4 ms·

Love this blog, appreciate the author. > This is probably the most difficult part. I had to remove all social media and streaming apps from my iPhone. I remove

Love this blog, appreciate the author. > This is probably the most difficult part. I had to remove all social media and streaming apps from my iPhone. I removed Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. When I started, I found myself picking up the phone and immediately noticing that something was missing, since the only things left to do were check the weather, read boring emails, or see my bank account. These past few months, I have more resolve than ever to cut the chains. Willpower is a practice, and there have been successful steps towards the goal. First, blocking the real sucks (X, Reddit). Then news (Canadian, won't bore you with the list). And then an innocuous yet sticky set of apps that I would bounce to often, for little benefit or reason: weather, server stats, stocks. A new wrinkle? Inane conversations with LLMs. Blocked! HN still because, well brothers and the rare sister, it's lonely out there and this place cracks me up. And not much longer. Now on to entire devices. Desktop, laptop, destined for a locked-down iPad. Lobotomized iPhone, got a watch, and now, slowly, more and more reading. What pushed me over the edge is the realization that I'm in grief. The Internet which once shaped my identity today, in no defensible way, resembles the silly place which once gave me solace. And yet, like a husk I cling to the teet of these manipulative networks and websites hoping for one last, satisfying drink. It ain't comin'. Books, then. Like my mother.

