If this is for personal interest, go into it with relatively concrete questions, and then try to answer them.

Right, what I’m saying is where do you draw the line at where “in the sun” ends?

What? You didn’t verify anything, you just said you remember being told once. It’s not an obvious fact because it isn’t true, you made it up. It’s not foolish to believe a word means what it means, you can just look up the definition. Are you high or something?

Whoever told you that was incorrect. Literally means the plain textbook definition of the words written, as opposed to euphemism or metaphor. If I say “I would literally die on this hill”, it means that there is an actual large mound of dirt that I am willing to lose my life on.

Any other interpretation is literally incorrect.

I’m thinking about it, and I think they might be right. Sunbeams are a part of the sun, albeit mingled with atmosphere. If they were in direct line of the sun, i could consider them technically, literally, correct.

It all depends on whether you consider an object bathed in the radiance of something to be “in” that thing, but I’m kinda inclined to consider that.

Starship Troopers is not misunderstood satire

I’ve read a lot of Heinlein, and while I don’t think “satire” is quite the right word, I’d consider it more of a thought experiment than sincere belief.

As long as they stay to the right I don’t care that much

I’m fine with language evolving over time, but I reject “literally” being used to mean “figuratively”. Distinguishing figurative from literal is, literally, the word’s one job. Take that away, and the word literally doesn’t mean anything but a generic intensifier. There literally isn’t another word that fulfills that disambiguating purpose, this semantic drift only decreases clarity.

The typical therapist advice about focusing only on the things you can personally change does not work well on macro issues. Issues that were created by lots of people working together like climate change require a bunch of people working together to fix.

But collaborating with others to address macro problems is something you can personally do.

See, there are three kinds of people: dicks, pussies, and assholes. Pussies think everyone can get along, and dicks just want to fuck all the time without thinking it through. But then you got your assholes. And all the assholes want is to shit all over everything. So pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes! And if they didn’t fuck the assholes, you know what you’d get? You’d get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!

I mean, I like Turkish delight, but I’m not sure I’d betray my family to an evil witch for it.

Women face different inequality than men. Where women are treated as valuable property, men are treated as disposable tools or dangerous threats. Feminism has done much to elevate women above valuable property, but men are still treated as disposable or dangerous.

Egalitarianism is a better term.

I’m partial to the original Dwarf Fortress music

Boot up

Nothing But Trouble

Watching sports

It’s also stupid to waste resources to run an inefficient LLM that a regular search and a few minutes of time, along with like a bite of an apple worth of energy, could easily handle.

From what I can tell, running an LLM isn’t really all that energy intensive, it’s the training that takes loads of energy. And it’s not like regular searches don’t use loads of energy to initially index web results.

And this also ignores the gap between having a question, and knowing how to search for the answer. You might not even know where to start. Maybe you can search a vague question, but you’re essentially hoping that somewhere in the first few results is a relevant discussion to get you on the right path. GPT, I find, is more efficient for getting from vague questions to more directed queries.

After all that, you’re going to need to check all those sources chatGPT used anyways, so how much time is it really saving you? At least with Wikipedia I know other people have looked at the same things I’m looking at, and a small percentage of those people will actually correct errors.

I find this attitude much more troubling than responsible LLM use. You should not be trusting tertiary sources, no matter how good their track record, you should be checking the sources used by Wikipedia too. You should always be checking your sources.

Many people aren’t using it as a valid research aid like you point out, they’re just pasting directly out of it onto the internet.

That’s beyond the scope of my argument, and not really much worse than pasting directly from any tertiary source.

Just using the “information” it regurgitates isn’t very useful, which is why I didn’t recommend doing that. Whether the information summarized by Wikipedia and ChatGPT is accurate really isn’t important, you use those tools to find primary sources.

ChatGPT is a moderately useful tertiary source. Quoting Wikipedia isn’t research, but using Wikipedia to find primary sources and reading those is a good faith effort. Likewise, asking ChatGPT in and of itself isn’t research, but it can be a valid research aid if you use it to find relevant primary sources.