There are many reasons why someone might want to improve their reading, and the only solution to that is to practice reading.
Audiobooks are someone else's (i.e. not your) interpretation of a work. Kind of like how you might go watch a play or a movie instead of reading a script. There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but they're not reading.
> How to you estimate the 'time and skill' that went into the creation of a random piece of art?
You don't. Unless that's the kind of thing you're into, I guess.
> Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?
You can't quantify art that way. People work at different speeds. I can appreciate that something took some number of hours without knowing the precise number of hours.
> As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.
Maybe, but I'm not qualified to make that comparison. Both are beyond my level of artistic ability (I've never studied art nor practiced much). I don't know why one thing or artist gets more popular than another while another who's just as talented (or maybe even moreso) languishes in obscurity. Skill is a factor, sure, but there's no formula that I'm aware of.
> What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'
Maybe some people think of it that way. I don't know. I've never asked those questions about any art I consume. I just think something like, "wow, this looks nice, it must have taken a while" or "what would it take to make something like this, I wonder"
Creating art, even via using something like Photoshop, is a skill that takes years of learning and practice to do well. Most people who appreciate art appreciate not only the art itself, but the time and skill that went into its creation.
When someone short-circuits the whole creative process by putting a prompt into a machine and having it spit out an art, there's nothing to appreciate.
Text-based browsers are also great for just reading hypertext documents. I've been using a combination of a text-based rss reader and web browser to keep up with the sites I care about, and I can tear through my collection of articles pretty quickly
My house has a problem with little black ants that pest control services never could quite take care of. Spiders kept trying to set up shop near a window, but I would always knock the web down. Once I relented and let the spiders do their thing my ant problem went away. All I need to do is clean up a few ant corpses in the fall, which is a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
> I disagree with a notion that a page needs to work without javascript. It is only design choice of author.
Sure, I guess, but if a site that's primarily text doesn't work without Javascript then that's a design failure. I sometimes use a browser like links2 because eliminating everything but text can sometimes help me focus. If the site displays nothing, I'm probably not going to bother reloading it in a different browser just so I can render the text.
(It's a nonissue for this site, which appears to render fine in links2.)
> Hey team! I find journaling for a fictive audience to be more effective personally; since it forces me to try digest my thoughts for an external listener.
Okay, but I don't understand the benefit of writing to an entirely fictitious AI construct instead of writing to the ideal of the kind of reader you'd eventually like to have.
I mean, I get that it's frustrating to pour effort into writing something that effectively nobody reads (i.e. you never connect with a wider audience), but engaging with an entirely fictitious audience seems hollow to me.
If I'm just jotting down personal notes, I use a pen and a notepad. If I need to transcribe anything into my long-term notes, then I can do that at the end of the day/week/whatever, when I review what I wrote down.
> I've made a ton of attempts to build my giant collection of subscriptions but always just burn out on maintaining it.
RSS subscriptions aren't like Pokemon. You don't have to catch them all. One of the major selling points of RSS is that you can subscribe to sites that update infrequently so you get notified when they have a new update instead of checking the site manually and being disappointed that it hasn't updated in three weeks or whatever.
Adding a bunch of sites that update hundreds of times a day is a great way to DDOS your own attention span
> over 100k emails to go through in one lifetime isn't worth the trouble
Unless you're on a bunch of mailing lists, I can't even fathom having that much email, much less that much unread email. I'm fanatical about making sure that I'm at inbox zero as much as possible because the 'unread' counter is the enemy. It takes some effort to set up and adjust filters and actually unsubscribe from stuff, but it's completely worth it to have a mailbox that's actually usable.