lotsofpulp 3mo ago
How do you trust anything written after 2023 or so to not be slop? Or even trust the claims that it was written before 2023?
- apsurd 3mo ago
  self-evident quality
- Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
  Why does it matter whether the writing is AI generated or not? You should always be critical of everything you read. I have stopped reading plenty of books after a few chapters when I realized there was little value in it for me.
  - Planktonne 3mo ago
    We read books because the words convey meaning, not because they appear to.
    - titularcomment 3mo ago
      Yet a good enough reader can distinguish between appearance and content. Better yet, everyone has their own type of favourite content. Maybe someone out there enjoys a 300 page Claude essay, you never know. Therefore the 'books after 2023?' argument is senseless sans the purchase part in which the contents may not be immediately obvious.
    - Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
      So you're implying AI is incapable of producing meaningful output? Have you not used models from the last few years?
      - WolfeReader 3mo ago
        They may have been implying it; I'll say it. Token prediction machines do not produce meaningful output. It is much more likely that they will regurgitate, without attribution, something meaningful that a human wrote (in their plagiarism/training data). Meaningful "output" is only meaningful if the author understood the meaning, instead of predicting words in sequence.
        Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
        In what way does a human author "understand the meaning" that AI does not? Just because a brain is made from organic material rather than silicon, doesn't make it less of a prediction machine.
        WolfeReader 3mo ago
        Wow, you are drinking the corporate kool-aid eagerly. The brain understands concepts. I can say, for example, "a penny saved is a penny earned" and understand that I'm talking about money and savings in general. I've felt the satisfaction of a full bank account and the panic of a near-empty one. The AI knows that someone once wrote the words "a penny saved is a penny earned" in that order. It has ingested volumes of wise sayings and economic texts to facilitate the statistically accurate words which will follow previous words in the conversation.
- blakes 3mo ago
  I wouldn't blindly trust a brand new author in 2026, but it's very easy to trust an author that has put out good writing in years past. Not hard to find, there has been plenty of great books written after 2023. New authors however will certainly have to earn trust for a few years now I think. It's similar with music, if someone puts out their first album in 2026 and has no singles or EPs, no YouTube presence, etc., it's probably slop. If they have a body of work that goes back a few years, easy to trust.
  - titularcomment 3mo ago
    I don't understand caring about 'slop' in creative media. Its pressingly more important in programming because there are a lot of bugs linters, complicated language models and even fuzzy sandbox searches can't catch. Even if they did, coding is collaborative work and maintaining vibecoded infra is a genuine hassle. However, none of these apply to music or books. AI or not, humane feelings always shapes a piece to its last form and its entirely up to you to determine if you like it or not. AI generally fails to capture this, and if it didn't - a fluke -, why not enjoy the piece?
    - kipchak 3mo ago
      There's only so much time we have. If I can filter out a category of music (slop) I know from experience I'm 99% likely to not enjoy I'd like to be able to.
    - moate 3mo ago
      why not enjoy the piece>> The theft. I for one can't enjoy a piece of creative media made by AI because I know it only exists so that a handful of losers can profit off the wholesale theft of actual human creativity. Other people don't share these qualms (they are also losers) and that's their choice. Honestly, I could give a fuck if AI tanks coding because I think the internet as we now know it is a mistake of capitalism and if using the plagiarism machine causes codebase maintenance to be harder, aww shucks sucks to suck, guess that's your job now? IDK, I'm married to an artist/writer and was a cook for most of my 20s so I have become a neo-luddite in my middle age when it comes to this specific topic. Weird how "where you are in the world" affects your view of things, right?
dude250711 3mo ago
Pre-2023 books I presume?
- WalterBright 3mo ago
  I collect books, but have decided to omit the post 2023 ones.
bootsmann 3mo ago
An easy trick nowadays is to simply log out of the accounts. Most social media websites really want you to log in so they become unusable when you log out. Its a good defense in depth strategy.
- pjerem 3mo ago
  Yep, or… disable the cookies on this website. You’ll have to login each time you’ll want to access it. If you have a password manager that allows you to login faster, just modify your password in a known way like {password_stored_in_passmanager}_IACKNOWLEDEGEIREALLYWANTTOLOGIN If you want to keep the account but lose the access for a long time, just remove the password from your password manager, next time you’ll want to login you’ll have to use the password recovery.
shepherdjerred 3mo ago
I wrote about this a few years ago [0] It's _really_ hard to break the phone habit. I was in a good place for a few years but have recently been spending time on Reddit. It's not the end of the world. Ultimately I think going back to Reddit is because I recently haven't had the patience to really read, reflect, etc. [0]: https://sjer.red/blog/2023/screen-time/ https://sjer.red/blog/2023/screen-time/
petra 3mo ago
For me, as an avid reader of non-fiction books, for learning, i'm starting to question the value of reading them, compared to a good in-depth discussion with an LLM about a subject, together with reading academic papers and long articles/blog posts.
- greymalik 3mo ago
  Why not both?
  - petra 3mo ago
    Because using the other methods of learning, possible coupled with having a search environment inside the chat for the future, or creating memorization material for the stuff i specifically want to memorize - seems more efficient and effective.
    - mckn1ght 3mo ago
      Two things here. First, you have to know what to ask an LLM. A book on a subject is already organized with all the information that could be returned by the same prompts that would lead to it. The prompting effort was essentially already done by the author and publisher. Second, you’re getting a more compressed and lossy form of that information from an LLM, unless you go to such efforts that it’s be easier to just read the book. It’s akin to a conversation where a friend asks you about a book in finer and finer detail until you either recite the book for them word for word or direct them to just go read the book. So, I don’t think LLMs are replacements for reading books. They’re complimentary.
