4 ms·
Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.
by no_multitudes 4mo ago
Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.
- pocksuppet 4mo agoMy boss pays me for the lines of code, right?
- jolt42 4mo ago"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal
- grey-area 4mo agoUnfortunately with word generators this has become - I would have written a letter, but I couldn’t be bothered.
- r1zzzzA 4mo agothird time i see this cliche quote in two days
- recursive 4mo agoAnd yet people(?) keep publishing stuff that's too long.
- FergusArgyll 4mo agoThe quoting will continue until writing improves
- AnimalMuppet 4mo agoThe thing is that writing - especially writing well - is fairly hard, and does take time and mental effort. So lazy authors (or wannabe authors) take the shortcut. But the fact remains that most of us do not want to read AI-generated slop, and human-written slop is not much better. So there is a point to the quote, no matter how many times you've read it. But there is a countering point as well: If you don't have time, don't write. Don't use that as an excuse to get lazy and shove slop at us.
- stavros 4mo agoI enjoyed the fact that AI was used to deliver the anti-AI message.
- hurtigioll 4mo agothat fewer people will read because it spends pages saying what could be paragraphs
- SoftTalker 4mo agoYeah it became very wearisome to read. I started skimming about halfway through.
- Windchaser 4mo agoYeah, I got through about 2/3 of it, then called it quits. I wonder if the author tried to sit down and read the whole post, from beginning to end in one go? The AI-written posts feel sludgy, like plain oatmeal that's been cooked too long, homogenous and bland.
- uludag 4mo agoMaybe you don't understand, if we didn't have LLMs expanding our ideas into longer form we wouldn't have anything to give to LLMs to summarize.
- CuriouslyC 4mo agoNo, but it satisfies a number of algorithms that drive traffic to websites better, and there are honestly people who will upvote something that starts strong and is long without reading the whole thing, who wouldn't upvote that same strong start if it wasn't padded with filler to make it look more exhausitive. Not a fan either but there are real game theoretic reasons to do it.
- cdfalcon 4mo agoYou think this was written by AI? I'm curious, why? Anytime I'm about to read a long post I generally paste it into a few detectors for sanity, but none of them flagged anything for this one. I read the entirety and thought it was pretty compelling - long maybe, but thoughtful. I appreciated the historical quotes interjected, and didn't find the prose suspect.
- corvus-cornix 4mo agoSome of the formatting for emphasis and em-dashes looked a bit iffy. It's hard to imagine AI wasn't involved, at least an an editor or to discuss ideas. To be clear, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with this.
- no_multitudes 4mo ago"On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question:" "This gives us the first corollary of end-state thinking cold but honest:" "What does the end-state look like? My take is simple — a single line: PRD is Code." "This shift brings a quiet, lethal corollary: " "But think clearly about what letting go means." "It sounds like a lament; it is actually a refining process. " "When the tide of the times is pushing you along, slow can be a discipline." These outtakes are all fairly obvious unedited claudeslop that add nothing to the argument. The excessive use of bolding and em-dashes throughout the article are also signals.
- imhoguy 4mo ago"—" "blast radius" done :)
- 627467 4mo agoIsn't the original post in Chinese? English is probably llm translated - like the whole blog
- no_multitudes 4mo agoLLM translations of non-LLM text don't generally look as bad as this does. Many of the LLM-y traits -- inappropriate overuse of bolding and em-dashes, aggressively punchy sentences, and an essay that seems artifically stretched out to hit a word count -- are not affected by translation.
- lookACamel 4mo agoYou can switch to the Chinese language version. Why don't you read that one first before deciding if it's LLM generated.
- mizzao 4mo agoI actually didn't smell AI at all while reading this article, because the idea density seemed high, rather than when AI just expands a few ideas into repetitive mumbo jumbo. The last portion was a bit wordy and metaphysical, but he landed the plane at the end.
- GaryNumanVevo 4mo agoGlad I wasn't the only one!