Other translations keep Zinsser's preferred lack of fuzz but avoid using "is ... to" for possession.
For example, the Lexham English Bible:
> I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all of them.
This could be shortened to "success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all" with no meaning lost. It's self-indulgent fluff. Meanwhile, Orwell's actually adds more to the statement - much better signal to noise.
You're running into a cultural difference. The book of Ecclesiastes was written in Hebrew, in a poetical style even though large chunks of it are prose. But if you read other parts of the Bible, such as the book of Psalms (which is entirely poetry, specifically songs, though in many cases we do not know the tune that they were set to), you'll see that Hebrew poetry relied on repetition. For example, here's the King James Version's translation of the famous "to every thing there is a season" passage from chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes, which most translations render as poetry:
> To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
That could have been said in less than a quarter of the words the author expended on it. But something of the style would have been entirely lost. He wasn't trying to be succinct, he was trying to repeat the same concept over and over until it sinks in.
Repetition can make a good impact, but it's beyond excessive in this instance. Contrast with this poem:
Non est salvatori salvator,
neque defensori dominus,
nec pater nec mater,
nihil supernum.
Translated:
No rescuer hath the rescuer.
No Lord hath the champion,
no mother and no father,
only nothingness above.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
I find this one profound, and it's given me a lot to think about over the years - in situations ranging from asking what our place in the universe is, to doing the "right thing" (and deciding what "the right thing" even means to yourself), or standing at the helm of some team or project, knowing that judgement call is yours alone and there's no authority or higher power coming to swoop in and give you the answer or authoritatively judge your decision can be simultaneously liberating and terrifying. The use of repetition works incredibly well in my opinion and it still gives me chills to read it.
I never had formal training in Latin, just what I've picked up. But grammatically, I would think the second line would translate to "No champion hath the lord", not "no lord hath the champion". Am I misunderstanding the grammatical suffixes here?
I'm admittedly no Latin expert, so I can't give an authoritative answer, but the translation was actually arrived at on a forum where the author asked for help, and I can see someone asked the same question: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qpp6ZdwHLNKj6PXRp/req-latin-...
I have a distinct line between when I'm willing to believe an LLM's output and when I'm not: whether I would believe the same thing from an anonymous Internet forum post or a blogger I don't know. Those posts are not unlikely to be misinformed, biased, lies, or otherwise untrustworthy. And yet, I spent plenty of years honing a sense of when they were good enough for certain things.
No, the sense had nothing to do with the content and everything to do with the context. Perfect grammar and writing style were never enough to get me to trust an anonymous forum post or unknown bloggers post for certain topics like health advice. Sloppy grammar and writing style were never a deterrent for me believing them for other kinds of topics like where to check on the HVAC system to find the sticker. I think the line could more accurately be described as the level of risk if it's wrong.
I dunno, I've read a lot of very well presented nonsense and some very useful insights that were barely readable. I think it's probably useful that people are being trained out of this bias (though of course that's in large part because LLMs do tend to exploit this bias).
You could tell from tone and polish how much effort someone had put into writing an answer. That was a pretty good signal for some topics on forum sites like Stack Overflow. There were always nuts and cranks who would happily spend an hour writing well-formed prose about nonsense or something obviously wrong, but the eloquent ones were few and far between. Now every crank is equally eloquent and can spit out 1,500 words of passable prose in seconds.
Before we would find an intriguing post on the internet from years ago, and you have to verify it with additional research--it's easy to skip that additional research.
With a LLM when you're skeptical you can interogate it. One thing we know for sure is LLMs are quick to admit mistakes were made when interrogated, comically so. A LLM might not always recognize its own mistake, but at least it is available for easy interogation, unlike the forum posts of old.
Manual research from reputable sources remains an option.
One of the things I do semi-frequently is look for the evidence that some concert took place 15+ years ago. Or maybe I already definitively know it happened, but not exactly at which venue or the exact date of the concert. This I feel like is a non-trivial task, but one with a very definitive answer whose evidence more often than not still exists somewhere online.
In my experience every LLM out there is utterly useless and quickly defaults into "here are other concerts that took place around that time near that location". Google Search (ignoring the AI overview) is even more useless, as it refuses to show literally any webpage that's older than say 5 years. YouTube search is genuinely better than Google at surfacing old and grainy fan-made videos uploaded in like 2010, but also defaults into synonyms nonsense pretty quickly.
