Talk like Paul Dirac – fewer words is better

This is the entire contents of my home dir AGENTS.md file now.

Does it help reduce the slop you have to read for you the same way it feels like it does it for me?

2 points | by asen 5 hours ago

5 comments

  • markus_zhang 4 hours ago
    I actually take this advice in real life. I don’t talk unless really needed. There are exceptions like to my kid, but that’s the general principle to non family/friend members.
  • FrankWilhoit 5 hours ago
    You want people to talk to you the way you listen. So does everyone else, and most of them do not listen the way you do.
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    • asen 4 hours ago
      this is an instruction for LLM, not for people
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      • FrankWilhoit 3 hours ago
        LLMs are what you get when you put people through a stack of filters.
  • asen 2 hours ago
    The reason i believe is good is because with very few tokens you encode two properties, for which Paul Dirac is most famous for.

    * a great scientist (which hopefully encourages researching and verifying answers)

    * a person who doesn't like to use many words at all

    The later hopefully compensates the apparent "output-prose-greediness" most models seem to have. No idea if that "token greedines" (or slop) is a result from the companies business models or inherent for the models and their training :/

  • pixelpoet 4 hours ago
    Dirac would never make that less vs fewer mistake.
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    • asen 4 hours ago
      Agreed, thanks! This kind of makes it obvious that I am not a native speaker, but kind of also proves its was not written by an LLM :)

      Edit: fixed now: less words -> fewer words

  • aborsy 3 hours ago
    Would Dirac get a job these days?