Ask HN: What is the alternative to LLMs in real life? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the alternative to LLMs in real life?

Humans are fallible. That's what I noticed over and over when using llms.

Compare forum posts to the output of an average llm and you get tenfold the compassion and friendliness with llms. People stop listening after 5 minutes, are biased, have ulterior motives. Whenever I go back to other humans, I think "how in the world does this person have any friends".

This is not any different with conversations with real people outside the Internet.

In tune with those people is also their overused fallacy of "good people are out there, you just have to search properly"

View on HN

You need better friends.

I found some in the most roundabout way. I was looking through Half Price Books and found a copy of "The Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra." This was interesting but living alone in the foothills, hard to visualize in action. So I consulted Apple Maps and looked for anything Buddhist and one meeting place turned up 50 miles away. Better than nothing, I drove there and met very like-minded and yes, compassionate people. The main philosophy in the west is some Ayn Rand-ish survival of the greediest, whereas Buddhism is all about sharing and caring.

Sure, it's going to be difficult to find compassionate people in a "beat the other guy down" ethos. It took me a long time to find them. Take the lack of drum-beating and media-bombardment as positives.

Interesting approach, I also like compassion

If you want factual, how about the source material the LLM was trained on?

If you want human interaction, you will probably have to deal with people being messy (just as LLMs are - they just hide it better beneath a veneer of sickly „politeness“).

The closest analogy might be to move somewhere where you can get slaves, find a few well-educated ones and interact with them like you would with an LLM. You could even make some psychedelics available to them so they can occasionally hallucinate a bit.

And I forgot to mention people who pride themselves in being cynical. That's pathetic and doesn't bring you any true friends. You are threatened by LLMs for good reason, because your audience hoping to read or hear any useful information, shrinks every minute.

I was serious (though I like irony, yes). People are messy and if you want facts and knowledge, getting as close to source materials as possible is what one always has to do. LLMs can help but they are no replacements for knowledge work and learning.

Even my last paragraph served a purpose: To express that you probably will never get interaction in real life like you would with an LLM (if you are not in a position of power - take my slave example or take a retail sales experience for a less extreme example).

Not sure what you mean by "audience", through.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com