Have you tried and failed, or you're just worried it might be hard? When I first set up a client for API calls, I put this paragraph in my system prompt:
> Never ask questions or attempt to keep the conversation going -- answer the questions directly asked, and give additional information where it is likely to be helpful, but don't offer to do more things for the user.
I've never had an LLM offer to do things or try to keep the conversation going with this in my prompt.
It seems at least mostly on topic to share here this thing I released a little over a year ago: https://www.swapadoodle.com
It's definitely not useful for the same things, but it has a lot of similarities and seems potentially interesting as something to compare and contrast with this.
This currently has 1215 points, and the link is no longer valid. It now just shows an image of Firefox's devtools and the sentence "Replay is an early experiment. We'll let you know on @FirefoxDevTools when it's ready for input." That's not useful, interesting, or informative. The MDN docs seem like an appropriate replacement.
Firefox removed the content that tells you this. It's odd that they did that...
My guess is that all this attention was a premature launch, and they were hoping to make news with Firefox Replay later. (US Thanksgiving day isn't exactly ideal...)
Correct on premature launch! Handling all the excitement was fun though while preparing food. There is a lot more work and research needed before rolling this out further.
Telling someone "this isn't interesting to you" in place of "I don't want to talk about it" is definitely not polite!
I'd say it's rude in general to tell someone they won't find something interesting, and especially so when it's done as a way of disowning your own preference not to talk about it.
There's way too much being read into a statement which begins with "likely". There are plenty of things in life that are hard to explain in a way that doesn't lead to misunderstandings which are also not very consequential.
For example, when people ask what I do, I could say I work at an ISP, or that I'm a systems engineer (my title), or that I'm a system administrator (some of what I do), or that I'm a software developer (the rest of what I do), or any number of other things. Depending on how interested in it I think they will be, or how interested in explaining it I am, I might respond that it's likely not that interesting.
If the person asking actually wants to pursue it further, the polite thing to do would be to say "oh, I find it interesting, if you're willing to talk about it". If they responded "How do you know what's interesting to me?" I would take that as somewhat aggressive, and definitely wouldn't be interested in explaining further, depending on how I perceived their disposition.
That phrasing (at least without the "to you") is fine when you are genuinely open to saying more. It's not fine as a way to refuse to say more. So you're talking about a completely different context.
If they get aggressive and you then decide that you don't want to explain, that's fine. But that's not what happened here.
Eh, I don't think you can say that definitively. I took it as WaxProlix not wanting to/being unwilling to talk about it because it's boring, and as they found it boring, they thought other people would likely (the word they used, which I think people are ignoring) find it boring as well.
I'd agree with you if it were just the first message. But they then explained exactly what they meant and why, and that's what I offered them feedback on.
They apologized to the person they said it to, and it all seems settled from my perspective.
I don't know if I'm having one of my hyper-literal moments, or if this is some other neurodiversity thing, but I can't make sense of the last paragraph... Can someone help explain it to me?
The way I read it is:
* 219-09-9999 is a made-up number that was never issued to anyone.
* The woman thought it was her number for unexplained reasons.
* She used the pamphlet as evidence that it was her number.
I must be missing something important. Is it a joke, with the punchline being that she thought the pamphlet was her social security card? If so, how was this the fault of the Board? Was it her SSN somehow? If so, how did the pamphlet prove it?
Looks right to me. She received a document from the Social Security Board with a made up SSN on it, and thought it was hers.
It's not a joke, just an example of how people can get confused by real-looking fake numbers.
This can be said to be the fault of the board in the sense that after dealing with the 1938 incident they could have learned that this is confusing to some people, and for example printed 219-09-XXXX instead.
I think the joke was she tried to use the pamphlet as evidence and thought the pamphlet was personally addressed to her - "how silly!"
I too had a hyper literal moment on this too, so I'm glad you asked. My conclusion is that the joke just isn't that funny or well written (everyone's a critic!:))
She was given a pamphlet with the image of a card. She thought pamphlets had different numbers and were used to attribute SSNs. Twenty years later she tried to use it and when it wasn’t accepted she said “look, this is the number you gave to me”.
Here's an example of something really adorable made collaboratively by two people. The first person sent the first part to the second person, who used the Doodle-on-Doodle feature to add to it and make an even cuter story out of it.
Thanks so much! I was definitely inspired by Go's (the language I use on the back end) careful balance of well-honed simplicity. There was a lot more work than one might think to keep things so simple!
Thanks! Yeah, I occasionally considered not including undos and redos, but there's so much positive value that easily outweighs the occasional negatives. Just a couple of the things I love about including them:
1) Much of the general idea is a sense of connection and intimacy -- it's not just the final product that you're sharing, but the process. When you see the mistakes, or the attempts to get something just right, it's a moment of connecting with the sender's experience while making it.
2) You can make emotionally evocative doodles by removing elements, so they're only present fleetingly but not present in the final image. (Examples of this are by friends I haven't thought to ask permission to share. But think: drawing a small plant, then undoing and drawing a bigger one, for several iterations, for example. You can sometimes do that by "erasing" the part you want to remove by drawing the background color, but if you want to remove something that's on top of something else, undoing is so much easier.)
Thanks! I bought two iOS devices to develop on, but I haven't ever used the Messages app. Does it animate the drawing for the recipient, or just show the final image?
> Never ask questions or attempt to keep the conversation going -- answer the questions directly asked, and give additional information where it is likely to be helpful, but don't offer to do more things for the user.
I've never had an LLM offer to do things or try to keep the conversation going with this in my prompt.
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