5 ms·

Why not... do this with a person, instead? Other humans are available. (Seriously, I don't understand this. Plenty of humans will be only too happy to argue wi

Why not... do this with a person, instead? Other humans are available. (Seriously, I don't understand this. Plenty of humans will be only too happy to argue with you.)

layla5alive 7mo ago
Many other humans are .... Not very available - certainly many shut down when conversations reach a certain level of depth or require great focus or introspection..
- balamatom 7mo ago
  Depth? Introspection? I'd say these days the norm is to not simply shut down, but to become irrevocably and insidiously hostile, the moment someone hints at the existence of such a thing as "ground truth", "subjective interpretation", "being right or wrong" - or any of the bits and bobs that might lead one to discover the proper scary notion, "consensus reality". "What do you mean social reality is a constructed by the consensus of the participants? Reality is what has been drilled into my head under threat of starvation! How dare you exist!", et cetera. You've heard it translated into Business English countless times. They are deathly afraid of becoming aware of their own conditioned state of teleological illiteracy - i.e. how they are trained to know what they are doing, but never why they are doing it. It's especially bad with the guys who cosplay US STEM gang. One is not permitted a position of significance in this world without receiving this conditioning, and I figure it's precisely this global state of cognitive disavowal which props up the value of the US dollar - and all sorts of other standees you might've recently interacted with as if they're not 2D cutouts (metaphorical ones! metaphorical!). PSA: Look up "locus of control" and "double bind". Between those two, you might be able to get a glimpse of what's going on - but have some sort of non-addictive sedative handy in case you do.
  - gverrilla 7mo ago
    I think you will enjoy Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem.
    - balamatom 7mo ago
      Just like a certain defense minister was shown to enjoy D&G; after which the latter were never heard of again. Where they go, eh? +1 for Vaneigem, he has a nice cryptohistory of Nälkä; and you might also want to check out Villem Flusser.
  - VonTum 7mo ago
    You had me on the first three paragraphs, but the last two veer so far off course that I've no idea what you're trying to say. Mind clarifying?
    - balamatom 7mo ago
      Yes
- rsynnott 7mo ago
  > when conversations reach a certain level of depth or require great focus or introspection.. I mean... if the alternative is an LLM... you realise that the LLM isn't doing any focusing or introspection, right?
awithrow 7mo ago
oh i do as well. I think of the LLM as another tool in the toolbox, not a replacement for interactions. There is something different about having a rubber duck as a service though.
kelseyfrog 7mo ago
"the percentage of U.S. adults who report having no close friends has quadrupled to 12% since 1990"[1] 1. https://www.happiness.hks.harvard.edu/february-2025-issue/the-friendship-recession-the-lost-art-of-connecting https://www.happiness.hks.harvard.edu/february-2025-issue/th...
- nathan_compton 7mo ago
  More technology is probably the solution to this!
mock-possum 7mo ago
Arguing with a human costs social energy. Chatting with a robot does not.
- balamatom 7mo ago
  s/social/demonic/
balamatom 7mo ago
OK, I'll bite the artillery shell: I don't mean to dismiss you or what you are saying; in fact I strongly relate - wouldn't it be nice to be able to hash things out with people and mutually benefit from both the shared and the diverging perspectives implied in such interaction? Isn't that the most natural thing in the world? Unfortunately these days this sounds halfway between a very privileged perspective and a pie in the sky. When was the last time a person took responsibility for the bad outcome you got as a direct consequence of following their advice? And, relatedly, where the hell do you even find humans who believe in discursive truth-seeking in 2026CE? Because for the last 15 years or so I've only ever ran into (a) the kind of people who will keep arguing regardless if what they're saying is proven wrong; (b) and their complementaries, those who will never think about what you are saying, lest they commit to saying anything definite themselves, which may hypothetically be proven wrong. Thing is, both types of people have plenty to lose; the magic wordball doesn't. (The previous sentence is my answer to the question you posited; and why I feel the present parenthesized disclaimer to be necessary, is a whole next can of worms...) Signs of the existence of other kinds of people, perhaps such that have nothing to prove, are not unheard of. But those people reside in some other layer of the social superstructure, where facts matter much less than adherence to "humane", "rational" not-even-dogmas (I'd rather liken it to complex conditioning). But those folks (because reasons) are in a position of power over your well-being - and (because unfathomables) it's a definite faux pas to insist in their presence that there are such things as facts, which relate by the principles of verbal reasoning. Best you could get out of them is the "you do you", "if you know you know", that sort of bubble-bobble - and don't you dare get even mildly miffed at such treatment of your natural desire to keep other humans in the loop. AI is a symptom.
- hluska 7mo ago
  When you start hearing things like “you do you” or “if you know you know” it means that you went way too far. That’s a sign of discomfort. If you make uncomfortable, you won’t get diverging perspectives. People will agree to anything to get out of a social situation that makes them uncomfortable. If your goal is meaningful conversation, you may want to consider how you make people feel.
  - 7mo ago
layer8 7mo ago
In addition to availability, usually because you want to take advantage of the knowledge that is baked into the models, which for all its flaws still vastly exceeds the knowledge of any single human.
- emp17344 7mo ago
  For this use case, how do LLMs provide more value than a standard search engine? They may actually be destroying value here, as LLM-generated text pollutes search results.
  - layer8 7mo ago
    They let you find things faster, and they combine and synthesize information from different sources. I’m more on the AI skeptic side and always prided myself on my Google foo, but nowadays chatbots can really save a lot of time with that. Publishing LLM-generated text is a separate use case, I’m not a friend of that.
ip26 7mo ago
No living breathing human deserves to be subjected to my level of overthinking, and vanishingly few share my fascination with my favorite topics.
matheusmoreira 7mo ago
> Other humans are available. Are they? I have some personal projects that I enjoy working on whenever I have free time. One of them is a lisp interpreter. I just overhauled its memory allocator, now I'm working on the hash tables. Would you like to help me develop it?

