Maximise your reading potential = work yourself back towards illiteracy.
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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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.
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.
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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.
kitty kitty kitty, i want to pet the kitty
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times
Being compelled to read it in middle school, I probably wouldn't have used crib notes if that first sentence hadn't been there
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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
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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"]
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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?
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".
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.
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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!
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"modernized" bibles have been around for a few decades at least. that's not really a point in favor of the practice.
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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.
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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
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.
i thought newspeak would only be implemented in evil gomnunist nations
if people can't read i'll still have a job i guess. I feel pretty fucking lucky I finished all my education before todays AI existed.
goo goo gaga
Dr. Doofenshmirtz voice "BEHOLD, MY BOOK-WORSENATOR!"
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