In school this lead to a lot of difficulties for me, one in writing those comments out for other people to understand, but the other seemed to be that when reading the average statements used in education for teaching I could map the same strings of language to multiple and sometimes conflicting statements because of the inexactness of the language used.
It turns out explaining concepts while leaving little room for different interpretation is hard.
This pops up as one of the annoying aspects of LLM writing, at least for coding models. They are always saying things like "this test only establishes this, not that." Much of the time, what they say is either obvious, or you get to thinking "maybe the test should establish the other thing as well."
There is no undercurrent or symbolism, just read the email as written please.
I became aphantasic at ~15 and spent years after interfacing with non tech people over the phone and email.
In English it's so damn hard to be precise compared to languages like Portuguese.
Also, LLMs blather so fucking much context is impossible to track wtf they are even writing about.
* Fast screenshotting and arrows/drawijg should be first class on all OSes.
AFAIK aphantasia hasn’t been super widely known about until the last decade or two (obv I have no idea how old you are now)
To play devil's advocate: explaining concepts while leaving little room for different interpretation is also pointless. If you don't care about the interlocutor's interpretation, then why are you even talking to them? If the task is really deterministic, then automate it.
The problem I have is that when I'm asked to follow a procedure that you know just while reading it was created by someone with less experience and better/faster/cheaper ways are available to get to the same result. Deviation will however get you into trouble because the procedure is what is vetted and approved. Deviations from procedure could open one up to liability if things later do not work as expected.
While we can automate away most things, human learning doesn't seem to be one of them.
A teacher should therefore embrace the fuzzy nature of explaining concepts.
e.g. as you both write documentation and see yourself or others use it, you start to get a feel for what people tend to understand and how to communicate it.
You can also do "dog fooding" where one person or group writes the docs and then other people follow them. If you iterate on this quickly, you can get to really good docs in a short amount of time.
You may still be the audience. But you will be four or five years older, shit will have gone on in your life, you will have more to remember, you will be tired, you will have less patience, you will resent being forced to do archaeology on yourself, and have a dim view of the irresponsible young scamp who thinks he has an excellent memory that you are right now.
Write for that person and your documentation will be better.
(As you may be able to tell, I am now that person. And I fear there are two more cycles of this to go)
I started a daily journal when my team’s workload got to be so much that we can’t remember everything. It helps, but even going back to it weeks later there were things I did not write down because I assumed I’d remember them later.
I’ve since gotten better at being more comprehensive, and trying to think in the “how to make a sandwich” way of instruction. I’m not being condescending to my future self, I know my future self has too much shit to mange to remember it all.
There is no "cloud". There is other peoples hard drives.
But let's pretend the "clouds" you use are "clouds". Ok. What makes the other hosting providers not "clouds"? Bit of a no true Scotsman.