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?
>In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?
Why would a reduction in human writers cause a complete reduction in motivation to read? There's millions of books already written and it makes zero sense that people would stop writing. People write for hundreds of reasons other than to make money and they created literature before copyright was a thing.
The human tradition is storytelling. The idea that storytelling was something a company could own and other's weren't allowed to tell is very, very new in our history.
People write without any profit motive today. It's weird of the OP to think of writing in such a narrow space as commercialization.
> 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...
Notably, Shakespeare lived in a time before copyright and famously ripped off plots from his contempories. I dont think he's a great reference for the argument that there would be no writing about the modern world if you removed copyright.
>On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people.
Which exists to enrich Disney and other large corps, while they hide behind artists as a human shield.
>Artists need some form of reward.
Right, as do artists who use the work of other artists as their starting point. Copyright holders aren't bill and bob artist, they are massive corporate trolls throwing around the weight of almost 100 years of our cultural heritage, sucking the marrow from its bones.
>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.
The books are getting digitised into a permanent record of all our cultural heritage. It just sucks we don't have control over it. If only there was a way we could get them digitised AND control our cultural heritage. HMMMMMMM.
>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.
The incentive to write is being killed by slop groups like 20Booksto50K and Kindle which predate AI by at least a decade. AI just lets them work faster.
>We might end up with all of humanity’s books digitized and accessible for free
Excellent
>But there would be no human writers left.
Unlikely, but there would definitely be no Disneys or Conde Nasts left, which is a massively pro social outcome.
>In a world like that, what motivation would we still have to read?
In a world with all books digitised and accessible to read? A huge huge huge incentive. I already partake if books are too expensive where I am. It would take me the rest of my life to read all the books I already want to read. What kind of inane dribble is the idea that copyright makes it interesting to read? I havent even read all of Howard and he's in the public domain (in cool countries at least)
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.
Yes. In my experience, I need to at least read a book for 1-2 hours to really enter the story, and then I can read for 10 minutes here and there. The issue is if I start reading the book 10 minutes by 10 minutes I never really enter the story and it takes me more time to finish it.
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.
- Working remotely by yourself every day sucks. Get a coworking space, shared office, work from a cafe, at least a few days a week.
- Go out. Riding a bike, hiking or even bringing your dog out three times a day keeps you stimulated and makes your body moving. Go to the mountain, go to the beach, go to rivers and parks.
- Join clubs that interest you. You like cinema? Join cinema a cinema talk, a book club, if you like a sport join a club that organise communal things. Doesn't really matter what, since nowadays there are clubs for everything.
- Take a brake from internet. After work, keep yourself busy doing things that don't involve using a screen and even try some hard blocking method to avoid using tech in public spaces.
All this things might help you finding people to connect. Your initial answer should rewritten: "How to be alone?" -> "How to meet people?". The individualistic culture created in the last few decades, exacerbated by social media create a loneliness epidemic; kids have less friend, same for adults, so many people I met told me that online dating sucks, more and more people are using brain medication for anxiety and depression. The situation is not good and individualistic thinking clearly is not working.
The real trick is not learning to be alone, but re-learning how to make friends and share parts of life with others. Humans are social animals.
The loop seems to go like this: remote working + increasingly isolated-by-default urban cultures => social depression => not having the energy to go out => more social depression
Spending too much time on the internet exacerbates this. It seems like a cure, but is really just empty social calories. And too much news is even worse.
Being in a relationship or having kids provides built-in, daily social stimulation. I can almost guarantee that's what you're missing, even if it doesn't feel like that and/or that doesn't sound appealing.
Your skills around doing that with strangers might have also atrophied (some strangers suck, so why deal with that when you have great people at home?).
But... it is a skill that can be rebuilt!
I'd recommend making a plan for social engagement, that feels right, and sticking to it. And there are tiny steps: taking a book to a local library and reading around other people (instead of alone), starting one conversation with a stranger (no matter how short or simple), walking through a park (with dog!), etc. Anywhere there are other people.
As someone who went through something similar to OP recently, the things that saved me: (1) getting a dog, (2) giving up a remote-only job for a hybrid one, and (3) diving back into dating.*
* Bumble. Yes, it sucked. Imho, best way to approach it: only match with people you'd be interested enough to go on a date with, chat just enough to figure out if you vibe (and learn red flags to watch for), then plan an in-person date, and be honest with them about feelings after the first date.
It's unclear, but it seems like this was someone testing to see if this exploit would really work. From the article:
> The severity was debated - Endor Labs characterised the payload as closer to a proof-of-concept than a weaponised attack - but the mechanism is what matters. The next payload will not be a proof-of-concept.
But it does seem odd not to use an actual payload right away.
Kind of yes and kind of no. Not many reasons to use Common Lisp I agree, but the Lisp idea itself has still something to offer that couldn’t be found in other systems.
I’m comfortable to declare that are not macros the most powerful thing of Lisp, but the concept of an environment. Still in 2026 many languages now implement the concept of evaluating the code and make it immediately available but nothing is like Lisp.
Lower level programming languages today they all still requires compilation. Lisp is one of the few that I found having the possibility to eval code and its immediately usable and probably the only that really relies heavily on REPL driven development.
Env+REPL imo is the true power still far ahead of other languages. I can explore the memory of my program while my program is running, change the code and see the changes in real time.
The issue is that CL is old, and Clojure is so close to be perfect if it wasn’t for Java. Clojure replaces Java, not CL and this is its strength but also its weakness.
I lived in Australia in Far North Queensland until last year and power was running out every heavy rain. The point is that in that region there are only two seasons: a short dry season and a long wet one.
So everyone expects multiple power off a year and every household has generators and stock of fuel and matches for emergency.
Locals have a “it’s gonna be fine” attitude against a poor (but expensive) infrastructure. I was really disappointed, growing up in Europe, where a power off it’s extremely rare (even if we have rain and snow).
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?