[avemg]

I am seeing this kind of comment more and more here and I think it's a trend I would like to see end. That's fine if you don't want to read a long, meandering essay. I myself made it about 30% through and decided I didn't want to finish. But why would you then expend the effort to come here and ask others to do work for you? Paste it into chatgpt and ask it to summarize for you.

[Applejinx]

I read the whole thing. It's a bit of a 'moralistic' ending, but I didn't have enough of a problem with it to find that a serious fault.

Unlike that comment about 'please summarize'. I'll fault that.

Here's the problem: this is an artwork. It's there to experience something, not intrinsically to deliver an answer or data point. It's to vicariously go on a journey without literally doing the thing. That's a purpose of artworks, and one that's completely wasted on LLMs as they cannot feel or experience or have a purpose: if they did they'd be fixed (or, I supposed, punched in the digital stomach)

Summary? You don't need an LLM for that, conserve the energy. The summary is 'The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach. And that's bad'.

It's literally in the title. I read through to see if it was 'and that's bad' or, 'and that's good', or possibly 'and that's inevitable'. I like the author better for ending up at 'that's bad' with a little bow on the end to celebrate meaningfulness, but that's not the only possible conclusion, and other conclusions would be just as artistically valid.

Quitting 30% of the way through is just as valid. You don't HAVE to take the ride just because it exists. If you're curious, averng, it's an okay story, leads up to its ending pretty well and finishes with a hopeful note. That's most of what you missed.

The only NON-valid way to engage with it would be to point an LLM at it and say 'tell me what the point is, I'm busy' because that would be failing to take the ride without even comprehending that you're failing to do so.

Living life through ChatGPT is about as useful as getting punched in the stomach. Try reading the story or ignoring it completely. There is no summary that is not as meaningless as… well, you know :)

[avemg]

I mean, I agree. My point is just that if you can't be bothered to read the piece but have such an insatiable curiosity to know what it was about, then do us a favor and just dump it into an llm to scratch your itch.

I find two things to be distasteful: 1) Asking others to do the work you're uninterested in doing yourself and 2) the rejection of any kind of stylistic writing as an annoying distraction. I don't know if the person I was replying to is guilty of #2 but I've seen the sentiment a lot here and more frequently than I used to. Not everything is a technical manual that needs to convey its main ideas in as straightforward a way as possible.

This article is a work of art. And I don't mean that in the highfalutin sense. But the style is meant to evoke something just as much as the words themselves. It's fine if it that doesn't work for you, but the goal was not to convey as much meaning in as few words as possible.