Why not... do this with a person, instead? Other humans are available. (Seriously, I don't understand this. Plenty of humans will be only too happy to argue with you.)

layla5alive 7mo ago

Many other humans are .... Not very available - certainly many shut down when conversations reach a certain level of depth or require great focus or introspection..

balamatom 7mo ago
Depth? Introspection? I'd say these days the norm is to not simply shut down, but to become irrevocably and insidiously hostile, the moment someone hints at the existence of such a thing as "ground truth", "subjective interpretation", "being right or wrong" - or any of the bits and bobs that might lead one to discover the proper scary notion, "consensus reality". "What do you mean social reality is a constructed by the consensus of the participants? Reality is what has been drilled into my head under threat of starvation! How dare you exist!", et cetera. You've heard it translated into Business English countless times. They are deathly afraid of becoming aware of their own conditioned state of teleological illiteracy - i.e. how they are trained to know what they are doing, but never why they are doing it. It's especially bad with the guys who cosplay US STEM gang. One is not permitted a position of significance in this world without receiving this conditioning, and I figure it's precisely this global state of cognitive disavowal which props up the value of the US dollar - and all sorts of other standees you might've recently interacted with as if they're not 2D cutouts (metaphorical ones! metaphorical!). PSA: Look up "locus of control" and "double bind". Between those two, you might be able to get a glimpse of what's going on - but have some sort of non-addictive sedative handy in case you do.
- gverrilla 7mo ago
  I think you will enjoy Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem.
  - balamatom 7mo ago
    Just like a certain defense minister was shown to enjoy D&G; after which the latter were never heard of again. Where they go, eh? +1 for Vaneigem, he has a nice cryptohistory of Nälkä; and you might also want to check out Villem Flusser.
- VonTum 7mo ago
  You had me on the first three paragraphs, but the last two veer so far off course that I've no idea what you're trying to say. Mind clarifying?
  - balamatom 7mo ago
    Yes
rsynnott 7mo ago
> when conversations reach a certain level of depth or require great focus or introspection.. I mean... if the alternative is an LLM... you realise that the LLM isn't doing any focusing or introspection, right?

