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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2271 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 7, 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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Has anyone else experienced the paradox of choice with LLMs? There was a tine when ChatGPT would suggest several follow-up topics after answering my question. I would usually pick none of them. Now it offers just one suggestion, and on softer topics I just say "please go on" 80% of the time. The suggestions are still not this useful when I'm asking a technical question, though.

Use an interface that lets you fork the conversation, and explore several branches.

Why can't I explore several branches in the same conversation? The limited context window?

It depends on the exact implementation, but most frontends have to provide the LLM all or a large subset of the previous conversation as an input for a conversation to meaningfully continue. Where context windows are small, they'll have to truncate early portions, use summarization tricks, or use tricks like rag. Even using those techniques, or for LLMs with very long context windows, an LLM given both 'forks' as an input will usually seem very incoherent very quickly, as it will put information, requests, or status from the 'other' branch -- even the best-case scenario would be much more similar to asking the LLM option A and then option B in sequence, rather than separate branching options.

That said, even LMStudio supports just branching a conversation with a single click. I think you can technically do it with ChatGPT/Grok by abusing the Share function and just using that linked conversation as a separate branch, though it's a little more annoying.

even the best-case scenario would be much more similar to asking the LLM option A and then option B in sequence, rather than separate branching options.

That's what I meant by staying in the same conversation. Not forking it and trying to splice it together, but just adding "thanks, not let's go back to option B and discuss it as well".

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