But, the search functionality of exactly one forum and three local news websites that I know have an archive that dates back long enough beats every single one of those abovementioned every single time. Three people are talking about their experience at a concert on a random 15+ year old forum thread? It happened. The tiny list of 5 or so (Google-hosted!) Blogspot blogs I have bookmarked? They usually have a photo of the ticket that Google Images refuses to show me.
Not only are search engines completely dead as a category, but LLMs are a shit replacement for them. "We" (okay, Google specifically) has truly committed a crime comparable to burning the Library of Alexandria. Everything older than a decade that wasn't properly documented on Wikipedia is just gone, never to be seen again.
The funny part of this is that Google search is intentionally bad at returning YouTube videos, presumably because some anti-trust action scared them into artificially ranking videos from local news sites, Facebook, and other ad-walled content ahead of YouTube videos. Seriously, go watch a YouTube video, then try googling its title with “video” appended to it, and see if the “Videos” tab of google search ranks it as the first result.
The most absurd thing that has happened to me more than once is that I found a YouTube video, not by searching through Google, not by searching through YouTube, not by asking an LLM to find it for me, but by finding an old article that embedded it. That embed is of course long broken by the changes on YouTube's side, but once I use inspect element to find its Youtube ID, surprise, surprise, it's still there!
It's usually uploaded by a channel with like 20 subscribers and has maybe like 300 views, but YouTube would rather show me some artist playing a similar genre on the other side of the continent with millions of views that was recently uploaded than a video from an event I specifically typed into a search bar.
For some things, good enough is good enough. For many things, it is not (and neither are random posts on the internet). Before Web 2.0, it was similar to whether I'd trust some random person on the street with it versus going and looking it up in Encyclopaedia Britannica, or the American Heritage Dictionary, or Roget's Thesaurus, or the UC Davis Book of Dogs, or the Cornell Book of Cats, or the Merck Manual, or even the World Almanac or Bartlett’s Quotations if I was feeling petty.
An anonymous answer to a question is more trustworthy to me. They have no reason to lie. They are usually answering out of kindness. At least they used to be. Now it’s often actually bots advertising a product or pushing something, pretending to be a helpful user with an anecdote and a good experience using a niche product.
AI shouldn’t have any reason to lie. But its lies aren’t intentional. It’s just actually making things up and “hallucinating” when it pretends that an option or setting exists, or confidently claims something entirely untrue, and makes up a source to go with it. For something Google is willing to shove into the top of every search result it’s crazy the percentage of time the answer is blatantly incorrect.
You can handwrite more than just your first draft. It was common before the proliferation of computers to handwrite early drafts in pencil, and then handwrite the final manuscript with ink.
> It was common before the proliferation of computers
We always had to write our first couple drafts in pencil/handwritten in school. Eventually we moved to typing the final draft by the time I hit high school but exams were always handwritten still and now I feel quite "old" at 38 knowing that there are adults on this very forum that probably did not have to handwrite much beyond elementary school.
That wall was detailed in 2003 in Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans, Chapter Four, "Smart UI Anti-Pattern." The context is the same, the problem is the same, the solution is the same. Even the advantages and disadvantages are the same as what you see in vibe-coded projects.
> A project needs to deliver simple functionality, dominated by data entry and display, with few business rules. Staff is not composed of advanced object modelers.
> [...] Simple projects come with short time lines and modest expectations. Long before the team completes the assigned task, much less demonstrates the exciting possibilities of its approach, the project will have been canceled. [...] And in the end, if they do surmount these challenges, they will have produced a simple system. Rich capabilities were never requested.
> Therefore, when circumstances warrant:
> Put all the business logic into the user interface. Chop the application into small functions and implement them as separate user interfaces, embedding the business rules into them. Use a relational database as a shared repository of the data. Use the most automated UI building and visual programming tools available.
> [...] Yet it is a legitimate pattern in some other contexts. In truth, there are advantages to the SMART UI, and there are situations where it works best—which partially accounts for why it is so common. Considering it here helps us understand why we need to separate application from domain and, importantly, when we might not want to.
