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>they put in a lot of effort to get you to stop using them

such as? maybe I am missing something, but I find this "this big outcome is due to some engineered effort" applied to this specific case to be inaccurate as I was there and I remember.

> Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem.

As someone who made posters in 2000, I respectfully disagree.

I think this easily could have been me if I didn't have a gnawing hunger to find weird niche books that seem interesting to me and have very few "opinions" about them online. I think it was at 19 that I discovered I just hate reading anything that is saturated with opinions and reviews, even if "complex" "challenging", a "cult favorite", which was my precursor to this (and I did enjoy that phase while it lasted). Sometimes I go to the library and carry a stack of books, read the first page, and put it back if I don't want to go on. Every once in a while, I get a random interest in something that is indeed saturated, and I do read it, but also drop it when I lose interest without guilt. Doing anything because everyone else who is similar to me is doing it never worked for me, don't see a reason why it should work in reading, and finding something good to read can be as simple as going in a rabbit hole of search. For reference, I'd say I completed over a thousand "serious" (non Harry Potter/YA/"easy read") books, including nonfiction, and I'd say there is almost an equal number of books I did not finish.

How I feel when I see a fat person dieting.

You do need to have some combination of money, time, a car, patience, taste, willingness to inspect things in person, and owned housing to care about a piece of furniture that's "not from IKEA". For a normal person who wants their rented apartment to be livable like... now, it is probably the only good choice. People are so quick to talk crap about it when their only decent options outside of it are either "designer furniture" they cannot afford, custom made furniture they don't have the vision for (but also can't afford), or "eclectic pieces" from "thrift stores" that only unemployed hobbyist or people who own their apartments can afford (in terms of time). I really dislike that.

I don't hate either particularly, but I care more about getting any book I want whenever, wherever, than I care about some abstract far away moralizing of something of consequence to me only ambiguously.

weird hill(s) to die on

A craft can be extremely hard while useful output from it is relatively easy to obtain. Case in point, I used to be a very serious baker. I mean, very serious. It started when I was a child. I made sure I understood things at a molecular level, cared about first principles, redid techniques thousands of times, spent hours on the craft in every axis imaginable. And yet people who baked ten times a year sometimes made better cookies than I did. A friend once made a better carrot cake than mine because she didn't waste time trying to figure out how to "bring depth to carrots." and the many ways of modifying textures. She just picked a very good recipe and had the tastebuds to know it's good enough to make for people.

That didn't mean she understood baking better than I did. If something went wrong, I usually knew why and what to do about it. If someone gave me direction and wild requests, I could get us there, meanwhile she could not. If things didn't work out, her solution was more likely to be "find another recipe"... and finally, the part that "validates" the ego of bakers, if you looked at everything we both made, I'm sure mine was better on average.

BUT... if what people actually value is "who made a great carrot cake tonight?", then yes, baking is easy. All she had to do was find a recipe detailed enough for her and apply it without majorly messing up.

I think that's what the "coding was never the hard part" argument is getting at. The fact that programming has difficulty that people spend decades mastering it, or that the best programmers can do things ordinary programmers cannot does not tell you how much of that depth is actually required to produce the software people value. Which is, tbh, very little.

Anyway, I could spread this analogy further but this is long as it is so I will stop here. It just reminded me of when people accused me of "just knowing how to pick a good recipe" as a way of reducing my development efforts, and it made me laugh.

It's bad at anything that still requires constant human judgement. The only reason it can build apps and websites so easily is that human judgement was encoded in that a long time ago in many forms. It's a developed and aged practice.

So you're saying a lead/manager that recognizes good programmers from bad programmers should be paid the most... rubs hands together

Honestly, I personally would be less nervous visiting China.

I wouldn't say you are overreacting at all. I know someone who was detained for months on US soil after a phone search where the only "evidence" against him they found is illegal content sent by someone else to him on a group chat he doesn't even check. Had to get a lawyer and spend time in prison just waiting to be deported back.

I believe we should.. step back a bit, and agree on what we mean by "reading books", vs "other things on a screen"; you all mean the tension between reading cumulative attention-intensive material versus discontinuous context-resetting material, right?

It would only be an oversimplification if they had claimed that every book reader understands more than every online reader, regardless of subject matter. They didn't. Plus, in your example, this hypothetical online reader has already acquired the capacities that books are supposed to help develop, and he might be closer to a book writer.