alt Hacker NewsI've decided that I'm done being pissy about this kind of response, or thinking that it's something that can be coached away. I choose to look at it like any other cultural communication difference - something that you learn about, try to give some grace to, and work a little harder to bridge (unless you're defusing a bomb, performing surgery, flying an airplane etc.).
In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help."
For me, it really comes down to is whether or not I believe the responder is acting in good faith. If you can't assume good faith, the shape of the response isn't the actual problem.
Of course, my opinion of them is also related to how often their interpreted answer or conversational contribution is "I don't know", and how often they choose to interject with that when it's not necessary. I suppose the latter is cultural too; perhaps I should be clearer in open forums whether I expect them to answer.
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To me, acting in good faith means saying something like "I'm not sure, but Claude says this, which sounds right: [short informative clip from Claude's wall of text]". Don't pretend it's your response, make sure it has info you think is useful, and edit it down.
> In this person's communication culture, they are saying "I don't know, but here's my attempt to help."
It's still a bad attempt at help. Objectively net-zero utility at best.
If it's really just "culture" but they genuinely want to help, then they can in fact be coached. If they're only interested in appearances, well, I agree training isn't going to help.
Copy/pasting a question to LLM and pasting back the output isn't an attempt ar being helpful. It's the equivalent of a lmgtfy link.
With lmgtfy, the point was to show that you can do that with Google, how you can do it, and you shouldn’t ask (not in the nicest way for sure). With replying with an LLM answer, you pretend that I cannot do the same. The equivalent would be a link to an LLM chat. There is a clear intent difference. The LLM answer version doesn’t want to teach the how.