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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

Because it makes the product mostly useless for all kinds of things?

Care to enlighten us? Because you seem to imply you want to have a conversation about your day every time you fire up a shell.

What things? Again, I don't see any but manipulation and fraud, but I certainly could be missing some.

Role play, which is a huge consumer of tokens. You can glance at openrouter's usage stats and see what apps tokens are going to and what the inference content was classified as. It's quite revealing.

Yeah, the costs of that use case far outweigh the benefits.

Like online gambling, some things cause more harm than good.

How would that regulation interfere with role play? Role play is 'play'; people know what it is.

It shouldn't interfere with immersion: People suspend disbelief in movie theaters or reading books, despite knowing it's a film or novel. The risk with AI is that people don't understand what an LLM is.

I'd say making LLMs useless would be a net positive for humanity.

What world are you living in, I don't want to go there

I don't need a computer to mimic a human. AT ALL

As a matter of fact, for the line of work I do (programming, devops, the works) being conscious about the fact that I am just getting an algorithm outputting text that is probabilistically related to the input I gave it would actually be healthy for me and my mental state.

I HATE having to say "you" when working with an LLM.

I have the same urge - third-person the LLM is an it, for sure, but I'm not aware of a suitable second-person construction for talking to things. Maybe we need to invent one.

When yelling at the other appliances I own, "you" usually turns into "you fucker" or "you useless piece of shit", so I stick with what I know.

"Claude, you useless piece of shit, I already told you..."

Always loved the tweet: "I don't know what machine they were raging against, but I'm pretty sure it was a printer" [paraphrased]. We could definitely update that.

I'm Australian, so "oi cunt" works about as well as "you" for most things, though I'm not suggesting we adopt that formally.

ok that cracked me. Could be worth of an update:

    I don't know what machine they were raging against, but I'm pretty sure it was an LLM

Don't say 'you'?

One solution is to use commands (imperatives), as you've always done with computers. For example, instead of 'you are an expert in Lisp', say 'function as an expert in Lisp.'

Are there use cases where that isn't applicable.

I don't think that works at all times; actually I think it only works when starting a conversation. In the middle, "Why ~did you~ while action as an export in Lisp <this happened>?" needs a certain level of mind gynmastics that is not worth it. I'd rather curse at it.

I do wonder if there are circumstances where it doesn't work. But it's hard to believe I'm addressing basic syntax for computer commands on HN:

'Display the cause of the <this prior output>'.

> needs a certain level of mind gynmastics that is not worth it. I'd rather curse at it.

I guess I knew an LLM's natural language interface made it easier to use for non-technical users. But wow, it's been normalized so quickly. Now the universal old way, needed for every line of code and command line and more, is "mind gynmastics"?

Inputting curses seems just odd to me, beyond the initial novelty. It's a distraction, completely unproductive, and sending emotion into a void.

Anthropomorphisizing it seems dangerous personally and society-wide.

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