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Your posts always seem interesting. I wish they were comprehensible (to me), at least without really digging into them.
I'd really recommend a full paragraph of summary at the top, with no rhetorical flourishes or weird words (like "blahaj and leekspinners") that only make sense in the context of someone who's been following the situation. This screenshot that you linked does a fairly good job. You have that first sentence saying someone linked to the Linux community got banned, but you need more in a place like this where all the topics get jumbled together. I want to know if a topic interests me before I read any further, and you typically only have a single paragraph to hook people like me before my eyes glaze a bit and I scroll down.
Confession. I only read gattsuru posts while on ADHD meds and even then, I can't break them down on my own. I have to have a conversation with bots regarding them.
During such a conversation, you get to do things like ask what a leekspinner is, get an immediate response, and go verify it. But I absolutely agree with you. All of the things you cite are additional context costs and inferential distance costs for the reader.
Dear @gattsuru, if you want your posts to filter the audience by requiring them to put in an insane level of engagement, you are doing a great job. Otherwise you should try to budget complexity better.
My advice- Assume that most people have a limit to how many concepts they can hold in their head that is smaller than yours, and that switching windows to look things up is high cost and risks scrambling their current contextual flow when they return. Most of your ideas could be explained to a even a halfwit if you made sure to design your posts to not cause expensive flailing on their brain hardware.
To be fair, this is also my advice to half this forum.
This is intriguing, are you saying you copy+paste his writing into chatGPT and then ask questions of it? Do you do this for other pieces of writing as well? I've been looking for actual use-cases for chatbots and this seems promising.
Yes. For this post, I skimmed it, then I pasted the full post in GPT. GPT summarized it, which gave me a few more mental handles to start asking questions, and reading the post proper. As I did this, I re-pasted pieces alongside questions about them, followed links sometimes pasting bits from those, and so on as I began to understand it and have questions.
I do indeed do this for other pieces of writing as well, ML papers are a good example. GPT-4 is going to know any ML jargon that came out before 2013 for instance.
Hallucination can still be an issue, but if you treat it like a friendly human teacher who sometimes gets confused, and keep your critical thinking skills about you, these systems can really help introduce you to new topics where it might otherwise be hard to get a foothold.
I do also sometimes craft posts in a similar way. Talking to GPT about my ideas with stream of thought, asking it to summarize them... And then throwing out it's summary because it messed up my voice and changed some of my meanings and social intents. But this is still useful, because it's still often successful at drawing all my scattered ideas together into a structure, so I can then rewrite my ideas again with a similar structure to it's summary, then move on to my reread and edit phase.
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To summarize: guy makes a popular window manager for what will be the new standard for Linux desktop window display software, the community around it is composed of half "programmer socks" trans people and half toxic 4Chan shitposters, the toxic parts of his community prompt a Linux dev with more privilege to get him declared persona non grata from working within the "mainstream" of this tech.
Yes, something like this would be great to have at the top of the post. Most of this could be understood by carefully reading the entire post, but something like this would be helpful to know if reading the post would be of interest in the first place.
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This is the first gattpost that I could actually 90% understand if I read slowly, which makes me wonder if I should touch more grass.
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