I was once unemployed for a year when I was young (about 19) and I rather frighteningly read about one (probably 0.75) fairly serious novel a day (think Graham Greene sort of stuff). I have loads of time on my hands now (I'm 72) and thankfully could not get anywhere near that today.
I spent years reading a little in bed before falling asleep and I wish I had never started doing that. I've conditioned myself that reading leads to sleep and now it's very difficult for me to read for long because a few pages in I start to feel sleepy.
Same, but I don't think it's the conditioning itself, it's just being comfortable. I can't watch/listen to a video of a presentation either and struggle sitting in at presentations.
how scary is the decay of cognition? i'm 29 and i already noticed the amount of energy i had on my early 20s on everything, stamina to read, watch movies, exercise, recover from the exercise etc. compared to what i have now. guess it's a slow downhill till i mature to old age but still. shit. i hate the linear time
It's important to factor in lifestyle factors here.
By the time you hit 40, you've accumulated ~20 years of adult-life habits. For a lot of people, that lifestyle is very sedentary, missing most dietary recommendations (insufficient fiber intake, oversufficient saturated fat intake), poor sleep, frequent emotional stress etc.
As a young adult, you've spent most of your life being very active, sleeping ~10 hours a night (as a child), having plenty of downtime and playtime etc. It's why you can party hard, study hard and sleep a little; you're starting fresh.
The good news is that some of these habits are massive levers; biological age can drift decades (worst-to-best).
My experience dating someone younger. She was still in college and I was already working full time. I noticed that if we stayed late night on the weekend, she would make the sleep back during the week, may be in short spans, here and there. But once you work full time, you cannot. At work, you have be up and ready all day. So you carry a sleep debt for a long time. Once, she started working full time, she was as tired as me.
43, I've never felt better or smarter, the wisdom vs intelligence ratio is real, and you learn to take better care of yourself over time. I am definitely old, but it's less in the brain than I would have expected when I was younger.
The other thing you gain is time contraction - a year now feels like a month when I was younger, so it's easier to plan long term and follow through on projects.
But I too am very interested in the perspective from closer to 80! I suspect, if I'm lucky enough to make it there, I'll consider present me the same kind of fool as I now consider younger me.
I find it a bit scary too - I simply cannot write programs anymore (mostly motivation, I think) though I'm not conscious of decay in my other mental functions. But I suppose those poor people that go wandering off into the night would say the same sort of thing.
I'm not the OP and I imagine all cases are different, but my dad was a software developer who had early cognitive decline in his 60s (he died of vascular dementia recently) and he used to talk about it a lot. He said it was like his tolerance for complexity kept closing in.
Where he could once hold an entire system and its details in his head (almost an essential skill in the 80s/90s), he could only instead focus on smaller pieces at a time. Any new tooling or approaches that came along, he was fascinated to hear about them, but no longer felt able to pick them up. He could still solve algorithmic problems and debug "in the small", but it was like he had to do math on a Post-it note where once he had a huge sheet of paper.
It's not a linear cognitive decline but more like hitting a wall (usually late 40s/early 50s).
What's it like? Frustrating as Hell because you can remember your prior capabilities but have to deal with things like randomly forgetting words/names temporarily, decreased short-term memory abilities, etc.
How did he get that job? I imagine you have to prove you have good "taste" for what makes a good movie... I imagine some difference from what makes a good book
I think it was a combination of right place/right time, knowing everything about film-making (and you're right, what makes a good adaptation) and was just a naturally cool, interesting guy, so that everyone who met him just liked him.
It didn't last forever. The last time I saw him was one of those wild random coincidences. I was visiting Cannes during the festival (as a tourist) and ran into him on the Croisette. We went for coffee and he told me that he had become a television producer.
You're definitely looking for something other than the writing and even the plot. For example, the novel "The Firm" had a ridiculous ending but they fixed it for the screenplay.
I dropped of a book to this guy that I had just finished called "The Hotel on the Roof of the World," and he later told me that they optioned the author. Unfortunately the film never got made, but if you read it you'll see it has the bones of a really nice film.
There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign.
