Or what if local models get good enough to threaten the server based product?

I read/listened/sampled a lot this year but a few have reached out into my life and changed me at least a little bit.

- In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan. A brilliant "not diet" book about not eating crap and enjoying chocolate cake with your friends. I followed this up with Ultra Processed People to arm myself with the facts to defend not eating the junk people call food.

- The Dispossesed - Ursula Le Guin: recommended in previous year's HN what did you reads. An absolutely triumph for how it manages to portray a believable anarchist society.

- Adult Children of Alcoholics: useful to the multitude of us who grew up with an alcoholic parent(s). I used this to identify the common patterns I share with others who grew up like me. You are not alone!

- The Invention of Clouds (not finished): I really like the context of "dissenting science" which the author conveys brilliantly. Turns out Dark Academia and Bro Science are not new.

- The Art of Frugal Hedonism: Irreverant although it comes off a little pious. This book has helped me accept that I have enough stuff already.

Can't speak for OP but I largely spend it reading (and web). I bought a kindle recently because I found the ipad/iphone were too distracting to reliably avoid web surfing instead of a book. I view the switch to long form content as a form of information dieting in the same way as a switch to whole foods.

> LLMs struggle with simplicity in my experience

I think a lot of this is because people (and thus LLMs) use verbosity as a signal for effort. It's a very bad signal, especially for software, but its a very popular signal. Most writing is much longer than it needs to be, everything from SEO website recipes, consulting reports, and non-fiction books. Both the author and the readers are often fooled into thinking lots of words are good.

It's probably hard to train that out of an LLM, especially if they see how that verbosity impressess the people making the purchasing decisions.

HN is too boring though. Often I come here and there is nothing clickbait enough to get me to read it and I go elsewhere. It's great.