- telxosis 3mo ago
  I understand what you mean but there is a depth of thought that is hard to capture outside a book. The main problem is that so many books are really just essays or papers that get stretched to 300 pages because that is what the publisher wants. A great book I don't think has this problem. I don't see a separation though between books, LLMs, papers and audiobooks. I would add youtube lectures in there too. They are all valued friends in learning to me.
mns 3mo ago
I loved the article, but the only part that I didn't connect with was the blocking, and probably the goals (not sure if going for the numbers instead of the pleasure of reading something good is ideal long term). I think the author and you shouldn't necessarily be so hard on yourselves to go to these extremes of blocking of these things, usually it works for a while, but it might come back worse when you crack and try it again. I found myself in a similar situation last year, I felt like I have no time, but I was just scrolling mindlessly on social media whenever there was some off time. As I was reading quite a lot when I was younger, I ended up maybe reading 1-2 books a year, best case scenario. Last summer somehow I wanted to try something else that would help me keep focus or disconnect, maybe for me it worked because of what I started reading. I heard 2-3 years ago on a podcast (Tim Ferris I think) about Ted Chiang and bought one of his collections, but never read it. I got so fascinated with the first book (sort stories, you could just read a story on the go, no huge time investment) and the stories that I ended up reading most all his works, that just hooked me up. A year later, I'm around 2-3 books per month, always try to alternate from fiction to non-fiction, try to mix up and probably the most important part, like in the post, whenever I feel like I don't "vibe" with the book or author, I just stop. Forcing yourself to read a book that you don't like is probably the easiest way of breaking the habit. I even stopped driving to work, the 40 minutes I get per day to read on the train are amazing, it makes me happy if there is some technical issue and the train takes 10-20 minutes longer, more time to read.
- latexr 3mo ago
  > but the only part that I didn't connect with was the blocking, and probably the goals. Funny, because I found the post terrible but approve of the goals technique if done temporarily. Many many years ago I set myself a reading goal (first year it was number of books; second year and beyond it was time spent reading) and that served me well to both establish the types of books which aren’t worth it and create the reading mindset. Now I read whenever, but it has become frequent and effortless. Some of the things I found terrible advice in the post include: > Also, Ryan Holiday — a famous author Look, you do you, but Ryan Holiday is not a good person to take advice from. Also, being a “famous author” is not a credential for being the person to help you read more, especially if you are familiar with his history. > Avoid summaries and summary services. (…) reading a summary does not equal reading a book. Many many books are not worth the amount of pages they take. This includes several books popular on HN. Too many books should have been pamphlets. They take one big core idea then stretch it out over multiple chapters with self-serving examples, story after story of repeating the same bullshit. Not every book is read for pleasure, some are only worth it for the information. Find a talk on YouTube that the author has given, and you’ll get all the important points. > Avoid even audiobooks. (…) Look, it’s fine if audiobooks don’t work for you, and it’s fine to let your readers know why. But don’t phrase it as advice of audiobooks not working in general. You may get distracted when listening to an audiobook, you may not be able to concentrate on it, but that is definitely not true for everyone. Listening to an audiobook while cooking or cleaning can work like doodling while listening to a lecture, i.e. it helps retention, attention, and understanding.
sien 3mo ago
A Kindle really helps me. I don't do anything else other than read with it. As does Goodreads and reviewing, for myself, every book I read. Logging out of social media on phones is a good idea.
Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
Yeah I'm trying the same thing, I have an e-reader which is compact enough to have with me. Reddit is entertaining but it's only good for like half an hour a day at best, after which point you start to scrape the bottom of the barrel / niche posts and a lot of repeats. At one point I realised I was reading the same posts three times a day hoping for something new, but that's not how it works. Reading it is.
aftergibson 3mo ago
I very much connect with the "I'm in grief but desperately trying to hold onto something long dead". People point to the smolweb (ugh, that term), Gemini, or something else as proof it's still there, but it really isn't. I'm glad they exist, but the mindshare is with the addictive, algorithm-driven destinations. It's like listening to your favourite band play to a handful of people in the room next to a Taylor Swift concert, you might not like Taylor Swift, but the crowds and energy are all over there, and it's hard to hear your own music when something else is blaring through the wall. My own response has been to opt out at the hardware level: I've gone for a Mudita Kompakt e-ink phone. I haven't even bothered installing social media, the experience would be bad enough that I'd never be tempted, but what it's great for is KOReader and some light fiction. I use my Kindle for heavier fiction and non-fiction, and paper when I suspect I'll really want to engage with a book, writing all over it, referencing it heavily.
ubermonkey 3mo ago
>What pushed me over the edge is the realization that I'm in grief. The Internet which once shaped my identity today, in no defensible way, resembles the silly place which once gave me solace. ooof. I'm 56. I got an Internet email address before most people knew email existed (1987). I belonged to virtual communities on usenet and listservs well before the web as we know it took root. Consequently, I feel your comment in my bones.
z0r 3mo ago
You reminded me of the 10 years I spent loading up Achewood every week after it was functionally ended. (Although recently I discovered Onstad has a Patreon, and is regularly drawing new comics again behind the paywall). Most of the internet feels the same way, but there are still pockets of creativity. If you can tolerate a podcast (or a radio play, if you prefer), I really enjoyed listening to the first season of Valley Heat last year. Very silly. A friend linked it to me, and I surprised myself by actually giving it a try; I am glad that I did.

