For fun, I recently rebuilt a little text adventure some friends and I had built in the early 2000s. Originally written in QBasic, I translated it line by line in Go, and set it up as a little SSH server.
For posterity, I didn't want to change anything about the actual game itself but knew beforehand that the commands were difficult to figure out organically. To try and help modern players, I added an introductory heading when you start playing informing the player that this was a text adventure game and that "help" would give them a basic list of commands.
Watching people attempt to play it in the logs, it became painfully obvious no one read the heading, at all. Almost no one ever typed "help". They'd just type tens of invalid commands, get frustrated and quit.
I think this is more true now than ever. Before LLMs, when someone came up with an ADR/RFC/etc you had to read it because you had to approve it or reject it. People were putting effort and, yeah, you could use them in your next perf. review to gain extra points. You could easily distinguish well written docs from the crap (that also made the job of reviewing them easie)
Nowadays everyone can generate a 20-page RFC/ADR and even though you can tell if they are LLM generated, you cannot easily reject them based on that factor only. So here we are spending hours reading something the author spent 5 min. to generate (and barely knows what’s about).
Watching the Artemis II splashdown and following media event, I’m suspicious that a woman from TechTalk Media read out some LLM blurb instead of asking a question; I can’t prove it, but I can almost hear the em-dash in:
"What you have done this week is remind the people of Earth that wonder is worth chasing. That curiosity is the most human thing we have. You didn't just test a spacecraft -- you tested mankind's potential...”
I think the good news here is that very soon, parroting some shit an LLM wrote will be a sure sign to everyone that that person is a moron or lazy or otherwise useless. If all you do is repeat what an AI gives you, then you can be replaced by the AI. I can't imagine why anyone would want to signal that to potential employers or, really, any other human being.
As a counterexample, thanks to LLMs many long-form articles that get posted with clickbaity (but devoid of content) headlines that I would have ignored otherwise now get "read" (albeit indirectly, with the prompt "Summarize the insights of the article $ARTICLE_URL in an academic, dry, technical and information-dense way")
Those generated ADRs are pure crap, full of unnecessary hedges and superficial solutions that don’t survive scrutiny longer than 10 seconds. I do generate ADR skeleton drafts because I hate empty pages, but I need to add the substance or they are not helpful at all.
What we are doing is probably not in training data, maybe that’s why.
This signals something that is happening somehow predictably due to the increasing abundance of code. It exponentially grows the surface offered for understanding (text as in comments, docs etc) and our attention bandwidth, well, is not exponentially growing, so...
Despite using an ai while programming I still have open Java doc and other api documents and find them very useful as the ai often gives code based on old apis instead of what I'm actually using. So I do read those documents.
But also, I have a somewhat mentally ill (as in he takes medication for it) coworker that sends rambling extra-long emails, often all one paragraph. If I can't figure out what he's asking by reading the first couple and last couple of sentences I ask him to summarize it with bullet pouts and it actually works. Lol.
A totally understandable situation. Most people just want to use technology to accomplish their immediate goal. I'm tech savvy and I lose my mind every time I get distracted by broken/misconfigured technology.
They do, but it doesn't mean that entire texts will remain in their context. Increasingly they can use agentic reading, whereby they will spawn an agent to read long texts, then present a condensed version back to the parent LLM, leading to a theoretical opportunity for information loss.
This principle applies to the following:
- User documentation
- Specifications
- Code comments
- Any text on a user interface
- Any email longer than one line
If you read closely, you’ll see that there is no claim that this would be an exhaustive list rather than an exemplifying one, and the principle itself unambiguously states “anything”.
We are reaching society shown in "Johny Mnemonic" movie.. So much (useless) information around that people gets overloaded. I barely read anything these days on NH, too much (crap) information. I skim and only read stuff that is very close to my interest.
I used to read a lot more in the past, not the case anymore..
The Laravel documentation is GREAT when you're getting started. Every chapter starts by answering the very question you might ask yourself if you're going through it top to bottom.
I'm a one-man-band so if I write code comments, I write them for future me because up to this point he has been very grateful. Creating API documentation is also easy if you can generate it based on the comments in your code.
Maybe rename it the Filler principle. Nobody reads mindless comments that are 'filler'.
For posterity, I didn't want to change anything about the actual game itself but knew beforehand that the commands were difficult to figure out organically. To try and help modern players, I added an introductory heading when you start playing informing the player that this was a text adventure game and that "help" would give them a basic list of commands.
Watching people attempt to play it in the logs, it became painfully obvious no one read the heading, at all. Almost no one ever typed "help". They'd just type tens of invalid commands, get frustrated and quit.
'Thanks for the doc, let's set a meeting' (implied: so you can read the doc aloud to us ) is the bane of my existence.
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...
Nowadays everyone can generate a 20-page RFC/ADR and even though you can tell if they are LLM generated, you cannot easily reject them based on that factor only. So here we are spending hours reading something the author spent 5 min. to generate (and barely knows what’s about).
Same goes for documentation, PRs, PRs comments…
"What you have done this week is remind the people of Earth that wonder is worth chasing. That curiosity is the most human thing we have. You didn't just test a spacecraft -- you tested mankind's potential...”
What we are doing is probably not in training data, maybe that’s why.
Mini-article is from 2007.
At the time, more reports were generated than humans could read. People weren't reading them for good reason.
I suspect author is more annoyed about people being (grossly) negligent in reading important things.
But also, I have a somewhat mentally ill (as in he takes medication for it) coworker that sends rambling extra-long emails, often all one paragraph. If I can't figure out what he's asking by reading the first couple and last couple of sentences I ask him to summarize it with bullet pouts and it actually works. Lol.
So if the read of the Miller principle is interpreted as read+understanding (it should) an interesting deeper discussion can happen.
It can be invoked with a way more dramatic "None understands anything"
Good documentation is hard.
I used to read a lot more in the past, not the case anymore..
I've heard this sentiment: "If you didn't even bother to write it, why should I bother to read it?"
But often there is real value there, and I sometimes force myself to cringe my way through the GPT-isms, to find the gems buried within.
Anyway, this is just projection. The Miller principle really should be "Miller doesn't read anything". I read plenty.
I'm a one-man-band so if I write code comments, I write them for future me because up to this point he has been very grateful. Creating API documentation is also easy if you can generate it based on the comments in your code.
Maybe rename it the Filler principle. Nobody reads mindless comments that are 'filler'.
it's in there