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by abound 112 days ago
> There were entire classes of Hacker News submissions that I refused to read the comments on. Including the comments about this article, should such comments ever materialize.

The author has made the correct call. There's a pretty deep irony that all the top-level comments at the time of this writing are about how the article is too long. It's quite clearly not trying to succinctly convince you of a point, it's meant to be a piece of genuinely human writing, and enjoyed (or not!) on the basis of that.
4 comments
fuball63 112 days ago
Author writes an interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching essay about AI and society, with a main theme being about AI and its impact on our humanity.

All other top level arguments offer AI summaries that miss all of the interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching topics about AI and its impact on our humanity, and complain it was too long to read.

Truly a gem of irony.

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coffeefirst 112 days ago
Yeah, this thread is eye opening.

I loved the essay. If anyone didn't enjoy it, quit halfway, or decided not to read it, that's absolutely fine. There's plenty of thoughtful writing I don't enjoy or don’t feel like spending my time with. But it is well-executed.

But apparently a sizable percentage of today's HN user base can't get through it, and finds the very idea of being able to get through anything longer than an LLM summary objectionable.

If I wanted to be an ass, I would call it a "skill issue."

But I don't want to be an ass. It's just deeply sad.

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nh23423fefe 112 days ago
It's not worth 40 minutes to learn no new facts, while irrationally hoping for a payoff.

The feeling of boredom created in me is the author's fault. This is just content.

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amoss 112 days ago
I personally love the appearance of the tl;dr about a third of the way through, that is some S tier trolling.
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colbyn 112 days ago
Design can go a long way when reading long form text. If someone here is in contact with the author please tell them to improve the typography; most notably smaller and justified text for mobile phones. Other designers could probably weigh in. I’m not an expert, but well designed text goes a long way towards comfortable reading.

Apart from that, content wise a preliminary abstract is nice to have. I do like how the author provides a table of contents.

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