Book sales in general (across all formats) are up I think - so there are still many, many readers around. We just have many new formats (EPUB, audiobooks, reader devices, etc.) and of course population is increasing over the globe. I'm pretty sure we have the highest number of readers on the planet right now than ever before in absolute terms.
I'm not sure that's still correct. There was an uplift because of Covid and people having more spare time, but whatever more recent (2024 - 2025) sources I can find suggest the trend has reversed.
It's worth also considering demographics. If you narrow the focus to just younger generations (who, we can guess, are more addicted to smartphones) then the numbers look pretty bad. E.g.:
My son, who is away at college as a freshman this year, recently phoned me and apologized for calling me a bad dad and thanked me for not allowing him to have any devices in his bedroom after bedtime growing up, as it made him become a reader. He said he was amazed when he got to school and nobody else reads for pleasure.
I can't fault people for feeling that nobody reads anymore. In the US today the majority of Americans can't even understand books written at a 6th grade level and literacy has been trending downward. Only a small number of us are propping up book sales.
Audience matters here. Most book sales have been falling. The one increase has been in romance porn with those books accounting for some 50% of all paperbacks sold at this point (they are dominating for the exact same reason porn dominates internet video content).
Personally, I don't count pornhub traffic the same way I count Youtube or Netflix traffic and I think the same applies here.
You ever have a user who pines for this or that feature, and when you tell him it's already implemented, he'll change the goalposts in some trivial way? It's not solutions we love, it's the warm fuzzy narcissism of complaining.
You seem challenged with having a basic discussion without resorting to baseless personal attacks. HN discussions have nosedived in quality over the time. Feel like I'm on reddit.
On the topic - here were my original points (with some extensions):
1. I want a smalltalk-like environment but with modern languages (webassembly makes this technically possible)
2. Alan Kay himself agrees smalltalk is no longer relevant in a concrete manner anymore - it's too old and outdated. The library support is absymal, and LLMs etc won't be as helpful as modern langs, since the training data available is less in quantity and quality. And I am in line with Dr. Kay's view - Smalltalk is indeed too old. I feel the same way about using Lisp for my particular goals.
3. I am not complaining in any way - just stating my requirements in explicit terms. Also I dont consider myself a "user". I am a system builder. I am fully capable of doing things myself if there's no alternative available.
Interesting stuff - none of these seem to have that Smalltalk-like visual IDE bolted right into them.
Given how big and important a platform the modern web is - I really am starting to think - something like this should exist - where I have a neat little IDE bundled right within the browser using which I can evolve the browser...
Amazon still has huge R&D spends, always had. Bezos had a dictum around having a high experimentation (and failure) rate as a matter of principle. They may not be making news-making moves, but I'm sure they'll develop the muscle in AI. Probably - just really honing on the customer use cases and working backwards over the long term.
Proof != evidence. In evidence, we corroborate, collate, add more sources, weigh evidence, judge. Proof is a totally different process. Only in the mathematical do one prove something, everywhere else we build up evidence, corroborate, etc.
Try finding PhD Students and see if you can help with their programming or experiments. You'll learn more about how to do research from a PhD student in months, rather than struggling on your own. Once you have the "learning to learn" chops, you're free to study anything you want at incredible depth.
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