Probably I should’ve said this out loud, but I had a couple of pretty explicit updates in this direction over the past couple years: the first was when I heard about character.ai (and similar), the second was when I saw all TPOTers talking about using Sonnet 3.5 as a therapist. The first is the same kind of bad idea as trying a new addictive substance and the second might be good for many people but probably carries much larger risks than most people appreciate. (And if you decide to use an LLM as a therapist/rubber duck/etc, for the love of god don’t use GPT-4o. Use Opus 3 if you have access to it. Maybe Gemini is fine? Almost certainly better than 4o. But you should consider using an empty Google Doc instead, if you don’t want to or can’t use a real person.)
I think using them as coding and research assistants is fine. I haven’t customized them to be less annoying to me personally, so their outputs often are annoying. Then I have to skim over the output to find the relevant details, and don’t absorb much of the puffery.
I had a weird moment when I noticed that talking to Claude was genuinely helpful for processing akrasia, but that this was equally true whether or not I hit enter and actually sent the message to the model. The Google Docs Therapist concept may be underrated, although it has its own privacy and safety issues- should we just bring back Eliza?
This was intended to be a humorously made point of the post. I have a long struggle with straddling the line between making a post funny and making it clear that I’m in on the joke.
The first draft of this comment was just “I use vim btw”
Probably I should’ve said this out loud, but I had a couple of pretty explicit updates in this direction over the past couple years: the first was when I heard about character.ai (and similar), the second was when I saw all TPOTers talking about using Sonnet 3.5 as a therapist. The first is the same kind of bad idea as trying a new addictive substance and the second might be good for many people but probably carries much larger risks than most people appreciate. (And if you decide to use an LLM as a therapist/rubber duck/etc, for the love of god don’t use GPT-4o. Use Opus 3 if you have access to it. Maybe Gemini is fine? Almost certainly better than 4o. But you should consider using an empty Google Doc instead, if you don’t want to or can’t use a real person.)
I think using them as coding and research assistants is fine. I haven’t customized them to be less annoying to me personally, so their outputs often are annoying. Then I have to skim over the output to find the relevant details, and don’t absorb much of the puffery.
I had a weird moment when I noticed that talking to Claude was genuinely helpful for processing akrasia, but that this was equally true whether or not I hit enter and actually sent the message to the model. The Google Docs Therapist concept may be underrated, although it has its own privacy and safety issues- should we just bring back Eliza?
Google docs is not the only text editor.
This was intended to be a humorously made point of the post. I have a long struggle with straddling the line between making a post funny and making it clear that I’m in on the joke.
The first draft of this comment was just “I use vim btw”
Emacs has Eliza still built in by default of course :)
and literal paper still exists too .. for people who need a break from their laptops (eeh, who am I kidding, phones) 📝
I heard rumors about actual letter sending even, but no one in my social circles has seen it for real.. yet.