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Comment by qsera

15 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.

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".

  • I'd say it's more related to getting dressed for work even if you're remote and have no video calls

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.

  • >investing energy

    For the vast majority of people, using capital letters and saying please doesn't consume energy, it just is. There's a thousand things in your day that consume more energy like a shitty 9AM daily.

  • > investing energy in formulating a syntactically nice sentence

    This seem to be completely subjective; I write syntactically/grammatically "nice" sentences to LLMs, because that's how I write. I would have to "invest energy" to force myself to write in that supposedly "simpler" style.

  • It's just easier for me to write that way. In that specific sentence, I also kind of reaffirmed what was going on in my head and typed my thought process out loud. There's no deeper logic than that, it's just what's easier for me.

  • "yy webhook" is much less clear. It could just as easily mean "why webhook" as "yes webhook".

    It's also actually more trouble to formulate abbreviated sentences than normal ones, at least for literate adults who can type reasonably well.

    • I confidently assume that the model has been trained on an ungodly amount of abbreviated text and "yy" has always meant "yeah".

      > literate adults who can type reasonably well

      For me the difference is around 20 wpm in writing speed if just write out my stream of thoughts vs when I care about typos and capitalizing words - I find real value in this.

  • > investing energy in formulating a syntactically nice sentence

    It would cost me energy to deliberately not write with proper grammar and orthography. I would never want to write sloppily to a colleague either.