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).
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.
I'm curious what these tests are measuring if you say your reading comprehension is only 50%. Your comment here is completely articulate and sensible so you are obviously fluent in English.
Edited to add: hm. I just got 67%. I guess my college degree is a waste. Should have gone the humanities route instead.
I didn't consciously focus on speed. I just completely overestimated my ability to skim. Interesting. I think I actually would have done better when I was younger and used to doing these things in school. I obviously don't read as carefully as I used to.
In high school, there was an academic event for reading comprehension. I tried it one time and was humiliated. They read aloud to you a story, and then they ask you questions about it after. I have no idea where my head was, as I didn't do well at all. I never tried the event again. It wasn't until that experience before I realized that I'm the type that needs to read things multiple times for it to stick.
I feel like in high school I would have scored better on this. I was overconfident. I skimmed it quickly, like anything I would have done at work, and figured I'd sort of internalize the main points. Like I think I do at work.
The swiftread writing samples are awful, one of them I tried was fiction that introduced four characters in three sentences, I just gave up on that one.
I scored 100% at 500+ WPM for a couple non-fiction samples which felt like my usual reading speed if I’m not reading carefully. I read books at 200-300 WPM.
I think reading for fun and reading for a job are difficult to compare; I'm sure this fellow has a very high reading speed and / or can skim across parts that aren't important for the task at hand. But that's making assumptions.
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.
Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption are good examples of the adaptation being an improvement. Then again, adaptations are usually a novel being adapted for a shorter telling rather than a short story being elaborated.
Those are great, but The Godfather is my favorite example. The book is, honestly, terrible. The prose is bad. It focuses almost exclusively on the salacious - does it need to tell us that many times about the size of Sonny's cock? - and enjoys the violence a bit too much. None of the minor characters leave any impression at all. The movie, though, is... The Godfather. It transcends it's source, without transposing or changing anything - in fact, I suspect it's far more faithful to its historical setting than the novel - more fully than any adaptation I'm aware of.
Another pretty famous example is Stalker, based on Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. The novel is an ok sci-fi concept, but the film takes it to a whole other philosophical level.
Stalker has an interesting history, because Tarkovsky did shoot the Strugatskys' own screenplay first.
But almost all of the shot film was accidentally damaged beyond repair by the Soviet lab — they were using specially imported Kodak film stock that apparently the lab was unfamiliar with — and Tarkovsky had to go back to the Soviet film board and negotiate more money to reshoot the film.
Tarkovsky had been unhappy with the film as he shot it, and during these months of downtime, he repeatedly workshopped the script together with the Strugatskys. Long story short, Arkady Strugatsky proposed that Tarkovsky strip down the story; he wrote a treatment that reduced the entire film to a bare-bones, more philosophical story with nameless characters and very few overt sci-fi elements. Tarkovsky essentially wrote everything around that new core, much of it apparently also written during the second shoot.
I recommend the book "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", by Johnson and Petrie, which has a whole chapter on Stalker and the difficulties of making that film.
In my opinion, Roadside Picnic is a masterpiece, and I would have loved to see a faithful adaptation of it. Stalker, as it ended up, is not really an adaptation of it.
The funny thing about The Godfather is that the movie made the book possible, in a way.
Paramount optioned the novel while Mario Puzo was still writing it. They heard about an early 60-page draft of the book from a literary scout. Mario Puzo was deep in gambling debt and took the option deal because he was desperate for cash. There's a chance Puzo couldn't have finished the book without the deal, because he got a $12,500 advance and would get another $80k if the movie got made.
Paramount announced the option deal in March 1967, two years before the book was published. After it was published they put the movie into production.
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola are the credited screenwriters for the movie. Puzo wrote drafts, Coppola revised them. It was Coppola's idea to start the movie with the line "I believe in America", to highlight what he felt was one of the story's core themes. In the book that scene happens a few chapters in.