He says he mainly summarizes plot and that the qualities of the writing are not important. It seems like that would miss opportunities - for instance he didn’t think Vineland was adaptable and didn’t even recognize One Battle After Another as the adaptation when he saw it until the credits rolled. Another example, IMHO Arrival is a beautiful adaptation that improves upon the original short story mostly by addition, or maybe it’s cause Amy Adams is more charismatic than the character in my imagination.
Two days per book full time means one every 16 hours. Enough to read the full Foundation Trilogy with one hour to rest between books.
On a side note, I'm ashamed to share that I tested my reading speed, and while it was 264 WPM, my reading comprehension was 50%. That's why I read slower, and frequently re-read.
Out of spite I tried to measure my Spanish reading, 520 WPM and 100% comprehension. Very unfair since it's my native language and I can glance and skip instead of reading every word.
To me the interesting question about a job like this is "How can you tell if you're doing it well?" It involves such high-stakes, high-uncertainty and highly variability that it has to be nearly impossible to know. I mean you're predicting distant outcomes from creative pursuits which must first survive a gauntlet of wicked complexity and randomness.
Only a few percent of your judgements are ever tested (by surviving being optioned, produced and released) and, of the ones that are, at best you only get a small sampling of false positives over a sea of potential false negatives. I imagine he's incredibly interested in the fate of any titles he didn't recommend which end up being produced (perhaps by another studio). Having filled a similar role in a different industry with similar high-stakes 'unknowables', I thought a lot about this. It was pretty obvious what practically mattered was how much my output "felt right" to downstream decision-makers vs actually being right.
While my stakeholders were quite happy with my work, actually targeting such ephemeral and uncorrelated feedback felt unproductive and dumb. Eventually, I settled on making the evaluation process fully transparent and consistent. I ensured all objective criteria were documented and each subjective judgement had clear confidence intervals. This was more challenging than it sounds. In the end, it was still hard to know if I was really improving year to year. For that, I still had to rely on my own, mostly subjective, self-assessment but at least I had some objective tracking data to calibrate on. That at least helped me feel like I was executing with diligence and integrity. It also increased my confidence no one else in the industry was doing it any better.
I suppose it's mostly about clear communication. If you are reviewing books for a movie, the job does not seem to be "will this become a successful adaptation?" so much as "what is the strongest movie latent in this book, and how do I communicate that to the people who can act on it?". Those people would then try to imagine how that script would be portrayed on the screen, what the acting would be like, what the scenes would look like and where the material would break under translation. Given you all have some understanding about what makes a great script and what makes a great movie, you make a pipeline that has multiple experts controlling different aspects of the transformation and generating the strongest final product based on the original book, which, from book adaptations I saw, most of the time is just a thin seed rather than a forced blueprint.
If it later turns out the material was not adaptable in the way you thought, I'd imagine that is not just a binary miss, since the reader, producer, writer and executives can discuss and try to see where their judgement failed and what went wrong. I get that the hard feedback is sparse, but it doesn't have to be researche-grade measurements as much as it has to be good judgement, constant reality checks, even if just from proxies, and good taste. I'd be curious if this sounds close to what you were doing.
PS: there's this Dalton + Michael YC advice for startups which seems relevant: when outcomes are highly uncertain, you can't judge the result-only whether you acted logically, ethically and treated people well along the way.. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgcdvIj5I-k)
Not sure what you want to know. To me, the interesting aspect is the unique challenges of making high-stakes decisions in ultra high-uncertainty situations where you never receive any feedback signal on most of your calls. And the little you do get is greatly delayed or buried in ambient noise. Yet, due to the size of the infrequent prize, the game can still be worth playing... if you can find and hold a slight edge.
There aren't a lot of professional careers which require skill and years of experience yet are flooded with so many false positives, false negatives, and "we'll never even knows". Domains where playing at a world-class level only takes being right 5% of the time - are just hard to reason about. It can feel like a sadistic casino where 97% of blackjack hands have no clear winner, yet sometimes hitting on 20 is the optimal call. But other times standing on 12 is the best strategy. But it's not entirely random. There are real signals. It's just hard to identify which are real, which are red noise and which are just mapped backward.
