Comment by tsukikage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsukikage | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Realise that you are talking to some mathematics in a box. You can't get a rise out of it. It cannot feel guilt or remorse. Whatever emotional payoff one might want from "I asked for ONE button" cannot be had here. Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word, but every word you send that is not directly on the path to getting what you want done is just noise in the maths getting in your way.

So leave emotion at the door and make your words count. Voice your frustrations at the stress doll next to your monitor, sure, but spending tokens on them us just wasting time and money. Explicitly typing out your exasperation will not get you closer to whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. What can you type that will?

Laser focus: clearly, concisely explain what is wrong right now, and how you want it solved. Then do that again until all the moles have been whacked. If the AI is stuck in a sycophancy loop, start a new clean session. Do this frequently anyway: every turn in the same session charges for all preceding conversation again /and/ degrades the LLM's performance.

> Meanwhile, not only are you being charged by the word,

I've never explicitly paid for AI and never will. I only use the free Claude, etc. So I'm happy to waste THEIR electricity telling their machine how much of a piece of garbage it is and hoping that sentiment gets back in some form to the dumb humans making such a dumb product. It's not like they don't evaluate performance with usage data.

(Afterwards, I do also make sure to actually click the "thumbs down" or whatever equivalent button, and submit a report if it's possible.)

> waste THEIR electricity

Thank you for helping us heat the planet.

You can blame the people making poorly performing LLM chatbots, not me. (For that matter, the paying users actually funding their insanity have more on their conscience than I do trying to keep up by using tools available to me and reacting in a normal way to their poor performance.)

Except you are missing an important aspect: the model includes training data that responds to THIS IS FUCKING WRONG, after which highly likely follows correction patterns and working solutions.

Ie, actually, yes, shouting at the AI can (and does, there are papers on this), work.

Anyone remember the gpt-3 era where adding "this is important to my job" and "if this is wrong someone dies" to prompts made a measurable improvement in accuracy and reduced hallucinations?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com