Talk like Paul Dirac – fewer words is better

[asen]

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?

[markus_zhang]

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]

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.

[asen → FrankWilhoit]

this is an instruction for LLM, not for people

[FrankWilhoit → asen]

LLMs are what you get when you put people through a stack of filters.

[asen]

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]

Dirac would never make that less vs fewer mistake.

[asen → pixelpoet]

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]

Would Dirac get a job these days?