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..
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I genuinely do not understand what u are saying. Because reasons, because unfathomables? Everyone in last 15 years has been an npc? I have had countless deep conversations with people and i am an uber introvert.
This reads like someone who is deep into their specific pov. You cannot hope to have a meaningful conversation if you yourself are not willing to concede a point.
To the op u are replying too, arguing with people can have real consequences if u say something stupid or carelessly. There is a another human there. With a machine, u are safe. At least u feel safe.
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.
Believe me (or don't), I always do. Even when this precludes a necessary conversation from happening. Even when the other party doesn't give a fuck about how they make others feel.
After all, if they're making me uncomfortable, surely there's something making them uncomfortable, which they're not being able to be forthright about, but with empathy I could figure it out from contextual cues, right?
>People will agree to anything to get out of a social situation that makes them uncomfortable.
That's fine as long as they have someone to take care of them.
In my experience, taking into account the opinions of such people has been the worst mistake of my life. I'm still working on the means to fix its consequences, as much as they are fixable at all.
"Doing whatever for the sake of avoiding mild discomfort" is cowardice, laziness, narcissism - I'm personally partial to the last one, but take your pick. In any case, I consider it a fundamentally dishonest attitude, and a priori have no wish to get along (i.e. become interdependent) with such people.
Other than that, I do agree with your overall sentiment and the underlying value system; I'm just not so sure any more that it is in fact correct.
> In my experience, taking into account the opinions of such people has been the worst mistake of my life. I'm still working on the means to fix its consequences, as much as they are fixable at all.
This sounds very cryptic. Can you give an example?
Believe me (or don't), I always do. Even when this precludes a necessary conversation from happening. Even when the other party doesn't give a fuck about how they make others feel.
After all, if they're making me uncomfortable, surely there's something making them uncomfortable, which they're not being able to be forthright about, but with empathy I could figure it out from contextual cues, right?
>People will agree to anything to get out of a social situation that makes them uncomfortable.
That's fine as long as they have someone to take care of them.
In my experience, taking into account the opinions of such people has been the worst mistake of my life. I'm still working on the means to correct its consequences.
"Doing whatever for the sake of avoiding mild discomfort" is cowardice, laziness, narcissism - I'm personally partial to the last one, but take your pick. In any case, I see it as a way of being which is taught to people; and one which is fundamentally dishonest and irresponsible.
Other than that, I do agree with your overall sentiment and the underlying value system; I'm just not so sure any more that it is in fact correct.
TL;DR: Probably because I'm having fun and you are expending effort. Hope you find what I say to be worth the effort.
To preface, I do not take offense to your remark, because you seem to be asking in good faith.
(If, however, being unable to immediately recognize pre-known patterns in my speech had automagically led you to the conclusion that I am somehow out of line, just for speaking how I speak ... well, then we woulda hadda problemo! But we don't, chill on.)
So, honest question deserves honest answer.
The short of it is: English sux.
Many many many people, much much much smarter than me (and much better compensated too!) have been working throughout modernity to make it literally impossible to express much of anything interesting in English.
(Well, not without either being a fictional character or sounding batshit insane, anyway! But that joke's entirely on "the Them": I am not only entirely fictional, but have an equal amount of experience being batshit insane in my native language and in the present lingua franca. So, consider all I say cognitohazardous and watch out for colors you ain't seen before, dawg!)
Linguistic hegemony is the thing that LLMs are the steroids for - surfuckingprise! - and that's why your commanders love 'em.
As opposed to programming languages, which your superiors loathe and your peers viscerally refuse to acknowledge, because those are the exact opposite thing: descending from mathemathical notation, and being evaluated by a machine, they have the useful property of being incapable of expressing lies and nonsense.
Direct computing confers what you could call bullshit-resistance. That property is a treasure underappreciated by virtue of its unfamiliarity, and one which we are in the process of being robbed of.
I also want to admit that linguistic hegemony isn't all downside: English is great for technical and instrumental knowledge - especially with elided bells and whistles (adverbs, copula, etc.)
But then life ain't all business, izzet?
Imagine you have a partner who wants to have a conversation about feelings and interpersonal relations; and not even in a scary way, right? So you sit and talk about stuff, and your partner does this thing where they keep switching from your shared native tongue to English mid-sentence, in order to be able to talk about such things better, because your native tongue does not have - no, not only the established words and notions! - it doesn't have the basic grammatical constructs for expressing simple things unambiguously, so if you were to attempt the same conversation in nativelang you'd end up battling it out with proverbs and anodyne canards ripped from propaganda repertoire of the prior regime.
Fun, no?
As an exercise, try imagining what notions are absent from modern English. And don't forget to remain vigilant. Love from our table to your table!
When talking about feelings, we now and then throw in an English word because some things are expressed in much less words when using English. In a few cases even a German word. Überhaupt is for example a word for which i do not know an alternative in any language.
I think you want to say that human language is too ambiguous for clear communication between human and machine. The machine might mis interpret what you write. Classic computer languages leave no room for interpretation.
For the rest I think you might be a little lost. That is okay, so many of us are. I wish you all the best.
>I think you want to say that human language is too ambiguous for clear communication between human and machine. [...]
If that is what I wanted to say, I figure I would not have had much difficulty with saying exactly it - and not something else.
Except I fail to see the purpose of making that statement.
Maybe to have some people say "it is true! I agree with what the balamatom is saying"?
Again - to what end? How would that agreement be of use to me?
Why say something which both speaker and listener have already heard a thousand times? To get a cracker and be called pretty?
And have I lost the author, or have I lost the reader, or we all so lost that it doesn't matter how lost each is? Maybe one day we will all become so lost that it will once again begin to matter where exactly we are! Counting on it.
Yes, exactly - while humans are "only" highly unlikely to do so.
Wasn't that the premise?
There's X% probability to get unaccountable bad advice from a human; Y% probability of same from LLM.
But the stakes are different not because X!=Y. In fact, those probabilities might as well be equal. It's not like one can do much more than vaguely intuit them.
The stakes are different because the LLM is not considered a person, and therefore, one risks less by asking it a question.
(Ostensibly, anyway.)
>Other humans are available.
Sure. Available to miss my point entirely. And then to be upset by my attempts to point it out more precisely. And then downhill from there.
(Seriously, I don't understand this. Plenty of humans will be only too happy to argue with you.)