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exmadscientist • today at 6:03 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

I agree that it's way too long and difficult to find the value in. One of the key features of a lot of good longer-form informational writing is that it goes around a subject before it goes into a subject. This takes many forms (and is, indeed, kind of fractal), but on its most basic level it's the "this is what I'm going to tell you, here let me tell you, now this is what I told you" pattern. And I say "fractal" because it applies not just to the whole thing, but to every chapter, and so forth. Even paragraphs often bear this structure.

When I don't know what you're going to tell me, I lose interest. When I hit descriptions of memory freeing right away, I don't know: are we going to blather in the weeds about pointers or malloc or ... ? When am I going to get to the part that's new to me? Etc. It's just hard to read, if I don't have to read it.

LLMs make this a whole lot worse because they don't need context like human readers and authors do. They can just jump right in. So they don't care, and they won't flag this, and if you end up writing for them, your writing won't be valuable to humans who need to learn.


Replies

djad04 • today at 6:25 PM

yes i understand that the problem is that I was writing this as I was investigating. I had a huge file of notes that I kept adding to as I went, than got back to add again each time and eventually turned that into the writeup. So what you're reading is quite literally my path towards understanding, rather than something I wrote afterwards with a predefined structure and roadmap, and once i finished i went back through the article, I realized I wanted to make some of the more complicated topics easier to understand and more accessible to everyone. So I added a few more sections including explanations of fundamentals that are just meant for people that doesn't have experience with low level programming