There's a lot of fluff that can be compressed into a much smaller amount of tokens. I kinda hope modern authors start publishing prompts instead of entire novels - imagine a world where anyone can take a prompt and run it through an llm to create their own personalized novel. With their own customizations and preferences.
Someone recommend H.M. To me a few weeks back. Started w/ Kafka by the Shore and then finished Norwegian Wood a few days after that. Couldn’t put them down, both were terrific.
Read Diaspora last year w/o knowing anything about it. Easily one of my favorite sci-do books to date—I can’t believe it was there waiting for me the entire time. Permutation City is one of my next 3 reads.
“A Timeless Way of Building” - Christopher Alexander
“Where The Wizards Stay Up Late” - Lyon
“Fahrenheit 451” - Ray Bradbury
“Slaughterhouse V” - Kurt Vonnegut
“Neuromancer”/Sprawl trilogy - William Gibson
Plus an assortment of business, systems thinking, and tech related books that were “fine”, but none that really left me with much to chew on afterwards.
First the minimum time:
- audiobooks while commuting (mostly walking to work). Even if it's like 30-40 minutes some day at most, it still adds up.
- add to that lets say ~15 minutes each night before sleeping.
And on top of that:
- sleepless nights, when you want to get back to sleep: 30 minutes - ...
- just having a good series to grind through.
- audiobooks during some manual labor (home restoration works for example).
So for me audiobooks + capability to read at night without disturbing others (dark mode + backlight on e-reader). And from that it adds up.
This comment slightly terrifies me. My reading has dipped this year, but generally this is a small amount of reading for 12 months. I think the norm on reading quantity has shifted.
Is social media to blame? TikTok and meta videos are extremely addictive. I have perhaps the strongest willpower of anyone I know, and the only way I can avoid losing hours to them every day is to delete these apps from all devices, and have a separate browser on my Mac for them.
I think it's quite hard to talk about norms for reading quantity, because it varies so much between people. There are a lot of people (more than half the population) who read basically no books in a year, and a tiny slice who read a huge number: so your intuitive take on what's "normal" is going to depend a lot on whether your social circle happens to have voracious readers in it. I suppose you can statistically determine some point in between as the "norm" but I'm not sure that point would reflect many people's experience...
I consider myself a fairly slow reader (see other comment) and nothing on this list took very long to read, other than LotR and The Count of Monte Cristo. One of my goals for 2025 was to replace parades of endless distractions (social media, hn, Reddit) with books. I found that if I only read even for just 5min during morning coffee, I was far, far more likely to open a book when waiting while my car got smogged, kid at dentist, school pickups, etc. Those little between moments are so easily stolen from us and monetized, and they add up to a frightful total.
One of the best pieces of advice I got was from my English lit teacher: always carry a book with you. You never know when you’ll have down time to read.
A couple of says ago there was an excellent comment here on Hacker News about that you shouldn't read only in bed but allocate proper not tired time for reading. Otherwise you learn to associate reading with sleeping and drowse off after a few pages.
FWIW, I’m mildly dyslexic and likely read slower than most. This year I’ve made it a goal to un-do many of the coping strategies I’d developed over the years to keep pace, and instead really focus on stopping and looking up phonetics for words I couldn’t easily sight (kindle is clutch here). On the plus, it also means I’ve had to become rather deliberate about what I read and when I read it — HN, newspapers, and Reddit all took back seat this year (and I couldn't be happier).
Firstly, reading is actually a bit boring and unpleasurable at first. Only once you’ve gotten up to speed does it start rewarding you. A bit like working out at the gym.
The other surprise is that once you start reading, you get really quick. Like, surprisingly fast. After a while you notice the words are going by faster. So the effort compounds.
When you start you think “my god that took 5 hours of boring reading time to get though” and by book 10 you think “that was 2.5 hours and I learnt a lot and my brain is happy.”
Curious about your view on The Count of Monte Cristo. It's one of my more disappointing reads of the year. I'm familiar with the story line from various film adaptations, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer amount of repetition and drawn out bullshit. That's when I learned it was originally published in a journal where Dumas was paid by the word over 18 parts. Then all the meandering bullshit and repetition made so much more sense.
I took read it this year and invested about 8 weeks getting through it. I found the story disjointed, repetitive and very hard to follow. It was only after finishing it I discovered I had read the abridged version that cuts out a number of chapters leaving multiple characters without conclusions. No wonder it was difficult to follow.
Similar to other commenter, after the first third, I felt it devolved into a long, overly drawn out and predictable slog. Glad to have finished it, but it’s probably not on my re-read list.
> It clearly wasn’t ’that bad’ for most human history given how prevalent it was. But in the modern world we are trauma merchants.