With so many false positives and false negatives it's easy to end up chasing black swans (random outlier events). Or to just settle for trying to please your boss, whose own track record is probably closer to astrology than strategy. My best meta-takeaway is to focus on thoroughly mapping the decision space, carefully track and map all the signals, even build a taxonomy of signal types if you can. Then relentlessly optimize the decision making process over the actual outcomes. Why? Because in such 'wicked' domains, sometimes the wrong decision process can still score winning results. And other times, an optimal decision process can yield a string of losses. Your job depends on figuring which is which before it's obvious to other expert players.
As for the book reader in the TFA, I suspect a lot of his value isn't in his a binary "go / no go" call. It's accurately mapping the strengths and weaknesses of a particular title and suggesting where to place it in the studio's current decision matrix. And, on a good day, maybe spotting non-obvious ways the property could be developed.
I started to find this article interesting but every time I tapped “x” on an ad to dismiss it, no more than five seconds later, the same ad would appear at the bottom and distract me. Over and over.
If someone has the will to fight those little xs, they have the will to install uBlock Origin. It even works on iPad and iPhone now, through a regular Safari Plugin.
sorta piling on here, but it's also worth noting that this problem goes away (and the article is quite readable) in a browser with javascript turned off (and no adblocker).
This is my retirement plan in circa 40 years from now: own a small bookshop/cafe and sit around reading a book all day. Without the pressure of reviews or deadlines.
Why wait until then? Who knows if you'll even be alive in 40 years? :) Not to sound macabre, but it always strikes me as weird to wait until retirement to do something that we think would be the most fulfilling to us. If this is truly something you want and look forward to, wouldn't you want to spend 40 years doing that now, rather than doing that for ~5-10 years 40 years from now?
Well because it’s not something I want to do now. Plenty of other bigger dreams in the meantime.
The retirement plan of sitting at a cafe with a book is more for when I’ve already done all the other things. I wouldn’t say it’s my ultimate life dream or anything.
On a similar note, I have friends who watches TV Series and Movies before they come out to create/review the subtitles. Sounds like fun job but gets boring really fast.
How does a Nokia snake game decide a path through ALL the books as if an intellectual stream of consciousness in AI core unsupported by runtime or operating system, contained in a portable cartridge smartphone form factor that mounts on humanoid or any other embodiment, where each book is a signed distance field to concentric open unit balls and at any point is a three way split projection to a triangle surface into the mathsemantic field or manifold, etc? imagine a bare metal self programming LISP that has journeyed 20 thousand years in the Asimov positronic brain construction.
The title is misleading, he isn't paid to read books he is paid to write an executive summary evaluating a book's suitability for film. The reading is just required for him to do his actual job.
True for me. I used to love writing software. About fifteen years into my career I lost interest in side projects, and by the time I retired anything that smacks of coding seems like drudgery.
I occasionally watch a woodworking YouTube channel. The creator tells people if they start woodworking as a job they'll have to find a new hobby.
I don't think it is cut and dry as that. Of the top of my head I can think of "Jorge Luis Borges" who was a voracious reader and much of his career involved reading (literary adviser, librarian etc.). I don't think (can't know for sure) he hated his job.
While he reads books in his job, what he's actually paid for is quickly synthesizing what he's read into actionable judgements assessing whether (and in what ways) those books have potential to be adapted into commercial film scripts. His assessments are ~10 to ~20 pages, and while being free-form to some extent, still follow fairly evolved standards for format, structure, criteria and terminology.
> even allowing for time off, that works out to roughly 300 books a year, or well over 6,000 across two decades. And that is just the professional tally.
I would imagine this sucks the fun out of some books and also forces you to read a lot of dreadful books. I knew a bibliophile who worked for a publisher and was sad to hear from him that he rarely got time to read for pleasure.
Isn't this a work-life balance issue? I work 8 hours a day on my work computer(s), yet I'm still eager to use my home computer for hobbies or pleasure.
This person could read for pleasure if they set the time for it. When I was coding all day, I didn't have the will to code for hobby at home, so maybe they had the time but not the drive.
This conversation was many, many years ago, but I think his point was that when he got home he didn't want to do any more reading. I have proof read etc and it is a very different type of reading from reading for pleasure. I think when you've been looking at text all day you might want to do something different.
Like I say, the man in the article must have to read some horrible books. What happens when there is a book which is horribly written, but which might make a good film. I think that is a genuine scenario.
