> This is all good advice but one thing it doesn't touch on is: which pen and notebook?

In what way could it possibly be relevant? Do you actually believe that the author could suggest a universally suitable pen and paper type? What if he'd had his best results with toilet paper, a sugar thermometer and a soot/diarrhea/lemon juice blend for the ink? Would his advice be any more complete?

The moment you lose sight of the habit and instead pay homage to paper and pens, its a fetish instead of a practical discipline.

> The moment you lose sight of the habit and instead pay homage to paper and pens, its a fetish instead of a practical discipline.

"Practice the hard thing until you are good at it" isn't as fun of a topic as "what can I buy?"

See any subreddit about cameras, guitars, ham radio, etc.

You can't separate the tools from the craft. Practical disciplines aren't just about doing things but also doing them well. The title of the piece was "take better notes, by hand" so you know, the tools I think are relevent. And come to mention it, the "by hand" part needs some attention too, because one complaint I often hear is that typing is less fatiguing than writing longhand. Ergonomics plays a big role here -- you're not going to write anything at all if you get cramped up. So yeah, I think that the tools are wholly relevent to the idea of taking better notes.

Generally people don't write with diarrhea for a good reason. I think anyone suggesting positive results would be suspect.

> You will to explain to me how the concise note I scribbled a few moments ago would have been improved if I'd written it on a particular type of paper, using a particular type of pen and a particular shade of ink. Because on the face of it, your proposition is very silly.

Sure, if the type of paper was for instance toilet paper, it won't last for a long time. Usually with note taking the intent is to keep the notes for later, so if you want to archive your concise note for say 30 years, you might choose to write on something more durable.

> When power is concentrated to the government, the corruption is concentrated with it.

This is a hackneyed neoliberal fundamentalist myth.

If power is concentrated anywhere, it should only ever be in government - where it's answerable to the public electorally.

Governments become corrupt when they are weak, and turn to serving private interests rather than the public they represent.

Corruption in general is far more prolific and fruitful where government is weak (the neoliberal ideal) - which is one of the reasons corrupt private actors look to weaken government - for instance by undermining public trust in it or lobbying for its parasitization by private entities. Or by stuffing their acolytes minds with foolish neoliberal fundamentalist myths.

Interesting tangent. This is the first I've heard the term "neoliberal" but it feels like it's being used as a perjorative term for libertarians?

"If power is concentrated anywhere..." The libertarian ideal is that it is not concentrated anywhere, because power corrupts. Maybe neoliberals want power concentrated in some entity that isn't government, and that's what you are arguing against? I guess I better do a little research on this new (to me at least) word

> Something I don't understand: Why don't you buy used books?

To me this is like asking what's wrong with buying used underwear. You don't know anything about the paws that have thumbed those pages. I had a flatmate in my early twenties who would kick off every reading session by scratching his bottom - and then as he read, he'd sniff his fingertips as a focus aid. I am not kidding. But even if the previous owners haven't had repulsive habits, people still sweat, cough and sneeze, rummage obliviously, read naked with their books in their laps, or in their partners laps, put their books down to please their partners then pick them back up - do I need to go on? We have intimate relationships with books, and a second hand book has all the detritus of an intimate relationship with its previous owner. Then there's the yeasts, molds, mildews, weird stains - anything humidity, cooking smells, damp, rotten trash, dense flatulence, halitosis, disease etc has impregnated the pages with. There's nothing noble or romantic about that aggregate odor they all develop.

A better way of thinking about them is that they're like semi-digested bites covered in the dried belly juices of whoever hawked them back up. How hungry do you need to be? It's no different really to dogs tucking into vomit in the street. Each to his own, though.

OK I love used books but this diatribe is a thing of beauty.

Geez, I have issues with bent bindings and people who lick their fingers to turn pages, but you take it to a whole other level of grossness. You did forgot the common practice of reading on the toilet.

Why are we supposed to think it's normal to see videos on every page? Even where it's directly relevant to the current page, what's the justification in thrusting those 36.30mb on the user before they explicitly click play?

I don’t think you are supposed to think anything.

It’s a news site with a lot of auto-playing video. If you like that kind of content, great. If not, there’s lots of other websites with different mixes of content. I subscribe to the economist which has few videos and they never auto play.

But that’s a question of taste. 5mb of JavaScript and hundreds of tracking assets is not.

> The "top researchers" in AI are Chinese. And I am skeptical that they have even remotely the philosophical or political alignment you are attempting to project on to them.

What an ugly trope. Idealism motivates Chinese workers just as often as any other nationality.

Idealism of what? That the government shouldn't use AI for surveillance or the military?

You really think the average Chinese worker thinks their government should stop working on AI because of liberal western values or something? This is nothing short of delusional.

I have my doubts that top Chinese AI researchers want to work for an AI company with direct tires to the white house and zero morals. Not for any great ethical concerns mind you. Simply because the US is a geological rival to China.

