On Sun, May 25, 2025, 8:14 PM G. Branden Robinson < g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> [CCing groff list as it's also on-topic there, as troff history is to > both lists] > > At 2025-05-25T10:59:13-0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > > I don't think I'd place that kind of faith in the LLM summary without > > having a good read first. > [...] > > At 2025-05-25T16:13:58-0400, Norman Wilson wrote: > [...] > > LLMs are not search engines. They are bullshit generators. > > I had a similarly bad experience with troff history and the AI-generated > "answer" Google situated in prime visual real estate. > > This "AI Overview" claimed: > > "In troff, Brian Kernighan modified the text formatter to include a > sentence space, which adds extra space between sentences. Specifically, > if the sentence space is not set to zero, the second space after a > potential end-of-sentence character (like ".", "?", or "!") will be > treated as a sentence space, adding extra vertical spacing." > > My aggrieved rant, which some of my social media friends endured: > > "Jeeeesus Christ. I needed to look up some advice Kernighan wrote to > troff users decades ago and I got a gout of lies sprayed directly into > my face in an area where I might be able to call myself a domain expert. > > Be VERY VERY careful accepting any AI-generated results, people. This > shit is ALMOST COMPLETELY WRONG. (It's correct about which punctuation > marks [can] end a sentence...but you already knew that part, didn't > you?) > > 1. Kernighan didn't innovate this. Ossanna troff (and nroff) already > implemented end-of-sentence inference. > > 2. Configuration of inter-sentence spacing is a GNU troff extension, > something else Kernighan had nothing to do with. Ossanna and Kernighan > troffs permitted configuration of the inter-WORD space size with the > `ss` request, but not the inter-SENTENCE space size. > > 3. Inter-sentence space is NOT VERTICAL. It's horizontal." > Some things it's quite good on. Other things it's terrible but plausible sounding like this. You never know which you'll get and as a non-expert, you can't know which is which. Warner >
