Urgent.News

What's breaking now, across thousands of outlets.

Tech

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good. If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing the following rule seems crucial to me: You must stand behind every idea and every sentence in your docs . It is your…

No natural-language text can be transformed without loss of information. Sophie Alpert has outlined her internal policy regarding the acceptable use of AI writing by engineers. This brief guide aligns with its own advice and is highly beneficial. When employing AI to refine your writing, it is essential to maintain ownership of every idea and sentence in your documents.

You must ensure that the entire document accurately reflects your personal thoughts before sharing it. If a reviewer inquires about the meaning behind a particular line, it is unacceptable to respond with, "Oh, the AI wrote that; just disregard it." Presenting content that does not genuinely represent your thoughts will confuse your readers and waste their time.

The concept of "no lossless transformations" from the article's title is further discussed by Simon Willison, published on August 11th, 2026.

Written by urgent.news from Simon Willison's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.

Read the original at simonwillison.net →

More in Tech

I Wanted Kubernetes Without an Always On EKS Bill

I wanted a Kubernetes lab that would still be there the next morning. A temporary cluster on my laptop would be useful for testing manifests, but it would disappear when I closed the lid.

  • Reporter sought always-on Kubernetes lab for testing.
  • Intel N100 server with Debian and Docker containers used as host.
  • k3s chosen for single-node cluster due to resource compatibility.

More from Tuesday 11 August →