Deliberate Limitations¶
Sketch writing • not complete or ready
Optimization is the art of doing nothing. Fine organization is not having things to organize. Avoid haunting language with useless words. Simple mottos, great results.
Minimalism is intentional reduction. Focusing1 on the essentials while not letting superfluous ideas making through takes experience, and defending an opinion.
Abstract: What about no, and directly talk the thing?
Words¶
Similar to how code is liability, words are too. For all new changes in a text work, retroactive and future contents should be reviewed for accuracy. Spaghetti code, spaghetti words.
Concise¶
Chapter 5 in the book The Man Who Counted (self-translation, reduced)
A merchant who had three sons proposed one day:
One who can go without using pointless words will be rewarded 23 coins.
At nightfall, the first son said:
Father, I avoided speaking all useless words today. I hope, therefore, to deserve (following your promise) the reward in question. As you may recall, the prize amounted to twenty-three gold coins.
Approaching the merchant, the second son kissed his hands and said:
Good evening, father.
The third son said nothing, extending his hand to receive the prize.
Subverting expectations, who should win the prize in your view?
First son lost my attention with various pointless words; the third was too terse. Second son, the prize is yours for being sage but not verbose, simple, and without pretension.
Unavoidably, natural language is a human construct that we expect cohesion via expressions and grammatical elements. Talking caveman weird specifics intent emotions important. All words are equal, but some are more entropic than others - or as the third son would say, " ".
Ghosts¶
Do not let the ghosts of technical debt and obsolescence haunt your product.
| Introducing | Publishing something already implies a new thing |
| Feature-rich | Split attention, weak foundations, unopinionated |
| SOTA | Uncharted, irrelevant soon, not descriptive |
| Embark, dive | Wouldn't be here otherwise |
| Empowering | E = mc² ever since 1905 |
(...)
Models¶
Language models output way too much useless words.
Hey agent, expand this e-mail to look professional and read smoothly. A Wall of Text is sent, the reader has no attention span or bothers reading a thing you didn't bother writing. Hey agent, summarize this email for me to save time, a telephone game scrambles information.
Compression minimizes space to store some data. LLMs act as reverse-compression, plagued by unsolicited advice, syncophancy, and ambiguous natural language instructions.2
Could there exist an optimal encoding for information, similar to implicit reasoning in thoughts?
Steer your models with tight instructions, save resources and time.
Code¶
Real world code is ugly (...)
Optimization¶
Optimization is the art of doing nothing.
(...)
Save the bytes, save the world! 3
Comments¶
Code is self-explanatory, comments must never describe mechanically what actions are being taken. Never engrave bug fixes in comments, unless non-trivial.
Design¶
Fine organization is not having things to organize.
(...)
Related¶
Steve Jobs "Focus is about saying no". Not really endorse or know him, but some ideas are worth sharing. ↩
LLM Inflation article with a similar conclusion. ↩
The Information Catastrophe paper. ↩