when me little, daddy say smart words
And I thought podcasts that have convinced uneducated people they now know more than experts was the downfall of society
Maximise your reading potential = work yourself back towards illiteracy.
I honestly don’t hate that. Whether by audiobook or easy book, I guess I just call reading axiomatically good.
Putting aside the fact that this is AI slop, there’s something to be said for the value of good prose. Reading fiction shouldn’t strictly be about conveying the bare facts of a story, but about drawing in the reader. And sometimes a really good sentence is just a work of art, all on its own.
*AI slop is bad; good prose has value. Fiction should do more than tell you the story, it should immerse the reader. A good sentence is art.
Ah fuck, I’ve been slopped!!
I’ve been slopped!!
It’s not just prose, it’s art.
Audiobooks are great but not reading, and regardless a) people should improve their receptive language skills, b) this is AI horseshit, c) in a literary work there is no equivalence between the actual work and a plot summary. It’s like having a summary of the stuff you see going on in a painted scene with only minimal discussion of composition, gesture, and so on. It’s literally anti-art.
Just look at this example, you can see an overt loss of information even with zero other context to tell us further about any significance in its phrasing, and even this is a more optimistic case. Just imagine how it must fail to relay something more complex.
Audiobooks are great but not reading
Do you mean in the literal sense?
Yeah, I like audiobooks but I think we should distinguish between people leaning on listening because they’re more comfortable with that than reading vs trying to “compensate” for weaker reading skills by mutilating the text.
this feels engineered to piss people off
And not even just at the app but also at each other.
This is still too difficult.
When I young, dad gave me advice.
Not to be ashamed of our dicks, given they’re such good size and all.
When young, dad gave advice.
get those woke pronouns out of there!
How HeelVsBabyface would change their point of view is if they get a footjob under the table at an Applebee’s (like in the meme). Very weird, I know.
when child, dad spoke
Young, got advice
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
vvv
Bro, some good stuff n some bad stuff. Happy, sad - like that.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times
kitty kitty kitty, i want to pet the kitty
Being compelled to read it in middle school, I probably wouldn’t have used crib notes if that first sentence hadn’t been there
first run the text through an AI generative simplifier, then convert it to audio and increase the speed by 1.5x
this is how i read and digested the entire western canon while doing kettle bell exercises for a month.
part of my wants to take Das Kapital and put it through the illiteracy machine and see how funny it gets.
edit: its apple only. i was about to do what i could to pirate this and try kapital but i’m not an apple loser so i will be putting zero effort towards my original plan
The fact that it’s apple only is extremely funny and I can’t quite place why.
because they’re the company that originally insisted that the ideal device is a device with one button that does everything
Have you heard of Hackintosh?
This would be perfect for the Capital bookclub I run here, I love the idea of making Capital easier to misunderstand.
I see. So this is what caused Kautsky’s fall from grace.
In regards to Capital, it is dense and is also translated from a stuffier German.
I want to turn all classical literature into gen-z slang. I want Gandalf to tell Frodo “It do be like that tho”
[They Live meme where Nada puts on the sunglasses and the phrase “Gen Z slang” turns into “appropriated AAVE”]
Gen Z slang
appropriated AAVE…Oh yeah we have emojis
I joke, but obviously a lot of white america hates gen-z slang because of how much it borrowed from that like you said.
Skibidi mordor dab on that ring
Fool of a Took! More like “sussy baka no cap!”
You kid, but I have wondered on occasion what it would be like if Capital were rewritten in the style of the Dao De Jing — how laconic could you make the ideas before they break down completely?
What about Capital, but only using pictures, no words.
Edit: Someone else beat me to it and provided a link to the actual comic.
Contains words but you may find this interesting: https://mangadex.org/title/9ad278ad-a3a5-4d47-a610-639c4473ca5e/das-kapital
Oh that’s wonderful I’ll share this with friends I wanna see if I can at least get them to go through this lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leader_(web_series) close enough?
incredibly large book
open it
yards of linen tumble out and cover your floorWe have that in film form: Koyaanisqatsi
Paul Cockshott has a few interesting videos on how Marxism in the west has created its own difficult jargon because it’s been pushed by masturbators in the academia.