lotsofpulp 3mo ago

How do you trust anything written after 2023 or so to not be slop? Or even trust the claims that it was written before 2023?

apsurd 3mo ago
self-evident quality
Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
Why does it matter whether the writing is AI generated or not? You should always be critical of everything you read. I have stopped reading plenty of books after a few chapters when I realized there was little value in it for me.
- Planktonne 3mo ago
  We read books because the words convey meaning, not because they appear to.
  - titularcomment 3mo ago
    Yet a good enough reader can distinguish between appearance and content. Better yet, everyone has their own type of favourite content. Maybe someone out there enjoys a 300 page Claude essay, you never know. Therefore the 'books after 2023?' argument is senseless sans the purchase part in which the contents may not be immediately obvious.
  - Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
    So you're implying AI is incapable of producing meaningful output? Have you not used models from the last few years?
    - WolfeReader 3mo ago
      They may have been implying it; I'll say it. Token prediction machines do not produce meaningful output. It is much more likely that they will regurgitate, without attribution, something meaningful that a human wrote (in their plagiarism/training data). Meaningful "output" is only meaningful if the author understood the meaning, instead of predicting words in sequence.
      - Eueudhsbsj32 3mo ago
        In what way does a human author "understand the meaning" that AI does not? Just because a brain is made from organic material rather than silicon, doesn't make it less of a prediction machine.
        WolfeReader 3mo ago
        Wow, you are drinking the corporate kool-aid eagerly. The brain understands concepts. I can say, for example, "a penny saved is a penny earned" and understand that I'm talking about money and savings in general. I've felt the satisfaction of a full bank account and the panic of a near-empty one. The AI knows that someone once wrote the words "a penny saved is a penny earned" in that order. It has ingested volumes of wise sayings and economic texts to facilitate the statistically accurate words which will follow previous words in the conversation.
blakes 3mo ago
I wouldn't blindly trust a brand new author in 2026, but it's very easy to trust an author that has put out good writing in years past. Not hard to find, there has been plenty of great books written after 2023. New authors however will certainly have to earn trust for a few years now I think. It's similar with music, if someone puts out their first album in 2026 and has no singles or EPs, no YouTube presence, etc., it's probably slop. If they have a body of work that goes back a few years, easy to trust.
- titularcomment 3mo ago
  I don't understand caring about 'slop' in creative media. Its pressingly more important in programming because there are a lot of bugs linters, complicated language models and even fuzzy sandbox searches can't catch. Even if they did, coding is collaborative work and maintaining vibecoded infra is a genuine hassle. However, none of these apply to music or books. AI or not, humane feelings always shapes a piece to its last form and its entirely up to you to determine if you like it or not. AI generally fails to capture this, and if it didn't - a fluke -, why not enjoy the piece?
  - kipchak 3mo ago
    There's only so much time we have. If I can filter out a category of music (slop) I know from experience I'm 99% likely to not enjoy I'd like to be able to.
  - moate 3mo ago
    why not enjoy the piece>> The theft. I for one can't enjoy a piece of creative media made by AI because I know it only exists so that a handful of losers can profit off the wholesale theft of actual human creativity. Other people don't share these qualms (they are also losers) and that's their choice. Honestly, I could give a fuck if AI tanks coding because I think the internet as we now know it is a mistake of capitalism and if using the plagiarism machine causes codebase maintenance to be harder, aww shucks sucks to suck, guess that's your job now? IDK, I'm married to an artist/writer and was a cook for most of my 20s so I have become a neo-luddite in my middle age when it comes to this specific topic. Weird how "where you are in the world" affects your view of things, right?

dude250711 3mo ago

Pre-2023 books I presume?

