‘Explain it to a rubber duck’, is a piece of advice that I understand computer people use to break down complex problems, which is a cargo-cult version of a writer working with an editor, who unlike the duck, can respond and give good advice
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‘Explain it to a rubber duck’, is a piece of advice that I understand computer people use to break down complex problems, which is a cargo-cult version of a writer working with an editor, who unlike the duck, can respond and give good advice
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@liamvhogan that is one use of LLMs that I have seen that might be useful: a system that you get to critique your own work, and you get to find out how generic and boring your writing is because it uses a lot of American Business Marketing Voice.
If an LLM could have written it, what are you doing with your life?
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@daedalus the classic use case of an LLM is to extend writing in quantity to meet an arbitrary word requirement, which is almost exactly the opposite of the advice every good editor has ever given
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@liamvhogan @daedalus I get so mad at word limits. Are we assessing the quality of the argument and writing, or what?
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jack is updating your databasereplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan that's explicitly not what rubber-ducking is, though. the origin was a (possibly apocryphal) team where colleagues would interrupt you at your desk to ask for help and spend five minutes explaining why they're stuck, and in the course of framing an explanation they see how to proceed and leave without requiring any response. someone figured it'd be cheaper to recruit a golden retriever who can listen patiently and not respond for a much lower hourly rate. from there they iterated to rubber ducks
so the whole point is you're solving a problem by framing it as a question or explanation and not requiring anyone else's input
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@liamvhogan That’s not entirely true. The most common use of the phrase these days is when you DO need help and are asking someone else in your field to be a sounding board. “May I use you as a rubber duck?”
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Liam :fnord:replied to jack is updating your database last edited by
@jackeric those three cases are all examples of what I mean: people going through a process that resembles the editorial process (or, now that it occurs to me, psychoanalysis), which because it resembles that, will bring about the solution internally, but without the external input of not-thought-of questions that makes those actual processes valuable
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@vampiress that’s perverse. Do you want feedback or do you not want feedback
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jack is updating your databasereplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan software development does have collaborative practices like pair programming and code review which would relate more to working with an editor
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Liam :fnord:replied to jack is updating your database last edited by
@jackeric I’ve read about pair programming. I cannot think of a more horrible activity and just thinking about it makes me recoil physically
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@Kels_316 @liamvhogan I am a big fan of limits in the sense of "no, the parties may not submit unlimited pages of submissions to the Court"
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@daedalus @liamvhogan oh yeah upper limit for sure, I was railing against the minimum word count
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@Kels_316 @liamvhogan Minimums are silly, unless you're practicing as part of being taught how to write. A rough guide is useful, because different lengths have a different character (e.g. 1500 words vs 600-800 vs 300) and it is that character that is important, not the word count per se.
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@daedalus @liamvhogan my argument against minimums is that we are supposed to be teaching kids to be concise, accurate and persuasive in their arguments and then we tell them "needs to be longer"
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Deborah Pickettreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan @Kels_316 @daedalus Thinking out loud here. Is there utility in LLM summaries as a kind of measure of entropy, to give the writer an idea of how overpadded their writing is?
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@futzle @liamvhogan @Kels_316 that's one use case I've seen described, and yeah, I think it could be useful for writers who care about such things. Like a linter for your writing, similar to spelling and grammar checkers. You can ignore them whenever you want, if you want to break 'rules' on purpose.
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@Kels_316 @daedalus @liamvhogan "minima" is more concise and more correct than "minimums"...
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