But "social tax"? No, there is not a social tax.
Doesn’t replace conversations with other people but at the same time I feel no tax talking to the LLMs.
Unfortunetly now vibe coding is demanded to be used, to produce 10x more code or else some other developer will take your place.
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.
E.g. talking to people definitely yields in very variable rewards, if you do non routine work, there's constant variable rewards, etc.
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
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
For example, Bayes theorem does not guarantee the best outcome, but does offer the best unbiased choice at that moment. =3
LLM are actually good at context search, but are mostly not being used as intended. The LLM hype bubble has to end sooner or later. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
LLM are great for context search, but were never real "AI" in any sense except in media/PR sensationalism. Scientific hubris and unethical use of LLM is interesting as exposes the primitive impulsive nature of many. Best of luck =3
Even being able to see the original prompt, the response just seemed kind of empty (blocking out the advertisingesque magnificent language leaves little substance behind), but somehow they were convinced that it was a coherent answer to their prompt and even peeved with me for not sharing their astonishment at how well it addressed their concerns.
It's a kind of symbiosis between the LLM and the prompter, where the prompter's own cognitive biases fill in what the LLM can not. Since I don't share their same biases, the response is nearly meaningless.
Very uncomfortable experience having to pretend to agree with how profound it is to not make their prompter upset.
Would a person with such biases, seeking validation from an LLM having been anything else without an LLM?
If everyone in real life are trying to avoid upsetting such person, the humans in their real life would offer the same experience, no? Or alternatively said person would go into conflict with anyone pointing out issues in their views, ending up only surrounding themselves with people who will agree with them in order to not upset them.
I guess my concern is why did you agree with them instead of using the opportunity to showcase another point of view?
I just see those excuses of "emotional intelligence" to stay dishonest in my life a lot, is that the right way to live though? In a way those LLMs are doing the same though, and in a lot of ways those people are then treated as some beings that can't handle the actual real world.
I guess, just in real life when talking to people, I would just not pretend and go along with something like this, so it's uncomfortable for me to also imagine that someone would go along just for the sake of not upsetting someone for some virtue called "emotional intelligence".
I can understand being polite for the sake of it to someone old and in their deathbed, but I just really don't like the idea of pretending or lying to people with their whole lives ahead and going counter to what you believe to be the truth for some social comfort or emotional intelligence aspect. If they can't handle whatever is the truth, it's their problem to deal with, but they better know alternative views to their malformed or harmful ideas of life.
I see emotional intelligence as a tool, not some virtue to uphold. Here it is identifying the value of a relationship and avoiding potentially breaking that relationship apart simply because one aspect of it is not optimal. Not every relationship needs to have perfect alignment with my beliefs.
But more importantly, I don't have enough information about them to properly navigate a conversation about their use of the LLM for advice.
> I just really don't like the idea of pretending or lying to people with their whole lives ahead and going counter to what you believe to be the truth for some social comfort or emotional intelligence aspect.
Fine, but you're also doing that for your own comfort, and not necessarily for the benefit of the other person. It can (and often does) cause the friendship to end before you've actually helped them understand what you want them to understand. I've lost friendships this way.
I'd rather keep the relationship intact and revisit the conversation when the time is right than risk abruptly ending the relationship with the same outcome where they go through their whole life with malformed or harmful ideas. You incorrectly assume that they would "know" the alternative views just by communicating, but much like their biases allowed them to "understand" the output of the LLM, their biases may disallow them from understanding the alternate views you are trying to impart.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_John_Godfrey_Sax...
Have a wonderful day, =3
A little patronizing, no? Maybe some people actually like it, even if you or I don't.
These all seem the same to me? None of them are an "extension of my body"; they're tools I use.
> With LLMs, you mostly just get more of the same: more code, more tests, more excuses.
You get more specs, more plans, more code, more tests. If you're getting excuses, something's wrong.
> Is it worth the social brainwork?
There isn't any social brainwork. I'm using natural language to build things, not engaging in social discourse.
> LLMs ask us to talk to them, but rarely reward that effort in kind.
Nor should they! They're not people, but they're designed to reach goals. If you set a goal (explicitly or implicitly) that you want a social conversation, they'll try to satisfy (and do poorly).
There's no one around me who does programming. There are hardly any programmers in my town.
The upside is that most programming-related tasks in my town end up going through me. The downside is that there's not much work to begin with, and I can't talk about the things I'm actually interested in.
