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The Miller Principle (2007)

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Re: The Miller Principle (2007)

#21

I read this entire post and all the comments this disproving the Miller principle

This principle applies to the following: - User documentation - Specifications - Code comments - Any text on a user interface - Any email longer than one line Not blog posts or comments. Ironic

Damn, I guess I didn't read it closely enough

Re: The Miller Principle (2007)

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This principle applies to the following: - User documentation - Specifications - Code comments - Any text on a user interface - Any email longer than one line Not blog posts or comments. Ironic

Damn, I guess I didn't read it closely enough

Proved that read is not causation of understanding but mere correlation.

So if the read of the Miller principle is interpreted as read+understanding (it should) an interesting deeper discussion can happen.

It can be invoked with a way more dramatic "None understands anything"

Re: The Miller Principle (2007)

#27

I think this is more true now than ever. Before LLMs, when someone came up with an ADR/RFC/etc you had to read it because you had to approve it or reject it. People were putting effort and, yeah, you could use them in your next perf. review to gain extra points. You could easily distinguish well written docs from the crap (that also made the job of reviewing them easie) Nowadays everyone can generate a 20-page RFC/AD…

As a counterexample, thanks to LLMs many long-form articles that get posted with clickbaity (but devoid of content) headlines that I would have ignored otherwise now get "read" (albeit indirectly, with the prompt "Summarize the insights of the article $ARTICLE_URL in an academic, dry, technical and information-dense way")

Re: The Miller Principle (2007)

#30
post #27

I think this is more true now than ever. Before LLMs, when someone came up with an ADR/RFC/etc you had to read it because you had to approve it or reject it. People were putting effort and, yeah, you could use them in your next perf. review to gain extra points. You could easily distinguish well written docs from the crap (that also made the job of reviewing them easie) Nowadays everyone can generate a 20-page RFC/AD…

As a counterexample, thanks to LLMs many long-form articles that get posted with clickbaity (but devoid of content) headlines that I would have ignored otherwise now get "read" (albeit indirectly, with the prompt "Summarize the insights of the article $ARTICLE_URL in an academic, dry, technical and information-dense way")

I notice that with YouTube videos.
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