[ergl]

> The book is definitely LLM assisted authoring yet it also has great content, so not sure we can immediately jump to shaming it entirely for being slop.

Personally I have an extremely hard time reading text like this and it makes me lose trust in the author. Publishing potentially useful Git knowledge this way is a shame.

[tnm]

"Shame" is a strong word to describe a free ebook written for the general good. Happy to have a live conversation with you anytime to discuss Git and its internals to ensure your trust; I have some experience with it.

[ergl]

I'm sorry if I have offended you.

You probably have a great deal of understanding and knowledge about Git, and this book might be a good resource.

I'm not asking you to do anything differently, and yet I think it's important to realize that people have a deep aversion to text that appears to be LLM generated.

By "shame", I meant that just from a skim of the contents of this book, it can be hard to distinguish it from any other LLM generated text by any other author who has no idea what they're talking about.

That makes people (like me) inclined to discount what it has to say, potentially losing out on good technical content.

[tnm]

Yep, signals are signals, but I think it's quite complicated now. (In any case, this is still the embryonic era of LLMs).

An interesting point to consider: an author that goes out of their way to hide any LLM influence may actually be degrading the signal. Because in that case, you'll not see the LLM's etchings, and misattribute skill to the author under the belief an LLM was not involved. Complicated times.

[keybored]

> An interesting point to consider: an author that goes out of their way to hide any LLM influence may actually be degrading the signal. Because in that case, you'll not see the LLM's etchings, and misattribute skill to the author under the belief an LLM was not involved. Complicated times.

To someone who thinks that LLM use is an of-course-I-did-that, other people complaining about LLM-tells might seem like complaining about not post-processing the input enough. But they are more likely to be complaining about using it in the first place.

[tormeh]

I don't particularly care about LLM use per se, but when I see LLM text it makes me think I'm about to read something devoid of content - just word vomit. The equivalent of yesteryear's listicle. This instinct usually serves me well. A good text is a good text. If an LLM wrote all of it that'd be fine with me, but that's usually not how things go.

[ori_b]

I don't think it should be socially acceptable to perform a denial of service attack on people's attention.

[keybored]

“It’s a shame” is a very neutral way to criticize an editorial/authoring choice.[1] It conveys that they might have enjoyed it under different circumstances. Really no different than someone saying that it’s a shame that someone published some useful information in video form without any transcript. [But now with AI we can have the transcript anyway etc. etc.]

[1] A neutral way to express a subjective judgement: not blaming any person.

[alchemist1e9]

They wouldn’t be able to publish this useful knowledge easily without it though. And it’s the author’s guidance and vision which the LLM just helps materialize and so I think we should be studying how to generate content with less “slop” features and make it more natural and satisfactory for human readers, not discouraging it.