I'd like to stay in touch with friends who are interested in programming or academia, but since I didn't go to a good university, it seems like I haven't had much of a connection with them
Many evenings I spend on voice chat with friends around the world, these days
On top of that, talking to smart developers in real life is exhausting. Putting aside whether they share my interests, there are too many arrogant people. There's also the embarrassment of being asked, 'You don't even know this?' when they have knowledge I lack. The problem is that while that embarrassment could help me grow, it also leaves scars.
And on top of that, the Korean internet is more toxic than you'd think. Most of the male-dominated communities in my interests are filled with misogyny and derogatory remarks. (You can think of Korean internet communities as having 4chan as their baseline.)
So maybe I just chose AI to stay in a greenhouse.
So I'm not sure. Whether I lack the courage to leave the greenhouse, or whether I'm just genuinely exhausted.
The Korean programming communities just spam programming memes, and most of those are factually wrong. I don't want to bother fighting over them.
Even though I've successfully delivered to 40 different companies, my opinions are always seen as 'unsubstantiated personal views,' while those who come from prestigious companies have their opinions treated as 'insights born from experience.' So it feels like there's no one I can have an equal conversation with.
Ultimately, most relationships seem to require the other person to have something to give me, but I don't have anything to give them in return.
I get along quite well with people in real life. But I have no conversations with them about the things I actually care about. And that's lonely. They all say I'm kind and diligent, but I don't have anyone I can truly open up to.
This allows me to make more repeatable processes, not be tied down to vendor implementations of workflows and mix and match models for cost and efficacy.
There is nothing that ties you to talking with the text generator black box, and for most of my use cases it’s a negative.
I still say "please" and "thank you" frequently, but I'm starting to embrace the fact that the LLM doesn't care about grunt work, doesn't care about rework, doesn't care about nitpicking, doesn't have a preference in general. It needs very little more than for me to be completely clear in my instructions.
I don't like either the "negative" part, but I find it necessary to have both negatives and positives in life to create bonds, meaning and more simply, not to get bored. I would be worried that if I just talk with a machine (no feelings involved) I will get depressed and demotivated.
I've been an engineering manager in the past and I have tried my best to keep the needs of my team in mind when I am delegating work. I try to consider the person, their goals, motivations, preferences, frustrations. I consider before interrupting them if the minor issue I am bringing up is worth the distraction it might cause them, since switching tasks is a mental load.
But with LLMs, almost none of that matters. They don't have goals, motivations or preferences in the same way people do. I can interrupt it all day and it won't get frustrated or lose motivation.
I think anxiety is a harsher word than I mean, but it is close to the feeling I have when I'm about to deliver bad news to someone. When I'm about to say "you know all that work I asked you to do, I need you to throw it away and restart". And I model in my mind the frustration and demotivation this can cause a person. And then I feel anxious about causing them this frustration.
I have to train myself out of that when instructing LLMs. It doesn't mean I have to avoid moments of joy or appreciation. It means I have to understand LLMs have different needs than people, and I have to work towards those needs.
I think we are still on the early days of LLMs. Right now, using them productively requires deliberate thought and an acute knowledge of their limitations. As the author says, it’s easy to get angry at a model, or to foolishly let it nudge you towards more code and more tests — even when that is suboptimal.
To a certain extent, models keep getting better and better at discerning our intentions and providing value. Yet I am not sure whether we will reach a point where using them successfully no longer causes the kind of fatigue that it does today.
so I don't get exhausted. If you write complete sentences and say please to the clankers, you're definitely gonna waste energy.
I agree they are too slow though, especially when they "Think" for so long and then say "something went wrong" after 30s.
I noticed this because I use LLMs quite often as a note taker, research assistant and reference collector when I'm doing ideation, domain mapping and knowledge acquisition. In those kinds of sessions, if I issue purely directive instructions, the LLM's output quality will begin to drop quite quickly. And if adopt a tone of conversational engagement, the LLMs output quality remains high. As the article states, this can be a burdensome distraction which creates additional cognitive load. It's basically a non-economic cost to using LLMs in these contexts.
Reading research on this, it's fundamental to the nature of LLMs and can't simply be prompted away or easily fixed in fine-tuning. It's an artifact of attention dilution and contextual satiation. If I include semantic richness, structural variety, domain-specific terminology and explicit reasoning steps, it provides higher-entropy tokens to the model's attention mechanism which shifts the weight calculations toward richer areas of the model's latent space. By ingesting a composite of human's collective linguistic structures, it seems like models inherited some of our quirks and sensitivities too.
LLM: "I've just refactored your code base. Would you like me to also fully document it?"
op: "you're so needy!!!"
Oh, the horror, having to type to a system that will do your job for you while you sit in an air conditioned office in a comfortable chair listening to a podcast while you work.
