I wonder how much productivity is being lost by people using LLMs to write long things where the meaningful content remains very small in comparison.
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I wonder how much productivity is being lost by people using LLMs to write long things where the meaningful content remains very small in comparison.
I've noticed that looking up how to do $THING with a command-line $TOOL now almost always gives me an LLM-generated page with pages of boilerplate nonsense (what is $TOOL? How to install $TOOL on Ubuntu, how to install $TOOL on macOS, and so on), with the actual two sentences of content right at the end. These are obviously generated to provide more space for ads, but there's a lot of this cropping up in other contexts.
Saving a few seconds of writing time in exchange for wasting a few minutes of reading time for each of your readers is a staggering drop in overall efficiency.
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I wonder how much productivity is being lost by people using LLMs to write long things where the meaningful content remains very small in comparison.
I've noticed that looking up how to do $THING with a command-line $TOOL now almost always gives me an LLM-generated page with pages of boilerplate nonsense (what is $TOOL? How to install $TOOL on Ubuntu, how to install $TOOL on macOS, and so on), with the actual two sentences of content right at the end. These are obviously generated to provide more space for ads, but there's a lot of this cropping up in other contexts.
Saving a few seconds of writing time in exchange for wasting a few minutes of reading time for each of your readers is a staggering drop in overall efficiency.
If only man pages had examples of typical usage in them. I could never understand why not.
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I wonder how much productivity is being lost by people using LLMs to write long things where the meaningful content remains very small in comparison.
I've noticed that looking up how to do $THING with a command-line $TOOL now almost always gives me an LLM-generated page with pages of boilerplate nonsense (what is $TOOL? How to install $TOOL on Ubuntu, how to install $TOOL on macOS, and so on), with the actual two sentences of content right at the end. These are obviously generated to provide more space for ads, but there's a lot of this cropping up in other contexts.
Saving a few seconds of writing time in exchange for wasting a few minutes of reading time for each of your readers is a staggering drop in overall efficiency.
@david_chisnall Seems to work as intended. The amount of times I've heard "Yeah, I just asked Copilot, because online search just gave me too much text" (they meant the exact pages you describe) is staggering.
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If only man pages had examples of typical usage in them. I could never understand why not.
A lot do. There is a standard
EXAMPLESsection in mandoc. -
I wonder how much productivity is being lost by people using LLMs to write long things where the meaningful content remains very small in comparison.
I've noticed that looking up how to do $THING with a command-line $TOOL now almost always gives me an LLM-generated page with pages of boilerplate nonsense (what is $TOOL? How to install $TOOL on Ubuntu, how to install $TOOL on macOS, and so on), with the actual two sentences of content right at the end. These are obviously generated to provide more space for ads, but there's a lot of this cropping up in other contexts.
Saving a few seconds of writing time in exchange for wasting a few minutes of reading time for each of your readers is a staggering drop in overall efficiency.
@david_chisnall With some of the recipients of the long LLM-generated content using their own LLM to summarise
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