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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • You don’t understand small talk if you think it has no functional purpose. Small talk has several purposes.

    One, it sends a bunch of signals. I see you. You see me. Neither of us are threats. We have a shared language.

    Two, it’s how you find deeper topics to talk about. “What did you get up to this weekend?” “Oh, hung out with my friend. We saw a band I like - All Dogs - do a surprise anniversary show. You do anything big?”

    Three, it lets people choose their level of engagement. “Cool, sounds fun. I stayed in, watched some TV” signals minimal interest vs “All dogs? Never heard of them but I love live music. What’s their genre?” signals interest, and now you can a little deeper on music.

    If you just plunge directly into deep stuff that’s like skipping foreplay and lube. It’s probably going to make people uncomfortable.





  • It is absolutely stupid, stupid to the tune of “you shouldn’t be a decision maker”, to think an LLM is a better use for “getting a quick intro to an unfamiliar topic” than reading an actual intro on an unfamiliar topic. For most topics, wikipedia is right there, complete with sources. For obscure things, an LLM is just going to lie to you.

    As for “looking up facts when you have trouble remembering it”, using the lie machine is a terrible idea. It’s going to say something plausible, and you tautologically are not in a position to verify it. And, as above, you’d be better off finding a reputable source. If I type in “how do i strip whitespace in python?” an LLM could very well say “it’s your_string.strip()”. That’s wrong. Just send me to the fucking official docs.

    There are probably edge or special cases, but for general search on the web? LLMs are worse than search.








  • I rarely use a cart anymore because I do more frequent, shorter, trips and just bring a tote bag. But the other day I went with someone to a store and we used a cart. I returned it to the cart return place and she was like “good. You can learn a lot about someone by what they do with the cart”