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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

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bluGill

> Someone on HN responding to you with single-sentence responses? Either don't respond, or respond in kind.

"I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal.

The length of the response doesn't indicate effort.

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This is true if you're writing a letter about a difficult topic.

For HN comments, 99.9% of the time, a short comment is a low effort one and should be disregarded.

on the other hand, when I see a long post here I assume it’s yet another ego-driven tirade and skip past it.

> yet another ego-driven tirade

I tried to recall the last time I saw what I felt was an ego-driven tirade on HN comments, and I'm currently drawing a blank. There's a lot of what's called "performative erudition", and there is the occasional lengthy diatribe, but I would call neither one of those ego-driven tirades.

"performative" = "ego-driven"

long, low: copypasta; rant; sales; slop.

(brevity, purposeful /s).

A comment should fill exactly the amount of space that it fills, no?

For him, the cost of editing was much larger. Condensing your writing in his time meant rewriting it more concisely, requiring strictly more time than collecting his thoughts as he went.

With LLM's, we are in a new state of the world: it can expand any one sentence off hand remark in an essay.

You seem to be talking about how one can expand information into useless babbling, whereas you are responding to a comment about condensing information into true essence.

This is about human attention and what is worth getting it. Both points are very important and valid.

Sure; I was using shorthand. Sometimes a whole edifice of ideas rests on one shaky one; and if you can challenge that one the whole thing falls apart. But even being able to identify the shaky one demonstrates engagement. That's really the key.

There are obvious exceptions to that rule. Laconic phrases are short but have a lot to them, while AI slop is long while having very little to it. But it's a decent rule of thumb when considering the middle of the bell curve.

Couldn't agree more.

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