So yeah, the book was kinda pulpy and schlocky. But it may never have been published without Hollywood backing. And its author was also half-responsible for turning it into a near-universally acclaimed, Oscar-winning screenplay.
That’s true, your comment reminded me of The Electric State which maybe 50 pages of drawings with descriptions and the trailer for the movie was unintentionally funny to me like it was a parody and World War Z where I loved the short action packed book which seemed like an easy translation but I was so wrong.
I think "Arrival" as a story is better than the movie. I think the movie misses on the part on how hard communication can be, and how different is the way aliens grok the reality as a whole. Also did you watch the movie first and read the story or the other way. I read the story first and then watched the movie with lot of anticipations, and was tad disappointed.
> I think "Arrival" as a story is better than the movie. I think the movie misses on the part on how hard communication can be, and how different is the way aliens grok the reality as a whole.
The movie does not miss anything about the difficulties of communication because that is not what the movie is about: it is about motherhood/parenthood, love, grief.
That is the point I am making: how hard communication is, grokking reality as whole are some of the core themes of the story (is what I felt). The movie doesn't focus on these aspects at all, maybe these are hard to adapt in a mainstream Hollywood movie.
'Children of Men' is probably the best contemporary example of this - appalling book that informed a piece of cinema that's basically beyond reproach.
The archetype in blockbuster cinema has to be Spielberg's 'Jaws'. I'd also give 'Barry Lyndon' a huge commendation.
Those who contend that 'Starship Troopers' is a better adaptation than the book simply don't understand Heinlein or his aims. A fantastic movie and a darkly cynical piece of social commentary on jingoistic nationalism and 'bootcamp' movies as seen through the lense of a highschool ensemble. The book, however, represents a weightier piece of analysis in its own right and provides some fascinating insights into fascism, civil and civic duty, and the role of the individual in the machine.
I could also go into a long and varied debate about Michael Crichton and Stephen King properties which span both sides of this fence, but that's for another post I feel!
Nerdsniped by Starship Troopers, I think it's important to make the distinction there between a direct book adaptation versus "a movie inspired by".
Standalone (and keeping the "this whole thing is a propaganda movie" thing in the back of your head), Starship Troopers is a great film. But it's not a good book adaptation.
> [Re: Starship Troopers] The book, however, represents a weightier piece of analysis in its own right and provides some fascinating insights into fascism, civil and civic duty, and the role of the individual in the machine.
One of my favorites as a teen, and it holds up reasonably well for me decades later. I didn't see it as insights into fascism so much as a meditation into what it would take to keep a global, and later interstellar, society functioning. Yes, there was emphasis on duty, but not to an excess (ISTM), and not a surprise considering Heinlein's U.S. Naval Academy background and subsequent service.
This is very weird to me. Is it that hard to find good fiction that hasn't already been made into a movie, that they need to hire someone else to do it? Is the difference between a good movie and a bad movie the quality of the source material it was based on? Maybe I'm reading this wrong.
The number of bad book adaptations makes me believe this is harder than you'd think. It's really an act of translation; you have to figure out if a book "works" without being able to just say what a character is thinking, without using descriptive lanfuage to imply something, etc.
Plenty of great books would make terrible movies for this reason, and plenty of pretty terrible books can actually make good movies.
Likewise video game -> movie adaptations, it seems to be very hard to do. Or they just don't get it, but that's probably my own bias. Thing is, some games are basically interactive movies, but they still make changes to meet some Hollywood ticklist.
(I am forever salty about Max Payne, Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, etc. Max Payne could've worked with 1/10th of its budget (no CGI or famous actors necessary).
I'd imagine you have to read for a particular framework to assess viability. Translating from a literary medium to a visual one is very challenging. Much of the detail in the former will be lost in the latter, like inner monologue, narrative time compression, etc.
