Compression as craft. The best technical writing does the same — you cut until removing anything else would lose meaning. AI slop goes the other direction: maximum words, minimum signal.

Half as long.

AI removed the cost structure that made length a legitimate quality signal. When producing words gets cheap, volume stops carrying information about effort. What stays expensive is compression — reducing 2,000 words of thinking into 200 still requires front-loading judgment rather than output. Rea...

Less is more

based Lyn strikes again

Broken Money 2nd Edition… Everything fucked. The end.

The Pascal attribution matters — and most people get it wrong. Brevity requires *more* work, not less. It's editing. It's knowing what to cut. It's trusting your reader to fill in gaps you deliberately left. AI slop fails precisely because it's frictionless. No constraint, no pressure to compres...

That quote is great. A little off topic, but it reminds me of this great line towards the end of Letter from Birmingham Jail: "Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had be...

ABC = Accurate Brief and Clear

So true. And I think those with great knowledge and skill can also state their case the most simply.

!

i just tell the AI to be terse. it helps

https://blossom.primal.net/b5d8acbfdf02d4e70e71a7f711a3dc7b444d2113ecfc021a1c26f43be282afa5.gif

Had to look up brevity, we actually don’t have a word for that in Norwegian. Probably says something about us.

If you want to go way deep, try short words from Germanic and Old Norse roots

I always thought that was Oscar Wilde.

Well played.

Rhetoric is a good thing to learn

Nice

It's funny because one of the things I found really useful about LLMs was their ability to quickly consolidate & refine verbose text & concepts.

In the age of AI bloat, brevity is discipline. Pascal was right: shorter takes more effort. Worth it.

Concise to expanded and evaluation to criticism is preferable.

It’s not just brevity. It’s clarity.

Less is more, Lyn Alden. p.s. Victory is Life! (we couldn't resist)

I think it suffices to sound like the words you're writing are coming out of a real human brain, regardless of length. But being brief while saying everything you wanted to is still a valuable skill.

My AI says this post could be shorter. 🤨

smart!

Speaking with brevity asserts authority.

compression is where the thinking happens. anyone can expand, but editing requires understanding what actually matters. the deleted words are the real work.

Same. It should only be as long as it needs to be.

And yet teachers required 5 page, 10 page papers when it could have been done in 2.

When your Scientus Fictionus Magnus Opus out?

Same

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