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                 WHY I DON'T ADD TL;DRS TO MY WRITINGS

                                   GP
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                            <2026-09-13 Sun>


I recently read a discussion on the internet about the usage of LLMs to
summarize an article. Some of the people in the discussion were in favor
of using it to summarize long writings. Some other people were against
the use of LLMs for this purpose, suggesting that they could introduce
some bias. Then someone said something along the lines of "if you don't
want your writing to be summarized with an LLM, then provide a TL;DR
summary yourself".

I kept thinking about this, trying to understand why I felt reluctant to
add a TL;DR to any of my leisure writings. Of course, if I'm writing a
technical paper or a hefty thesis, I'd rather write and abstract or
summary. But do I really want to add a TL;DR to this writing? Why not?

Two things came to mind. The first is that no matter how good, a summary
fails to capture the nuances of a full writing. Think of a law that is
fairly complex. Yes, you could write a summary of the law, but it won't
cover all the many nuanced aspects that the full writing does, and that
will open a big door for conflicting interpretations. I can only imagine
that's why laws, acts and statutes don't have TL;DRs.

The second thing that came to mind was that I read and write for
pleasure and growth. It's not something I do in a rush, like someone is
making it more expensive by the minute. Imagine if /El Quijote/ had a
TL;DR. Sure enough, there are plenty of summarized versions of El
Quijote available to those school students that choose not to read the
actual thing. But why would you want to read a summary, if you wanted to
read the book in the first place?

For me it's about you wanting to do the thing. If the movie is boring,
stop watching it. If the book or the blog feel like not worth the time,
then stop reading and move to the next thing in your to-do. But if they
are interesting of useful, stop trying to make a more efficient use of
your time: at the end, each day has only as many seconds.