For executives looking to impress? Not really. Being able to rattle off perspective on a book, curated by someone with very high media literacy would signal the same level of media literacy to their audience.
An LLM may be able to synthesise results well each time, but there will be quite a difference between a synopsis written by an LLM and someone whose job it is to write synopses of books.
Huge difference in quality, and considering the clientele, they are willing to pay for that quality.
Reminded me a bit of the man who 100-percents (completes all achievements) and reviews video games for a living, usually a couple per week but it varies by time of year and industry cycles:
I was once unemployed for a year when I was young (about 19) and I rather frighteningly read about one (probably 0.75) fairly serious novel a day (think Graham Greene sort of stuff). I have loads of time on my hands now (I'm 72) and thankfully could not get anywhere near that today.
I spent years reading a little in bed before falling asleep and I wish I had never started doing that. I've conditioned myself that reading leads to sleep and now it's very difficult for me to read for long because a few pages in I start to feel sleepy.
Same, but I don't think it's the conditioning itself, it's just being comfortable. I can't watch/listen to a video of a presentation either and struggle sitting in at presentations.
how scary is the decay of cognition? i'm 29 and i already noticed the amount of energy i had on my early 20s on everything, stamina to read, watch movies, exercise, recover from the exercise etc. compared to what i have now. guess it's a slow downhill till i mature to old age but still. shit. i hate the linear time
It's important to factor in lifestyle factors here.
By the time you hit 40, you've accumulated ~20 years of adult-life habits. For a lot of people, that lifestyle is very sedentary, missing most dietary recommendations (insufficient fiber intake, oversufficient saturated fat intake), poor sleep, frequent emotional stress etc.
As a young adult, you've spent most of your life being very active, sleeping ~10 hours a night (as a child), having plenty of downtime and playtime etc. It's why you can party hard, study hard and sleep a little; you're starting fresh.
The good news is that some of these habits are massive levers; biological age can drift decades (worst-to-best).
3 replies →
My experience dating someone younger. She was still in college and I was already working full time. I noticed that if we stayed late night on the weekend, she would make the sleep back during the week, may be in short spans, here and there. But once you work full time, you cannot. At work, you have be up and ready all day. So you carry a sleep debt for a long time. Once, she started working full time, she was as tired as me.
43, I've never felt better or smarter, the wisdom vs intelligence ratio is real, and you learn to take better care of yourself over time. I am definitely old, but it's less in the brain than I would have expected when I was younger.
The other thing you gain is time contraction - a year now feels like a month when I was younger, so it's easier to plan long term and follow through on projects.
But I too am very interested in the perspective from closer to 80! I suspect, if I'm lucky enough to make it there, I'll consider present me the same kind of fool as I now consider younger me.
4 replies →
I find it a bit scary too - I simply cannot write programs anymore (mostly motivation, I think) though I'm not conscious of decay in my other mental functions. But I suppose those poor people that go wandering off into the night would say the same sort of thing.
3 replies →
I'm not the OP and I imagine all cases are different, but my dad was a software developer who had early cognitive decline in his 60s (he died of vascular dementia recently) and he used to talk about it a lot. He said it was like his tolerance for complexity kept closing in.
Where he could once hold an entire system and its details in his head (almost an essential skill in the 80s/90s), he could only instead focus on smaller pieces at a time. Any new tooling or approaches that came along, he was fascinated to hear about them, but no longer felt able to pick them up. He could still solve algorithmic problems and debug "in the small", but it was like he had to do math on a Post-it note where once he had a huge sheet of paper.
It's not a linear cognitive decline but more like hitting a wall (usually late 40s/early 50s). What's it like? Frustrating as Hell because you can remember your prior capabilities but have to deal with things like randomly forgetting words/names temporarily, decreased short-term memory abilities, etc.
Don't you feel an increase of abstraction level though? I became 2x slower at 30 but a lot of concepts started to click.
> and thankfully could not get anywhere near that today.
Because you're addicted to HN now and HN didn't exist by then?
I don't spend anywhere near the time on HN today that I used to spend reading books back then.
[dead]
I had a good friend who did this -- was a reader for a movie studio, looking for adaptations. Everyone teased him for having such a great job.
