You might like Kagi. The ability to upvote/downvote/block domains completely transforms the product.

It looks like just another search engine trening towards Ai UX. Do they have an API?

I'm now looking for APIs to integrate with my custom / personal agent setup. I'm done outsourcing my UX to Big Ai/Tech. I don't think we should repeat the same mistakes of outsource a core human/digital UX to Big Ai/Tech. We (HNers) complain so much about all the bad stuff the prior iterations (social media, saas out the wazoo), are we going to repeat it again by defaulting to whatever they give us, misaligned incentives and all?

They have an API but they're pretty costly(search is actually pretty costly).

> Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video...

In no world would I consider a person who says "it's okay if the next generation is illiterate" an education expert.

And the guy selling excerpts software says there's no data suggesting a deep, unsolvable flaw in his product. Cool.

> Timothy Shanahan, a leading literacy scholar and an author of the StudySync curriculum, said there was no data suggesting that students become stronger readers when they are assigned full novels.

... If anyone is working on reversing this I'd love to hear where you're starting.

My suggestion is get kids into audiobooks first and then get them reading, also don’t let kids watch tv or have a smart phone I wasn’t allowed to watch tv during the week as a kid, and I have neck problems because I read so much. Now I’m lucky if I get through a book a year.

Reversing it? We're on the cusp of the LLM era. You're on a site full of people trying to sell one kind of summarization or another as so thoroughly a replacement for reading full original texts that it can't be questioned without raising hackneyed accusations of objecting to the invention of the calculator. Before long people who read full novels will be seen the way we now see people who listen to music on vinyl.

The modern AI phone support systems I’ve encountered aren’t able to do anything or go off script, so it sounds better but it’s still a lousy experience.

This is also a story about marketing.

At this point, the level of puffery is on par with claiming a new pair of shoes will turn you into an Olympic athlete.

People are doing this because they’re told it works, and showing up to run a marathon with zero training because they were told the shoes are enough.

Some people may need to figure out the problem here for themselves.

I remember the early days of the ipad 1 where publishers and technologists were stoked about all the cool new interactive things they could do with this format.

It flopped. It turns out interactive infographics and scrollytelling are fun (and costly) to make but readers don't really like them.

The smashing success story wasn't actually what you can do with the new devices' screen, it was audio. It turns out audiobooks (and podcasts) are a huge hit when the price is right and you make it accessible enough.

Better yet, I prefer to read some unusual word choices from someone who’s clearly put a lot of work into learning English than a robot.

Indeed, this sort of “writing with an accent” can illuminate interesting aspects of both English and the speakers’ native language that I find fascinating.

Yeah, the German speakers I work with often say "Can you do this until [some deadline]?" When they mean "can you complete this by [some deadline]?"

Its common enough that it must be a literal translation difference between German and English.

100%! I will always give the benefit of the doubt when I see odd syntax/grammar (and do my best to provide helpful correction if it's off-base to the extent that it muddies your point), but hit me with a wordy, em-dash battered pile of gobbledygook and you might as well be spitting in my face.

Yep, it’s a 2 way learning street - you can learn new things from non native speakers, and they can learn from you as well. Any kind of auto Translation removed this. (It’s still important to have for non fluent people though!)

That's my finding as well. The smaller the chunk, the better, and it saves me 5m here and an hour there. These really add up.

This is cool. It's extra cool on annoying things like "fix my types" or "find the syntax error" or "give me the flags for ffmpeg to do exactly this."

If I ever meet someone who drank the koolaid and wants to show me their process, I'm happy to see it. But I've tried enough to believe my own eyes, and when I see open source contributors I respect demo their methods, they spend enough time and energy either waiting on the machine and trying to keep it on the rails that, yes this is harder, but it does not appear to be faster.

No... I've found the opposite where using the fastest model to do the smallest pieces is useful and anything where I have to wait 2m for a wrong answer is just on the way.

There's pretty much no way anyone context switching that fast is paying a lick of attention. They may be having fun, like scrolling tiktok or playing a videogame just piling on stimuli, but I don't believe they're getting anything done. It's plausible they're smarter than me, it is not plausible they have a totally different kind of brain chemistry.

The other major feature is anyone can learn it in 5 minutes and fit all the instructions on an index card.

Many years ago I introduced it at a newspaper full of OG reporters who were a little nostalgic for the clatter of typewriters and the kid who would run the drafts around the newsroom.

On the first day they thought it was weird. On the second—and I'm not exaggerating, it was 24 hours—they loved it, because unlike MS Word/most WYSIWYG junkers, it did exactly what they told it to, without fussy formatting or invisible characters.

I've done this several times since, with all kinds of non-technical users who would never, ever tolerate something like LaTeX.

The whole point is to dumb a problem down so that people can focus on substance instead of form. It’s typesetting for people who aren’t technical and to lower the barrier for technical people for documentation of what they’re working on so far that you can ridicule people who still refuse to document their shit.

Any time you can make a developer chose between belligerence or stupidity to explain their behavior, they will either change the behavior or go with belligerence because they’d rather be dead than thought stupid. In either case you have maneuvered them out of being able to continue to be obstructive to team dynamics.

So you “solve” social problems with technical solutions not by making the solution better, but by making it the dumbest thing ever so only an idiot wouldn’t understand it.

It's not even typesetting. It just formalizes the semantic parts of any well written long document.

It holds people back because it's not meant to be a typesetting tool. It's mostly meant to look good in its raw format.

It’s called markdown because it contains simple markup. Some of that is structural, no argument, but it’s also layout. Just enough to keep readers on board with what you’re saying.

Let me insert one more: you have to spend some time with your own thoughts.

Whatever you read, whatever you listen to, if you do not actually stop to consider it, by taking a long walk without headphones or scribbling in a notebook perhaps, you can’t know what you think.

And I suspect this is what’s happening to a lot of people. It’s easy to perform a psychological DDOS on yourself with doomscrolling or YouTube or podcasts or cable news in a way that’s actually really hard to do with a 500 page book.