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Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

thesignalist.io

121–130 of 169 posts

Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

#122
It started out as an interesting read, until I got to this paragraph:

> The value didn't come from what was said at that moment. It came from what had been built across many such moments: a pattern of mutual recognition, a shared context, a baseline of trust that made the later exchange possible. The relationship was the infrastructure. The conversation was where it had been built, one cup of coffee at a time.

And that made me immediately question the worth of the entire piece. I get it, LLMS can rewrite an entire blog post in a minute, which can be quite tempting for people that don't enjoy writing itself, but it just takes so much variety away. I think people should stick to grammatical corrections only, and not rephrase entire paragraphs (never mind letting an LLM write everything in the first place).

Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

#123
In the nineties I was a junior copywriter at BMP DDB in London. The creative department was made up of loads of small offices, each with a two-person creative team working out loud all day. The best ideas rarely came from one person thinking alone. Someone would say something half-formed about a brief and their partner would catch it, often bouncing ideas back and forth. Reckon the whole building ran on that. Well, apart from the late and brilliant John Webster, who had his own office at the top of the corridor. We were lucky enough to have ours opposite his.

Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

#125
post #3

In 2017 LLMs weren't powerful enough to generate working code on their own, but my goal was to at least create a chatbot that could help you rubber-duck-debug your way to a solution. Unfortunately the tech wasn't quite strong enough for that, and not enough engineers even knew what rubber-duck-debugging was. RIP Duckly. Trying to train an LLM on two 1080ti's on the StackOverflow corpus in my living room was a vibe th…

I wonder how much is actually needed to create an automated rubber duck. How well would ELIZA work? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA) (might need some adjustment to not talk like a therapist, but you get the idea)

Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

#126

It started out as an interesting read, until I got to this paragraph: > The value didn't come from what was said at that moment. It came from what had been built across many such moments: a pattern of mutual recognition, a shared context, a baseline of trust that made the later exchange possible. The relationship was the infrastructure. The conversation was where it had been built, one cup of coffee at a time. And th…

Similar: as soon as I see that LLM style I bail out, you can't trust the content.

If they can't be arsed to write it, why TF should I be arsed to read it.

Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

#127

Something funny i discover: i had thoughts or tried to explain something decades ago and made a drawing. Some of these are just a circle with some arrows. Turns out it is really hard to make a drawing bad enough that you dont know what it is. It sometimes works better than even a written description. So you can just doodle in a notebook and tell yourself you've written it down. If you look at it regularly im sure rec…

A different funny that should be archived here with the above. Assuming you can type well. Take a sentence, put your hands on the keyboard with the intend to type it but dont do it. Some time later dont try to remember the sentence but just put the hands on the keys and let them type. Its really funny seeing the text come out of your keyboard buffer muscle memory. Some japanese guy said he played with the concept and…

You can't think of a sentence and type it later without actively remembering it. You either forgot the sentence by then or you're able to recall it - just typing from memory without actively remembering is just not a thing that is possible. Muscle memory isn't built from thinking one time about what you'd do.

Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Created a throwaway for this, but is this not what people do? Not so much imagining a conversation in your head, but playing through a conversation with "the other side" of the coin (be it an idea, plan, problem, solution etc) which are both yourself if that makes sense. Is this not what the inner monologue to yourself is? Your inner is conversing with your outer monologue. Hard to explain. Would consider myself to b…

> Created a throwaway for this, but is this not what people do? I think it's okay, unless you converse online with your throwaways.

No, I've hacked other peoples account to do that.

Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

#129
post #95
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different people’s minds work very differently. More differently than most people imagine.

I was reading the parent and thinking the same thing - I can't do that. There's no "voice" in my head like some people describe. If I want to model speaking like a mock conversation, I have to write it or ... speak it, even silently, to convert from the visuals that are my thought. As an aside, I end up having to organize certain types of thoughts through speaking, which requires some adaptations and limiting functio…

Agreed. I have to write stuff down, with a pen, on paper, for this to work. Typing into a machine works sort of, but not on the same level.

Re: Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

#130

It started out as an interesting read, until I got to this paragraph: > The value didn't come from what was said at that moment. It came from what had been built across many such moments: a pattern of mutual recognition, a shared context, a baseline of trust that made the later exchange possible. The relationship was the infrastructure. The conversation was where it had been built, one cup of coffee at a time. And th…

This shit gets me irrationally mad. Well, the existence of such content doesn't, but the fact that other people aren't disdained by it (this dogshit has almost 300 upvotes on _HN_ right now) is what gets me.
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