u/ZBLongladder

Every time I've interacted with an LLM, the answer I got back invariably felt way too structured. Like a B/B+ high school student who had a solid enough grasp on writing to get their point across but wasn't actually a good enough writer to make it flow or sound natural. E.g., I've never had a human insert a bulleted list into a response to something I said in casual conversation, but bots do that constantly. Like, it really sounds like a student doing a miniature essay, just about, like, what to look for in a good tube amp or whatever I asked about. It can be practically useful to have stuff presented that way, it just feels unmistakably like you're talking to a machine. I even once tried to use Gemini as a chat companion when my anxiety spiked and nobody was available to comfort me, but I didn't find it helpful because its style just felt so unnatural, even though I sincerely wanted it to work at the time.

Dad's death was a complete shock. He had been having memory trouble for years, but that seemed to get better and worse with treatments his doctors prescribed, and I was worried about him but he seemed to be doing OK. Then all the sudden he forgot how to use his computer, he started going downhill really quickly, and a month later Mom had to get him to the hospital because he was acting strangely. It turns out, in his mid-70s, he had what the hospital staff described as the brain of a 95-year-old and had only a few days left to live. I didn't even get to come down to say goodbye, and he didn't want a funeral, so to me it just felt like my dad was fine one day, in the hospital the next, and less than a week later he was gone. He must've been masking the symptoms for years -- he was really smart, and I've heard that smart patients can mask their symptoms more easily.

My mom has dementia, too, and I'm worried about her now...she has confabulations (sometimes really bad ones, like thinking my partner wants to steal her house), she has trouble with memory (she can't even remember the name of the shopping center down the street from her house that has her favorite restaurant in it), and her personality has been changing (sometimes for the better, like she's been a lot less judgmental of me, but sometimes worse, like she's pretty much driven away everyone who's tried to make friends with her since Dad died by being judgmental and dismissive). She was pretty much codependent with Dad, so she complains of being incredibly lonely and bored, but she won't try to go out and make friends, and she says mean things about the friends and family who try to help her (sometimes due to confabulations, I think). Most of the family wants her to move into a home, but her yard work is her only hobby, and besides she loves her house so much she'd never agree to it. I want to have a nurse or social worker do home visits, but she won't agree to that either. I'm so worried about her -- I keep thinking I'm just going to get a call one day that she's had a horrible accident and died, but there's really nothing we can do right now because she's so stubborn...

Bucatini Cacio e Pepe