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When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

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Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#541

Post by dctoedt »

makeitdouble wrote: post #526
dctoedt wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The lawyer. Needs walls of text. Lawyer and law professor here: No, no , NO ! Wall-of-words text is a sign of a L.O.A.D. — a Lazy Or Arrogant Drafter. I teach contract drafting to 3Ls and stress The Two Great Rules of Readability: 1. SSSSP: Short, Simple, Single-Subject Paragraphs. https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin... 2. BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes…

I really love how even the lawyers don't want these gigantic walls of texts they produce. I totally get the walls of text are needed to a point, and we don't have good options to produce succint contracts. It just feels like an everybody lose situation.

> I totally get the walls of text are needed to a point, and we don't have good options to produce succin[c]t contracts.

You're too kind — literally.

Wall-of-words text is never needed in a contract. Clients should demand that lawyers do a better job in drafting readable contracts — because readable contracts get signed sooner, thus taking up less of the business people's time to negotiate and freeing them up to focus on other things (not to mention being less costly).

The Two Great Rules of Readability above will get you at least 95% of the way there.

Wall-of-words contract language is analogous to spaghetti code in a computer program.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#542

Post by dctoedt »

jjeaff wrote: post #517
dctoedt wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The lawyer. Needs walls of text. Lawyer and law professor here: No, no , NO ! Wall-of-words text is a sign of a L.O.A.D. — a Lazy Or Arrogant Drafter. I teach contract drafting to 3Ls and stress The Two Great Rules of Readability: 1. SSSSP: Short, Simple, Single-Subject Paragraphs. https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin... 2. BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes…

You are describing the "good lawyer". Judging by the absolute walls of text given in the terms of service and contracts of almost every big company out there, most lawyers are not "good lawyers".

I sometimes wonder whether some lawyers intentionally draft wall-of-words text in the hope that the other side's contract reviewer will miss something because of the MEGO Effect (Mine Eyes Glaze Over).

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#543

Post by Paul-Craft »

gwd wrote: post #293
sschueller wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree, I also pay for api access and I am still trying to figure out how I can benefit from using it when it gives me blatantly incorrect commands or wrong answers. I can see it guide me in the right direction if I have a more generic question but even then, if I am not specific enough I fear I might go down a rabbit hole that ends no where. It may be better than google in finding something but when I manage…

> Totally agree, I also pay for api access and I am still trying to figure out how I can benefit from using it when it gives me blatantly incorrect commands or wrong answers. So here's one that saved me a bunch of time: https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2535443 Basically, I knew the package could do what I wanted; I knew it was almost certainly in GPT-4's data set; I could do it myself, but it would involve searching thr…

> My day job is basically arguing with people on the internet. :-)

Okay, now I have to know what this job is.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#544

Post by cainxinth »

noobermin wrote: post #261
futureshock wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is the bias of a very smart, highly educated, highly capable person. If you are already an excellent writer and coder, can take vast fields of knowledge and blossoming ideas and spit them out onto paper in skilled form with minimal anxiety, GPT probably does very little for you. Maybe you could see if you were missing something very obvious and average. I read for probably 8-12 hours a day. I write e…

The thing is this will rob a whole generation of that learning. To struggle to learn to write, code, and all that is how you become a professional. A lot of people will never develop these skills, and the chasm between the talented and untalented will only grow.

Before books, everyone had to memorize information they wanted to preserve. Books robbed a hundred generations of that learning. So it goes.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#545

Post by PaulHoule »

rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

All the time I see blog posts by people who give ChatGPT way too much credit for partially correct answers than it deserves.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#546

Post by Capricorn2481 »

jmillikin wrote: post #10
armchairhacker wrote: post #8

How much is ChatGPT replacing human writing? It still seems to me like most of the articles on HN are human-written, and I heard CNBC tried replacing writers with ChatGPT and it went terribly. But I've also heard anecdotes of freelance writers getting replaced [1] [2] [3], and every once in a while I spot or hear about something ChatGPT-written in the wild. I'm sure ChatGPT replaces boilerplate writing (e.g. legal do…

ChatGPT can't replace writing intended to convey information, but that's only a small fraction of the writing that's getting created. There's a whole industry where people are given prompts like "five paragraphs about the history of spaghetti" and get paid $0.01 per word, then that text gets put into an Italy-themed travel blog full of ads. You and I wouldn't notice if that entire industry was replaced by ChatGPT bec…

Those people are not going to be hired in the future. The companies will use ChatGPT directly.

I don't disagree, by the way. I think ChatGPT may be a net negative for us, but the issue you describe has more to do with the way Google rewards the web

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#547

Post by Capricorn2481 »

rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

I think ChatGPT is impressive, but it's revealed just how insular and vapid the thoughts of some HNers are. Hearing people's "endgame" for ChatGPT has been very depressing

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#548

Post by rcme »

d23 wrote: post #413
vagab0nd wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense but you are almost certainly using it wrong. Consider the following: 1. Use it when you know how to do something but don't want to. 2. Use it when you don't know something, and don't know how to find the answer. 3. Never trust. Verify. Clearly, this means the examples that impress others will often not impress you.

It’s very difficult for me to wrap my head around people that aren’t blown away by both this and generative image AIs, and I tend to be in the skeptical side when it comes to fancy tech adoption.

I find generative AI very impressive, but impressive in the sense of "wow, it's impressive that an algorithm can do that." If I ignore the fact that something was algorithmically generated, then I'm not impressed by the generated output on its own.

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#549

Post by schwartzworld »

barrkel wrote: post #35
rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

The tools are at their most useful when they're replacing Stack Overflow searches for common tasks. An example I had last night: how do you split a pdf into separate pages on the command line, and how do you put them back together again (I replaced one of the pages with a scanned signed version). This is a basic task, a beginner's task in the world of pdf munging, but I didn't know the answer off the top of my head.…

This is exactly what I don't understand about it. I copied your question directly from your comment into google and the top-ten results were all sufficient to answer the question. The nature of common tasks is that the answers are also common, so where's the value in paying for a service that regurgitates them to you?

Re: When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think

#550

Post by asdasd213123 »

rcme wrote: post #14

Sometimes I wonder if I'm using the same ChatGPT as everyone else. I pay for GPT4 access in ChatGPT, and it is a really terrible writer. I also pay for Copilot, and I think a can count the number of times it has been helpful with one hand. I'm trying to get on this hype train, but I'm left with an empty feeling every time I try to seriously spend some time with these new tools.

You got filtered btw
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