Certainly you realize that these comments exist for more than a single person right? You expect potentially hundreds of viewers to each burn through AI tokens instead of just getting a direct and relevant answer here? This has the same vibe as the old forum posts where the only response was a "google it".
Unless there's evidence that all of it was fact-checked, it's a waste of time to look harder. You can get any output you like, it doesn't mean it's correct.
How different is this from humans? In my experience people fill in the blanks quite the same, they just do it less convincingly and sometimes maliciously. Having the sort of prejudice you describe against AI content doesn't make sense if you consider humans make mistakes and lie all the time, coming from a position of less knowledge than LLMs. You need to approach both with similar caution.
Why does this make it better for you the consumer? You still need to detect the lie and respond to it appropriately. Machines lie more elegantly, I think is the scary part
At least part of it is that we do attribute malice or lack of care (or madness) to people who repeatedly do it, and treat their output differently in the future.
For some reason, some people repeatedly defend machines that constantly do the same thing, and claim we should give it the benefit of the doubt.
Why give anyone benefit of doubt when you're just trying to extract true information. If a person BSs you, you don't believe them in the future either. Giving BS the benefit of doubt isn't serving anyone. Giving intent benefit of doubt makes sense, but intent isn't important when it comes to technical information and lying about it
Yes, that is my point about "AI" generated text. It's deep into "doubt by default, require evidence before bothering" territory. Hence I think it's strange to defend spending time on it by default.
It’s interesting this AI-generated article references “Reddit threads” being “full of support” two or three times, yet I can’t find Reddit threads in the references.
I wonder if we are seeing what may be the result of a Reddit bot campaign to sway generative output.
It's telling, IMO, that Western cultures deals with suicidality with hotlines you can call. It's like some joke from gonzo journalism come to fruition. I don't know what the answer is, but as a person who's been suicidal, for me it wasn't a hotline. It's even more fitting, if not kind of perfect, that said hotlines farm your data and sell it. :chef's kiss: what else is there to say. Like just about everything else, callous people make money while vulnerable, sensitive people pay up. Beautiful world we live in ;). Please drink responsibly!
Yes, they seem to work for many people. I don't mean to belittle that, I guess that is good. But, I'm not sure how that's interesting because "something works for somebody" is true for just about every category.
For example, some people want to work at Palantir and find it interesting that some executive named Steve Cohen runs the AC at 60 degrees and eats ice cubes all day to aid cognition[0]. There's a very wide diversity of people out there, so the fact that some find this appealing is not interesting or surprising.
So, the question, in my mind, is less that something works for somebody, and more about the broader meaning of this civilizational function.
Can you explain what your point really was then? Belittling the idea of hotlines seemed central in your messaging and the possible exploitation of data more of a secondary thing.
It's fine to be cynical but it's also good to remember that there are real people that do care and try to improve the world as well.
Most people don't believe in incremental progress anymore, either it works 100% of the time and solves everything forever or it's a failure and you probably wanted it to fail because you're evil.
No I believe that what you have with the 11 percent decrease is reflective of diversity among people and what causes crisis. Suicide hotlines work for some people in some cases, that is undeniable. But it's not incremental in that you're not going to then iterate on the hotline and make it more effective and one day we've got 20% and so on. That won't be the case because the hotline is just not appealing for many people. It's good for the people it's good for, but that doesn't mean it's not a civilizational CYA/"not my problem".
Not the OP, but I saw it as a bandaid. Creating a hotline vs fixing underlying societal issues is a quick fix but doesn't fix the real drivers of the longterm increases.
Sure, concretely, my point was that hotlines are a very capitalist feeling thing for me. Probably because of trying to deal with corporiations, from monopolies/utilities to things like airlines. My experience in this realm has been one of alienation. So, taking the hotline and applying it to people in suicidal crisis is like peak alienation in my mind.
Personally, I'm not anti-capitalist, but capitalism to me is tied up conceptually with money and expedience. Feelings, in my opinion, are sort of in a different human realm.
But yes, for sure, that alienation as I allege it, is probably good for many people in crisis who are uncomfortable with the people around them. However, the question of why it is that such people aren't comfortable with anyone around them is the bigger one in my mind.
> Please drink responsibily
To me, although they work, suicide hotlines appear to be a naked corporate CYA, just like gambling and other addiction hotlines. Civilization will beat you down, won't give you health insurance except for a few free COVID shots (then, suddenly, people can totally mobilize to administer collective healthcare), but hey when you've just about had it, here's a hotline you can call (and we'll sell your data hahahahaha sucker).
