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I wrote this awhile ago on a social network... i've been trying lately to think how to talk about my creeping fear of LLMs... here's my best effort at explaini
by patcon 23d ago
I wrote this awhile ago on a social network...
i've been trying lately to think how to talk about my creeping fear of LLMs... here's my best effort at explaining the intuition:
the words are the map. we've built this map together over generations. Words are where we've cross-boned the dangers and x-marked the treasures, whether the things that we've found in the territory or that we've buried within it.
a few weeks ago, a strange new player arrived at the edge of the night's encampment, and it knows our secret society's handshake, and so we are compelled to invite it to join us. it seems to be a good navigator... and so now it's taken to sitting at the front of the convoy, pointing the way as it quietly redraws the map...
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- itake 23d agoI asked a Vietnamese woman if she wanted to play board games at a cafe with me. She got very upset and stormed off. 2 hours later, she messaged me: "sorry, I was rude, but I will not go to the casino with you." Common language, culture, and context makes a more peaceful world.
- jagenabler2 23d agoIt also makes a boring one. Friction is where interesting experiences, stories, and cultures are born.
- itake 23d agoThe friction in my story resulted in 2 unhappy people, a relationship lost, when what should have been fun experience for both.
- globular-toast 23d agoThere is no light without shade. These experiences are necessary for you to appreciate the people you actually mesh with. People are more than just ChatGPT with a vagina.
- bluebarbet 23d agoPresumably there are other stories of linguistic mishap that resulted in 2 happy people and a friendship or marriage. You got unlucky.
- patcon 17d agoHaha I like this complexity. It's also very "meta" and recursive to be having this discussion about the term "friction" itself...! I hope the irony is at least interesting, and you both feel better and/or worse off for it ;)
- someguynamedq 23d agoI can imagine more interesting pass times than failing to communicate
- elliotec 23d ago[flagged]
- alephnerd 23d agoMy SO is Vietnamese and a Bac Si trained in Japan and here, and even she has made similar ESL mistakes. Some of the tools and dictionaries used for Viet-English are wonky, and depending on when they were educated the English teachers were either unqualified backpackers or some grifter who opened an English tutoring center (oftentimes one and the same). And coming from a language with little overlap with Indo-European languages and roots makes it a very alien experience (and the same in reverse as well).
- elliotec 23d agoI don't know where "here" is, but yes, translation can be hard. That's fine. It doesn't mean we can't get along or have a peaceful world full of diversity in language and culture. We just need to get better at nuance and understanding.
- alephnerd 23d ago> where "here" is California > It doesn't mean we can't get along or have a peaceful world full of diversity in language and culture. We just need to get better at nuance and understanding Wasn't making a judgement about that. I was just pointing out a somewhat common mistake and pattern I've noticed Vietnamese ESLers make. Your reaction seemed very intense and polarizing for what sounded like a funny anecdote of a date gone wrong. My SO had a similar reaction when she confused "common law marriage" and "civil law marriage" years ago.
- neuroticnews25 23d agoDiversity of cuisine, language and lifestyle is great but at the limit peace is a cultural value in itself, you can't always have peace with a culture that doesn't believe you're as deserving of freedom and wellbeing as they are, and there have been plenty of those over history.
- 23d ago
- yongjik 23d ago> Common language, culture, and context makes a more peaceful world. As a South Korean - well, considering that my country once went through an existential war against our mortal enemies, the other Koreans ... Common language and culture doesn't stop hate. Sometimes it just means that your insult will land on your target perfectly as intended.
- itake 23d agoVietnam (and the USA) also famously had civil wars as well :)
- elzbardico 23d agoYeah. Let's make the world a fucking boring place because american white tech bro thinks he is entitled to have sex around the world without even trying to understand the culture of the people they want to fuck.
- carlosjobim 23d agoWhat a sad comment. How would you know if the commenter is American or white or a man at all? Much less what "he" works with. Or if the interaction happened "around the world" or in the commenters home country? Or if any of the involved people spoke English at all? Probably you don't care about any of that, because you are high on your own supply of hatred.
- elzbardico 22d agoYou're just moralizing in another direction. We live in a world of imperfect information, we vote with imperfect information, we marry with imperfect information, we invest with imperfect information, heck, now we even write computer code with probabilistic methods! And you are trying to imply that I am somehow a bad boy for noticing the obvious clues and inferring the scenario? Are we now living in the world of the dictatorship of the literal, where we can't even make social discurse without a school marm appearing to stamp [citation needed]? All that said, this is very typically brazilian, as I infer that you most probably are, due to the fact that nobody uses their real name on HN and thus, much probably your name is paying homage to the famous brazilian music who created Bossa Nova. This petit-burgeouise habit of tone-policing without really adressing the argument is a defining characterist of the brazilian educated elites. Oh! I did it again! I inferred a conclusion from incomplete information. Pardon, mon ami!
- majorbugger 23d agoWhile at that, let's also get rid of all the cultural differences (which can cause problems during such interactions) because it's gonna be more peaceful
- CyberDildonics 23d agoI'm not sure a woman not wanting to hang out with you has anything to do with LLMs affecting the way people write.
- 4b11b4 23d agoDamn, that resonated.. and gave me some chills
- patcon 17d agoAw thanks, that means a lot
- ninalanyon 22d agoWhy is everything quietly done now?
- patcon 17d agoAh yeah, as in, you're saying that this is one of those words that's gone down in stock now due to LLM preference for using it? I think that's true I used to like it. I guess I have always liked "quiet" things in writing, things that work from the edge and are not immediately evident as powerful. It's a simple tension device that perhaps LLMs mined the value of, and lean on too strongly