Fuck, that sounds too amazing to not try. Thanks for the idea! I’ll try it the next Sunday, as I’m planning pork knuckles for lunch. (I’d try it today but I’m preparing Zebu hump so it doesn’t combo that well.)

That reinforces what you said about being very likely in the autism spectrum - when I say “most people use implicatures all the time”, the exceptions are typically people in the spectrum. Some can detect implicatures through analysis, and in some cases they have previous knowledge of a specific implicature so they can handle that one; but to constantly analyse what you hear, read, say and write is laborious and emotionally displeasing, it fits really well what you said in the OP.

(Interestingly that “all the time” that I used has the same implicature as the “all the millionaires” from your example - epistemically, the “all” doesn’t convey “the complete set without exceptions” in either, but rather “a noteworthy large proportion of the set”. “Boo millionaires” is also a good interpretation but it’s about the attitude of the speaker, not the truth/falseness of the statement.)

This conversation gave me an idea - I’ll encourage my mum (who’s most likely in the autism spectrum) to give ChatGPT a try. Just to see her opinion about it.

I’m sure a linguist could dive way more into depth, but “not English words” is the equivalent of “not a true Scotsman”.

Pretty much. Once speakers start using the word, and expecting others to understand it, it’s already part of the lexicon of that language. Specially if you see signs of phonetic adaptation, like /ø/ becoming /u:/ in a language with no /ø/ (see: “lieu”) - and yet it’s exactly why people complain about those words.

And this sort of complain isn’t even new. Nor the backslash agianst it, as Catullus 84 shows for Latin and Greek.

No problem - I’ve seen worse. I’ve done worse.

(I’m fine, thanks! I hope you’re doing well too.)

I think that the key here are implicatures - things that implied or suggested without being explicitly said, often relying on context to tell apart. It’s situations like someone telling another person “it’s cold out there”, that in the context might be interpreted as “we’re going out so I suggest you to wear warm clothes” or “please close the window for me”.

LLMs model well the grammatical layer of a language, and struggle with the semantic layer (superficial meaning), but they don’t even try to model the pragmatic layer (deep meaning - where implicatures are). As such they will “interpret” everything that you say literally, instead of going out of their way to misunderstand you.

On the other hand, most people use implicatures all the time, and expect others to be using them all the time. Even when there’s none (I call this a “ghost implicature”, dunno if there’s some academic name). And since written communication already prevents us from seeing some contextual clues that someone’s utterance is not to be taken literally, there’s a biiiig window for misunderstanding.

[Sorry for nerding out about Linguistics. I can’t help it.]

That seems sensible.

Even a hypothetically true artificial general intelligence would still not be a moral agent, thus it cannot be held responsible for its actions; as such, whoever deploys and maintains it should be held responsible. That’s doubly true with LLMs as they aren’t even intelligent to begin with.

Yeah, as would eliza (at a much lower cost).

Neither Eliza nor LLMs are “insightful”, but that doesn’t stop them from outputting utterances that a human being would subjectively interpret as such. And the later is considerably better at that.

But the point is that calling them conversations is a long stretch. // You’re just talking to yourself. You’re enjoying the conversation because the LLM is simply saying what you want to hear. // There’s no conversation whatsoever going on there.

Then your point boils down to an “ackshyually”, on the same level as “When you play chess against Stockfish you aren’t actually «playing chess» as a 2P game, you’re just playing against yourself.”

This shite doesn’t need to be smart to be interesting to use and fulfil some [not all] social needs. Specially in the case of autists (as OP mentioned to be likely in the spectrum); I’m not an autist myself but I lived with them for long enough to know how the cookie crumbles for them, opening your mouth is like saying “please put words here, so you can screech at me afterwards”.

People do it all the time regardless of subject. For example, when discussing LLMs:

• If you highlight that they’re useful, some assumer will eventually claim that you think that they’re smart
• If you highlight that they are not smart, some another assumer will eventually claim that you think that they’re useless
• If you say something but “they’re dumb but useful”, you’re bound to get some “I dun unrurrstand, r u against or for LLMs? I’m so confused…”, with both above screeching at you.