Existence, where you're just thrown out there to sink or swim and that's thats. If you're lucky you have parents and/or friends who can help you. If you're not, well... good luck!
I didn't think that in Netherlands, Germany or France you can live like a normal person if you are, say, depressed or addicted to drugs and don't want to or can't work.
An 11% drop isn't "something works for somebody," it's "it works for a lot of people, substantially more people than it harms, making for a clear net gain."
In individual with odd habits is a completely different thing. That comparison is utterly inapt.
If you had an entire population that started running the AC at 60 degrees and eating ice cubes all day, and cognition measurably increased by 11%, that would be incredible news.
To be clear I'm not saying it's not a net gain. It's very clearly a net gain.
But, just because it works doesn't mean it's not a capitalism solution using the capitalism hammer of talking to random people behind a phone (which, again, might be a net good thing for some people crisis).
So again, I am not against anti-suicide hotlines. I am sincerely happy they help many people. I just think they are very symbolically representative of our capitalist alienated world where everything, down to our very drive to exist, has a corporate CYA hedge hotline.
It is interesting because while the hotline might help some, it can also do significant damage to others depending on what happens after the phone call. Of course, nothing in life is every 100% good for everyone or every situation.
While not everyone that calls the hotline is involuntarily committed, I wonder how the data matches up with this finding [1]:
> "In this meta-analysis of 100 studies of 183 patient samples, the postdischarge suicide rate was approximately 100 times the global suicide rate during the first 3 months after discharge and patients admitted with suicidal thoughts or behaviors had rates near 200 times the global rate. Even many years after discharge, previous psychiatric inpatients have suicide rates that are approximately 30 times higher than typical global rates."
Are they accounting for the fact that people who are admitted with suicidal thoughts will tend to be those much more prone to suicide in the first place? It seems obvious, but it doesn't sound like they are.
People who come home from the hospital after being admitted for cancer treatment will have a much higher cancer death rate than the general population, but that doesn't imply that hospital treatment is damaging.
> Are they accounting for the fact that people who are admitted with suicidal thoughts will tend to be those much more prone to suicide in the first place?
How certain are you that this is a fact? I agree that is seems like common sense on the surface, but that might not be the case. The closest I could find in the study was this:
> However, the findings should curb enthusiasm for restrictive interventions directed at patients labeled as having high risk of suicide by virtue of demographic or clinical variables. Our figures suggest that 0.28% of all discharged patients can be expected to commit suicide during the first 3 months after discharge. The modest statistical strength of suicide risk assessment means that even patients who are classified as having high risk because of their suicide risk factors will have a low absolute probability of suicide over clinically meaningful time frames, whereas patients with a low risk for suicide will still have a probability of suicide that is many times that in the general community.
It also seems that largest factor, and perhaps a better determinant of severity, is the number of times one is (re)admitted.
> People who come home from the hospital after being admitted for cancer treatment will have a much higher cancer death rate than the general population
How much higher?
Do you think this statement is comparable to cancer treatment?
> Our data suggest that the suicide rates among discharged patients have not decreased in the past 50 years. This is a disturbing finding considering the increase in community psychiatry and the availability of a range of new treatments during this period.
I think this is the take away from the study that is also important:
> However, the very high suicide rates calculated in this study and the known limitations of suicide risk assessment suggest that a focus on clinical risk assessment might mislead clinicians into thinking that some patients can be regarded as having low risk after discharge. Our findings better support the views of authors who believe in a more universal approach to suicide prevention that might focus on periods of high risk but that extends for periods of years.
Also, I need to clarify one thing. I apologize for any confusion. I realized how half-finished my initial comment was. I did not mean to imply the damage from facilities comes from treatments per se, though there are still risks with all treatments. I should have clarified that damage can occur from the systems surrounding the facility. The (incorrect) stigma surrounding admission, the potential police interventions, the medical debt from being admitted, loss of certain rights/job prospects, etc.. Yes, the facilities do help some individuals, that is their purpose, but some people are hesitant to say, call the hotline, out of fear of being committed, which can also be damaging.
I'm quite confident that people admitted to institutions for suicidal thoughts are much more prone to suicide.
But it doesn't actually matter to my point. It's a very reasonable hypothesis, true or not. It needs to be addressed as a potential confounding factor, either by showing it's not true, or by showing that the size of the observed effect is greater than the effect from the confounding factor.
