← Back to context

Comment by raincole

14 hours ago

Because some people like to be polite? Is it this hard to understand? Your hand-written prompts are unlikely to take significant chunk of context window anyway.

15 comments

raincole

Reply
cpt_sobel  14 hours ago

Polite to whom?

  • northzen  1 hour ago

    To machine. It just easier to be polite by default than split our language into two forms "I speak to human" and "I speak to machine". Because the chat interface is really close to what we see when we speak to human. Well, exactly the same.

  • qsera  14 hours ago

    I think it is easier to be polite always and not switch between polite and non-polite mode depending on who you are talking to.

    • silversmith  13 hours ago

      I believe it's less about politeness and more about pronouns. You used `who`, whereas I would use `what` in that sentence.

      In my world view, a LLM is far closer to a fridge than the androids of the movies, let alone human beings. So it's about as pointless being polite to it as is greeting your fridge when you walk into the kitchen.

      But I know that others feel different, treating the ability to generate coherent responses as indication of the "divine spark".

      1 reply →

    • cpt_sobel  13 hours ago

      I get what you're saying, but I'm not talking about swearing at the model or anything, I'm only implying that investing energy in formulating a syntactically nice sentence doesn't or shouldn't bring any value, and that I don't care if I hurt the model's feelings (it doesn't have any).

      Note, why would the author write "Email will arrive from a webhook, yes." instead of "yy webhook"? In the second case I wouldn't be impolite either, I might reply like this in an IM to a colleague I work with every day.

      7 replies →