- Road closures - Boil orders - Product recalls - Neighborhood breakins - Weather forecasts and alerts - Updated laws and court rulings that might impact you - Public safety notices - Health inspections - Public works projects - and a zillion other things that happen as a consequence of living in a complex society

It's frequently beneficial to know what's happening in the world around you, even though possessing a sense of empathy can make knowing what's happening in the world around you unpleasant.

Maybe, but there could be other reasons.

In a former life I briefly worked at a game developer, and the PC port of a game we shipped did the same thing. The reason I got was that the assets were just barely too big for the game to ship on one CD-ROM and going to a second disc was going to cost too much. The solution was to encode all the sound assets into .ogg (because it was free and unencumbered) to put on the disc and then convert them all to .wav post-install because the in-house engine couldn't play .ogg files and there was no time to add support before publishing.

Audiobooks are someone else's (i.e. not your) interpretation of a work. Kind of like how you might go watch a play or a movie instead of reading a script. There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but they're not reading.

Listening to an audiobook is not the same as reading a book.

The whole point of the article was how to read more books, not how to have someone read books to you.

You don't. Unless that's the kind of thing you're into, I guess.

> Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?

You can't quantify art that way. People work at different speeds. I can appreciate that something took some number of hours without knowing the precise number of hours.

> As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.

Maybe, but I'm not qualified to make that comparison. Both are beyond my level of artistic ability (I've never studied art nor practiced much). I don't know why one thing or artist gets more popular than another while another who's just as talented (or maybe even moreso) languishes in obscurity. Skill is a factor, sure, but there's no formula that I'm aware of.

> What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'

Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"

When someone short-circuits the whole creative process by putting a prompt into a machine and having it spit out an art, there's nothing to appreciate.

Okay, but this isn't a news article, it's an opinion piece on some guy's substack.

Sure, I guess, but if a site that's primarily text doesn't work without Javascript then that's a design failure. I sometimes use a browser like links2 because eliminating everything but text can sometimes help me focus. If the site displays nothing, I'm probably not going to bother reloading it in a different browser just so I can render the text.

(It's a nonissue for this site, which appears to render fine in links2.)

You can still do that right now. I highly recommend it.

Okay, but I don't understand the benefit of writing to an entirely fictitious AI construct instead of writing to the ideal of the kind of reader you'd eventually like to have.

I mean, I get that it's frustrating to pour effort into writing something that effectively nobody reads (i.e. you never connect with a wider audience), but engaging with an entirely fictitious audience seems hollow to me.