To me, the hotline is an absolute joke and one of the last things I would do if I were contemplating harming myself. I've often wondered if there is hard data showing it is effective overall, or whether it's just bandwagon group think run amok.
I have lost a number of friends to suicide, and as a result I spent a significant amount of time thinking about what could have been done to have helped them before it was too late. In nearly all cases, it was pretty well thought out and not a spur of the moment thing. In some cases, they even took steps to prevent people from discovering their plans. So anecdotally, a suicide hotline would not have helped at all.
Based on some searching though, it seems like there is data showing that it helps on the whole. I guess for people who are having a spur of the moment thought, it might be potentially helpful. However I also found some people saying that seeing the prolific messages about calling the hotline when searching for information about things really pushed them away and somewhat backfired.
I guess ultimately this is a very complex issue with no one size fits all solution. If I ever get to a point where I no longer have to work, this is a cause I would love to work on for the people that tend to think it through more and less spontaneous.
Having an option to talk to someone when you're alone and having trouble getting out of your own head is a great option. If you don't know what to do and you only see death as the option, having someone give you options seems like a good thing to have available at a relatively low cost.
I don't think anyone is expecting this to "solve suicide" but it sure as hell beats the alternative of... :checks notes: nothing?
Calling a therapist is similar to a "hotline" but you need to have a therapist first, which is a pain in the ass. Making that easier would be a good concrete second step (which a hotline can also help with!)
"sure as hell beats the alternative of... :checks notes: nothing?"
There seem to be many things that we could do, like addressing suicide as a social contagion including in media portrayal, providing better substance abuse and mental health treatment options, etc. A hotline is like a bandaid - its not going to fix the underlying societal issues like disconnection, lack of community, lack of opportunity/hope, social media, etc.
Disconnection, lack of community / opportunity / hope and social media are all major societal issues that (in my opinion) are not going to be solved by any sort of single government or charity. Making progress on that takes shifting norms / moving the overton window on depression and addiction, and overriding a lot of human nature (we like easy, we like saccharine, etc).
Definitely open to whatever concrete ideas you have that would fix those things, especially if they don't require a nation's whole GDP.
What’s your point? Okay, the hotline is a bandage, but that’s entirely the point, you use it when you’re feeling suicidal and you need to talk to someone. You don’t use it to fix structural issues in your life that lead to you feeling like that.
As another, intermittently suicidal person, I have never received helpful support from a hotline. In fact, I have never managed to speak to another human on the phone at all.
Out of four hotline calls in my life, mostly as an older teenager, I waited for >1 hour in every case, listening to pre-recorded “please continue holding, we will get to you” messages and elevator music, before giving up.
The only time I contacted a human it was via a text chat, and the interaction was laughably shallow — they hit me repeatedly with condescending, “reflective listening”-style questions and basically offered no depth or consideration to my situation, or me as a person.
If these services demonstrably save lives then that’s great, but they did absolutely nothing for me.
What do you advocate for to help people contemplating suicide? WHat do non-Western culture do to "deal with suicidality"? The issue is when the hotline is selling the data and not that the hotline itself exists.
A quick sweep of the lowest 20 countries in suicide and the most obvious thing that can be teased out is they're by vast majority extremely conservative societies where family and religion (mostly Islam) would likely dominate the goals of any person living there (with a couple exceptions). Only about half of the lowest 10 have any sort of functional welfare or state support programs.
I wonder if having a pretty rigid, straightforward, and achievable set of life goals lowers suicide. This isn't to say that's the best way to live, but I could understand how it may make people more satisfied with their life.
There's a very real risk that data from conservative societies, which often see suicide as shameful, is underreporting the actual level. If a family is going to be looked down on if one of its members kills themselves, there's a strong motivation to attribute the death to another cause if at all possible.
In between is a table that shows the suicide rate is much lower in "upper middle income" countries than in either poorer or richer countries. I suspect that is a pointer. Affluent enough not to be constantly struggling, but different in some ways (urbanisation? materialism? isolation?) from the rich countries.
You also need to look at other factors. Conservative countries have younger populations, so you need to correct for that. Not all countries have equally accurate statistics.
I think conservative countries may have an advantage because of larger families, extended families, fewer people being single (and less isolated if they are) etc. but it needs more data. There are some pretty conservative countries with high rates.