I’ve read this text. It’s a good piece, but unrelated to what OP is talking about.

The text boils down to “people who believe that LLMs are smart do so for the same reasons as people who believe that mentalists can read minds do.” OP is not saying anything remotely close to that; instead, they’re saying that LLMs lead to pleasing and insightful conversations in their experience.

My impressions are completely different from yours, but that’s likely due

1. It’s really easy to interpret LLM output as assumptions (i.e. “to vomit certainty”), something that I outright despise.
2. I used Gemini a fair bit more than ChatGPT, and Gemini is trained with a belittling tone.

Even then, I know which sort of people you’re talking about, and… yeah, I hate a lot of those things too. In fact, one of your bullet points (“it understands and responds…”) is what prompted me to leave Twitter and then Reddit.

I couldn’t find it to show you, but I remember an episode of The Osbournes where Ozzy put the pet food bowl in the middle of the kitchen, Sharon warned him “don’t do this, you’ll eventually kick it”, then after some time Ozzy kicked the bowl and blamed their pet for moving the bowl to that position.

I don’t know if Ozzy has victim mentality, but people with victim mentality do this sort of thing all the time - they never acknowledge that they did something that caused them an issue. And that’s bad for both the ones around them and for themselves.

Even when they say to eat an Aussie instead?

and likewise data as [ˈd̪äːt̪ä] “dah-tah.”

More like [ˈd̪ät̪ä], no long vowel. There’s also some disagreements if short /a/ was [ä] or [ɐ], given the symmetry with /e i o u/ as [ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ]. (I can go deeper on this if anyone wants.)

Another thing that people don’t often realise, when they say “you should pronounce it like in Latin!”, is that Latin /d t/ were different from English/German /d t/. They were considerably less aspirated, and as your transcription shows they were dental.

That’s just details though. Your core point (Latin didn’t use a diphthong in this word) is 100% correct.

English covers hundreds of accents and multiple English speaking countries. There isn’t just one pronunciation.

I’m listing the variants that I use.

I’m aware that all three languages have heavy internal variation; for example the Portuguese word could be also pronounced as ['dä.ðuʃ], and a lot of N. Italian speakers don’t really do the compensatory lengthening that I do.

a specific kind of “R” (I have no English examples on mind

General American rendering of “butter” as [bʌɾɚ] uses it.

Kind of off-topic but “Brazilian Portuguese” is not an actual variety (language or dialect). It’s more like a country-based umbrella term, the underlying varieties (like Baiano, Paulistano, etc.) often don’t share features with each other but do it with non-Brazilian varieties.

There’s a good example of that in your own transcription of the word “arauto” as /a’ɾawto/. You’re probably a Sulista speaker*, like me; the others would raise that vowel to /u/, regardless of country because they share vowel raising. (Unless we’re counting Galician into the bag, as it doesn’t raise /o/ to /u/ either. But Galician is better dealt separately from Portuguese.)

*PR minus “nortchi”, SC minus Florianópolis Desterro, northern RS, Registro-SP.

Desculpe-me pela nerdice não requisitada, ma’ é que adoro falar de idiomas.

It’s both things, and subjected to wide variation:

Source for those pronunciations, Wiktionary.

To complicate it further some varieties merge /ʌ/ and /ə/, or /ɪ/ and /ə/. And I’m not even taking into account varieties using a different consonant, /t θ d f v/.

The other side of it is believing everything is your fault.

Yeah, both are problematic. And for the same reason - the person does not learn to accurately identify when they’re responsible for something and should do something about it, although for different reasons.

Watermelon rinds and citrus peels are perfectly edible and tasty once candied, so don’t waste them. If you’re into booze, dump the citrus peels into vodka, wait a month, then mix the vodka half-and-half with syrup. (I know that this is technically not a food eating trick, but still - waste not, want not.)

While not a food eating trick, chopsticks are also great when you’re deep-frying food - they allow you to firmly hold it for flipping, without piercing it or spooning oil.

I had a supermarket pizza (you know, the one that you buy assembled but raw) and a latte.