Few put it better than Tolstoy (from "What is Art?"):
"Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.
Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or God; it is not, as the æsthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity.
As, thanks to man’s capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can, in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity, and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man’s capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others."
I don't think what you shared is an exhaustive or even a valid answer to "why do people read novels?" It's just one author's thoughts on art, and it's debatable how accurate they are.
I really don't understand why people can't stop thinking that people like Tolstoy, Kant, and Hitler were beyond human beings who weren't absolutely influenced by the common thinking of their time. Almost every great writer/philosopher had massive blind spots that could only be fixed over time.
Yes, the categorical imperative still stands as a sound idea, but Kant also thought African people lacked the natural intelligence and emotional faculties that Europeans possessed. Does not sound that categorical to me if you're willing to consider a race of human beings as subhuman.
The point is that it's not just Tolstoy; a lot of views shared by some of the "greatest men" are absolutely vile garbage, and we must talk about that as well when we talk about them, instead of making an intellectual martyr and using their quotes as if they have any valid objective truth behind them to answer genuine questions.
Ideas can stand for themselves, the quote can stand for itself. You don't need to take all the things Tolstoy ever said and average their badness to decide whether a quote is true. You can read it yourself and see if it resonates with how you think of things.
Similarly, if you find that the quote resonates with you, you are not on the hook as endorsing every bad thing he ever did, or stupid thing he ever said.
There's a class of people who are so unfamiliar with ideas and critical evaluation that they cannot separate the idea from the person. These same people are the kind that typically excuse horrible ideas from people they admire/idolize.
That is a quote (not from one of his own writings but from a retelling from one of his friends) that is preceded by a one page disclaimer. I'm sure Gemini can find you a better quote than that if you want to slander Tolstoy.
But if you really are interested in knowing about Tolstoy's views on women, go read Anna Karenina. There is good reason why it is considered one of the greatest pieces of art ever written.
Think they're referring to the following, when Amodei was still working for OpenAI:
'OpenAI Feared “Optics,” Not the Law – “Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s then-Research Director, responded that ‘as a training set [LibGen is] a bit sketchier.’ [OpenAI researcher Sam] McCandlish explained: ‘I was just worried about optics – i.e. ‘openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on [Hacker News] would be unfortunate.”'
I was curious what he was responding to. Per https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2026/09/Class-Plaintiff... it was "On July 19, 2019, McCandlish wrote in an OpenAI Slack channel: “We’re not sure if we’re going to release the Foresight LM Scaling paper publicly, but if we do we were thinking about removing all mentions of LibGen, since it's a bit of a sketchy data source." The paper may or may not be https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 where they write "we also test on similarly-prepared samples of Books Corpus [ZKZ+15], Common Crawl [Fou], English Wikipedia, and a collection of publicly-available Internet Books."
"A lobby organisation?" Of course a single author would not be able to afford facing a multi billion dollar company on their own? And the "sketchy russian website" quote is from OpenAI employees themselves? What are you on about?
First, it's still a lobbying organization, so it's their job to make exaggerated claims, like a union in a company or any other organization with a political purpose. My first point was to highlight that it's not neutral or news related. It's fine that they have their opinion, but it's also my right to say that they're biased.
The second thing underscores my point. They use one line and think they've made a great point because one employee called LibGen sketchy. This site has been around since the 2010s, and it has helped many people do research. It's not just a sketchy website that suddenly appeared and is always doing bad things. I think a more nuanced stance is necessary.
> They use one line and think they've made a great point because one employee called LibGen sketchy.
No, you are using one line from the post to discredit them. The release has more than that and it’s not the only communication they made on this matter nor is there any indication it will be the last, it’s just the current one.
They are having it in the subtitle. In general their whole article is about two main points, first the use of stuff from Libgen, second the points of making people jobless. Three of their points are about the jobless thing two about the LibGen.
About LibGen, there might be more discussion - fair. However, the second argument is no real discussion IMO. Why is putting people out of work suddenly a bad thing? Since when do we argue this when talking about automation?
There is nothing to discuss about LibGen, really. I don't read this as OpenAI employees even believing LibGen is sketchy. They were worried about optics, because LibGen itself is Russian and does look a bit sketchy, and at the time - much like today - it was easy to make it a headline that makes people pattern-match to "troll farms".
(And then Russia invaded Ukraine, turning any association with .ru things into potential corporate suicide.)
Really has nothing to do with LibGen or with OpenAI. It's about people being easy to manipulate into believing bullshit, which is a reasonable worry, and the Authors Guild is trying to do that exact thing OpenAI was worried about.
You can presume they are biased, then you have to prove it. You cannot assume all they say is biased, no debate is possible with that kind of assumptions.
Of course they are, but the quote "LLMs can produce any algorithm, any tech stack, any concept in seconds, minutes, or hours" is more true there than in other domains. "Any concept" is the most laughable.
Sweden uses a party list proportional representation system. Seats are allocated based on how many votes a party gets, and they are allocated to parties first. The selection of who then sits in those seats then comes down to ”personröster” (literally “person-votes”, but I think they're conventionally translated as “preferential votes” or something like that), which are optional. Most voters do not put a cross next to their preferred candidate, they just put the party ballot paper in the envelope and the envelope goes in the box. And because they're optional, there's therefore a threshold for how many personröster a candidate has to receive to be elected. That threshold is 5% of voters in the particular electoral district. Only candidates that get more than 5% of votes are even considered in this process; if there's none (or not enough), then the candidates from the party list are taken.
The seat would have gone to the Left Party either way. But only this guy specifically got enough personal support to get elected. There's nothing that crazy about it. Participative democracy rewards those who choose to participate. In this case, it's a two-tier participation system. People who vote for a party, but not for a specific candidate, are letting the people who do vote for a specific candidate choose for them. And that's fine.
- There's an ongoing investigation into alleged election fraud, which has not yet proven anything
- The candidate himself is not even a suspect in that investigation
- The candidate is known to have had some contacts with Somali government officials in the past, but no relation to this election is alleged by said investigation
Given the user you are responding to is named “try-working” and is participating heavily in this post, arguing heavily on the side of “where there’s smoke there’s fire,” I think they might in fact be one such political opponent. Or at least politically opposed to the existence of Somali migrants in Sweden.
Yes, and he had meetings with Somali state representatives in Somalia and in Sweden before the election, discussing how the Somali population in Sweden should act in the election to further Somali interests.
With just 600 votes needed, seats to the Swedish parliament can be bought by foreign states for just $5,000 or so.
Absolutely nothing point toward a shifting "organised" on some grand scale where all somalis move in unison on some leaders say-so. Ledarsidorna is a far-right conspiracy blogger, you should check your sources.
There's hundreds of reported cases of election fraud and interference. The Somali state meetings are fact, and the participating Somali candidates are being investigated for election fraud.
The special police force dedicated to guarding against threats against our democracy is involved in investigations.
