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by boca_honey 73 days ago
I appreciate the sentiment, and good for him. However, from an audience perspective, why choose to watch a guy filming himself eating cereal with a shaky phone camera when you could watch The Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast extravaganza, to avoid being pedantic).

I guess it's OK if you enjoy reading someone expressing himself without communicating anything valuable and well produced. It's kind of like people who enjoy stream-of-consciousness poetry or unhinged personal blog posts. It's fine.

But most of us (I think) read for our own gain, expecting substantial / stimulating text that is ideally well researched and serves a clear purpose.

Something like that needs an editor, effective proofreading, and quite some time of work and rework.

2 comments

At this point, it is far more distracting to see LLM-isms and get completely thrown out of the reading-understanding process than to see some typos or grammatical errors. I actually feel reassured when I see something like a "they're/their" swap, because I know I am reading the author's thoughts instead of some linear algebra vaguely influenced by the author's thoughts.

Five years ago, I probably would have been annoyed by the same.

An editor's role is not fixing typos and grammar (that's the proofreader's job). The editor helps you order your thoughts, pointing out inconsistencies, redundancies, or general lapses in reasoning. When I talk about "unedited," I meant without a clear point, repetitive, unreferenced, etc, etc.

I have nothing against LLMs for proofreading. I'm actually using one now to fix my grammar because English is my second language. I won't let it change my points, though... it's just for cleaning up without having to spend 3x the time on a comment, editing out minor mistakes.

I'm aware this might make my posts feel less natural, but I think it's a good middle ground.

> why choose to watch a guy filming himself eating cereal with a shaky phone camera when you could watch The Sopranos? (or the latest MrBeast extravaganza, to avoid being pedantic).

This is a specifically funny question because every Masaokis video is better than every MrBeast video

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OERZ8Pqs9iU