The site appears to be down. HM hug of death, maybe?
Writing isn't just communication—it's a thinking tool that forces clarity and precision. Yet I still get pushback when advocating for written narratives over slide decks in technical decision-making. Writing is frequently considered "extra work" :(
Well, it is the same as all those examples of people "just doing their jobs" in concentration camps. Being compliant, focused on execution of their ~orders~ process. Interestingly, many people are being pre-emptively harsher, than required/requested. Checkout "Those Who Said No" (DOI 10.2307/1429971).
Once, I got pulled into a fintech company who done synchronization of remote psql databases by dump to csv -> send over ftp or email -> verify in Excel -> import back to centralized psql. No wonders, they have been missing some transactions...
I would recommend a slightly different approach to written/async standup. Issue I have with stand-ups is the ad hoc nature of proving a report, instead of making it a collaboration space
I do agree with the fact, that this is an annoying phenomenon. It took me a while to understand that there are people who are not just using LLM to write these style of emails, but those people are the source of the training data for LLMs.
The solution is "simple", to move aways from such people and stick to genuine communicators.
And if that's not an option, another solution is to use AI to summarize those long emails. In the end both parties will be writing and reading terse little emails, with the verbose text in the middle as the world's most ridiculous communication protocol.
This is why I am starting a new aI company, the a is for automatic and the I is for identity. We will automate the application of the identity matrix multiplication/solve operation to produce an extremely performant implementation of the bullet point/prose/bullet point protocol.
Wow, you have the tech not only to apply the identity, but to solve for it? That is something!
A major flaw in your approach is the identity is potentially too large, you should instead project something onto a very small space, and then extrapolate in some more or less random (but pretty) manner back to the full dimensional space.
We’re still optimizing. We tried to use a low rank approximation but for some reason it didn’t work. We’ll probably use a banded or sparse representation.
Progress would be faster, but for some reason we can’t retain a mathematician after showing them our experiments.
It’s something so ridiculous it’s difficult to even parody. I guess the real-world equivalent is ordering a single microSD card and getting it in a plastic case, in a blister pack, in an envelope, in a mailer, inside a Jiffy bag that doesn’t fit through your letter box because none of the middlemen cared enough to think about it.
I consider myself a “genuine communicator” insofar as I write messages thoughtfully and thoroughly.
Though I suspect many of my emails go unread, and people have confessed that they ran my personal messages to them through an LLM to generate something for them to report up in some spreadsheet etc tool.
Or in the case of some managers for whom the critical technical detail goes over their head, they just re-ask their questions in a call and try to get to “is it done yet” and “how many engineers can I add to make it go faster”.
I think I might be on the chopping block if a move was made to get rid of overly-thorough verbose communicators, genuine or not
Writing isn't just communication—it's a thinking tool that forces clarity and precision. Yet I still get pushback when advocating for written narratives over slide decks in technical decision-making. Writing is frequently considered "extra work" :(
I was even so frustrated that I've put together https://www.bobek.cz/written-narratives/