Once in a while, you’ve got to bend the rules a bit.
hjhornbeck: I know, I know, I’m not allowed to comment here, but this is definitely worth clarifying in public.
Nope! One side effect of having no comment section under my posts is that you can’t do drive-by insults. If you have beef with something I wrote, you’ve gotta spend the time and effort to type up a blog post, and that leads to much higher-quality feedback. I haven’t always spotted your blog posts directed at me in a timely fashion, but I have always found them educational.
This goes both ways. My “Loneliness” series is me bringing out my “A game” to respond to your pinned post. I’m trying to keep it down to four posts in five parts, but that currently implies “Loneliness, 4” is going to be quite long. Hopefully it’s worth the wait.
If my last post‘s thesis is correct, the alternative to dysfunction is dialog. Get everyone talking, swapping evidence and arguments, and we’ll avoid all that mess. I’ve been trying to put that into action for months now… with one glaring exception. I publish a blog post, Mélange responds, but I don’t respond back. Wash, rinse, repeat.
LLM boosters and I have another asymmetry. If LLMs have “become your councilor, your guidebook, your companion, friend, or even lover,” as I put it, you are not going to respond well to any critique of them. It may not have been obvious I was trying to soften the blow on my first critique of Ranum, but for the second I tried to make it visible enough to be seen from space. Mélange has made it abundantly clear they do not want me in their comment section, even when I’m not challenging their views. My words can do a remarkable amount of emotional damage, so I must wield them carefully. Or not wield them at all, even if that makes me a bit of a hypocrite.
Get emotional. Tell us why you feel what you feel. I did. … While I don’t think you’ve been straight with us about the emotional underpinning of your position, you really aren’t obligated to. I’m not entitled to anything you don’t want to give of yourself.
A few paragraphs of minimal critique made Mélange explode, by their own admission, and yet they also want some sort of reply. I suspect this is bait (why threaten to ban me, when you’ve already banned me?), but my hypocrisy is grating on me.