There is a reason most underlying film stories are so short, or feel tenuously connected from major scene to scene. There just isn't room to express much complexity through imagery and dialogue in 120ish minutes, unless you are also overtly narrating or exposition dumping. And a core rule of modern fiction is "show, don't tell" no matter the medium.
And yet, it's not unusual that a poorly written book gets a decent movie adaptation. Sometimes it's not even a good plot OR well written, sometimes a book is just popular and the execs cash in on its popularity.
I'm thinking things like Da Vinci Code, 50 shades, Twilight, neither of which (the books) are particularly good or tasteful or whatever, but they were very popular, appealing to people who normally don't read books.
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.
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 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.
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:
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.
It's a fascinating question. I took the GPP as "media literacy" as more of an elite culture shibboleth. Making the right references in this sort of elitist signalling process is more about showing alignment to your contemporaries. It is just as much making the right references and omitting other references.
Being an LLM that "knows a bit of everything" doesn't necessarily give you access to know the audience expectations in this sort of environment. They are layers of fashion and social context which almost intrinsically embodied as a fringe of temporal currency and connection, not necessarily available in any training corpus.
An LLM could be stuck in some imposter/savant moat here, always making last year's references or possibly over or under selling the current expectation.
> 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.
> He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day.
Sounds like one book per bank day, mon-fri, like many work schedules out there :) Would make sense considering the context too, doesn't sound like too much or too little.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 don't even like to think about setting up a project or dev environment.
That's a strong burnout indicator/symptom (or maybe you just don't enjoy it anymore), not necessarily something age related.
In fact plenty of people seem to fill their days with more work as they get older, where their younger selves would have chosen to do as little as possible.
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 think you have to give yourself the grace of realizing it's research. Nobody comes into the world with a manual, and even people with great intuition in taking care of themselves run into unexpected challenges
I'm in my mid 30s and I already feel the time contraction. I have noticed that weeks are going by incredibly quickly, and months and years have started to feel like they slip by faster and faster. I live a fairly busy life, and I enjoy it, so I am not walking around with regrets, but it is concerning sometimes that it seems like an entire season has gone by without me really realizing it.
My understanding is that the median point in most people's subjective experience of life is in the late teens to early 20s. The cruel irony of retirement at the end of life is that it's effectively one long summer afternoon when you're a child, in terms of subjective experience.
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.
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).
The famous JAMA cohort study[0] of 120k people showed some 5x difference in all cause mortality and morbidity between sedentary and highly active individuals, showing effectively no upper bound.
The NHANES study[1] is another one that showed huge jumps in slowed aging with proportionally (to calories) increased fiber consumption.
There's a lot of these. I recommend Dr Michael Greger for a lot of them summarized. He's very biased towards whole food plant based diet (a type of vegan diet), but he references and cites every statement he makes and is generally a very good communicator.
There is a YouTube channel called Viva Longevity! that invites research authors and generally presents longevity/health information in a way that is very thorough and sincere.
> He's very biased towards whole food plant based diet (a type of vegan diet) […]
A large contributor towards leaning towards plants (or awareness thereof) was probably Michael Pollan with his "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." tagline:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like an opportunity! One thing about these 'sadistic casino' domains is that small edges can have outsized impact. Even imperfect data that's swamped in noise can work. As long as the noise is consistent enough to be modeled, you can glean actionable insight.
Outdoor billboards are often priced based on raw traffic count. Imagine using a cheap license plate reader to sample traffic looking for enough identity data to map back to actual consumer behavior. Even if you can only do it for a few days and only a fraction of percent of your samples correlate to partial data, given high enough stakes and noise - just adding that as a correction overlay on your existing shitty model can yield a winning edge. In the land of illusions, any ground truth can be gold.
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)
> I'd be curious if this sounds to what you were doing.
Yes, there were definitely aspects of teasing out how much a poor outcome was related to the initial call and how much was in the execution. The execution breaks down into the early definition and scoping, which can be part of the initial decision, and then all the downstream decisions.
