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glenstein 2 hours ago

I think it's bad manners to bluntly tell someone they should "read up" on something because it naturally reads as a kind of a closeted accusation of not being sufficiently well informed. There are ways of broaching the topic of what background knowledge is informing their perspective that don't involve the accusation.

Just to add a small bit of anecdotal value so this comment isn't just a scold: I one time many years ago suggesting an elegant way for Twitter to handle long form text without changing it's then-iconic 140 character limit was to treat it like an attachment, like a video or image. Today, you can see a version of that in how Claude takes large pastes and treats them like attached text blobs, or to a lesser extent in how Substack Notes can reference full size "posts", another example of short form content "attaching" longer form.

I was bluntly told to "look up twitlonger", which I suppose could have been helpful if I had indeed not known about twitlonger, but I had, and it wasn't what I had in mind. I did learn something from it though, which was that it's a mode of communication that implies you don't know what you're talking about with plausible deniability, which I suspect is too irresistible to lovers of passive aggression to go unused.

vunderba 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It wasn't intended as such, but I take your point.

To provide a bit more context: Weizenbaum (a computer scientist in the 60s) developed ELIZA, a LISP-based chatbot that was loosely modeled on Rogerian psychotherapy. It was designed to respond in a reflective way in order to elicit details from the user.

What he found was that, despite the program being relatively primitive in nature (relying on simple natural language parsing heuristics), people he regarded as otherwise intelligent and rational would disclose remarkable amounts of personal information and quickly form emotional attachments to what was, in reality, little more than a glorified pattern-matching system.

quectophoton 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If it helps, I didn't find anything wrong with your comment.

I appreciate the link and the info :)