WalterBright 3mo ago
I collect books, but have decided to omit the post 2023 ones.

bootsmann 3mo ago

An easy trick nowadays is to simply log out of the accounts. Most social media websites really want you to log in so they become unusable when you log out. Its a good defense in depth strategy.

pjerem 3mo ago
Yep, or… disable the cookies on this website. You’ll have to login each time you’ll want to access it. If you have a password manager that allows you to login faster, just modify your password in a known way like {password_stored_in_passmanager}_IACKNOWLEDEGEIREALLYWANTTOLOGIN If you want to keep the account but lose the access for a long time, just remove the password from your password manager, next time you’ll want to login you’ll have to use the password recovery.

shepherdjerred 3mo ago

I wrote about this a few years ago [0] It's _really_ hard to break the phone habit. I was in a good place for a few years but have recently been spending time on Reddit. It's not the end of the world. Ultimately I think going back to Reddit is because I recently haven't had the patience to really read, reflect, etc. [0]: https://sjer.red/blog/2023/screen-time/ https://sjer.red/blog/2023/screen-time/

petra 3mo ago

For me, as an avid reader of non-fiction books, for learning, i'm starting to question the value of reading them, compared to a good in-depth discussion with an LLM about a subject, together with reading academic papers and long articles/blog posts.

greymalik 3mo ago
Why not both?
- petra 3mo ago
  Because using the other methods of learning, possible coupled with having a search environment inside the chat for the future, or creating memorization material for the stuff i specifically want to memorize - seems more efficient and effective.
  - mckn1ght 3mo ago
    Two things here. First, you have to know what to ask an LLM. A book on a subject is already organized with all the information that could be returned by the same prompts that would lead to it. The prompting effort was essentially already done by the author and publisher. Second, you’re getting a more compressed and lossy form of that information from an LLM, unless you go to such efforts that it’s be easier to just read the book. It’s akin to a conversation where a friend asks you about a book in finer and finer detail until you either recite the book for them word for word or direct them to just go read the book. So, I don’t think LLMs are replacements for reading books. They’re complimentary.
telxosis 3mo ago
I understand what you mean but there is a depth of thought that is hard to capture outside a book. The main problem is that so many books are really just essays or papers that get stretched to 300 pages because that is what the publisher wants. A great book I don't think has this problem. I don't see a separation though between books, LLMs, papers and audiobooks. I would add youtube lectures in there too. They are all valued friends in learning to me.

mns 3mo ago

I loved the article, but the only part that I didn't connect with was the blocking, and probably the goals (not sure if going for the numbers instead of the pleasure of reading something good is ideal long term). I think the author and you shouldn't necessarily be so hard on yourselves to go to these extremes of blocking of these things, usually it works for a while, but it might come back worse when you crack and try it again. I found myself in a similar situation last year, I felt like I have no time, but I was just scrolling mindlessly on social media whenever there was some off time. As I was reading quite a lot when I was younger, I ended up maybe reading 1-2 books a year, best case scenario. Last summer somehow I wanted to try something else that would help me keep focus or disconnect, maybe for me it worked because of what I started reading. I heard 2-3 years ago on a podcast (Tim Ferris I think) about Ted Chiang and bought one of his collections, but never read it. I got so fascinated with the first book (sort stories, you could just read a story on the go, no huge time investment) and the stories that I ended up reading most all his works, that just hooked me up. A year later, I'm around 2-3 books per month, always try to alternate from fiction to non-fiction, try to mix up and probably the most important part, like in the post, whenever I feel like I don't "vibe" with the book or author, I just stop. Forcing yourself to read a book that you don't like is probably the easiest way of breaking the habit. I even stopped driving to work, the 40 minutes I get per day to read on the train are amazing, it makes me happy if there is some technical issue and the train takes 10-20 minutes longer, more time to read.