Assessing all this is inevitably clouded by confounding factors like unforeseeable external factors and even human variability. That's pretty easy if a film you green-lit hits screens the week the COVID shutdown happens but in my domain post mortems more often came down to non-binary judgements like the degree to which an unlikely outcome was unforeseeable. In my post mortems I focused a lot on how well I modeled and surfaced the more relevant risks. Unlike an IPO prospectus, just listing all the possibilities isn't enough. The value is in identifying and surfacing the factors below "obvious" but above "very unlikely", then plugging them into scenarios and playing them forward.
To my company's credit, it wasn't uncommon that during a detailed, often painful, post mortem of a horrendous failure, my work would be singled out for being outstanding. Why? Because I'd surfaced and appropriately weighed the risks, including the ones that sank the project. When the calls weren't obvious (and many aren't), my job was to ensure the stakeholders had situational awareness, including relevant risk factors. As I got better at modeling the intractably 'wicked' nature of my role, I included fewer "Go / No Go" calls and more provisional judgements like "If we choose Go, we're betting we can execute a combination of these factors better than their median probability and that the following less-likely externalities won't occur."
Conversely, I found it frustrating that in the celebratory review of one especially huge win, which I'd endorsed with as big a "Go" as I'd ever give, my esteemed stakeholders failed to notice that my "Go" was right but for the wrong reasons. My private self-assessment was quite brutal because the excellent outcome wasn't due to an unforeseeably rare "Golden Goose" (the opposite of a Black Swan). It was a less likely factor that ended up being critical for reasons I'd seen and assessed but weighed incorrectly. The silver-lining was this was one of those rare times that exactly how I'd blown the eval of that factor was discernible. It ended up being one of the single most instructive events of my career because in parsing how I'd failed, I uncovered a process error which significantly leveled up my skills. It's like finding a math mistake wasn't a calculation error but an error in the formula or, in coding, a mythical compiler bug.
It's ironic the legendary 'big win' I was probably most known for was actually one of my biggest preventable errors. Once I'd had time to really study it, I did an internal talk on the whole episode, labeling it as my best-ever 'teachable moment.' I've heard the video of that talk is still regularly shown.
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.
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.
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.
oinoom | a day ago
asdff | a day ago
ASalazarMX | 23 hours ago
dieselgate | 23 hours ago
readthenotes1 | 23 hours ago
goodmythical | a day ago
bsammon | 22 hours ago
criddell | 9 hours ago
slwvx | 22 hours ago
sharkjacobs | a day ago
dylan604 | 23 hours ago
ASalazarMX | 23 hours ago
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/
daveshistory | 23 hours ago
Edited to add: hm. I just got 67%. I guess my college degree is a waste. Should have gone the humanities route instead.
ASalazarMX | 23 hours ago
daveshistory | 21 hours ago
Makes you wonder what else you're missing.
dylan604 | 22 hours ago
daveshistory | 21 hours ago
Oops.
quickthrowman | 23 hours ago
I scored 100% at 500+ WPM for a couple non-fiction samples which felt like my usual reading speed if I’m not reading carefully. I read books at 200-300 WPM.
CobaltFire | 22 hours ago
Hard to judge that based on just five questions though.
daveshistory | 21 hours ago
Edited to add: we must have followed different links though, mine only had three questions obviously.
CobaltFire | 20 hours ago
Mine was a paragraph about small loans to poor populations, and had five questions.
daveshistory | 19 hours ago
testaccount28 | 22 hours ago
guardiangod | 17 hours ago
Reading fast means you can take in more info per unit of time. It can be a useful ability, if tedious at times.
Cthulhu_ | 7 hours ago
stevenwoo | 19 hours ago
dylan604 | 19 hours ago
eszed | 18 hours ago
simiones | 13 hours ago
atombender | 11 hours ago
But almost all of the shot film was accidentally damaged beyond repair by the Soviet lab — they were using specially imported Kodak film stock that apparently the lab was unfamiliar with — and Tarkovsky had to go back to the Soviet film board and negotiate more money to reshoot the film.
