Re:Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
by muro on Thursday July 05, 2018 @08:09AM
(#17462597)
tl;dr. Excellent first few chapters (which deserve the high praise and possibly are the cause of all the hype), gets less and less interesting. At some point, I dreaded returning to it and gave up.
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Did you sum up your experience reading the book? Or did you try to sum up the critique we're discussing here? If it's the latter you failed.
The book.
Apologies, you are right, should have been clearer. I think the other comments at the time were also about the book, not the article.
So now we have to consider the specter of someone writing an overly verbose review of something that reduces to "tl;dr". Someone might summarize the review by writing "tl;dr: tl;dr". Or they might express the same thing, but overly verbosely, so someone might summarize their response by writing "tl;dr: tl;dr: tl;dr". In general, if N "tl;dr"s is a valid sentiment, and any valid sentiment can be expressed overly verbosely, then N+1 "tl;dr"s are a valid sentiment, so by induction any positive integer repetition of "tl;dr"s is valid. However, there exists some number L such that L repetitions of "tl;dr" is itself too long to express the necessary point, and someone who didn't read it would want a summary, the most succinct of which would presumably be "tl;dr: tl;dr nested L times". This meta "tl;dr" itself might be expressed overly verbosely, of course...
Well done. Shame it's buried under N comments.
"tl;dr" here actually means "Too long; didn't read", as in, GP's result of reading the book, and not the "here is the summary" we usually tend to associate with the abbreviation.
Re:Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach
by lettucehead on Thursday July 05, 2018 @10:56AM
(#17463724)
thanks - that was helpful to know