N0o one is happy about this.

I am so mad right now

haha same. I went years knowing from technical osmosis that it meant “supporting other languages” but I never knew what it represented or why it had numbers in it. There are so many acronyms in tech I think inevitably some of them fall by the wayside for everyone.

Still at a loss as to what "“Sk8er Boi” is short for.

frfr

Scientists are often criticized for giving prosaic names to the things they discover but I think they really knocked it out of the park with time crystals.

It insists upon itself.

I want to make a documentary about a guitar player who lived hard and died young just so I can name it “Struts and Frets”.

It often is, but this poem isn’t about the kind of death that includes an afterlife. That’s just more life. This is an exhortation for nonexistence. I think that’s what makes the volta tricky, is that the speaker knows exactly what they’re asking for from the jump. Which I think is what makes it feel kind of like a prayer, the old school Catholic kind, not the non-denominational invocative freestyling where people just say whatever they want to god. When I was a kid we got all our prayers pre-written from the church, and those were the prayers we said. Feels… genre bending to have realizations in the middle of prayers, lol.

I don’t set out to write sonnets, but I keep getting pulled in that direction. Three quatrains is a good length for a poem, I think. I also spent a lot of time trying to think of a good couplet to put at the end because I feel, for some absurd reason, that it “should” have a couplet, but I can’t think of one that fits the tone. Couplets just feel too cutesy and rhymey for a topic as super serious as the shuffling of the ole mortal coil.

Right, I guess I’m more taking issue with the article than with you, because the “trail” is always documents, and it’s pretty easy for LLMs to fake documents. I mean, humans have been half-assing verification checks for decades, and it has kind of worked because even half-assing a verification document has required at least some fluency with the code under test, which in turn has required the engineering team to develop enough understanding of the code that they can maintain it, just to produce plausible verification trail documents. Now, the relationship between plausible documentation and a dev’s understanding of the code being verified is much less reliable, so we need more precise mechanisms. In other words, the signals of trust have always been broken, it’s just that it hasn’t been a problem up until now because there were side effects that made the signals a good-enough proxy for what we actually wanted. Now that proxy is no longer reliable.

I mean, they already do that, right? If buggy code comes with polished documentation and passing unit tests, that’s a verification trail that looks correct but is not. The problem is that, up until recently, those were broadly assumed to be good enough even though we’ve known for decades that flawed unit test suites can ignore or even obscure bugs, documentation can be incorrect or out-of-date, because their existence implied, reasonably safely, that the dev who wrote the code understood it well enough to write the doc and the tests. The signals of correctness have always been imperfect, they were just good enough that we got by with them until now. Now we need to think of something more rigorous.

I don’t think it’s as simple as there being “good people” and “bad people”, and that only the worst people are capable of extreme wealth. I think wealth just happens to some people. Some people are born into it, some stumble into it, a lot of people seek it out and a few of those people “succeed”, though I’d argue even then it’s mostly chance. Of the people who get substantial wealth, some give it away, some retire into a wealth cocoon and are never heard from again, some lose it, and some actively grow it because they love the feeling of gaining wealth.

I don’t know if it’s addictive in the same way that some chemicals are addictive, but I bet it’s addictive in the same way that gambling is addictive, and wealthy people can get hooked on the feeling of “winning” more wealth the same way people get addicted to slot machines. I also think that it’s not strictly wealth addiction, but power addiction, which is why some super wealthy people tend to extravagantly flaunt their power: building megaprojects, influencing or simply taking over governments, violating laws with impunity, forcing the working class to work in extreme conditions if not outright enslaving them, etc. The use of power is their drug and they won’t stop themselves because they can’t. Does that make them bad people? It makes them harmful people who need intervention, the same way an alcoholic needs intervention before they get behind a wheel. I feel bad for kids born into wealth, who never had the chance to just be a human without the veil of power being drawn between them and the rest of humanity. The Don Jr.'s of the world. That doesn’t excuse their actions, nor does it mean that they don’t need to be stopped. But I think it hurts us to think of them as fundamentally “bad” in the same way I think it’s unhelpful to categorize alcoholics as “bad”. The real horror is that the monsters are just like us, and treating wealth hoarders and power addicts like they’re a different, less human kind of human is the same thing that they do to rationalize their own abuses.

Will no one rid me of these troublesome conspiracy laws?

