I am seeing this kind of comment more and more here and I think it's a trend I would like to see end. That's fine if you don't want to read a long, meandering essay. I myself made it about 30% through and decided I didn't want to finish. But why would you then expend the effort to come here and ask others to do work for you? Paste it into chatgpt and ask it to summarize for you.
I read the whole thing. It's a bit of a 'moralistic' ending, but I didn't have enough of a problem with it to find that a serious fault.
Unlike that comment about 'please summarize'. I'll fault that.
Here's the problem: this is an artwork. It's there to experience something, not intrinsically to deliver an answer or data point. It's to vicariously go on a journey without literally doing the thing. That's a purpose of artworks, and one that's completely wasted on LLMs as they cannot feel or experience or have a purpose: if they did they'd be fixed (or, I supposed, punched in the digital stomach)
Summary? You don't need an LLM for that, conserve the energy. The summary is 'The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach. And that's bad'.
It's literally in the title. I read through to see if it was 'and that's bad' or, 'and that's good', or possibly 'and that's inevitable'. I like the author better for ending up at 'that's bad' with a little bow on the end to celebrate meaningfulness, but that's not the only possible conclusion, and other conclusions would be just as artistically valid.
Quitting 30% of the way through is just as valid. You don't HAVE to take the ride just because it exists. If you're curious, averng, it's an okay story, leads up to its ending pretty well and finishes with a hopeful note. That's most of what you missed.
The only NON-valid way to engage with it would be to point an LLM at it and say 'tell me what the point is, I'm busy' because that would be failing to take the ride without even comprehending that you're failing to do so.
Living life through ChatGPT is about as useful as getting punched in the stomach. Try reading the story or ignoring it completely. There is no summary that is not as meaningless as… well, you know :)
I mean, I agree. My point is just that if you can't be bothered to read the piece but have such an insatiable curiosity to know what it was about, then do us a favor and just dump it into an llm to scratch your itch.
I find two things to be distasteful: 1) Asking others to do the work you're uninterested in doing yourself and 2) the rejection of any kind of stylistic writing as an annoying distraction. I don't know if the person I was replying to is guilty of #2 but I've seen the sentiment a lot here and more frequently than I used to. Not everything is a technical manual that needs to convey its main ideas in as straightforward a way as possible.
This article is a work of art. And I don't mean that in the highfalutin sense. But the style is meant to evoke something just as much as the words themselves. It's fine if it that doesn't work for you, but the goal was not to convey as much meaning in as few words as possible.
This isn't notably hard to read, though... and it's stylistically fairly plain and unadorned. Down-the-middle '80s-'00s era fiction style, for literary-leaning fiction that aspired nevertheless to sell some copies.
It isn't difficult to understand, it is difficult to get through. It is difficult in the sense that crawling through mud under barbed wire is difficult: exhausting because of its unpleasantness.
>the assumption that everyone will share the writer's understanding of why it's worth reading.
There is no "why it's worth reading". They write for enjoyment, and don't care if anyone reads it.
"I write this content because I want to, and because I enjoy it. If you do too, great! And if not, also great; I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for elsewhere."
So you found it not worth your time to read the story, but found that it was worth your time to participate in discussions about it? That's certainly an interesting set of choices.
Or, perhaps, the author wrote the piece to fulfill his own intrinsic motivations, and then published it on his website so that anyone who did happen to find it worth reading could do so, without necessarily expecting anything of "everyone".
With the caveat that this is only possible with very lossy compression:
1. You land a software job which is "perfect" on almost every traditional indicator. Amazing office and amenities, incredible compensation and benefits, and no hard demands on your time... except to meekly endure some brief pain, for no particular reason, every day.
2. However it seems that neither the team nor yourself really accomplish anything, you gain no sense of social belonging, and you are literally a (very brief) punching-bag for your manager.
3. You "should" be happy, but you aren't. What's the point of it all? What are your values, and what is your worth? You start to struggle with depression. Eventually you can't take it anymore. You quit. Maybe you heal.
It's sort of like a Twilight Zone episode: You get (almost) everything you (believe that you) will be happy with, yet somehow the result is a subtle form of hell.
It’s a short story about corporate work and bullshit jobs, not an informative blog post. Either read it for your own enjoyment (or dread) or skip it, a summary doesn’t make much sense here.