This is meant for people that are socially isolated, and don't have anyone to talk to about their personal issues and challenges. It's of course not great that it supposedly has a need to exists. But the fact that it is there to provide help to people that can't get it anywhere else, is a good thing I would think.
Edit: Apart from that, the people that are running it are probably not technically skilled or aware, so privacy issues like this should be highlighted.
I think many people, not all, who are labeled “mentally ill” are just more attuned to the truth that society is depressing and anxiety inducing. In other words, the so called normal people are the crazy ones. But we define mental illness relative to how well someone can function in society, that’s literally how the DSM is used, even though society is clearly mad and perverse and 10 minutes on Twitter or reading the news is more than enough evidence to draw that conclusion. Every tech CEO or celebrity or successful person could be diagnosed with a multitude of mental illnesses, but because they’re “productive” members of society we glorify them instead. Explain to me how it’s normal and healthy to work 100 hours a week, take ketamine and adderall and other hardcode drugs regularly, post rants on the Internet at 3am, go make a decision that hurts or kills thousands of people, and then hit up the golf club after.
Then we take the people who notice all of this madness and tell them they’re crazy, ill, and malfunctioning. We put them in this Kafkaesque nightmare of gaslighting that probably does drive them mad over time.
I don’t want to say that if you’re hearing voices telling you to do things that you’re ok, but if you just feel depressed or anxious I think there’s a good chance you’re just awake to the sickness of society that most people are still in denial about and it might make you feel better to know you’re not the broken one. You still need to figure out how to adapt to the world, but just knowing you’re not broken gives you a foundation to build from.
I understand the point you make but I would counter that being happy doesn’t mean you aren’t aware of the world and injustice around you. It doesn’t mean that you condone it, think it’s good, etc. It does mean you probably avoid self-destructive behaviors like excess drug use, poor sleep, etc.
Many happy people are also agitators for change.
Not to say that happiness is a choice, but you can certainly make choices which make you sick with anxiety. It’s a disordered behavior to purposefully reinforce your sadness and anxiety about the world for no useful reason.
For instance, many people feel compelled to expose themselves to the horror of certain ongoing events constantly, via video. There are whole subreddits dedicated to it, on every side of most conflicts. At the end of the day, that is neither healthy nor productive, solely self-traumatizing. One reason this is a pernicious behavior is because it feels like there is righteousness in being a witness, but in reality it’s no different than self-harm.
I saw a LinkedIn thread just the other day that called it the "suicide prevention industrial complex," and that phrase will stick in my head like "orphan crushing machine" or "leopards eating faces"
What on earth is the "industrial complex" part about this? Outside of pharma pushing pills I'm not sure what other profit-seeking, recursive elements exist in the "suicide prevention industry".
Legitimately curious about this - not sure how these words would apply.
Not entirely sure what the GP meant either, but maybe it's like sports betting? Where some companies are heavily advertising and trying to get people to become "responsible gamblers" (addicted), meanwhile, some of those same companies are investing in mental health treatment facilities on the side. Thus, those gambling companies can make money off gambling addicts and when gambling addicts try to quit. As the saying goes, the house always wins.
Um. I don't have the link directly in front of me, but the tl;dr of the OP's point (that I was referencing/quoting in the above comment) was that, in the US, our efforts around suicide prevention are last resort options, that we offer instead of actually fixing any of the things that make people here suicidal. We gut mental health resources, and fuck people over in pretty much every other critical, material way -- healthcare and otherwise... But meanwhile we make a big deal about how we have a hotline, and how the number is even easy to remember now.
It's sort of like how we give enormous amounts of money to cops (institutionally), instead of funding the safety nets that actually reduce crime. Actually (edit), those analogies are kind of related, because the same safety nets are important for driving down both of these things. Yk, because people are more stable in other ways when they aren't in desperation all the time.
You might say it's the difference between emergency services and emergency prevention.
I wasn't going to comment, but this is just too dumb on too many levels.
The hotline is not the way to deal with suicidality - suicidality is a longer process and something you can ask your GP about and most help is covered under most western versions of universal health care.
The hotline is an idea that intervenes in the last steps of a suicide process. The idea can reach into the moment where people have convinced themselves they're stuck - and they can reach out with extremely low effort or barrier to entry.
If you have some better 'idea' we can spread into the culture that does this better, then by all means enlighten us.
