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The revolt of the reader

bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Re: The revolt of the reader

#191

Post by 27183 »

> If your position is that we should be fine with an LLM crafting prose from your prompt, spare us all the wasted cycles and just give us your prompt.

This is an excellent point. It should apply to LLM generated code as well. If you send your colleague a vibeslopped PR, please also include all the prompts you used to generate it. Check that mess into version control right beside the code changes. Later, when we have to untangle all the spaghetti, then at least we'll have some archeological record of intent.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#192

Post by andai »

masswerk wrote: post #98
kierangill wrote: post #65

My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read. I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1]. > Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: > > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is…

In contemporary YouTube-script wording: > The Ecclasiast looked under the sun, but there was something he didn't understand. Something that wasn't right. Something that was not as it was supposed to be. And here is what the Ecclesiast didn't understand. Here is what nobody understood. Not then. Not in the years that followed. Not now. It was not the swift who won the race. Not the strong who won the battle. Not the w…

Isn't that just ChatGPT?

Re: The revolt of the reader

#193

Post by bigstrat2003 »

andai wrote: post #190
kierangill wrote: post #65

My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read. I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1]. > Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: > > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is…

I actually found the second one easier to understand. What the hell does "time happeneth" mean? Despite our best efforts, events continue to occur!

> What the hell does "time happeneth" mean?

It's perfectly clear from context. Time and chance are the governing factors in success, not intrinsic merit.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#194

Post by andai »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #193
andai wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually found the second one easier to understand. What the hell does "time happeneth" mean? Despite our best efforts, events continue to occur!

> What the hell does "time happeneth" mean? It's perfectly clear from context. Time and chance are the governing factors in success, not intrinsic merit.

Well what does time mean in this context? Patience? Foresight?

I've actually spent the morning journaling on the value of having a long time perspective. So initially I thought the author was saying something to that effect.

But the other translation leaves out time altogether! So honestly I don't know what he was trying to say. I guess it's just some archaic idiom for luck?

Re: The revolt of the reader

#195

Post by valleyer »

rcxdude wrote: post #140
bananaflag wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why dont they train LLMs not to speak like that? Is it some tragedy of the commons here?

LLMs get a lot of finetuning, but I suspect there are two things that can cause this kind of writing: Firstly, some parts of the RLHF involve human graders on the LLM's performance. I suspect their general bias towards a punchy, persuasive writing style could come from what biases the graders towards preferring that response, especially in shorter segments and when the grader is not focused on writing style Secondly,…

I'm not an expert, but... might this indicate the need for "sub-models", meant to be invoked by the general model to write good prose for it? Those sub-models would not be RLed on code (or any algorithmic-feedback tasks that might reinforce bad writing), and could specifically be tuned for prose, even at the cost of general intelligence (which would be provided by the worse-at-writing more general model).

Re: The revolt of the reader

#196

Post by bigstrat2003 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #79
dwattttt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pieces that people aren't revolted by will be fine. Readers aren't revolting because of a flood of high quality writing though.

Some people are still losing their shit over em-dashes, with no other tells, and humans can't use the not x; y construction anymore either, regardless of any other merit to the writing. LLM writing is verbose and meandering, but people are making a much bigger deal over this stuff than necessary for virtue signalling purposes. You don't want to read someone else's LLM writing? Get a summary of the page from yours. No…

> You don't want to read someone else's LLM writing? Get a summary of the page from yours.

I am disinclined to take someone's error-prone machine generated text and run it through an error-prone summarizer. That's a waste of time (not to mention electricity), when all that needed to happen was for the original person to not be so fucking lazy and just write out his thoughts.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#197

Post by cainxinth »

kierangill wrote: post #65

My revolt is against the cognitive stress of reading generated text. A trope typically indicates I’m in for an uphill read. I recently read this William Zinsser quote that inspired a nickname for this: Clotted Claude [1]. > Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes: > > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is…

“It’s better to be lucky than good.” - Lefty Gomez

Re: The revolt of the reader

#198

Post by bigstrat2003 »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #84
cagenut wrote: post #9

if its not worth your time to write, its not worth my time to read this goes 10x for all the slide decks and google docs and wikislop everyone's trying to pass off as an accomplishment lately

You're marginalizing yourself. I don't have hard data for writing, but I do for another area: YouTube Thumbnails. AI generated thumbnails outperform human thumbnails, often with a +2-5% delta in CTR. Yet "so many" people loudly complain about how they HATE AI thumbnails and block channels that have them. Clearly the incentive is there, and (in the case of YT) these are mobs of angry people who don't really matter but…

Good for them. I don't care. I'm not going to subject myself to slop just because some other people don't mind it.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#199

Post by rmunn »

jimmaswell wrote: post #121
Kerrick wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other translations keep Zinsser's preferred lack of fuzz but avoid using "is ... to" for possession. For example, the Lexham English Bible: > I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all o…

This could be shortened to "success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all" with no meaning lost. It's self-indulgent fluff. Meanwhile, Orwell's actually adds more to the statement - much better signal to noise.

You're running into a cultural difference. The book of Ecclesiastes was written in Hebrew, in a poetical style even though large chunks of it are prose. But if you read other parts of the Bible, such as the book of Psalms (which is entirely poetry, specifically songs, though in many cases we do not know the tune that they were set to), you'll see that Hebrew poetry relied on repetition. For example, here's the King James Version's translation of the famous "to every thing there is a season" passage from chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes, which most translations render as poetry:

> To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

That could have been said in less than a quarter of the words the author expended on it. But something of the style would have been entirely lost. He wasn't trying to be succinct, he was trying to repeat the same concept over and over until it sinks in.

Re: The revolt of the reader

#200

Post by rikroots »

Oh, it's about avoiding LLM-generated slop. I was hoping it would be about the increasing trend over the past 20 years for writers to stop trusting their readers, and instead insist on telling the readers how they should read and interpret a piece of writing, as the reader is reading that work. Framing and triggers and stuff. Which I find really, really annoying, and leads - in my view - to safe, unadventurous and, yes, boring writing.

Of course I wrote an essay about this[1]. Here it is: https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/how-not-to-train-you...

[1] - Trigger warnings: discusses poetry; touches on using LLMs in the research phase of essay writing and poetry review.

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