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My favourite German word

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Re: My favourite German word

#11

Post by dmvdoug »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #8

The first half of the essay: > It happened astonishingly fast; within about five years a knowledge skill that I had completely taken for granted as a basic requisite in an undergraduate was diminished beyond recognition. Then the second half > A good way of writing documentation for human beings today will still be a good way to do it in a few years’ time. Don't these contradict each other? Documentation that worked…

No, because the first one isn’t talking about writing documentation. It’s talking about knowledge discovery as a learned skill that eroded when web searching replaced how knowledge used to be sought. They actually say: even in the new-fangled domain of web searching, which you would think web natives would be better at, it’s actually people who had learned the skills and techniques of knowledge discovery pre-web who were better at finding what they were looking for. Now, why they think that is the case is a bit harder to grok, having to do with their object-oriented (sorry, sorry) view of understanding/knowledge.

Contrast that with the second quote. Good documentation could be in a dusty book in the library or in a SPA. What makes the documentation good isn’t, however, related to people’s ability to navigate information spaces.

Re: My favourite German word

#12

Post by TacticalCoder »

llopium wrote: post #9

That’s great, but gegenstand just means object, and that definition of object is part of English, e.g. “The object of having this talk is to learn about how we can do better.” You don’t hear that said much anymore, but in the 20th century it was said fairly regularly.

Same in french: "Quel est l'objet de ta visite ?" literally would be "What is the object of you visiting?" or basically "Why are you here?".

It's still somehow used.

Re: My favourite German word

#14

Post by bryanlarsen »

dmvdoug wrote: post #11
bryanlarsen wrote: post #8

The first half of the essay: > It happened astonishingly fast; within about five years a knowledge skill that I had completely taken for granted as a basic requisite in an undergraduate was diminished beyond recognition. Then the second half > A good way of writing documentation for human beings today will still be a good way to do it in a few years’ time. Don't these contradict each other? Documentation that worked…

No, because the first one isn’t talking about writing documentation. It’s talking about knowledge discovery as a learned skill that eroded when web searching replaced how knowledge used to be sought. They actually say: even in the new-fangled domain of web searching, which you would think web natives would be better at, it’s actually people who had learned the skills and techniques of knowledge discovery pre-web who…

> What makes the documentation good isn’t, however, related to people’s ability to navigate information spaces.

Then what's the point? If nobody can use the documentation properly, then the term "good documentation" is meaningless.

Re: My favourite German word

#15

Post by andyferris »

I have been interpretting the new "we need to write documentation for LLMs!!!" trend to REALLY mean "oh damn, we don't have ANY concise and navigable documentation at all..." (combined with the fact you can't just ignore this fact like when onboarding a human over weeks or months - LLMs have no capability to create long-term memories _except_ to create documentation artifacts to look up later).

In the end I'm hopeful about this because it means there will be more concise and navigable documentation for me to refer to (though I might be slightly offended to be reading the AGENTS.md instead of the README.md, lol)

Re: My favourite German word

#17

Post by card_zero »

llopium wrote: post #9

That’s great, but gegenstand just means object, and that definition of object is part of English, e.g. “The object of having this talk is to learn about how we can do better.” You don’t hear that said much anymore, but in the 20th century it was said fairly regularly.

Object has "against" in it, that's the ob- part. The other part is "throw". The German comes from the Latin. (Why did they go for -stand instead of a word for throw?)

Re: My favourite German word

#18

Post by card_zero »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #14
dmvdoug wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because the first one isn’t talking about writing documentation. It’s talking about knowledge discovery as a learned skill that eroded when web searching replaced how knowledge used to be sought. They actually say: even in the new-fangled domain of web searching, which you would think web natives would be better at, it’s actually people who had learned the skills and techniques of knowledge discovery pre-web who…

> What makes the documentation good isn’t, however, related to people’s ability to navigate information spaces. Then what's the point? If nobody can use the documentation properly, then the term "good documentation" is meaningless.

I think the article is saying that good documentation is objective, and is not defined by ease of use. You will ingest this difficult documentation and you will like it, because it is good for you.

You might reasonably ask "in what way".

> this is how documentation is, because this arrangement is part of its integrity, and this is how you must learn to use it and work with it.

The word "integrity" comes up six times. Something about integrity.

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