latexr 3mo ago
> but the only part that I didn't connect with was the blocking, and probably the goals. Funny, because I found the post terrible but approve of the goals technique if done temporarily. Many many years ago I set myself a reading goal (first year it was number of books; second year and beyond it was time spent reading) and that served me well to both establish the types of books which aren’t worth it and create the reading mindset. Now I read whenever, but it has become frequent and effortless. Some of the things I found terrible advice in the post include: > Also, Ryan Holiday — a famous author Look, you do you, but Ryan Holiday is not a good person to take advice from. Also, being a “famous author” is not a credential for being the person to help you read more, especially if you are familiar with his history. > Avoid summaries and summary services. (…) reading a summary does not equal reading a book. Many many books are not worth the amount of pages they take. This includes several books popular on HN. Too many books should have been pamphlets. They take one big core idea then stretch it out over multiple chapters with self-serving examples, story after story of repeating the same bullshit. Not every book is read for pleasure, some are only worth it for the information. Find a talk on YouTube that the author has given, and you’ll get all the important points. > Avoid even audiobooks. (…) Look, it’s fine if audiobooks don’t work for you, and it’s fine to let your readers know why. But don’t phrase it as advice of audiobooks not working in general. You may get distracted when listening to an audiobook, you may not be able to concentrate on it, but that is definitely not true for everyone. Listening to an audiobook while cooking or cleaning can work like doodling while listening to a lecture, i.e. it helps retention, attention, and understanding.

sien 3mo ago

A Kindle really helps me. I don't do anything else other than read with it. As does Goodreads and reviewing, for myself, every book I read. Logging out of social media on phones is a good idea.

Cthulhu_ 3mo ago

Yeah I'm trying the same thing, I have an e-reader which is compact enough to have with me. Reddit is entertaining but it's only good for like half an hour a day at best, after which point you start to scrape the bottom of the barrel / niche posts and a lot of repeats. At one point I realised I was reading the same posts three times a day hoping for something new, but that's not how it works. Reading it is.

aftergibson 3mo ago

I very much connect with the "I'm in grief but desperately trying to hold onto something long dead". People point to the smolweb (ugh, that term), Gemini, or something else as proof it's still there, but it really isn't. I'm glad they exist, but the mindshare is with the addictive, algorithm-driven destinations. It's like listening to your favourite band play to a handful of people in the room next to a Taylor Swift concert, you might not like Taylor Swift, but the crowds and energy are all over there, and it's hard to hear your own music when something else is blaring through the wall. My own response has been to opt out at the hardware level: I've gone for a Mudita Kompakt e-ink phone. I haven't even bothered installing social media, the experience would be bad enough that I'd never be tempted, but what it's great for is KOReader and some light fiction. I use my Kindle for heavier fiction and non-fiction, and paper when I suspect I'll really want to engage with a book, writing all over it, referencing it heavily.

ubermonkey 3mo ago

>What pushed me over the edge is the realization that I'm in grief. The Internet which once shaped my identity today, in no defensible way, resembles the silly place which once gave me solace. ooof. I'm 56. I got an Internet email address before most people knew email existed (1987). I belonged to virtual communities on usenet and listservs well before the web as we know it took root. Consequently, I feel your comment in my bones.

z0r 3mo ago

You reminded me of the 10 years I spent loading up Achewood every week after it was functionally ended. (Although recently I discovered Onstad has a Patreon, and is regularly drawing new comics again behind the paywall). Most of the internet feels the same way, but there are still pockets of creativity. If you can tolerate a podcast (or a radio play, if you prefer), I really enjoyed listening to the first season of Valley Heat last year. Very silly. A friend linked it to me, and I surprised myself by actually giving it a try; I am glad that I did.