How did he get that job? I imagine you have to prove you have good "taste" for what makes a good movie... I imagine some difference from what makes a good book
I think it was a combination of right place/right time, knowing everything about film-making (and you're right, what makes a good adaptation) and was just a naturally cool, interesting guy, so that everyone who met him just liked him.
It didn't last forever. The last time I saw him was one of those wild random coincidences. I was visiting Cannes during the festival (as a tourist) and ran into him on the Croisette. We went for coffee and he told me that he had become a television producer.
I kinda feel that's like "video game tester". Sounds great from the outside, but I bet he spent 90% of time reading absolute dreck.
You're definitely looking for something other than the writing and even the plot. For example, the novel "The Firm" had a ridiculous ending but they fixed it for the screenplay.
I dropped of a book to this guy that I had just finished called "The Hotel on the Roof of the World," and he later told me that they optioned the author. Unfortunately the film never got made, but if you read it you'll see it has the bones of a really nice film.
the worst part isn't even the garbage, it's the "good plot written in very bad way"
you power through it, you get invested - but you know that nothing will ever come out of it and in no way can you recommend it
4 replies →
I always think of the twain quote:
There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line in the summer because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work, and then they would resign.
-- Mark Twain
> a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation
From studio output, it feels like all they read are graphic novels
He says he mainly summarizes plot and that the qualities of the writing are not important. It seems like that would miss opportunities - for instance he didn’t think Vineland was adaptable and didn’t even recognize One Battle After Another as the adaptation when he saw it until the credits rolled. Another example, IMHO Arrival is a beautiful adaptation that improves upon the original short story mostly by addition, or maybe it’s cause Amy Adams is more charismatic than the character in my imagination.
15 replies →
I was skeptical, but the article starts with Train Dreams, which according to HowLongToRead, would take 2 hours at 300 WPM.
https://howlongtoread.com/books/323872/Train-Dreams
Two days per book full time means one every 16 hours. Enough to read the full Foundation Trilogy with one hour to rest between books.
On a side note, I'm ashamed to share that I tested my reading speed, and while it was 264 WPM, my reading comprehension was 50%. That's why I read slower, and frequently re-read.
https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test
Out of spite I tried to measure my Spanish reading, 520 WPM and 100% comprehension. Very unfair since it's my native language and I can glance and skip instead of reading every word.
https://speedreadr.com/es/
13 replies →
Robert Redford's character in _Three Days of the Condor_ gets asked what he does for a living. "I read." Has always seemed to be the ideal job. :-)
You mean the job where his entire department was murdered?
But the reader escaped! :-)
To me the interesting question about a job like this is "How can you tell if you're doing it well?" It involves such high-stakes, high-uncertainty and highly variability that it has to be nearly impossible to know. I mean you're predicting distant outcomes from creative pursuits which must first survive a gauntlet of wicked complexity and randomness.
Only a few percent of your judgements are ever tested (by surviving being optioned, produced and released) and, of the ones that are, at best you only get a small sampling of false positives over a sea of potential false negatives. I imagine he's incredibly interested in the fate of any titles he didn't recommend which end up being produced (perhaps by another studio). Having filled a similar role in a different industry with similar high-stakes 'unknowables', I thought a lot about this. It was pretty obvious what practically mattered was how much my output "felt right" to downstream decision-makers vs actually being right.
While my stakeholders were quite happy with my work, actually targeting such ephemeral and uncorrelated feedback felt unproductive and dumb. Eventually, I settled on making the evaluation process fully transparent and consistent. I ensured all objective criteria were documented and each subjective judgement had clear confidence intervals. This was more challenging than it sounds. In the end, it was still hard to know if I was really improving year to year. For that, I still had to rely on my own, mostly subjective, self-assessment but at least I had some objective tracking data to calibrate on. That at least helped me feel like I was executing with diligence and integrity. It also increased my confidence no one else in the industry was doing it any better.
