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The end of reading

2026-07-10 23:51:47.040017+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

Harpers: The End of Reading Is Here Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history. (Gift Link via Elf Sternberg.)

That thread, and Elf's quote skeet of his link have some other choice bits.

The essay aggregates and touches on all sorts of ideas, from the Harvard student using LLMs to translate A Clockwork Orange into "modern English" to short-form videos, to...

One of the things I've been a cranky old man about, what with the decline of programming tools leading into the era of LLMs and vibe coding, is how programming used to be a skill, and when we let people who hadn't actually learned programming but had gotten college degrees in "computer science" into the workforce, we both got the extreme financialization of the activity, but also the decline of understanding.

And it occurs to me that LLMs are enabling these people to actually write code, and I'm not sure how I feel about that...

[ related topics: Language tolkien Software Engineering Writing Education Economics ]

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