> I could tell you exactly how I think we might advance the state of the art in technical writing with embeddings, but where’s the fun in that? You now know why they’re such an interesting and useful new tool in the technical writer toolbox… go connect the rest of the dots yourself!
Wow, that's bold. I guess "good" technical writing no longer includes a thesis statement.
Seriously though, why would this be useful for technical writing? Sure you could make some similar pages widget however i dont think i've ever wanted that when reading technical docs, let alone writing them.
> I guess "good" technical writing no longer includes a thesis statement.
Thesis is outlined in the second paragraph:
> What embeddings offer to technical writers is the ability to discover connections between texts at previously impossible scales.
I think it's fair, however, to say that this post is ineffective because it does not provide concrete examples of the thesis in action. My only excuse is that I never intended for this to be a standalone post but life got in the way (in the best possible way!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964584
> why would this be useful for technical writing?
You're not going to like this answer, because it's also vague. There are 3 intractable challenges in technical writing. Embeddings can help us make progress on all 3: https://technicalwriting.dev/strategy/challenges.html
Related documents aside, technical documentation benefits from really great search.
Embeddings are a _very_ useful tool for building better search - they can handle "fuzzy" matches, where a user can say things like "that feature that lets me run a function against every column of data" because they can't remember the name of the feature.
With embeddings you can implement a hybrid approach, where you mix both keyword search (still necessary because embeddings can miss things that use jargon they weren't trained on) and vector similarity search.
In-site search is super important. I suspect that many docs maintainers don't realize how heavily it's used. Many docs sites don't even track in-site search queries!
One of the things I love about Sphinx is that it has a decent, client-side, JS-powered offline search. I recently hacked together a workflow for making it search-as-you-type [1]. jasonjmcghee's comment [2] has got me pondering whether we can augment it with transformer.js embeddings.
Wow, that's bold. I guess "good" technical writing no longer includes a thesis statement.
Seriously though, why would this be useful for technical writing? Sure you could make some similar pages widget however i dont think i've ever wanted that when reading technical docs, let alone writing them.