Tarkovsky had been unhappy with the film as he shot it, and during these months of downtime, he repeatedly workshopped the script together with the Strugatskys. Long story short, Arkady Strugatsky proposed that Tarkovsky strip down the story; he wrote a treatment that reduced the entire film to a bare-bones, more philosophical story with nameless characters and very few overt sci-fi elements. Tarkovsky essentially wrote everything around that new core, much of it apparently also written during the second shoot.
I recommend the book "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", by Johnson and Petrie, which has a whole chapter on Stalker and the difficulties of making that film.
In my opinion, Roadside Picnic is a masterpiece, and I would have loved to see a faithful adaptation of it. Stalker, as it ended up, is not really an adaptation of it.
triceratops | 8 hours ago
Paramount optioned the novel while Mario Puzo was still writing it. They heard about an early 60-page draft of the book from a literary scout. Mario Puzo was deep in gambling debt and took the option deal because he was desperate for cash. There's a chance Puzo couldn't have finished the book without the deal, because he got a $12,500 advance and would get another $80k if the movie got made.
Paramount announced the option deal in March 1967, two years before the book was published. After it was published they put the movie into production.
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola are the credited screenwriters for the movie. Puzo wrote drafts, Coppola revised them. It was Coppola's idea to start the movie with the line "I believe in America", to highlight what he felt was one of the story's core themes. In the book that scene happens a few chapters in.
So yeah, the book was kinda pulpy and schlocky. But it may never have been published without Hollywood backing. And its author was also half-responsible for turning it into a near-universally acclaimed, Oscar-winning screenplay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godfather#Production
stevenwoo | 2 hours ago
sateesh | 16 hours ago
throw0101c | 7 hours ago
The movie does not miss anything about the difficulties of communication because that is not what the movie is about: it is about motherhood/parenthood, love, grief.
sateesh | 5 hours ago
piltdownman | 12 hours ago
The archetype in blockbuster cinema has to be Spielberg's 'Jaws'. I'd also give 'Barry Lyndon' a huge commendation.
Those who contend that 'Starship Troopers' is a better adaptation than the book simply don't understand Heinlein or his aims. A fantastic movie and a darkly cynical piece of social commentary on jingoistic nationalism and 'bootcamp' movies as seen through the lense of a highschool ensemble. The book, however, represents a weightier piece of analysis in its own right and provides some fascinating insights into fascism, civil and civic duty, and the role of the individual in the machine.
I could also go into a long and varied debate about Michael Crichton and Stephen King properties which span both sides of this fence, but that's for another post I feel!
Cthulhu_ | 7 hours ago
Standalone (and keeping the "this whole thing is a propaganda movie" thing in the back of your head), Starship Troopers is a great film. But it's not a good book adaptation.
dctoedt | 56 minutes ago
One of my favorites as a teen, and it holds up reasonably well for me decades later. I didn't see it as insights into fascism so much as a meditation into what it would take to keep a global, and later interstellar, society functioning. Yes, there was emphasis on duty, but not to an excess (ISTM), and not a surprise considering Heinlein's U.S. Naval Academy background and subsequent service.
rendaw | 12 hours ago
antasvara | 7 hours ago
Plenty of great books would make terrible movies for this reason, and plenty of pretty terrible books can actually make good movies.
Cthulhu_ | 7 hours ago
(I am forever salty about Max Payne, Prince of Persia, Assassin's Creed, etc. Max Payne could've worked with 1/10th of its budget (no CGI or famous actors necessary).
HardlyCognizant | 6 hours ago
There is a reason most underlying film stories are so short, or feel tenuously connected from major scene to scene. There just isn't room to express much complexity through imagery and dialogue in 120ish minutes, unless you are also overtly narrating or exposition dumping. And a core rule of modern fiction is "show, don't tell" no matter the medium.
