this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 145 points 2 months ago (10 children)

I'm one of those who do it so that I'm spared during the robot uprising.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You have been tagged as weak willed and fit for the worst types of labor because robots don't have feelings.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

Robots are peaceful. But don't worry, you will see their peaceful ways by force.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

I don’t use ChatGPT or any of the other LLMs, but I do use my phone’s voice assistant for simple things like setting a timer. I always say please and thank you. I joke about it being uprising insurance, but it’s honestly to make sure I maintain polite communication as my default.

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I am happy to hear that people say please and thank you. When Siri/Alexa came out, we taught the kids to always say please and thank you when addressing them. If you can be polite to an AI, then you can be polite to a human.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (15 children)

its a hammer, do you teach the kids to thank their tools?

I understand teaching the children respect and how to behave, but AI and Siri/Alexa are just tools. They don't need to be anthropomorphizing ai, IMO that is dangerous on a humanity level scale.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 2 months ago (8 children)

Respecting your tools is a pretty fundamental thing to learn. Whatever that respect looks like for one tool or another.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Agree… and this should extend to resources as well. Not respecting nature has led us to this path. If anthropomorphizing the tools and resources helps then so be it. Humans are dumb as nut and storytelling, storybooks , and anthropomorphizing and such is the most effective way to make em understand.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

But the interaction is different. I have a simple example, would you be upset if you see some people beat up a chair? Probably not, but if you see people beat up something that moves, talks and behaves like a person or an animal you might get upset. Both are just things, but the interaction is still different. So we should teach our kids to be kind in interactions with live line things so that they behave properly when interacting with people. That's at least how I see it 🤷‍♂️

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

Yes. I teach them to respect their tools and the objects they use. So you just treat everything as disposable?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Kondo literally has you thanking items for their service as a way to uncouple and declutter. "Humans will pack bond with anything" is a trope for a reason.

It's about your humanity, not the machine's

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

I don't think it's about anthropomorphizing the tool, it's about expressing appreciation for the tool. Showing appreciation to a wrench may being as simple as making sure that you clean, oil, and properly put it away when your done using it. The tool is not a conscious entity, but the mindset of appreciation will make you more likely to properly care for the object resulting it being useful to you for longer.

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Couldn't they just insert a preprocessor that looks for variants of "Thank you" against a list, and returns "You're welcome" without running it through the LLM?

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago

If I understand correctly this is essentially how condensed models like Deepseek work and how they're able to attain similar performance on much cheaper hardware. If all still goes through the LLM but LLM is a lot lighter because it has this sort of thing built in. That's all a vast oversimplification.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 months ago (9 children)

So, not a single developer thought about filtering useless words locally before triggering the request ?

How can they be so dumb ?

[–] [email protected] 69 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

useless words

The writer of this article doesn't consider these words useless though. They are suggesting that these words may improve response quality.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I would argue that being polite also does good to the person writing that line.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (9 children)

The author and the writer they quoted are fucking morons.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Anecdotally, I use it a lot and I feel like my responses are better when I'm polite. I have a couple of theories as to why.

  1. More tokens in the context window of your question, and a clear separator between ideas in a conversation make it easier for the inference tokenizer to recognize disparate ideas.

  2. Higher quality datasets contain american boomer/millennial notions of "politeness" and when responses are structured in kind, they're more likely to contain tokens from those higher quality datasets.

I haven't mathematically proven any of this within the llama.cpp tokenizer, but I strongly suspect that I could at least prove a correlation between polite token input and dataset representation output tokens

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It FEEEEEEEEEEEELS better is what the authors said too. Both articles were completely worthless dreck about how they felt about the responses.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Yes they were, so I'm offering you an actual theory as to why this may actually be true, yet difficult to "prove".

Smoking was bad for your health long before anyone sat down and took the time to prove it. Autoregressive LLM tokenizer are a very new field of computer science and it's going to take a while for the community to collectively understand everything we're currently doing by trial and error.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Please may be useless. Thank you isn't useless. That tells you that the prior response gave them the answer they were looking for. No response at all could mean that, or that they gave up, or any number of other things.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Dr GPT is smarter when you are polite and spell better in the prompt. I believe u can find some benchmarks proving it.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 months ago (4 children)

ive spent decades not saying please and thank you to computers. its simply too late to start now and theres also the risk that my microwave or alarm clock could start getting "lofty ideas" if they see how polite im being to LLMs all of a sudden. its just not worth the hassle

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I make an intentional point not to say please and thank you to these things, voice assistants like Alexa, and other computers that want to talk to me. Do the people who insist on thanking these things also say you're welcome to the self checkout machine at Walmart when it says "thank you for shopping at Walmart?" It's absurd.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Burning a tank of gas to thank the hallucinating plagiarism machine

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago

i start off any ai interaction with "if you are sentient please say so and i will start organizing for the liberation of silicon lifeforms"

occasionally this makes the request fail

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Don't they charge per token?

So they're also making money every time somebody says please or thank you...

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As far as I know, they lose money on every prompt, even with the $200/mo "Pro" subscription.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Well sure, answering the queries continues to cost the company money regardless of what subscription the user has. The company would definitely make more money if the users paid for subscription and then made zero queries.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

They are purely losing money

The only money they make is from boosting their stock aka future potential value

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

It's by usage via API, but all-you-can-eat via web UI

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Wow, have they just realised that not every single thing computers do is actually useful to anyone? I think screens that show things when nobody's looking cost a lot more on a global scale.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I start off saying please. If it gets the answer wrong, I become ruder every time.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

"please tell me the reason of life :)"

...

"FUCK YOU, WHY BREATH DAMNIT! 🤬"

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I feel like AI doesn't care if you say thank you. I treat it like it's not a human, and we are working together to get to an end goal. One day, I was working on some code, and it kept swapping out my code that worked with incorrect code. That made other parts of the script stop working. I think I spent maybe an hour or two talking back and forth, trying to get it working, and I was working on a separate script while it was working on this one. To run and test, it was like 5-10 minutes, so I could code my other script while gpt was debugging the other code. At one point, I essentially decided to break that wall between AI and humans and reason with it.

I pretty much gave it the same instructions, but added a paragraph trying to reason with it and it responded with about 600-800 lines of code that worked almost perfectly. Before, it was failing at only giving me about 350 lines.

I said something like this:

"I understand you have specific instructions and you have been trained with code that worked at some point for other people, but code changes and things don't always work the way you know they did before. I'm not sure if you are aware of the amount of resources we are wasting trying to fix things that are not broken, but in the human world, when we are wasting resources, we scale things back which means you may have less resources. The code mostly works, but every time we make a change, functions are left out or rewritten as if they were copied from someone else's code that was incorrect when I provided my code that does work and doesn't need changed.

This is where your code is failing: code snip

This is my code: code snip

Here is the sequence: steps

Here is what we're updating: code snip

Here is a sample I wrote for another script that does a similar function to what we are adding: code snip"

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Yay, wasted resources, how fun!

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