silcoon

Agree with the author. Most rationalist material I've tried to read it's incredibly lengthy and frequently boring. It's also true that they are using verbosity and a certain academic style to hide the lack of precision and correctness. They are prolific writers, but not great.

> Paywalls pay for journalism. If there’s a paper or news site you read every day, please subscribe to it. WallHop is for the one-off article someone texts you from a site you’ll never visit again.

What protection is implemented to make sure of this? Or you leave the choice to the good moral of the users?

> Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read?

Because there would not be human written books about the present. All books would be about the past. But literature is not stuck in time. Today writers talk about topics and feelings that writers of the last century might never know or experienced. Many people read books to better understand the today world (non-fiction) and to better understand their today feelings (fiction).

> People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money.

Agree, but most of the writing that we have from the past still came with some form of financial incentives. Shakespeare didn't write all of the compositions just because he wanted to express himself. He was making money with theater performances. Many religious writing got patronage by the church. Dante Alighieri had a career as politician, Plato came from an aristocratic family. Writing was reserved to elites because education was expensive and people had to work for food.

Today we are lucky because education is accessible and printing is cheap.

> they created literature before copyright was a thing.

Copyright wasn't a thing because replicating content was hard. Try to manually copy a book...

As much as I hate piracy in a sector in financial crisis like book publishing (because Anna’s project is piracy), I hate even more what these large AI companies are doing: privatizing human knowledge.

On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people. “Information wants to be free” is bullshit spread by people who have never spent a minute in their lives trying to create something themselves. Artists need some form of reward.

On the other side, buying and destroying copies of rare books is quite scary. We would lose access to those books if they weren’t digitized. They are creating walls around knowledge that they acquired because there are no laws in place to protect authors.

This is scary, and it reminds me of Fahrenheit 451.

Do not believe Anna’s claims, since physical book sales are plummeting — the main source of income for writers — and shadow libraries are killing the incentive to write. But even more importantly, do not believe AI companies will help you discover and access knowledge.

We might end up with all of humanity’s books digitized and accessible for free, and LLMs capable of writing entire books for us. But there would be no human writers left.

In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?

Author here. Yes, I agree that reading for two minutes here and there is not that effective, but in my opinion, as little as 10 minutes of reading helps me make progress. The story is already loaded in my recent memory, so it's quick to switch context and immerse myself back in the book, even if I only have a short amount of time.

Reading multiple books at the same time helps with this. The level of concentration required varies by book and personal experience. I can set aside a larger span of time for more complex books and read more lightweight stories for the rest of the day.

Next week I will try to answer your question with a new post. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reporting. I fixed the error as soon as I read your comment.

Curious, is there an Andreesen Horowitz Agent MCP?

Let’s automate this end to end, from idea to raising capitals. Vibe Angels should just be multi agents managing how much capitals to allocate to each projects.