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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 10, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How do you all interact with LLMs?

I’ve seen a few articles recently noting the rise of AI as a buddy / therapist or whatever. It’s usually beside the point of the article but an implicit notion is that lot of folks regularly ‘chat’ with AI as if it were a person.

Which I find baffling. Outside of the very early novelty, I find this way of interacting extremely boring and tedious, and generally find the fact that AI wants to get conversational with me a general frustrater.

If I’m not using AI as a utility ‘write X, troubleshoot Y, give me steps for Z’, and I’m using it recreationally / casually, it’s more akin to web surfing or browsing Wikipedia than chatting on a forum or whatever. I will use it as an open format encyclopedia and explicitly not as a conversationalist sounding board. And i genuinely find negative value in the fact that the former is constantly interrupted with the attempt to be the latter.

So my question is again, how far outside of the grain am I?

It's basically replaced google for me.

I use it for boilerplate business writing, as it's both faster and slightly better at it than I am (I just started a new career so it's very useful).

It writes me code/excel formulas, it's insane at writing formulas.

I find chatting to an AI just to chat is insane, weird, and mildly off-putting. However, I actually think it's a decent tool for self-therapy, if used well.

It's great as essentially an interactive CBT workbook. "I'm feeling anxious about X,Y,Z what should I do?"

It gives pretty trite advice (go for a walk, do a breathing exercise, etc) but when you're dysregulated it's soooooo much easier to follow instructions than it is to self-motivate and bootstrap your way out.

I've also tried to infodump my neuroses to see if it had any root cause/triage advice, which it was about as effective as a therapist, which is to say it took some slightly emotionally resonant stabs in the dark but it's all so squishy it's basically impossible to say or verify. The "why am I like this" is a mediocre question, "I'm like this, what next" is a much better one.