The mobile client still seems to work for me though but the electron client is down.

Edit: the mobile client loaded messages but also fails to send.


It also seems like all integrations that use Slack webhooks are working. But the ones which are like a dedicated app are failing with the same `fatal_error` message.


Maybe not a super popular opinion on HN, but this effectively changes nothing for me. I love reading on my kindle, by far the most convenient way to buy and read books for me (esp when traveling often).

It’s good that they are now being upfront about it, but it won’t impact my buying behaviour and it won’t for the majority of readers.


My daughter will grow up with direct access to my entire library of books and all other media, and I'm beginning to think (assuming we have any kind of future beyond current and future crises) that's going to be an enormous advantage for her.


If you somehow acquired the ePub by some other means, you can still side-load it to your Kindle, correct?


You can literally just email any random ePub to a Kindle and it works.

(The cover art is finikey sometimes.)


It's not that easy on the latest versions at least through Calibre where there's a very common issue that if your Kindle is connected to wifi it will remove side-loaded books (through a "bug" or something else). There's more info on that issue in many threads like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1g7yt0r/psa_the_ne...


and like that, the frog boils


"doesn't affect me!" Yet.


There are alternatives like Kobo.


I’m not sure - big tech is reversing their DEI narrative since the Trump election/ inauguration.


And even before that Amazon had The Man in the High Castle, which seemed like an edgy exercise in displaying Nazism more than anything else. You could tell there was some sci-fi plot there but the adaptation merely just touched on it. New Bond is likely to be joining Spectre.io and helping put down rebellions in colonized lands. Perhaps even helping the Russians/Chinese undermine the EU, working with a Leiter who avoided "rightsizing" and was promoted four levels by pledging loyalty to the Party.


Sounds more like the author just had bad experiences with non fiction? There are plenty of non fiction books which are good and where the book doesn’t just feel like filler. Some that come to mind quickly :

- bad blood (about theranos)

- SPQR

- King Leopold’s Ghost

- Lost in Math

- masters of doom


There's non-fiction (historical accounts and pop-sci explainers) and there's non-fiction (here's how you ought to behave.)

Obviously SPQR, but also Bad Blood is a historical account, and it's interesting.

Most business books are of the "here's how you ought to behave" variety. Most of these were written to win the author consulting gigs. The vast majority are formulaic and bland. Also, to hit a publisher's wordcount/shelf-space targets, they're always heavily padded. 99.9% of them would be better off in much more concise bullet-point format.

Of course there are a lot of edge cases and books that don't fit neatly into any category. And there are some books, like the Hagakure, Meditations, and the Bible itself, which started off as clear-cut examples of "here's how you ought to behave" but later became historically important.


He's not talking about books like that, I think he's talking about things pop sci and management books, but struggled with a way to describe only those books and not anything else that falls under the broad hemisphere of non-fiction. You could say that he's begging the question ("books I think are the problem are, in fact, the problem") but I immediately felt I knew the kind of book he meant, so I was not confused by it.


He's talking about how these books are padded with unnecessary filler material because people expect a nonfiction book to be a certain number of pages.


He's not saying that all non fiction is bad, just that the incentives are misaligned, and to be fair at least in my experience, there are a lot of popular non-fiction books where each chapter is repetitive, and I feel the whole thing could have been written in 2-3 chapters, if publishing a 30-page nonfiction book wasn't taboo


It's about those self improvement books that in 99.99% of the cases can be summarized in one phrase.

Unfortunately you can't print and bind just one phrase because no one will pay for it... or will they?


Non-fiction is a bad term.

An historical account is not fiction (because it happened) but it read as well as a fiction book.

Agassi's biography would be another example.


Yeah, it sounds like the author is referring to the “thoughtlord” strain that evolved out of self-help over the last decade or so.


I've never heard that term. Basically self help disguised as unbiased information or what?


A good example is "the subtle art of not giving a fuck". It's a book where the author rediscovers stoicism, badly, hidden within a chapter where they use "fuck" a lot. Reading any amount of say Seneca will be better, but Seneca is terse and dead for more than 70 or so years, which isn't a very good business case.


I just mean the fluffy thought leader/influencer junk that doesn't go much deeper than the obvious


Turing's Cathedral is another great one


I just wish he had applied a little bit of curation to his research before he put them on the page. Insight into the way the design team worked together is fascinating; recitation of cafeteria menu pricing is not.


Yeah, I listened to the audio book and there were some sections where I completely zoned out


Yup for anyone interested in the history of computing I highly recommend that one as well.


Yeah I think the author is just talking about personal development books, not non-fiction as a whole.


Yes, the “self help genre” might be more accurate. The author is painting in broad strokes for his post sadly.


I had the same reaction - but I guess images was just the first obvious application of fakes. ai text is similarly fake in the same vain


No, text is not fake in the same vein. The whole point of deepfakes is that they're images of real people in situations they were not in. Unless you're actively claiming that some victim wrote the text, it's not similar.


Mh fair point. I guess the terminology / actual use of the words will evolve over time as AI becomes ever more prevalent. I'll probably have the deepfake - image/video connotation for some time.


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