Good insights, and not just software developers, really. We don’t like ads, sensationalism, or anything reeking of bullshit. If we have to talk to someone to find out the price, the product may as well not exist.
Good insights, and not just software developers, really. We don’t like ads, sensationalism, or anything reeking of bullshit. If we have to talk to someone to find out the price, the product may as well not exist.
?!?!?!?!!
White papers are shit written by marketing people who try to make their little ad sound like something academic. In truth these white papers are in equal parts misunderstandings, wrong and full of useless fluff. They are AI slop, often completely without any AI involvement.
If someone is serious about the content, they call it a documentation, reference or datasheet.
some counter examples:
https://cs.umb.edu/~poneil/lsmtree.pdf
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/ladis2009/papers/lakshman-ladis2009.pdf
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/atc10/tech/full_papers/Hunt.pdf
Those aren’t white papers. They are scientific papers.
White papers are written by companies as a marketing tool. The first two papers you linked above are written by universities and the last one by a research-focussed non-profit.
As per Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper
It’s a marketing presentation masquerading as a fake scientific paper.
While I’m not saying they don’t both exist, there are plenty of people writing the original definition for tech products, too.
And I’d argue that purely scientific papers are often written to promote products and viewpoints, too.
There are both
But product whitepapers are ads
Yeah, when I first got a link to a whitepaper in the newsletter, I expected it to be a… a whitepaper (I read the meaning it had back then).
After reading it properly, as if I would an academic paper, I thought it was weird that I didn’t feel like I learnt anything useful.
It would take a while (and a few other whitepapers) for me to realise what it had become.