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mirawelnertoday at 5:17 AM1 replyview on HN

Sure, but the specific critique that it is too verbose seems less valid if one of the primary purposes of the piece was to be prose.


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jrflowerstoday at 5:48 AM

That’s kind of the point that I was making. When you mash the two together, both lenses are valid critiques.

It’s an exponentially more difficult way to accomplish either goal because one reader will see it and think “this is a sixteen thousand word essay that says very little” and another will see it and think “what a wonderful story” and there’s nobody to adjudicate who is correct.

Like I posted “this is sixteen thousand words about how the author doesn’t really use language models but might one day” and some folks’ rebuttal is that they enjoyed reading it. Those are two completely unrelated things! It’s like if folks saw the cover of The Hobbit and thought “Hell yeah!” and then when they read “there and back again” thought “whoever wrote that was being unnecessarily reductive”