---
You could have made a case and started a discussion how too many people see the existence of the hotline as _the_ way to deal with suicidality, but you didn't. You just decided to spread some shallow vibe nonsense.
The NYT released an article[0], sorry paywalled, that discusses the effectiveness of the 988 hotline in lowering the number of suicides where it is available. Sadly, because of the joke that is mental health coverage in the US, that's as good of news as I've got for you. Mental health coverage isn't even available on the open market AMA (Obama Care), so 988 is the best we can offer.
I've heard the Dutch one is is a little better. The ones in the USA aren't likely to do much more than call police to put a mental hold on you, during which the hospital will rack up so many bills that it would make anyone suicidal. And then yay, your gun rights gone forever, so if you are suicidal in part because you live in a dangerous impoverished shithole good luck defending yourself afterwards!
> Many people in mental health crisis fear that if they dial 988, law enforcement might show up or they might be forced to go to the hospital.
> But getting sent that kind of "involuntary emergency rescue" happens to around 1% of callers, suggests new data from Vibrant Emotional Health, the administrator of the 988 Lifeline for suicide and mental health crises.
I don't think that's the right way to consider your odds of involuntary committal. It really depends on what you say in the calls. The more immediate and serious the danger the more likely you are to be involuntary committed. The caller range is quite large.
What if the help they need is just to talk to someone without fear of consequences?
If they dispatch you to an institution you could lose your job just when you need money to pay for the bills you'll be sent.
With some careers, like being a pilot, you'd never be be to find another job.
You'd lose your ability to take out life insurance (even if it was a short temporary depression that you got over, like a side effect of a medication, the life insurance companies won't care.)
Or the institution's records could be hacked and you'll live in fear of your friends and family finding out.. which could cause rebound suicidal ideation...
There is no way I would ever call these hotlines unless it were 100% anonymous.
> What if the help they need is just to talk to someone without fear of consequences?
Is there actually any consequence free conversations? Even Lawyers can break confidentiality in some situations. I'm not saying that the hotline is perfect, I'm saying that it provides a lot of good. I hope you never feel the need to call the hotline, but it's an option that saves a lot of lives.
I think that's what strippers are for. Come in, pay in cash, say whatever, no paper trail or telephone logs, then leave. They're not mandatory reporters like doctors or licensed professionals and therapists are. From the ones I've known, this is no-shit what a lot of people use them for.
Yep, as someone who suffers from depression and suicidal ideation regularly its been made very clear to me on multiple occasions that I would rather be in this state than interface with involuntary committal. I don't know what points you are looking to score here.
I get it, I am not advocating to live unmedicated or anything, but pretty much every emergency medical experience I have had any contact with in the USA has been so universally painful and dehumanizing that it gives me extreme pause, I would not willingly engage with it.
I'm fine with someone making that call for themselves with personal experience, although doing it in a sound state of mind can be challenging in crisis.
I'd just caution you that it's not a universal experience. As with, say, COVID masking, some people found it abhorrent, and others still voluntarily mask today; some found lockdowns almost fun, others despised even the thought of staying home for a few days.
Statistically, police/committment intervention from calling the hotline is rare, and another commenter linked evidence (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122550) of significant benefits to balance it.
Gun rights are generally not gone forever. Federal law bars people adjudicated mentally defective or formally committed to a mental institution, neither of which include a temporary mental hold for suicide watch. State laws vary, but none of them have a law where a single temporary hold means "gun rights gone forever." Some states let people go buy a gun the day they are released from suicide watch, despite how irresponsible that sounds.
The temporary can easily turn into an adjudicated one. Happened to one of my friends during a nasty divorce, the high-IQ husband knew all the buttons to press to the state and kept fabricating to the state that the suicidal ideation was ongoing (it never existed in the first place) and then they committed my friend based on that. He was then successful in getting my friend's ability to defend herself removed so that she would be defenseless.
So from what i understand the only way your gun rights are "gone forever" is if a court ordered you to go to a mental hospital. If it's just a 911 call and a ride to the hospital (every trip to the "grippy sock hotel" I've ever seen), that does not apply and your gun rights are not removed federally. Some states have "red flag" laws but to my understanding those are temporary and end either after a time period or a court petition. I'm curious what laws you're talking about in the US that would take your gun rights for a suicide call.
Involuntary commitment. Happened to a good friend of mine during a nasty divorce, the husband made up a suicidal story and my friend was committed without the court appointing her a lawyer to defend herself. She's struggling to get her rights back, it is apparently possible, but they're gone forever until you spend a lot of money on lawyers so it's true it's not strictly the case you can't get them back but they default to staying gone forever.
