You don't start with 100k lines, you work in batches that are digestible. You read it once, then move on. The lines add up pretty quickly considering how fast Claude works. If you think about the difference in how many characters it takes to describe what code is doing in English, it's pretty reasonable.
100,000 lines is approx. one million words. The average person reads at 250wpm. The entire thing would take 66 hours just to read, assuming you were approaching it like a fiction book, not thinking anything over
I wonder if it's due to diet. Endurance athletes love their simple carbs, highly processed gels. I've seen plenty of cyclists taking gummy bears on rides for fuel, or a concoction that is effectively sugar water to drink
The study referenced is really light on details and they don't say if they controlled for that
Fiber is so inconvenient to get in adequate quantity. We cook all our meals using tons of vegetables and none of it has much fiber if I remember. Occasionally I’ll try to start eating oatmeal but get burned out after a week or two.
My breakfast: 80g oats, 2tbsp chia seeds, 1tbsp ground flax, a shitload of frozen berries, 50g of mixed nuts (walnuts, almonds, whatever), raisins or other dried fruit
Delicious and has more than the recommended fiber in one meal. I didn't like oats much until I learnt how to make them taste good
There are apparently cases of psyllium leading to weird allergic reactions. IIRC this is frequently reported in caretakers who prepare psyllium for eldery patients, presumably because they end up inhaling some of the stuff?
"You're describing the default output, and you're right — it's bad. But that's like judging a programming language by its tutorial examples.
The actual skill is in the prompting, editing, and knowing when to throw the output away entirely. I use LLMs daily for technical writing and the first draft is almost never the final product. It's a starting point I can reshape faster than staring at a blank page.
The real problem isn't that AI can't produce concise, precise writing — it's that most people accept the first completion and hit send. That's a user problem, not a tool problem."
I don't know if this happens to anyone else but on reading LLM-generated text I did not prompt, my eyes do incredibly quick saccades from start to middle to end in always around <1-2s no matter the length of the text.
It's entirely involuntary, I am just unable to care. It's almost always justified because the text in question is always painfully bloated, and repetitive.
The LLM-text you posted could have been (given I didn't read it carefully):
"Skill issue. Iterate on the output, never accept what you receive on the first pass"
I don't really remember Claude 3.5 doing this, but it seems increasingly worse, with 4.6 being so bad I don't like using it for brainstorming. My shitty idea isn't "genuinely elegant".
Your sample sounds exactly like an LLM. (If you wrote it yourself, kudos.)
But, it needn't sound like this. For example, I can have Opus rewrite that block of text into something far more elegant (see below).
It's like everyone has a new electric guitar with the cheapo included pedal, and everyone is complaining that their instruments all sound the same. Well, no shit. Get rid of the freebie cheapo pedal and explore some of the more sophisticated sounds the instrument can make.
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There is a particular cadence that has become unmistakable: clipped sentences, stacked like bricks without mortar, each one arriving with the false authority of an aphorism while carrying none of the weight. It is not merely tedious or disjointed; it is something closer to uncanny, a fluency that mimics the shape of human thought without ever inhabiting it.
Set this against writing that breathes, prose with genuine rhythm, with the courage to sustain a sentence long enough to discover something unexpected within it, and the difference is not subtle. It is the difference between a voice and an echo, between a face and a mask that almost passes for one.
What masquerades as wisdom here is really only pattern. What presents itself as professionalism is only smoothness. And what feels, for a fleeting moment, like originality is simply the recombination of familiar gestures, performed with enough confidence to delay recognition of their emptiness.
The frustration this provokes is earned. There is something genuinely dispiriting about watching institutions reach for the synthetic when the real thing, imperfect, particular, alive, remains within arm's length. That so many have made this choice is not a reflection on the craft of writing. It is a reflection on the poverty of attention being paid to it.
And if all of this sounds like it arrives at a convenient conclusion, one that merely flatters the reader's existing suspicion, well, perhaps that too is worth sitting with a moment longer than is comfortable.
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(prompt used: I want you to revise [pasted in your text], making it elegant and flowing with a mature literary-style. The point of this exercise is to demonstrate how this sample text -- held up as an example of the stilted LLM style -- can easily be made into something more beautiful with a creative prompt. Avoid gramatical constructions that call for m-dashes.)
>It is not merely tedious or disjointed; it is something closer to uncanny, a fluency that mimics the shape of human thought without ever inhabiting it.
It still can't help itself from doing "it's not X it's Y". Changing the em-dash to a semi-colon is just lipstick
Yep. But that prompt I used was just a quirky. You can explicitly force it to avoid THAT structure as well. Just do what the smart ?ie, devious) middle-schoolers do: find a list of all the tell-tale ‘marks’ of AI content, and explicitly include them as prohibitions in your prompt… it’s the most basic work-around to the ‘AI spotters’ the teacher uses for grading your essay. (And, of course, be sure to include an instruction to include a grammatical or spelling error every few sentences for added realism.)
You're right, a lot of the style can be changed from its default. I don't think you can get rid of the soulless aspect though - the lack of underlying relatable consistency.
Especially once you go past a page or two.
When you get to the actual content so much of it just doesn't make sense past a superficial glance
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