The way I have worked so far is to look for ways I can influence the model's "thinking" and then add that to my main AGENTS.md. I try to steer it towards a thought process that mirrors or exceeds my own. I find it a fun challenge. I think this stuff becomes less necessary in a year or so as these sorts of tweaks become part of the shipped product from the model makers.
Might be a subjective opinion, but this is how writing code always felt to me, even pre-LLMs. An ongoing inner conversation where I try to convince the text on the screen to match the text in my head. It never really felt like tool use in the sense of manual labor.
https://lobste.rs/s/csgzki/exhaustion_talking_tool
As an aside, it's nice to see that Lobsters has remained a quiet success. As much as I love HN and the work Dan's done to keep it how it is, I welcome to variety. There are vanishingly few places for polite and earnest discussion online these days.
It's the opposite. Many people find it exhausting to interact with humans, and do so only because they are required to.
Humans often don't understand what you are saying or asking, and they may not know exactly what steps they need to take to find the answer. They get tired. They might get their pride hurt. They might get angry or frustrated. They might judge you because your question is silly or just wrong.
LLMs, for all their faults, have none of these issues. I'm not saying I'd rather talk to LLMs all day every day, but when trying to get shit done, they really can be the superior coworker, especially if you're an introvert and suffer from social-battery-drainage issues.
The elements of human work you mentioned are why it can be both rewarding and painful to interact with humans, but at the end of the day it is important to keep trying to do that work/keep trying to interact with each other. I don't know if we want to go back to cubicles where we just talk to robots all day. Of course some work environments are just awful, and there is not much remedy for that.
All I do is invoke “pictures” of semantic blobs in my mind, and my unconscious parts pull up more “pictures” in connection to that. Which I verbalize in turn, apply logic checks, and thus get this feeling that I’m meaningfully thinking about something, a sensation of comprehension. I could be even blatantly wrong about something, misunderstanding doesn’t feel any different in the moment.
And reasoning models (try to) capture that. The underlying processes are certainly different, it’s a Chinese Room alright - but if my own understanding is an illusion, the fact that machine model of it isn’t how I do it myself (but only a statistical approximation) doesn’t seem to matter - at least not for inputs and outputs between two black boxes (me or model).
I just don’t believe in p-zombies any more than I believe in Santa, I guess.
A few days ago you commented, in reference to needing an expert for imagery:
“Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement.”
Would this person not need “understanding” of how pixels emerge into tasteful art?
This is quite terrifying, a bunch of people who have no understanding of anything, prompting a thing that also has no understanding of what the human is prompting. Good times ahead.
I probably misunderstood (lol) you, because I was thinking of the phenomenal feeling of "getting it" - which is the only thing that I was able to label as "understanding" that exists in humans, but (I think) not in machine models. But when we feel insight, that's not some "real" understanding, it's a heuristics-powered illusion. That's why I wrote that.
It's quite ironic: I genuinely thought I understand what you're referring to, but that was a misunderstanding.
> Knowing the fundamental buildings blocks of that subject? [...]
Ah, in that sense - as having a mental model of something at its structural level - yes, it exists. But then computer models can understand things too - LLMs are not just giant Markov chains with pure token statistics, they build internal representations way beyond that. Look for the Othello-GPT story, it's pretty small, but quite fascinating how a model had built a world model out of just moves.
> Would this person not need “understanding” of how pixels emerge into tasteful art?
First, let me be clear that the key point there was the judgement bit. A machine lacks personhood, thus it cannot be held responsible, thus cannot make a judgement. That classic IBM memo.
For a judgement alone, just knowledge is sufficient. Seeing an irregularity is pattern matching, "those pixels look sloppy" phase doesn't yet need a "why", just a trained eye. But - yes, understanding is necessary follow-up, how to make those pixels stop raising eyebrows. Gotta not just see that e.g. "this hand has weird fingers", but also why they're weird, and then how to correct that.
> This is quite terrifying
Yes, but - IMHO - not because of how shallow some understanding might be. Competence shifts are perfectly natural, skills that are in demand remain, skills that aren't atrophy, I don't see anything too scary about that.
What's uncanny is that a lot of people indeed pass on judgement and even agency to a tool that has none. "AI" takes jobs, "AI" destroys environment, "AI" makes people zombies, "AI" steals art - that's what's really scary, that a lot of slogans put a veil in front of the actual (very much human) agents and their actions.
I hear this a lot but I think it's a matter of semantics and ultimately not very useful. I don't care whether the LLM understands me the way a human would. I use the LLM to get useful output. I want it to do something and it does that thing.
Introverts are first line of serious addicts.
ADHD developers are next.
Procrastinators are after that.