I know this gets called for so much that it starts to become background noise, but now is an excellent time to call your congressional reps, regardless of party, and tell them what you expect them to do to contain Trump. Don’t mince words. They may not agree with you, but they do monitor these calls and they do talk to each other. If enough of them feel the tide turning they will abandon Trump. They are fearful creatures and they move in packs. If enough of them move at once and visible momentum against Trump builds, there’s a good chance he can be contained democratically before he has a chance to meddle with the midterms, and even if he’s not impeached he’ll still have to do damage control with his party, which will limit his options.

My fellow Americans, please call your reps, and Senators, no matter how die-hard MAGA they are, and let them feel the pressure of the moment.

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

Thanks! I do like getting feedback on my writing, especially writing that I just spit out and fire off as opposed to agonizing over the composition. I think if I’m ever going to write a novel I need to get comfortable with “just writing” and this is good practice. I don’t think /u/originalucifer is a bot, I think they just use them, and even if they’re not great at articulating their problems with this piece, I’m still interested in getting to the bottom of what they think. Someone who complains about the formatting of a post in the LotR comm is very much my target demo 😅

I’m glad that you cited your source, because this is nonsense and I’m happy to take it apart for both of us. But for the sake of all of us, please don’t take literary criticism from an LLM seriously, that’s not what they do. All they can do is generate free-association text-adjacent word salad with mostly valid grammar, which, in the case of literary criticism, means they can only approximate the mean of all criticisms for all similar texts. At best, this makes them inane; at worst, it makes them convincing liars. Do not trust them.

1. The shift from metaphor to narrative: It’s kinda telling on how LLMs operate that it describes a simile as a metaphor (which is possibly technically correct in that you could consider similes a type of metaphor) but it completely misses the metaphor of the, as it calls it, “internal logic of the story”. It misses how that particular description of LotR is related to the preceding analysis, and only sees them as two discrete thoughts that would be better served by being separated by a paragraph break. They are not and they would not.

2. Rhetorical Escalation: I am at a bit of a loss here. I guess being on a long, difficult journey is sadder than playing a record, and therefore the piece has “rhetorical escalation”? Is any tonal shift considered an escalation? Can a paragraph not contain two tones?

3. The “Theme” pivot: this is the most insulting one of all, I think, because it hearkens back to the most braindead “rule” of writing paragraphs: the topic sentence must be the first sentence of a paragraph. That rule is for journalists writing baby-food news mash for people who scan newspapers for interesting paragraphs and I refuse. I’ll put my paragraph breaks where they make sense for the story I’m telling, and sometimes I’ll throw a volta in the middle of a paragraph. I might even put it in the middle of a sentence if I so please. Finally and least importantly, “the most important intellectual “click””? ugh.

4. Visual breathing room: Funny that this point directly invokes the specter of readers skimming my work. maybe I should break each sentence out into its own paragraph so readers don’t have to read in between the scary lines. Or, maybe it’s just twelve sentences that form a cohesive point. If people can’t handle that in one block, I think I’m at peace with them not reading it. I don’t think I’m asking too much. Especially from the LotR crowd.

Interesting. On closer inspection it still seems like a perfectly ordinary-length paragraph to me. Maybe a little garden-path-y because I didn’t have a clear idea of the end of the paragraph when I started writing it, but overall a single cohesive point.

I don’t think I’ve ever considered what the qualifications are for a wall of text, but I’ve always assumed that a “wall of text” was an unbroken line that (with word wraps) was too tall to fit in a single screen. I guess that definition formed when screen resolutions were much smaller.

How would you have formatted it?

I don’t think escaping the trauma was his intention, not when his books deal so intimately with the corrosive effects of power. I think he was processing the trauma by telling a story that describes the feeling of those traumatic events, and tries to make sense of how regular people can talk themselves into such senseless violence. I think it’s fair to describe that as coping, but I don’t think his cope was just ignoring it by describing a nice door for 10 pages. I also don’t think it’s really fair to say he just wanted “a” story to go with his fancy languages. He had a real point about what evil is, and he wanted to tell it in a story.

Interesting critique. I do love formatting! This post is formatted as a paragraph, which contains one or more sentences referring to a central topic. I felt it was the appropriate vehicle for this collection of thoughts.

It’s been so long since I read all the books in one continuous go. I should do it again, but there are so many books I still haven’t read it’s hard to justify the time. I guess that’s also true for movies, but it feels different somehow.