Much of the text is generated as well.

"Oh. Well, then stop."

So leave emotion at the door and make your words count. Voice your frustrations at the stress doll next to your monitor, sure, but spending tokens on them us just wasting time and money. Explicitly typing out your exasperation will not get you closer to whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. What can you type that will?

Laser focus: clearly, concisely explain what is wrong right now, and how you want it solved. Then do that again until all the moles have been whacked. If the AI is stuck in a sycophancy loop, start a new clean session. Do this frequently anyway: every turn in the same session charges for all preceding conversation again /and/ degrades the LLM's performance.

With attention matrix sizes being what they are, that's high enough that you can literally zero out a row or two and still have the test suite pass. Guess how I know!

Check your numbers, folks.

You’re making a distinction here, but training is something you repeat for every new point release, so you need to keep the data if you want to use it for training.

For me, the origin of this sentiment is the culture for certain departments at $LARGE_CORP I used to work for. People would ping me on the internal instant messaging tool to ask for help with things. Sometimes they'd take the nohello approach and just fold everything together in a single message: "Hello, hope you are having a nice day. I'm trying to do X, and I see Y instead of Z. What am I doing wrong?"

And sometimes, they... don't.

"Hello."

"How are you today?"

A conversation that could have been done in 30 seconds drags on for many minutes, and the message trickle feeds just fast enough that I can't do anything of any complexity in between the IM app's alert lighting up again. Extracting what they actually want from them feels like pulling teeth. It's a complete waste of their time and utterly disrepectful of mine.

They are there to ask a question. I know they are there to ask a question. They know they are there to ask a question. I'm happy to answer the question, when they finally get around to asking it. Just ask the bloody question, ffs.

We're literally about to require Meta to prohibit the creation of multiple accounts. Their T&Cs already prohibit that, so what we're saying is that just asking is not enough - we are demanding it is enforced. What we ask for, we get.

The world that results may be exactly what we want, IDK. It's just be nice if we could decide, collectively, one way or the other, then be deliberate about it.

We already had the mystery meat CPU wars several decades ago. We know how to make sane ISAs now and should be past that.

I mean, it's even the literal truth: they value your privacy in the sense of having their software do a little internal auction to put a price on it.

I still self-host, but now I cheat for deliverability: route the problematic destinations (I'm looking at you, Outlook) through Amazon SES. At a few cents for five-figure numbers of emails, it's as close to free for personal/vanity email quantities as it gets to have someone whose full time job it is to make sure outgoing mail stays deliverable on your side while still keeping everything else under your control.

One thing to note is that Amazon are not very good at keeping amazonses.com up to date, so despite including it you can't set DMARC to hard-fail SPF or you will have mail bounce days.