> Advantages: Productivity is high and immediate for simple applications; Less capable developers can work this way with little training; Even deficiencies in requirements analysis can be overcome by releasing a prototype to users and then quickly changing the product to fit their requests; Applications are decoupled from each other, so that delivery schedules of small modules can be planned relatively accurately; Expanding the system with additional, simple behavior can be easy; Relational databases work well and provide integration at the data level; 4GL tools work well; When applications are handed off, maintenance programmers will be able to quickly redo portions they can’t figure out, because the effects of the changes should be localized to each particular UI.
> Disadvantages: Integration of applications is difficult except through the database; There is no reuse of behavior and no abstraction of the business problem. Business rules have to be duplicated in each operation to which they apply; Rapid prototyping and iteration reach a natural limit because the lack of abstraction limits refactoring options; Complexity buries you quickly, so the growth path is strictly toward additional simple applications. There is no graceful path to richer behavior.
> [...] Remember, one of the consequences of this pattern is that you can’t migrate to another design approach except by replacing entire applications. [...] Don’t bother hedging your bet. Just using a flexible language doesn’t create a flexible system, but it may well produce an expensive one.
That is fascinating. thank you for digging out that quote. Maybe I should get into book writing.
> with few business rules. Staff is not composed of advanced object modelers.
That seems dismissive of the people who live day-in-day-out with the problem at hand. In my experience, most people are actually advanced data modelers, but they spend their energy on that on people instead of machines. Makes them less gullible than me but worse at computers, so it's a wash.
> Rich capabilities were never requested.
>
When you have to deal with someone else, especially from a different department or outside team, that you don't trust, revealing your rich inner data model of the situation at hand is not only not to your benefit, but often to your detriment. Especially with a history of IT projects not landing or going wrong. You're not getting those rich requests because you (well, the quoted author) isn't being trusted.
The advice is good, but dated. What do vibecoders who hit the wall need? Teaching people that wanna learn SQl has gotten a lotta people rich. Lemme talk to a thousand of the people vibecoding appa and lemme write their book. (After reading that book from 2003.)
I suspect that vibe coders who hit a wall need the same thing that programmers from 2003 who hit a wall needed. Talk to the business people, get an understanding of their domain and the problem at hand, and model that as a series of anthropomorphic objects that encode the business rules in the language that the domain experts already used (tweaked by the need for disambiguation and clarity). Back in the day, this was software design, a distinct skill (and often job!) from computer programming.
I'd love to read your book, if you write it. Anybody who's talked to a thousand people trying to solve the same problems will have an amazing perspective and a lot to teach.
Analog Mono and Two Slice are really neat. If you like those, you'll probably also like another of my favorite modern pixel fonts: Departure Mono. https://departuremono.com
Came here to say the same, I actually like Departure so much I use it as my coding and Terminal font. I'll definitely be trying out the fonts in the original post.
Yeah my programming font since many years now is a pixel-perfect (no AA at all) modified version of Terminus. I modified it myself: don't even remember with which software (but I've got notes about the modifications I did and what's required should I want to modify something again).
I remove a pixel from the lowercase 's' (the top-rightmost one), I modified lowercase 'l' a bit (so it looks less like the '1' digit), I replaced a few characters like the at sign '@' with those from a pixel-perfect Apple Monaco font, and I like to have an empty hole in the middle of my pipe symbol (which still cannot be mistaken for a colon).
Plus a few mods I forgot.
I'd argue that a pixel-perfect font is "tied" to a range of pixel-per-inch monitors: a pixel-perfect font that's perfect for a 110 PPI monitor may neither work on a 90 PPI one nor on a 140 PPI+ one.
But yeah I'm a very happy camper. I obviously cannot distribute it as I "stole" a few characters from Monaco as is and just replaced them in my modded Terminus font.
I'm not trying to defend the blog post, but I gave Slop Cop 775 words of an essay by Schopenhauer (translated into English) and got "15 patterns detected."
I fear we're approaching the point where AI-written text grows indistinguishable from human-written text, unless the AI-user is exceptionally lazy and uses an obsolete model...
> What I’ve built here is a structured edition — the parsing, reconstruction, linking, indexing, etc. I haven’t published a formal license for that yet.
For example, the Lexham English Bible:
> I looked again and saw under the sun that the race does not belong to the swift, the battle does not belong to the mighty, food does not belong to the wise, wealth does not belong to the intelligent, and success does not belong to the skillful, for time and chance befalls all of them.