This is a deceptive line of dismissal. Sound principles needs to be figured out before imposing any kind of restriction on art - "things have changed" doesn't cut it.

Figuring things out is exactly what needs to happen. I think it is valid to dismiss arguments of “this is how copyright has always worked” when those rules were written before AI completely changed the game.

It's even worse than that. You then have to pay an additional fee to use its ideas as inspiration for your own book.

> What is known is that the majority believe that if artists were to be copied, they should at least be compensated.

I get the emotional side of this argument - artists going hungry while someone else cashes in on their ideas. But compensation is a dangerous premise, because derivative art is an established type of artistic freedom. Artists routinely mimic styles, or work within the bounds of styles established by masters, but they've never been expected to compensate those styles' pioneers. Imagine it as a precedent:

"Your stuff borrows from Warhol? Guess what buddy, you owe the Warhol estate x% of your sale."

Perhaps you're arguing things change when commercial interests are involved? But again, this has never been the case for advertising companies (with their hired artistic guns) or any kind of graphic design leaning on established artistic styles for effect and making a killing in the process.

In the case of AI, even if it has a commercial master, it seems much closer to the borrowing of an ordinary artist. It's a trained entity, with deep understanding of styles, capable of making new works. On top of that, it works under the instruction of a user with their own ideas, whose guidance is crucial in deciding the work's final state. The user is the artist here - like one of the visionaries who delegate the nitty gritty of production to helpers. In this case the helper is leased from the AI company, which is more like an agency supplying those helpers.

All in all it's hard to see how any compensation model wouldn't end up constricting the artistic freedom most of these artists depend on.

You can’t derive works at scale manually. We’re talking about a machine here.

I suggest you look into the history of art, specifically how artists have operated studios or "factories" where apprentices produced replicas of the master's work. Modern artists have numbered prints, where they reproduce their work at scale to as a revenue source. Sol Lewitt produced instructions for his art, and people reproduce them as public murals all over the place. see: https://massmoca.org/event/sol-lewitt-a-wall-drawing-retrosp...

The 'machine' existed long before the AI companies in university art studies, galleries and republication, and the scale came from the graduates or ordinary acolytes borrowing wholesale the ideas and techniques they admired. Scale shouldn't alter the principle. Once there's a right to compensation established for derivation, you have to explain why it doesn't apply to the millions of artists making a living from exactly that.

> Why are the pro AI people so obsessed with proving the AI skeptics wrong.

It seems to me the pro-AI types just want to be free to enjoy a transformative tech and discuss the implications of its development and innovations - without being badgered and henpecked or told the results they see are some kind of mass delusion.

The "badgering and henpecking" "problem" was created entirely by AI bros hyping AI to everyone and forcing it in every possible channel and avenue.

You're literally trying to blame the victim. Put "don't show AI content" on every major platform and the henpecking will stop but (aside from technical annoyanced of doing it) that won't happen because companies want to force AI down our throats.

> Put "don't show AI content" on every major platform and the henpecking will stop

Your argument then is: "Ban the subject of AI from your platforms or we're coming at you with pitchforks. And don't say anything to us when we do, because we are the sad ones here." Correct?

A market has to exist for this expanded range and for the expanded ranges of every other bakery. Otherwise the bakery's just wasting flour.

Where is this expanded demand coming from?

Two loaves of bread off the same line are perfect substitutes for each other, and compete to be sold.

Lines of code within the same code base aren't competing to be sold. They either complement each other by adding new features, making the actual product sold more valuable, or one replaces another to make a feature more desirable- look better, work faster, etc.

The market grows if you add new features- your bread now doubles as a floatation device- or you introduce a new line of bread with nuts and berries.

So, the business has to decide- does it fire some workers and pocket the difference until someone else undercuts them, or does it keep the workers and grow the market it can sell to faster?

Read the comment I replied to to see where the bread came from.

But on your point (which seems to hinge on wish thinking), this infinity of new features you propose for every product still needs those new markets you take for granted to justify their inclusion in the product. However cornering a new market isn't as straightforward as deploying a new feature - we all wish it was. The tech that makes it trivial for one firm to develop these features, makes it trivial for everyone else to build them. This means any new market will be immediately saturated.

Even if the leap of finding new markets was as easy as you think, you still need to explain why this hypothetical company would keep paying millions in avoidable salaries. Because whatever jobs you assign to AI, it won't be any less available to do the work of the human labor.

Adding new features doesn't necessarily grow the market. Your bread with nuts and berries competes with the regular bread for the customer's money. Other things also compete for the same money, such as medical, daycare, schooling etc. So increasing features won't necessarily grow the market because the market. Even in an optimistic scenario, those features only have a probability of increasing revenue, it's not certain.

OTOH, if you fire those workers, it is a certainty that your bakery gets more cash. You can then use that cash to reward your shareholders (a category that conveniently includes you) via buybacks or dividends.