I suppose it's mostly about clear communication. If you are reviewing books for a movie, the job does not seem to be "will this become a successful adaptation?" so much as "what is the strongest movie latent in this book, and how do I communicate that to the people who can act on it?". Those people would then try to imagine how that script would be portrayed on the screen, what the acting would be like, what the scenes would look like and where the material would break under translation. Given you all have some understanding about what makes a great script and what makes a great movie, you make a pipeline that has multiple experts controlling different aspects of the transformation and generating the strongest final product based on the original book, which, from book adaptations I saw, most of the time is just a thin seed rather than a forced blueprint.
If it later turns out the material was not adaptable in the way you thought, I'd imagine that is not just a binary miss, since the reader, producer, writer and executives can discuss and try to see where their judgement failed and what went wrong. I get that the hard feedback is sparse, but it doesn't have to be researche-grade measurements as much as it has to be good judgement, constant reality checks, even if just from proxies, and good taste. I'd be curious if this sounds close to what you were doing.
PS: there's this Dalton + Michael YC advice for startups which seems relevant: when outcomes are highly uncertain, you can't judge the result-only whether you acted logically, ethically and treated people well along the way.. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgcdvIj5I-k)
Please tell more!
Not sure what you want to know. To me, the interesting aspect is the unique challenges of making high-stakes decisions in ultra high-uncertainty situations where you never receive any feedback signal on most of your calls. And the little you do get is greatly delayed or buried in ambient noise. Yet, due to the size of the infrequent prize, the game can still be worth playing... if you can find and hold a slight edge.
There aren't a lot of professional careers which require skill and years of experience yet are flooded with so many false positives, false negatives, and "we'll never even knows". Domains where playing at a world-class level only takes being right 5% of the time - are just hard to reason about. It can feel like a sadistic casino where 97% of blackjack hands have no clear winner, yet sometimes hitting on 20 is the optimal call. But other times standing on 12 is the best strategy. But it's not entirely random. There are real signals. It's just hard to identify which are real, which are red noise and which are just mapped backward.
With so many false positives and false negatives it's easy to end up chasing black swans (random outlier events). Or to just settle for trying to please your boss, whose own track record is probably closer to astrology than strategy. My best meta-takeaway is to focus on thoroughly mapping the decision space, carefully track and map all the signals, even build a taxonomy of signal types if you can. Then relentlessly optimize the decision making process over the actual outcomes. Why? Because in such 'wicked' domains, sometimes the wrong decision process can still score winning results. And other times, an optimal decision process can yield a string of losses. Your job depends on figuring which is which before it's obvious to other expert players.
As for the book reader in the TFA, I suspect a lot of his value isn't in his a binary "go / no go" call. It's accurately mapping the strengths and weaknesses of a particular title and suggesting where to place it in the studio's current decision matrix. And, on a good day, maybe spotting non-obvious ways the property could be developed.
2 replies →
I started to find this article interesting but every time I tapped “x” on an ad to dismiss it, no more than five seconds later, the same ad would appear at the bottom and distract me. Over and over.
The internet is so much better blocking ads.
If someone has the will to fight those little xs, they have the will to install uBlock Origin. It even works on iPad and iPhone now, through a regular Safari Plugin.
2 replies →
sorta piling on here, but it's also worth noting that this problem goes away (and the article is quite readable) in a browser with javascript turned off (and no adblocker).
I often use reader mode.
Archive.org has a few copies: https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://lithub.c...
Sounds like a "dickover", a term coined by John Gruber: https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover
This is my retirement plan in circa 40 years from now: own a small bookshop/cafe and sit around reading a book all day. Without the pressure of reviews or deadlines.
Why wait until then? Who knows if you'll even be alive in 40 years? :) Not to sound macabre, but it always strikes me as weird to wait until retirement to do something that we think would be the most fulfilling to us. If this is truly something you want and look forward to, wouldn't you want to spend 40 years doing that now, rather than doing that for ~5-10 years 40 years from now?
Well because it’s not something I want to do now. Plenty of other bigger dreams in the meantime.
The retirement plan of sitting at a cafe with a book is more for when I’ve already done all the other things. I wouldn’t say it’s my ultimate life dream or anything.
On a similar note, I have friends who watches TV Series and Movies before they come out to create/review the subtitles. Sounds like fun job but gets boring really fast.
Can you tell him to stop eliding words and paraphrasing that would be great. Also [speaks French] instead of translating or giving French subtitles.
