The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool
ohadravid.github.io65 points by BrunoBernardino 7 hours ago
65 points by BrunoBernardino 7 hours ago
I feel the opposite. Interacting with humans, I definitely pay a social tax - I have to negotiate the feelings of the people involved. With LLMs there is no social tax, I can be as blunt as I like. But there are other taxes to pay with LLMs; they don't learn, they BS relentlessly, there is less fun and camaraderie.
But "social tax"? No, there is not a social tax.
Agreed, I haven't yet internalized them not remembering feedback from a couple days ago, which humans typically would. The process of remembering to update the context isn't entirely natural to me to this day.
There are ways to put a superficial personality on the LLM which can break up some of the mannerisms that get old. Give it a new accent, allow it to keep a memory of things that nudge it into one personality or another, make it behave differently on weekdays vs weekends. Its still superficial, but if you work with it any reasonable amount of time, I think having the ability to change some of the characteristics can make it more..."fun" I guess.
I agree. I’m a social person but I also like my purely functional conversations with LLMs, and I have a lot of them going at once!
Doesn’t replace conversations with other people but at the same time I feel no tax talking to the LLMs.
The first-order social consequences aren't truly there but i think the format in which you interface with the tool can trick you into behaving as if they were, which is taxing it itself.
One giant issue with say Claude Code is the speed, say you ask it to do something and you want to review the response, then I want to ask questions , I want to chat about the changes , but the slow speed of responses it just breaks the flow.
Unfortunetly now vibe coding is demanded to be used, to produce 10x more code or else some other developer will take your place.
> With LLMs there is no social tax, I can be as blunt as I like. But there are other taxes to pay with LLMs; they don't learn, they BS relentlessly, there is less fun and camaraderie.
My experience is the opposite. They bullshit a lot, derail the conversation/coding session, get defensive, and gaslight. It is not “social tax”, but they mirror sometimes the worst human behaviour.
They only respond to the inputs. Try adding some communication preferences to your system prompt.
There was no system prompt, I asked claude thru the CLI to implement something. It did not agree that I need that feature and offered something else. I started debating with it, why did I need it, and it started derailing the conversation, and explaining why I was wrong. And this is not the first and only case.
Man, I don't know. LLMs (with the good and bad) feel like the first time a tool has genuinely been an extension of me. And quite the opposite. I'm a quite introverted person. Spending time in a meeting or talking with other humans I find quite exhausting. I don't really get that at all with talking with LLMs.
It’s because large language models give a variable reward and it’s essentially an addiction that many people have not even recognized.
That is interesting, but also I do wonder, what in life doesn't have a variable reward? You could say that any routine activities like maybe cleaning, etc, is all the same, but most non routine things in life seem like they would have variable reward?
E.g. talking to people definitely yields in very variable rewards, if you do non routine work, there's constant variable rewards, etc.
Happiness is derived from a balance of a meaningful life, and pleasant experiences we may choose.
Also, one may have no pain or concerns, and still existentially despair over a meaningless life built on intelligence campaigns exploiting millions of people.
Only psychopaths find short lived joy in harming others, and only make up around 1% of general populations. Have a wonderful day =3
I think happiness is very complicated. Would you think there's a perfect formula to follow that will yield you the "happiness"? And how does this relate to different brain wirings of different people? Would you say per brain wiring there's a different specific ideal formula one would have to follow? E.g. there's some base things like getting proper sleep, exercise, diet, but then there's some more specific things for that brain wiring?
>Would you think there's a perfect formula
The advice comes from coursework most medical students must do in year 2. It is backed by research data on integrated healthcare programs.
Simply avoiding misery is not the whole equation. =3
Would you say you are happy as in you have solved happiness for yourself?
On occasion, as I often chose wisdom, logic, and indifferentism. =3
Do you mean those three things are what let you solve it, or that they're what kept you from solving it more often?