So you don't have to:
"you don’t have to embrace a trend, tool, or narrative simply because others say you should — especially if it doesn’t resonate with you or align with your values"
An important new twist to add to the great AI versus NO AI discussion.
Every time I check this comment section, this sentence jumps out at me again. You "had to" ask an LLM. You "had to".
Genuine human writing can be great, this isnt it.
> I had to
got 'em
The author has made the correct call. There's a pretty deep irony that all the top-level comments at the time of this writing are about how the article is too long. It's quite clearly not trying to succinctly convince you of a point, it's meant to be a piece of genuinely human writing, and enjoyed (or not!) on the basis of that.
All other top level arguments offer AI summaries that miss all of the interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching topics about AI and its impact on our humanity, and complain it was too long to read.
Truly a gem of irony.
Apart from that, content wise a preliminary abstract is nice to have. I do like how the author provides a table of contents.
jrflowers•3h ago
Over sixteen thousand words about how the author doesn’t really use language models very much but might in the future
adampunk•3h ago
AnimalMuppet•3h ago
But thanks for saving the rest of us. This is why I read the comments first.
wewewedxfgdf•3h ago
jrflowers•2h ago
I mostly skimmed it. It’s entirely feasible that the author buried a confession about getting away with manslaughter or whatever that I missed somewhere in a few sentences in the middle of that novella though. It does begin with several paragraphs essentially telling you not to read the post and has a lot of completely unnecessary exposition (for example the section on Luddites)
Edit: I want to point out that I went over the post with my own eyeballs and brain
mirawelner•2h ago
It feels like half the people here do not read or write in their free time, which would be understandable if this were not primarily a site for software engineers who write (sorta) as a job
csande17•2h ago
mirawelner•1h ago
But after reading this comment section... I mean if enjoying well written prose counts as enjoying craft and artistry I guess I do then? Damn.
jrflowers•1h ago
This is not prose, it is exposition. It is perfectly valid to critique any expository essay, especially one of this length, for its density (or lack thereof) of substantive information.
mirawelner•1h ago
But this seemed like it bridges the gap between prose and an expository essay -it was doing both.
jrflowers•1h ago
Putting prose in an essay means there are more valid criticisms of a piece of writing, not fewer. If somebody is breakdancing and reciting the periodic table at the same time it’s ok if somebody notices if they skipped the lanthanides and actinides.
I’m a fan of blending the two! It’s just really really hard to do both well at the same time. My most recent example is Malcolm Harris’ history of Palo Alto, it is incredibly well-done.
mirawelner•52m ago
jrflowers•22m ago
It’s an exponentially more difficult way to accomplish either goal because one reader will see it and think “this is a sixteen thousand word essay that says very little” and another will see it and think “what a wonderful story” and there’s nobody to adjudicate who is correct.
Like I posted “this is sixteen thousand words about how the author doesn’t really use language models but might one day” and some folks’ rebuttal is that they enjoyed reading it. Those are two completely unrelated things! It’s like if folks saw the cover of The Hobbit and thought “Hell yeah!” and then when they read “there and back again” thought “whoever wrote that was being unnecessarily reductive”
pavo-etc•1h ago
A person writing an essay on their own site doesn't need to have the information density of bus timetable.
logicprog•1h ago