What in the actual fuck kind of logic brought you here to that conclusion? I worry for you and whatever content you’ve consumed over the years that allowed you to build up this theory.
Well I did a Psych minor for lols back in the day and there's no doubt that almost all of current social psychology is made up of trauma merchants peddling their wares. 'Step 1: gaslight you into thinking you're fucked up Step 2: Convince you I'm the one who can help you' kind of shit. Psychologists obviously get upset by the suggestion.
But in terms of rape, as I said in my original comment it's just a suspicion. Happy to hear your counterarguments if you have any.
Was rape that common? Like in hunter gatherer times (most of human history) most mating would have been within the band. I don’t think intra-band mating would have been rapey, mostly. Incestuous by modern standards, for sure, but I don’t see why it would have been rapey. Inter-tribe conquest mating definitely happened, but was it really that common compared to the normal mode? It takes way more effort, at least.
My similarly controversial take is that modern rape is traumatic because rapists are no longer hung in public. I think public hangings might have had an under appreciated healing effect on the psyche. Like if a guy who attacked you is still out there, he might attack you again. But if you saw him hang, you just might feel better.
It's been extremely prevalent. In terms of prehistory, we have lots of evidence that young women were almost always spared if one group massacred another, and we have genetic evidence that invariably the winning male bloodline would become predominant in any conquered group.
If you look at the Columbia link and do other research it's pretty obvious that 'punishing' rapists has never really been about punishing them or giving women some kind of absolution. In the code of Hammurabi and with the Jews women who didn't scream so that others could hear were prosecuted for adultery or stoned lol. The idea of giving women the satisfaction of watching anything for their own benefit is a very modern notion and even now doesn't really exist anyway. That's just your personal fantasy. You can go back to the Assyrians to see that if, for example, you raped my virgin daughter then I could legally rape your wife. It's mostly been a property or bloodline issue. It's never been about the females and that's another reason I think it's massively overblown in modern times. It's been normal human behaviour for millions of years. To put it another way, if you were a young 19 year old female in a village that was being ransacked, say, 4000 years ago, you'd know what was going to happen to you if your males lost. I don't think it would have been that traumatising - the males in your village would have done it to the females in their village were the roles reversed. The 'trauma' is largely a modern phenomenon where everything has to be upsetting/triggering/trauma-inducing. Everybody has to be a victim these days.
My daughter asked for a record player for Christmas. My wife and I picked a few albums to gift her… knowing that she’ll be captive to them for a short while. Starting her off with Nirvana’s mtv unplugged, Miles Davis kind of blue, and abbey road. She’s got great taste in music, so I’m looking forward to her to slowing down and deliberately experiencing an album, rather than fragmented playlists sprinkled with “Alexa/siri skip” every few minutes.
I was recently surprised to sell an old portable MiniDisc player on fb for close to $100. (FWIW, it was mint). I’m still nostalgic for them, and have another portable player and recording deck, but I’m left scratching my head at how much folks are willing to pay to pick up their first player. Shrug
+1 for the Tesla service manuals. My wife’s was making a clunk from front suspension. Before my assistant (my kid) had finished taking off the wheel, I found the up-to-date official torque specs on service site. Usually it takes me a while to find torque values and cross check with another source. It was beyond refreshing to see Tesla buck the trend of selling service-manuals-as-a-service.
Service documentation / manufacturer software required for cars I currently wrench:
- Early 20’s: Bookmarked URL to the official online documentation (Tesla). With that said, I haven’t had need beyond checking mechanical connections, flushing brakes, and replacing filters.
- Early 10’s: VM containing a mid-00’s version of windows that runs a cracked copy of the long defunct manufacturer software service manual. Also runs software to interface with car, but simply painful to use. Beginning of era where tasks like replacing the 12v battery require manufacturer software to interface (though simple things still had undocumented secret Contra-like button sequences to do so).
- Early 10’s car: folders of screenshots and pdf exports collected over a decade for various procedures I needed to do. OBD-2 dongle + generic app handled basic things. Not much different than decade prior vehicle.
- Early 00’s: PDF of a seemingly printed-and-scanned copy of a digital version of the service manual. Off by a model year, surprising number of inconsistencies given its German. Computer and K+DCAN connection required for re-coding new parts, flashing, etc. Some fancier OBD-2 scanners could do majority of service related functions (cycle abs, reset airbag light, etc).
- Late 80’s: PDF scans of the dozen+ service books (still trying to luck into a physical copy of the set without paying an absurd sum). Most mechanically complex vehicle I own. No computer necessary, but soldering required.
> As of 2025, The Medog Dam, currently under construction on the Yarlung Tsangpo river in Mêdog County, China, expected to be completed by 2033, is planned to have a capacity of 60 GW, three times that of the Three Gorges Dam.[3]
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