Many times it is only possible to know that post hoc. There are several books I've read that, in the moment of completing them, stand as the best I'd read in the past few years. Others I finished and figured I'd never think of them past the current month.
But books and their impact upon you can be surprising sometimes. There are some books I think about often, and that I would say have even influenced me greatly, that I wouldn't have guessed would have that impact when I read them. And others that I figured would remain "book of the decade" that barely made it to the two-year mark before being surpassed by something else.
As you said it can be kind of surprising!
This is a wonderful thought, I thank you for it
This guy's blog is great by the way, I went and subscribed.
Because an AI company made their LLM "roll a dice" that was loaded in a specific way to choose that word, so they could claim ownership of your document later.
:sigh:
So that wasn't really a consideration for me.
It still sort of sucks and you can tell I am not a web dev, but it was interesting to think about.
I think a good example for me personally is 2019 in music. And I assume most people reading this list will shake their head at my (in their view) poor taste.
1. Rammstein released their untitled album which to me remains the best they've ever made.
2. Slipknot released "We are not your kind" which I played on repeat for so long. Nero Forte remained my first or second most listened to song for three years in a row.
3. Lars Winnerbäck also released Eldtuppen, causing the one and only time someone else than AC/DC became my most listened to artist for a year
4. While I didn't like the 2019 Korn album "The Nothing", it made me realize I'd missed their 2016 release "The Serenity of Suffering", which remains one of my favorite albums of the last decade.
Because, man, some years really were just that good.
As always with scales like this, any definition is subjective and scales shouldn't be used without understanding their impact. I'd never apply this scale to an Uber driver. Also, scales shouldn't be used for stack ranking. At least not without defining the heuristics first.
To me, scales are a way to focus my qualitative impressions into something that's not an essay. It's a good starting point for a discussion about the merits of the work. It definitely has its footguns, though.
The "why this not that, even when it looks like that would do just fine" style of differential analysis is an exquisitely powerful analytical tool. Asking this question is probably the single most powerful method I know of to generate deep thought, in absolutely any aspect of life. If you haven't tried it... go for it!
(Sample question: why'd I choose the word "exquisitely" in the above sentence?)
> In the short term, thinness prevails. ... The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?”
That tracks with another thing I've noticed I approach differently. I've recently joined a book club and everyone loves to talk about how many "stars" they gave a book. I've never really been able to rank things like that. Aside from there being no such thing as a total ordering of books (or movies or ...), who's to say what five stars from you means, compared to five stars from me? Instead I've started thinking about books in terms of "book of the month", "book of the year", "book of the decade", "book of the century", et cetera. Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade? Am I going to remember this for a year or forget most of it next week? Is everyone still going to be talking about this one in 80 years? I think that's a much better scale than "one to five stars (but actually three to five stars)", and much more interesting. It also bakes in both the inherent subjectivity and inherent fuzziness really well.
(Yes, some things... plenty of things... are thin enough to be candidates for "book of the day" or "book of the hour". Few things are forgettable enough to go below that, though there have been some attempts; mostly at that level things underflow and you get in to Mystery Science Theater 3000 territory, which is its own special kind of thing.)