No matter how much you read or understand, someone is always going to come along and show you an essay from a century ago proving you wrong. Your classification and understanding of the issues is fundamentally misguided because you don’t understand some niche schism that has absolutely no bearing on anything tangible to our world.
We’ve built a monolith that now stands unintelligible to the masses. Sure you can join our movement but first I need to to slog through 3 massive volumes of dense theory, then read everything written, by x,y,z, leader, and don’t forget the rebuttals. It’s almost impossible to get into because it requires years of dedicated study. It’s worth it, but it ends up being an unending intellectual persuit more than anything.
I haven’t coined too many Marxist/Marxian terms in my conlang, but one thing I’ve tried to keep in mind when I have is to “dejargonize” and basically have each term be its own definition to whatever extent possible. The first example to come to mind is sotaňogestkruňiya (“commodity fetishism”): with-birth wealth-ness to-head-collection, i.e. “innate value ideology”. I think that’s a much clearer term for the belief that commodities’ exchange values are inherent to them than a term that assumes you have the cultural context of 19th century anthropology.
Also, something something Cockshott masturbation
A guy named cockshott starting off such a banger passage with a sentence about masturbation is amazing.
I dont think he used the word masturbation, he’s ancient and crumbly lmao. I’m just paraphrasing and adding some emphasis
He said jorkin the gorkin
Capital isn’t even particularly difficult. It’s repetitive to a fault really. He repeats the concept of the Labor Theory of Value until you’re good and damn tired of it, then it becomes a history lesson on working conditions in late 19th century Britain.
It has been said that a recurring issue in works written by philosophers is that they tend to repeat their ideas often. This is to say that philosophers’ writings frequently return to previously-discussed concepts and rephrase them. To use the German, philosophers often employ what is known as Wiederholung, essentially meaning “doing the same thing again”.
Capital: thing is made many times. System exists.
The Communist Manifesto: “The system sucks, let’s just overhaul it completely.”
This could actually have a fascinating application as a prompt for how stories are constructed and what is lost in these simplifications
This basically how we’d discuss a book in my high school english class
Like the other person, I’m disgusted by this. Aside from an educational case, where a person can use a simplified version to establish context and use it to learn how to read the original (which seems dubious), what’s an argument for this?
Human-written simplified versions of classic books have already been a thing for a very long time, as a way to make the stories accessible to people with intellectual disabilities. LLMs should probably not be used for this!
Yeah I kinda feel like it’s incumbent upon the translator to determine what themes are gonna get cut and what phrases need to stay to reinforce those themes or plot elements that make the grade.
I wouldn’t trust a llm to do that.
“modernized” bibles have been around for a few decades at least. that’s not really a point in favor of the practice.
People learning English as a second language?
ideally, but we know it will just be used to make 12th grade reading into 4th grade reading.
Half of Americans can’t read above grade 6
LLMs are class reductionists
I don’t think that’s the intended audience, and regardless the thing to do in that case is just get an easier text instead of pretend that this is the same thing, which is such a perversion of literature as an art form rather than just a bunch of Lore that you can be cultured if you know.
Summaries to help someone follow the text are a useful teaching tool, but this is plainly being proposed to replace the text, which is literally in some ways worse than reading its Wikipedia page because at least the Wiki will simply describe some of the themes and allusions and other more connotative elements that here only exist if they turn up in the crass plot summary that they are calling the text. Just read a “Simple English Wikipedia” page or SparkNotes or something if knowing Lore is that important to you for some reason.
Eh, I think that’s a pretty bad use case.
A long time ago my high school Spanish textbook used excerpts from some novel we had all been forced to read in earlier grades as practice reading sections. After I got to the end of the second or third level, I went back to read the first parts and realized that in order to make the text appropriate for what early learners had under their belts the translation had taken some liberties recognizable even to a high school student with a weak grasp of the language.
Of course, there’s a good reason for that! Translation for the purposes of education is different from translation for the purposes of conveying the texts meaning.
So it would seem like a tool intended to translate a text that’s relatively difficult to read for native speakers into one easy to read to native speakers wouldn’t be the best option for language learners.
And rather than just go off that one experience, I can corroborate it with advice from language teachers to choose texts that aren’t above my own level.
So I don’t think it’s a good tool for a language learner.
