alt Hacker NewsIt starts in the very first paragraph. “The headlines say yes. […] The headline is wrong.”
And there are numerous such examples. “That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.”
LLMs produce staccato, ugly chains of sentence stumps like this all the time. They’re easy to spot, and your essay is littered with them.
If anything, spending a week on a project like this seems liable to blind you to the shortcomings of the prose, because after putting in a lot of effort you can’t read it with fresh eyes. That’s what editors are for, but an LLM is by nature very weak at editing LLM-generated text.
I want to be able to offer constructive feedback on the structure of the overall essay, for example that the interspersed animated/interactive models often don’t seem strongly connected to the text, but simply reading the words makes this a grind.
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Fair, that's very helpful feedback.
> the interspersed animated/interactive models often don't seem strongly connected to the text
It's indeed the part I struggled with most. The intent was to make the constraint more "visceral", so that the "the interceptor can't catch up" point becomes something you feel by dragging a slider and wtaching the gap grow. But you're right that I didn't do enough to stitch each properly into the prose around it. It reads a bit too adjacent to the text.
For what it's worth, an earlier draft was nearly twice the length and even included a small missile-interception game as the introduction. I think cutting it was the right call though.
Thanks for the notes! I'll keep this in mind for the next post.
> That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.
That was one of the ones that particularly stood out to me. As I read the article, I often found myself wishing for semicolons and colons instead of full stops; or in some cases a comma and some conjunction:
> That was half true: the kill chain ran, but the interceptor did not.