Also [soft violin music] when it's a Bach cello suite.
Haha, [leaves rustling] I will ask her.
"I read books [...] I've read a couple of books a week for [...] 50 [years]"[1] - Jim Keller (CPU designer) with Lex Fridman.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=5039s
How does a Nokia snake game decide a path through ALL the books as if an intellectual stream of consciousness in AI core unsupported by runtime or operating system, contained in a portable cartridge smartphone form factor that mounts on humanoid or any other embodiment, where each book is a signed distance field to concentric open unit balls and at any point is a three way split projection to a triangle surface into the mathsemantic field or manifold, etc? imagine a bare metal self programming LISP that has journeyed 20 thousand years in the Asimov positronic brain construction.
This is true for freelance technical editors, too.
TIL I can get paid for doing what I do for fun: reading ~100 books a year.
What surprises me is that he only reads about 50 more books a year than I do, and he does it full time.
The title is misleading, he isn't paid to read books he is paid to write an executive summary evaluating a book's suitability for film. The reading is just required for him to do his actual job.
Don't make a work off your hobby, you'll stop loving that.
"Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life" is a lie.
True for me. I used to love writing software. About fifteen years into my career I lost interest in side projects, and by the time I retired anything that smacks of coding seems like drudgery.
I occasionally watch a woodworking YouTube channel. The creator tells people if they start woodworking as a job they'll have to find a new hobby.
Not necessarily true for everyone, either of them. Both parts feel too dogmatic, it always depends.
I don't think it is cut and dry as that. Of the top of my head I can think of "Jorge Luis Borges" who was a voracious reader and much of his career involved reading (literary adviser, librarian etc.). I don't think (can't know for sure) he hated his job.
While he reads books in his job, what he's actually paid for is quickly synthesizing what he's read into actionable judgements assessing whether (and in what ways) those books have potential to be adapted into commercial film scripts. His assessments are ~10 to ~20 pages, and while being free-form to some extent, still follow fairly evolved standards for format, structure, criteria and terminology.
> even allowing for time off, that works out to roughly 300 books a year, or well over 6,000 across two decades. And that is just the professional tally.
Every other day is ~3/week which is between 150 and 180/year; not 300.
He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day.
3 replies →
This seems like the kind of profession that AI would’ve already destroyed. Aren’t LLMs pretty good at what he’s doing?
Can't be any worse than what Hollywood puts out already.
I wonder how he felt about holiday vacation book report assignments back in school.
I read two books a day in middle school. Still my favorite time to look back on…
I would imagine this sucks the fun out of some books and also forces you to read a lot of dreadful books. I knew a bibliophile who worked for a publisher and was sad to hear from him that he rarely got time to read for pleasure.
Isn't this a work-life balance issue? I work 8 hours a day on my work computer(s), yet I'm still eager to use my home computer for hobbies or pleasure.
This person could read for pleasure if they set the time for it. When I was coding all day, I didn't have the will to code for hobby at home, so maybe they had the time but not the drive.
This conversation was many, many years ago, but I think his point was that when he got home he didn't want to do any more reading. I have proof read etc and it is a very different type of reading from reading for pleasure. I think when you've been looking at text all day you might want to do something different.
Like I say, the man in the article must have to read some horrible books. What happens when there is a book which is horribly written, but which might make a good film. I think that is a genuine scenario.
How does he stay awake??
This is LLM territory and they are extremely good at it.
For executives looking to impress? Not really. Being able to rattle off perspective on a book, curated by someone with very high media literacy would signal the same level of media literacy to their audience.
An LLM may be able to synthesise results well each time, but there will be quite a difference between a synopsis written by an LLM and someone whose job it is to write synopses of books.
Huge difference in quality, and considering the clientele, they are willing to pay for that quality.
There really isn’t anymore. It can ape anyone’s style well, including insights and almost no one can reliably tell if something is AI or not.
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Reminded me a bit of the man who 100-percents (completes all achievements) and reviews video games for a living, usually a couple per week but it varies by time of year and industry cycles:
https://youtube.com/@mortismalgaming
Boring isn't it? Reading half a book every single day.
Not for him though, he loves it.
With exceptions, after sometime everything can bring you down or nothing can bring you down.