Write-only memory
The Miller Principle (2007)
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: The Miller Principle (2007)
#32I 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…
Watching the Artemis II splashdown and following media event, I’m suspicious that a woman from TechTalk Media read out some LLM blurb instead of asking a question; I can’t prove it, but I can almost hear the em-dash in:
"What you have done this week is remind the people of Earth that wonder is worth chasing. That curiosity is the most human thing we have. You didn't just test a spacecraft -- you tested mankind's potential...”
Re: The Miller Principle (2007)
#33This signals something that is happening somehow predictably due to the increasing abundance of code. It exponentially grows the surface offered for understanding (text as in comments, docs etc) and our attention bandwidth, well, is not exponentially growing, so...
Re: The Miller Principle (2007)
#34[deleted]
Re: The Miller Principle (2007)
#35Damn, this is thin content even for HN. Anyway, this is just projection. The Miller principle really should be "Miller doesn't read anything". I read plenty.
[deleted]
Re: The Miller Principle (2007)
#36We are reaching society shown in "Johny Mnemonic" movie.. So much (useless) information around that people gets overloaded. I barely read anything these days on NH, too much (crap) information. I skim and only read stuff that is very close to my interest.
I used to read a lot more in the past, not the case anymore..
Re: The Miller Principle (2007)
#37For fun, I recently rebuilt a little text adventure some friends and I had built in the early 2000s. Originally written in QBasic, I translated it line by line in Go, and set it up as a little SSH server.
For posterity, I didn't want to change anything about the actual game itself but knew beforehand that the commands were difficult to figure out organically. To try and help modern players, I added an introductory heading when you start playing informing the player that this was a text adventure game and that "help" would give them a basic list of commands.
Watching people attempt to play it in the logs, it became painfully obvious no one read the heading, at all. Almost no one ever typed "help". They'd just type tens of invalid commands, get frustrated and quit.
Re: The Miller Principle (2007)
#38I 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…
Those generated ADRs are pure crap, full of unnecessary hedges and superficial solutions that don’t survive scrutiny longer than 10 seconds. I do generate ADR skeleton drafts because I hate empty pages, but I need to add the substance or they are not helpful at all.
What we are doing is probably not in training data, maybe that’s why.
Re: The Miller Principle (2007)
#39We are reaching society shown in "Johny Mnemonic" movie.. So much (useless) information around that people gets overloaded. I barely read anything these days on NH, too much (crap) information. I skim and only read stuff that is very close to my interest. I used to read a lot more in the past, not the case anymore..
Well, half the articles I see posted now, the author didn't even bother to write themselves, but outsourced to a machine.
I've heard this sentiment: "If you didn't even bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?"
But often there is real value there, and I sometimes force myself to cringe my way through the GPT-isms, to find the gems buried within.