awithrow 7mo ago

oh i do as well. I think of the LLM as another tool in the toolbox, not a replacement for interactions. There is something different about having a rubber duck as a service though.

kelseyfrog 7mo ago

"the percentage of U.S. adults who report having no close friends has quadrupled to 12% since 1990"[1] 1. https://www.happiness.hks.harvard.edu/february-2025-issue/the-friendship-recession-the-lost-art-of-connecting https://www.happiness.hks.harvard.edu/february-2025-issue/th...

nathan_compton 7mo ago
More technology is probably the solution to this!

mock-possum 7mo ago

Arguing with a human costs social energy. Chatting with a robot does not.

balamatom 7mo ago
s/social/demonic/

balamatom 7mo ago

OK, I'll bite the artillery shell: I don't mean to dismiss you or what you are saying; in fact I strongly relate - wouldn't it be nice to be able to hash things out with people and mutually benefit from both the shared and the diverging perspectives implied in such interaction? Isn't that the most natural thing in the world? Unfortunately these days this sounds halfway between a very privileged perspective and a pie in the sky. When was the last time a person took responsibility for the bad outcome you got as a direct consequence of following their advice? And, relatedly, where the hell do you even find humans who believe in discursive truth-seeking in 2026CE? Because for the last 15 years or so I've only ever ran into (a) the kind of people who will keep arguing regardless if what they're saying is proven wrong; (b) and their complementaries, those who will never think about what you are saying, lest they commit to saying anything definite themselves, which may hypothetically be proven wrong. Thing is, both types of people have plenty to lose; the magic wordball doesn't. (The previous sentence is my answer to the question you posited; and why I feel the present parenthesized disclaimer to be necessary, is a whole next can of worms...) Signs of the existence of other kinds of people, perhaps such that have nothing to prove, are not unheard of. But those people reside in some other layer of the social superstructure, where facts matter much less than adherence to "humane", "rational" not-even-dogmas (I'd rather liken it to complex conditioning). But those folks (because reasons) are in a position of power over your well-being - and (because unfathomables) it's a definite faux pas to insist in their presence that there are such things as facts, which relate by the principles of verbal reasoning. Best you could get out of them is the "you do you", "if you know you know", that sort of bubble-bobble - and don't you dare get even mildly miffed at such treatment of your natural desire to keep other humans in the loop. AI is a symptom.

hluska 7mo ago
When you start hearing things like “you do you” or “if you know you know” it means that you went way too far. That’s a sign of discomfort. If you make uncomfortable, you won’t get diverging perspectives. People will agree to anything to get out of a social situation that makes them uncomfortable. If your goal is meaningful conversation, you may want to consider how you make people feel.
- 7mo ago

layer8 7mo ago

In addition to availability, usually because you want to take advantage of the knowledge that is baked into the models, which for all its flaws still vastly exceeds the knowledge of any single human.

emp17344 7mo ago
For this use case, how do LLMs provide more value than a standard search engine? They may actually be destroying value here, as LLM-generated text pollutes search results.
- layer8 7mo ago
  They let you find things faster, and they combine and synthesize information from different sources. I’m more on the AI skeptic side and always prided myself on my Google foo, but nowadays chatbots can really save a lot of time with that. Publishing LLM-generated text is a separate use case, I’m not a friend of that.

ip26 7mo ago

No living breathing human deserves to be subjected to my level of overthinking, and vanishingly few share my fascination with my favorite topics.

matheusmoreira 7mo ago

> Other humans are available. Are they? I have some personal projects that I enjoy working on whenever I have free time. One of them is a lisp interpreter. I just overhauled its memory allocator, now I'm working on the hash tables. Would you like to help me develop it?