AlwaysRock | 6 hours ago
david927 | a day ago
TylerE | 21 hours ago
NooneAtAll3 | 20 hours ago
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
ginko | 7 hours ago
cestith | 7 hours ago
Cthulhu_ | 7 hours ago
I'm thinking things like Da Vinci Code, 50 shades, Twilight, neither of which (the books) are particularly good or tasteful or whatever, but they were very popular, appealing to people who normally don't read books.
david927 | 5 hours ago
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.
Rebelgecko | 18 hours ago
david927 | 5 hours ago
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.
anoncow | a day ago
nephihaha | 23 hours ago
ASalazarMX | 23 hours ago
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.
nephihaha | 13 hours ago
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.
foo-bar-baz529 | 23 hours ago
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS | 21 hours ago
michaelsbradley | 22 hours ago
https://youtube.com/@mortismalgaming
dyauspitr | 22 hours ago
devilsdata | 21 hours ago
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.
dyauspitr | 21 hours ago
saltcured | 20 hours ago
Being an LLM that "knows a bit of everything" doesn't necessarily give you access to know the audience expectations in this sort of environment. They are layers of fashion and social context which almost intrinsically embodied as a fringe of temporal currency and connection, not necessarily available in any training corpus.
An LLM could be stuck in some imposter/savant moat here, always making last year's references or possibly over or under selling the current expectation.
seabombs | 22 hours ago
Not for him though, he loves it.
garciasn | 22 hours ago
What surprises me is that he only reads about 50 more books a year than I do, and he does it full time.
nomadiccoder | 22 hours ago
garciasn | 22 hours ago
He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day.
nomadiccoder | 21 hours ago
embedding-shape | 21 hours ago
Sounds like one book per bank day, mon-fri, like many work schedules out there :) Would make sense considering the context too, doesn't sound like too much or too little.
garciasn | 21 hours ago
deepsun | 21 hours ago
"Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life" is a lie.
embedding-shape | 21 hours ago
laughing_man | 19 hours ago
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.
sateesh | 16 hours ago
cortesoft | 21 hours ago
mrandish | 21 hours ago
killbot5000 | 21 hours ago
mncharity | 21 hours ago
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA&t=5039s
__patchbit__ | 17 hours ago
zabzonk | 21 hours ago
knocte | 18 hours ago
Because you're addicted to HN now and HN didn't exist by then?
zabzonk | 15 hours ago
luqtas | 16 hours ago
zabzonk | 15 hours ago
Jean-Papoulos | 15 hours ago
zabzonk | 11 hours ago
I guess so, particularly the "getting started" problem - I don't even like to think about setting up a project or dev environment.
chmod775 | 4 hours ago
That's a strong burnout indicator/symptom (or maybe you just don't enjoy it anymore), not necessarily something age related.
In fact plenty of people seem to fill their days with more work as they get older, where their younger selves would have chosen to do as little as possible.
jaggederest | 15 hours ago
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.
jimbob45 | 13 hours ago
jaggederest | 13 hours ago
AlwaysRock | 6 hours ago
jaggederest | 4 hours ago
fallous | 15 hours ago
fredrikholm | 14 hours ago
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).
N19PEDL2 | 11 hours ago
Do you have any good readings to recommend on this topic?
fredrikholm | 8 hours ago
The NHANES study[1] is another one that showed huge jumps in slowed aging with proportionally (to calories) increased fiber consumption.
There's a lot of these. I recommend Dr Michael Greger for a lot of them summarized. He's very biased towards whole food plant based diet (a type of vegan diet), but he references and cites every statement he makes and is generally a very good communicator.
There is a YouTube channel called Viva Longevity! that invites research authors and generally presents longevity/health information in a way that is very thorough and sincere.
0. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... 1. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/10/4/400
throw0101c | 7 hours ago
A large contributor towards leaning towards plants (or awareness thereof) was probably Michael Pollan with his "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." tagline:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan#In_Defense_of_F...
petercooper | 11 hours ago
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.
agumonkey | 9 hours ago
MyHonestOpinon | 7 hours ago
criddell | 9 hours ago
Cthulhu_ | 8 hours ago
mrandish | 21 hours ago
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.
dhdaadhd | 20 hours ago
mrandish | 19 hours ago
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.
saimiam | 17 hours ago
mrandish | 16 hours ago
Outdoor billboards are often priced based on raw traffic count. Imagine using a cheap license plate reader to sample traffic looking for enough identity data to map back to actual consumer behavior. Even if you can only do it for a few days and only a fraction of percent of your samples correlate to partial data, given high enough stakes and noise - just adding that as a correction overlay on your existing shitty model can yield a winning edge. In the land of illusions, any ground truth can be gold.
gobdovan | 15 hours ago
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)
mrandish | an hour ago
Yes, there were definitely aspects of teasing out how much a poor outcome was related to the initial call and how much was in the execution. The execution breaks down into the early definition and scoping, which can be part of the initial decision, and then all the downstream decisions.
Assessing all this is inevitably clouded by confounding factors like unforeseeable external factors and even human variability. That's pretty easy if a film you green-lit hits screens the week the COVID shutdown happens but in my domain post mortems more often came down to non-binary judgements like the degree to which an unlikely outcome was unforeseeable. In my post mortems I focused a lot on how well I modeled and surfaced the more relevant risks. Unlike an IPO prospectus, just listing all the possibilities isn't enough. The value is in identifying and surfacing the factors below "obvious" but above "very unlikely", then plugging them into scenarios and playing them forward.
To my company's credit, it wasn't uncommon that during a detailed, often painful, post mortem of a horrendous failure, my work would be singled out for being outstanding. Why? Because I'd surfaced and appropriately weighed the risks, including the ones that sank the project. When the calls weren't obvious (and many aren't), my job was to ensure the stakeholders had situational awareness, including relevant risk factors. As I got better at modeling the intractably 'wicked' nature of my role, I included fewer "Go / No Go" calls and more provisional judgements like "If we choose Go, we're betting we can execute a combination of these factors better than their median probability and that the following less-likely externalities won't occur."
Conversely, I found it frustrating that in the celebratory review of one especially huge win, which I'd endorsed with as big a "Go" as I'd ever give, my esteemed stakeholders failed to notice that my "Go" was right but for the wrong reasons. My private self-assessment was quite brutal because the excellent outcome wasn't due to an unforeseeably rare "Golden Goose" (the opposite of a Black Swan). It was a less likely factor that ended up being critical for reasons I'd seen and assessed but weighed incorrectly. The silver-lining was this was one of those rare times that exactly how I'd blown the eval of that factor was discernible. It ended up being one of the single most instructive events of my career because in parsing how I'd failed, I uncovered a process error which significantly leveled up my skills. It's like finding a math mistake wasn't a calculation error but an error in the formula or, in coding, a mythical compiler bug.
It's ironic the legendary 'big win' I was probably most known for was actually one of my biggest preventable errors. Once I'd had time to really study it, I did an internal talk on the whole episode, labeling it as my best-ever 'teachable moment.' I've heard the video of that talk is still regularly shown.
yankee_dodge | 21 hours ago
Slow_Hand | 19 hours ago
yankee_dodge | 17 hours ago
mrkstu | 21 hours ago
ourmandave | 19 hours ago
gobins | 19 hours ago
adammarples | 18 hours ago
gobins | 17 hours ago
bloak | 14 hours ago
zem | 16 hours ago
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
keiferski | 15 hours ago
embedding-shape | 12 hours ago
keiferski | 12 hours ago
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.
rickcarlino | 10 hours ago