This is just another form of stigma. Better to go without getting treated for mental health issues, or that very responsible decision to seek treatment will be used against you later.
See also the jump seat pilot who tried to pull the fire handles on a commercial flight.
E.g. NY is not friendly in this scenario depending on the type of permit and the type of hold. An involuntary hold will impact your right to have a gun.
In The Netherlands you can be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital due to risk of suicide, still get a weapons license, buy half a dozen guns and then go on a shooting rampage killing 7 and wounding 17 (Alphen a/d Rijn shooting, 2011).
This is not a comment on gun rights, but, IF you are having issues with suicide and depression I would absolutely remove those weapons from your house and access. Talk to a friend you trust. Have them stored. Something. Having them nearby is only going to increase the odds you end up dead.
They follow a flowchart. Most of it involves trying to figure out if you know any friends or family nearby. I guess finding someone for comfort might make sense, but the flowchart is too obvious and makes it sound like another typical marketing callcenter.
Seems like one of those situations where damned if they do, damned if they don't, isn't it? Like if someone is in immediate crisis what do you expect them to do?
I feel like if someone is calling a line, they are looking for intervention. If someone cries for help and the response is ensuring that someone doesn't fearmonger on Hacker News, I feel like that would be a problem.
"And then yay, your gun rights gone forever"
Gun owners are much more likely to kill themself with said gun than to ever defend themselves in any way, and anyone who has ideations should be the last person to want a gun. And suicide mostly afflicts white middle-aged males, most of whom don't live in "dangerous impoverished shitholes". I doubt the correlation is more than random.
The Ubutnu coreutils thing last week really soured me on 99.8% test compatibility Rust rewrites :|. I clicked through to the tweet linked here and it was kind of like shudder I feel quite opposite now when I see this kind of thing. I'm like *looking for exit*
> When your workflow consists of asking questions and getting answers immediately, you don't get to see what's nearby.
Very much aligns with my experience. For me this is the most unsatisfying thing about AI-based workflows in general, they miss stuff humans would never miss.
All the time I wonder what am I missing that's right nearby? It's remarkable how many times I have to ask Claude code to fully ingest something before it actually puts it into context. It always tries to laser through to target it's looking for, which is often not what you want it to look for, at least not all you want it to look for. Getting these models to open up their field of vision is tough.
Actually lately I’ve been feeling the other way around with it. The LLM catches things I would have overlooked. I ask for a new feature in a certain file, and the LLM suggests fixing a tangentially related file to accommodate the new feature without breaking something else.
Maybe this is just the crap legacy codebase I’m working with and how tangled up everything is, but I definitely have found several times now that it caught things I would have missed.
> The LLM catches things I would have overlooked. I ask for a new feature in a certain file, and the LLM suggests fixing a tangentially related file to accommodate the new feature without breaking something e
What are you using? Do you think this behavior is in response to prompting? My goal at times is to "rabbit hole" the LLM to get it to go down rabbit holes and find bigger and bigger picture issues until it homes in on something fundamentally broken that could have big impact if fixed. But it's not trivial to push the agent in that direction for me.
Do you think this is inherent or an artifact of prompting? Curiosity and side quests leads to higher token usage and longer time to finish, so I could understand why current harnesses and system prompts would not encourage that sort of thing.
But what if a coding agent was prompted to be more curious during development? Like a human developer, make mental notes of alternatives to try out and chase suspicious looking code which may seem unrelated to the task at hand. It could even spawn rabbit hole agents in parallel.
Taking a step back, this probably highlights major hazard with the increased usage of LLMs for coding, which is that everyone's style of work is going to converge because most code will be written by the 2-3 most popular models using the same system prompts.
> But what if a coding agent was prompted to be more curious during development?
I've tried using the language of curiosity. My qualitative take was that it did have a positive impact, but not much. And I can only tinker with system prompting so much, before I get drawn into LLM driving :)
> which is that everyone's style of work is going to converge
yeah I imagine even people's styles of thinking will converge as a result of this, more so than from reading other people's prose or programs. I think I saw something on HN to this effect within the last month, too.
It’s interesting to compare how the agentic search performs, with these targeted reads and lots of tool calls in the stream, versus the older but still valid paradigm of using a high-reasoning model like GPT-X-pro and feeding in all the relevant files at once with no tools.
