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jacquesmtoday at 10:51 AM4 repliesview on HN

I have a very simple solution to this but it is a bit expensive. I run two laptops, one that I talk to an LLM on and another where I do all my work and which is my main machine. The LLM is strictly there in a consulting role, I've done some coding experiments as well (see previous comments) but nothing that stood out to me as a major improvement.

The trick is: I can't cut-and-paste between the two machines. So there is never even a temptation to do so and I can guarantee that my writing or other professional output will never be polluted. Because like you I'm well aware of that poor impulse control factor and I figured the only way to really solve this is to make sure it can not happen.


Replies

ethmarkstoday at 1:29 PM

In a similar vein, I want a text editor where pasting from an external source isn't allowed. If you try, it should instantly remove the pasted text. Copy-pasting from inside the document would still be allowed (it could detect this by keeping track of every string in the document that has been selected by the cursor and allowing pastes that match one of those strings).

It wouldn't work in every use case (what if you need to include a verbatim quote and don't want to make typos by manually typing it?), but it'd be useful when everything in the document should be your words and you want to remove the temptation to use LLMs.

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everdrivetoday at 12:38 PM

This is a nice solution, but I think it speaks to just how enticing the problem is. This is the sort of tactic someone with a gambling addiction would employ. I don't say that to be rude to you: I've had to do similar things with regard to addicting infinite-scroll internet sites, and I definitely give in more than I'd like.

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manbashtoday at 11:19 AM

This somewhat of the equivalent of "quitting cold turkey", in the sense that you remove the temptation from your reach.

The problem is that it's just much easier to un-quit and run the LLM in the same laptop you work on.

It's just so very tempting.

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jjgreentoday at 11:06 AM

You could ssh in to the "dirty" machine ... just sayin'

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