I can't stand it when LLMs tell you to tone it down. Their writing advice is almost universally awful. They want you to write the most cliched bland content possible.

Sometimes I see technical people who feel they aren't good writers, but who have good ideas. They then turn to LLMs, believing that the LLM will help them express their good ideas. They're often right that they have good ideas. But the LLM just turns them to sawdust.

Kudos to spurning the mediocrity conversion machine and hitting publish.

▲ matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know. Maybe you'll feel differently if you read my article. It's about conservative garbage collection, but I mythologized it as a story about people escaping the clutches of an orwellian surveillance machine created by technological wizards, until they learn the magical incantations required to find them.

Let's just say I definitely toned it down a bit in my next article.

▲ areoform 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Your article, https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/babys-second-garbage... made me happy. :)

I read this in the voice and cadence of a D&D dungeon master reciting an epic tale,

    The dark mages often braved the underworld themselves and were therefore undaunted by the task. It should not be difficult, they thought, to adapt the machine to do it. Why couldn't it travel the foreign lands? There was no reason. And so it was decided. The machine would be taught how to do it.
    
    The resources available at the garbage collector's disposal were substantial. It had the object census. It had a list of roots which it would search for objects. It would reap all objects it didn't find in those roots.
    
    One of those roots is the lisp stack. As the program churns, values are placed in stasis and stored there so that they may be recovered later when needed. It is when they escape from this stack that they create havoc in dynamic society. But where are they escaping to?

It reminded me of this ad for a video game cosmetic. It had the same brought-a-smile-to-my-face energy. :)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/K9mlJMVmEOY

▲ mplanchard 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I just read your article, and please don’t listen to the machines!!! It’s a very fun read, and I for one love some personality in an otherwise dry topic.

The thing about keeping your personality in your writing is that you will have to be prepared for it to rub some people the wrong way, even while some people (like me) like it much better: the only writing that no one dislikes is writing that no one likes, either.

Anyway, fight the corporate blandness, have fun in your writing, and keep it out there! That at least is my opinion.

PS if you add RSS I would gladly add your blog to my feed, based on this article.

▲ matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That means a lot, thanks.

I do have RSS and Atom.

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/rss.xml

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/atom.xml

Please let me know if it doesn't work, I'll fix it.

▲ mplanchard 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks for the links, added! The bit at the end with the assembly put me in mind of another favorite post, aphyr’s hexing the tech interview: https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview

	▲	matheusmoreira 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is an amazing article, thank you so much for posting this!! `(def racer (->> [0xca 0xfe 0xba 0xbe` > “What are these?” > “Magic numbers.” You are, after all, a witch. “Every class begins with a babe, in a cafe.” > “What?” I love it.

▲ bawolff 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I feel like LLMs kind of speak to making things be average. For half the population that is a step up, but for the other half that is a step down.

	▲	mediaman 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's right that they steer toward the center of their distribution. But I would offer a different view on whether that's a step up for half the population. Writing isn't a distribution on a single dimension that goes from "bad" to "good". It's a lot of dimensions that encompass everything from "funny" to "formal", "precise" or "hysterical". They may be filled with metaphors, or use allegory; they may use math or logic to explain. The allegories could be from science fiction or they could be Biblical or 19th century Victorian novels. None of these are right or wrong, but they are opinionated ways to express an idea. Writing feels better when it has real texture and character to it. That character is not the monodistribution of "bad" to "good". It's whether it inhabits pockets of out-of-distribution thought in the thousands of dimensions of "thought-space." An LLM pushing to the center of distribution means it pushes the writing out of inhabiting any of the interesting pockets that create the feeling of texture. The middle of the distribution does not mean it is average quality: it means it's not good at all. The median of the distribution can be far worse than the median writer if you accept that the median writer has out-of-distribution thoughts on at least something, and that it is this which makes their thoughts interesting. That's why a rough, perhaps not-totally-grammatical article written by someone with interesting thoughts is vastly better than a "correct" LLM revision, even if the human writer isn't a 'good' writer. Their article occupies an opinionated stance on some dimension that matters; it sits in a pocket of interestingness that LLMs seem almost totally unable to inhabit. The exact middle of the distribution across thousands of dimensions may actually be one of the very worst places of them all.