71–80 of 453 posts
“Worse: it's a conversation killer. There's nothing to respond to. Your wall of text suppresses dialogue. They can't reply, can't push back, can't clarify. It's a weapon disguised as helpfulness.” I can reply. I can push back. I can clarify. I am not helpless.
> Nobody writes essays in Slack I 100% write long texts in Slack. I always try to provide as much context as possible when reaching out to someone with a question or request.
> Nobody writes essays in Slack I 100% write long texts in Slack. I always try to provide as much context as possible when reaching out to someone with a question or request.
Honestly, speaking as a friend, and as someone who's been at this a very long time, maybe stop doing that? It doesn't foster conversion and I personally find it kind of a hostile/disrespectful communication style. It's much harder to have a proper back and forth with a firehouse than it is a few sentences at a time. It declares authority "these are the facts" rather than "let's discuss ideas" and if you haven't fully…
Sending me a message saying "Hi, I'm getting a Frobnizzle not found error" is a waste of both our time. Explain what you're doing so that I can reproduce it, even if it takes a few paragraphs. Maybe send me your user ID so I can check our logs. I don't care if you're declaring "these are the facts" because the facts are what I need to help you.
If it's a massive wall of text with a defensive tone during a discussion, yeah, sure, that's bad. Do you work somewhere where that's common?
"You asked a simple question. They lobbed a document." Oh look, another blog post that should have been a comment. No slop blogs either, loser.
The particular question in the blogpost can just be answered by a skill. Once you ask enough questions, the solution becomes obvious at the end. 5 Claude Code skills I use every single day https://youtu.be/EJyuu6zlQCg?t=80
I swear most executives can barely read so you're not doing your career any favors sending them more than 150 characters.
The CEO of one firm I worked at wrote emails totally in bullet point format. Made it much easier to read and you could just reply with: > bullet point response which made life much easier
I think we've all worked with someone who (I imagine subconsciously) feels the need to make things longer without actually adding more information in there, and it just makes everyone's day a little harder.
Do people actually do this in things like slack? (One of the best things about being a professor in a non lab field is that I don't have to use things like slack.) This seems like open contempt for the reader.
I imagine this is the kind of thing you see at a large company where a good chunk of people are just coasting by doing nothing, Nelson Big Head style.
Generates entire websites with AI Slop. Instead of sending a single text mail with three links and the words please make that certificate.
No. He wastes the time of all personnel. Wastes energy. And hides the important message in a wall of text (I was the only person which recognized, that he requires the certificate…it was hidden in a side box).
Right now we re-implementing every frogging tool which was ever developed by more experienced people.
Excuse the long letter, I hadn’t the time to write a short one.Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a coworker whose first language isn't English. She uses AI to polish up her writing, particularly long documents. She puts a ton of effort into making sure that it still reads well. Because of this effort her writing is strong and precise. Before AI she made all the obvious mistakes you'd expect from someone who's not a native English speaker. It's very hard to tell that she used AI because she puts so much ef…
You do realize that when you have to find a special use case to defend something you are really giving an argument AGAINST casual widespread use of it.
Even among native speakers, literacy is way down. AI could help with that… if people actually do the work.
That’s the real problem, not AI: no one wants to do the work. That is purely a PEBKAC situation.
When I'm encountering some WoT like that, I'd like to have a button like "view source", but for "view prompt". Most ai generated messages or docs are unnecessarily verbose and just reading the prompt would suffice. I don't really get why some people seem to think that it's somehow better to have their bullet point prompt as a huge text. It just wastes my time. And probably only makes it look like it took more effort…
In that case, there is nothing beneficial about the prompt, but the answer could be boiled down to a useful recommendation (from an AI, not a person).