Once upon a time the word processor was invented, and it made it so much easier to arrange your words on paper. iIf bits were wrong, you could just delete them, or copy and paste them across pages. It was actually pretty amazing what you could do; especially if you didn't mind dot-matrix type on fan-fold paper. Of course if you wanted to make a better impression, you'd type it on a typewriter, or better yet, hand-calligraph your writing with a fountain pen.
So LLMs allow you to work at the speed of reading, if not faster. So you can try a paragraph here, completely rewrite the tone. Start a chapter in 1PP and just have it rewritten to 3PP. And sofort and so on. The number of new transformations you can do is endless.
What do a lot of people do? Write a one line prompt and show everyone the oneshot result.
Ok fine, sometimes you don't need to write amazing prose. But you can also be like the early writers who adopted the word processor. If you put the same amount of elbow-grease into using an LLM as you did writing before, you can get some pretty cool results.
>Once upon a time the word processor was invented, and it made it so much easier to arrange your words on paper.
It’s easier to rearrange and rethink and tinker. Hard to imagine now but it was more efficient in the days when you would have to pencil out a memo and have someone type it up, you would make corrections and the final copy would be done in a couple passes. This has been studied, efficiency has actually gone down, in favor of immediacy and direct control.
What it frees you from is organizing your thoughts ahead of time, which takes practice and discipline. Using an LLM is just taking that further, you can avoid organizing your thoughts and ideas a bit more.
See also: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49795122">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49795122 "Socrates vs. the Written Word (2011)"
Kim_Bruning · · focus · HN ↗
So LLMs allow you to work at the speed of reading, if not faster. So you can try a paragraph here, completely rewrite the tone. Start a chapter in 1PP and just have it rewritten to 3PP. And sofort and so on. The number of new transformations you can do is endless.
What do a lot of people do? Write a one line prompt and show everyone the oneshot result.
Ok fine, sometimes you don't need to write amazing prose. But you can also be like the early writers who adopted the word processor. If you put the same amount of elbow-grease into using an LLM as you did writing before, you can get some pretty cool results.
Isamu · · focus · HN ↗
It’s easier to rearrange and rethink and tinker. Hard to imagine now but it was more efficient in the days when you would have to pencil out a memo and have someone type it up, you would make corrections and the final copy would be done in a couple passes. This has been studied, efficiency has actually gone down, in favor of immediacy and direct control.
What it frees you from is organizing your thoughts ahead of time, which takes practice and discipline. Using an LLM is just taking that further, you can avoid organizing your thoughts and ideas a bit more.
Kim_Bruning · · focus · HN ↗