121–130 of 451 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with passive?
In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.
Rewriting “the points already made” to “the points people have already made” would not have improved it.
The music notation tool space is balkanized in a variety of ways. One of the key splits is between standard music notation and tablature, which is used for guitar and a few other instruments. People are generally on one side or another, and the notation is not even fully compatible - tablature covers information that standard notation doesn't, and vice versa. This covers fingering, articulations, "step on fuzz pedal…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers. Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive v…
E-Prime is cool. OOPS! I mean E-Prime cools me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes É or E′) denotes a restricted form of English in which authors avoid all forms of the verb to be. E-Prime excludes forms such as be, being, been, present tense forms (am, is, are), past tense forms (was, were) along with their negative contractions (isn't, aren't, wasn't,…
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Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something. Examples: * Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal. * Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager. * Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?] Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize…
Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers. Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive v…
People forget that while technology grows, society also grows to support that. I already strongly suspect that LLMs are just going to magnify the dominance of python as LLMs can remove the most friction from its use. Then will come the second order effects where libraries are explicitly written to be LLM friendly, further removing friction. LLMs write code best in python -> python gets used more -> python gets optimi…
We don't live in a nice world, so you'll probably end up right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.
You used passive voice in the very first sentence of your comment. Rewriting “the points already made” to “the points people have already made” would not have improved it.
I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works. Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does…
> ChatGPT was outright lying to people. And making us look bad in the process, setting false expectations about our service. I find it interesting that any user would attribute this issue to Soundslice. As a user, I would be annoyed that GPT is lying and wouldn't think twice about Soundslice looking bad in the process
OTOH it's free(?) advertising, as long as that first impression isn't too negative.
I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works. Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does…
> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly. I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited. But if I'd have accepted all of Gram…
That’s like getting rid of all languages and accents and switch to the same language
I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works. Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does…
A light-weight anecdote: Many many python image-processing libraries have an `imread()` function. I didn't know about this when designing our own bespoke image-lib at work, and went with an esoteric `image_get()` that I never bothered to refactor. When I ask ChatGPT for help writing one-off scripts using the internal library I often forget to give it more context than just `import mylib` at the top, and it almost alw…