"You won't believe the weird trick that the city of Venice did to feed itself"
Once upon a time "one weird trick" was good advice too, before it got ran into the ground.
It’s not “make me care.” It’s “make me believe and care, every step of the way.”
Most people aren't technical.
The real problem is when they SEO the shit out of it and replace those links with irrelevant trash meant to steal your attention and people only want to share the "make me care" posts.
The writers stop bothering even posting details when they have them. They bury the lede because it's what the "make me care" crowd forces them to do.
I was interviewing a candidate yesterday and I noticed that a project inside their personal website was not working. I told him my opinion on care and he said that he hasn't had the time to deploy it, since he's been working on it for 2 weeks already and it was working on his local machine.
A few hours after the interview, the project was online.
The bitter pill of realizing the importance of care is that this applies not just to literary works, like Gwern's case, but it also applies to any creative endeavor: writing, music, drawing, and yes, software engineering.
That CLI tool without a tutorial. That product with a confusing sign-up flow. The purchase without a confirmation dialog such that I don't feel I was just scammed.
It's all the same. Lack of care.
I've also noticed that when caring is there, skills follow.
This seems to suggest that a human needs to be in the creative loop, but that could be short sighted. LLM training has humans in the loop which optimize for not being bored. That's a reason for LLM texts typically being recognizeable because at the current stage they are a little too simplistically flashy. But give it a few iterations and the machine will excel humans at catching their attention, i.e., making them care.
As others wrote: Tiktok is already excellent at that. While the content in there still has humans in the loop, the choice what to show to whom and when is already entirely mechanical.
And what would happen if everyone followed it? Clickbait titles like "the third one will surprise you" and TikTok.
Whenever I see this, I immediately turn to cmd-a + cmd-c + `pbpaste | llm 'summarize this'`