I have found that the “pro” approach is much more holistic and able to tackle rather “creative” problems that require very careful design and the overall artifact is tight and self-consistent. — Claude Code by comparison is incredible in exploration and targeted implementation but indeed is not great at seeing the forest.
> All the time I wonder what am I missing that's right nearby?
Add to the prompt "use coding conventions of the file which you are currently editing". That gets the machine (Opus and Sonnet at least) to go over the nearby code and occasionally mention something obvious.
Right but Al Capone did jail time, here Zuck gets to break and enter into people's homes, take their stuff, then haggle for it after-the-fact, all the while keeping the civilization-domination apparatus that he built using the stuff he stole? That is super not fair. Ordinary people could certainly not get away with that.
The US justice system doesn't start from fair. It starts from what you can prove to the letter of the law.
And when you're targeting someone / something with unlimited lawyers, you'd better have ironclad evidence that exactly that happened in exactly the way the claim is written.
Okay, sure, but I'm talking about being satisfied. I understand reality and that I may not get the satisfaction I would like. And specifically the example of Al Capone who was, yeah, got for tax evasion, but at least was treated ultimately like the criminal he was.
I mean, he was sentenced to 11 years and served 7 1/2.
But untreated (at the time, no penicillin) syphilis turned him into a mental pre-teen after his release, so I guess the universe serves some justice where the laws of the land do not.
Okay but... I am very unimpressed by this. How is it that he then gets to still be an AI monopolist/hegemonist? How's that fair? He basically force-acquired all this stuff without asking, now he's haggling for it later. Where are the criminal charges? Where is the deprivement of, if not freedom, then equity assets.
How unique are our problems? They have utilities, airlines, etc in India. Everything you'd talk to a support agent with is basically the same globally, and if not, can easily be explained to a person who hasn't been living in a yurt and burning yak dung for fuel; and tbh I think you could explain return processes to those folks as well.
I’ve spent time in India, and while they have many of the same things, they sometimes operate very differently. I assume call centers don’t pay that much, so it’s very possible that while India has certain things, the people I’m talking to have limited access.
If I’m trying to convey an issue about a flight, per your example, it may very well be to someone who’s never flown or has very different expectations for what it looks like to fly. At one of the airports I was at in India, I was trying to find my gate and was pointed to a guy at a card table with a 3-ring binder, where he flipped through to find the flight. This was maybe 10 years ago; I had never experienced anything like that in the US, even going back several decades. This is a cultural and experiential difference. If someone from that airport in India called me for help (prior to that experience), I would have had an really hard time parsing their problem, as I wouldn’t have any context for seeing a man with a binder about finding gate information. Someone saying that wouldn’t have made any sense to me. Other airports there were more akin to what I’m used to in the US, but still had their local quirks.
This same type of issue could play out regardless of the country. India was the example brought up, but I’ve run into confusion due to cultural differences everywhere I’ve been to some degree. How impactful this is to support will vary based on how common the issue is, but I’m usually not calling support for common issues now that most of those can be handled via a website.
Right but it's not like they don't know about flying and can't be instructed and coached? I don't mean to me dismissive, maybe (quite possibly) things are more complicated than that, but ...? Like, okay when an Indian person is working for an Indian airline they're instructed "hey, here's the departures binder." But when they're hired by Lufthansa they get oriented using whatever system and processes are in place at that company. And "hey, don't be rude. To western people, here's what that means beyond what's intuitive to you." How does their previous experience with a binder mean they can't relate to you on a support call?
Spent the last year building a customer-facing AI agent for a Miami law firm with operations in Colombia. The accent question never came up in the build. The knowledge question came up constantly.
Half the inbound clients were Colombian families navigating US immigration. The agent had to know which apostilled documents the Cancillería typically processes in 3 days vs 3 weeks, that "documento de identidad" in Colombia is the cédula not the DNI, that the consulate in Bogotá closes early on Fridays. None of that is in any LLM's pretraining; we hand-built and update the knowledge files monthly.
Your binder-table-at-the-airport story is the deeper one. AI can fake the voice. It can't fake the lived experience. Cheaper to invest in the knowledge files than in the accent layer.
it all depends on their training. And with the churn i imagine they are getting, or the cost measures, it's usually not quite the same.
And yes, cultural difference matters. Americans often have more agency to take initiative, on average. Knowing there's an American on the other side puts me at ease, mentally.
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