This lossy mingling of expressions that sound similar is a natural process always present in the evolution of a language. Giving up is a correct and healthy response imo.
"Begging the question" is a great example - its intended meaning as a specific fallacy descriptor lose to face-value interpretations that are "wrong" but also extremely fair for somebody to make. All this means is that "begging the question" is a weak name for the fallacy, because if you don't know what it means, a wrong assumption is easily available and contextually often seems to fit.
The language crushing out these expressions is a feature. Better all around to say the argument is circular or it assumes the conclusion. Doing those things may _actually_ "raise questions" as well as "begging the question" which makes things even worse.
It's not the fault of the casual language users that this expression is poorly understood, it's just bad naming in the first place.
Can confirm. I zoom and pan on lots of websites in my daily browsing and would have no idea if toasts are popping in and out. I'll notice system level toasts though.
Have you tested this? Often click handlers are on some non-interactive ancestor element, it is not a good heuristic for something being interactive itself or what name it should have. Sometimes the listener is on the body element and we just parse out the triggering element and do something.
> I didn't think that would controversial when talking about LLMs, with people rushing to remind me that the mirror is not sentient. It feels like an insecurity on the part of many.
For what it's worth I never thought you perceived the LLM as sentient. Though I see the overlap - one of the reasons I don't consider LLM output to be "truth" is that that there is no sense in which the LLM _knows_ what is true or not. So it's just ... stuff, and often sycophantic stuff at that.
The mirror is a better metaphor. If there is any "uncomfortable truth" surfaced in the way I think you have described, it is only the meaning you make from the inanimate stream of words received from the LLM. And in as much as the output is interesting of useful for you, great.
You know that it's true that stealing is against the ten commandments, so when the LLM says something to that effect based on the internal processing of your input in relation to its training data, YOU can determine the truth of that.
> The training data contains all kinds of truths.
There is also noise, fiction, satire, and lies in the training data. And the recombination of true data can lead to false outputs - attributing a real statement to the wrong person is false, even if the statement and the speaker are both real.
But you are not talking about simple factual information, you're talking about finding uncomfortable truths through conversation with an LLM.
The LLM is not telling you things that it understands to be truth. It is generating ink blots for you to interpret following a set of hints and guidance about relationships between tokens & some probabilistic noise for good measure.
If you find truth in what the LLM says, that comes from YOU, it's not because the LLM in some way can knows what is true and give it to you straight.
Personifying the LLM as being capable of knowing truths seems like a risky pattern to me. If you ever (intentionally or not) find yourself "trusting" the LLM to where you end up believing something is true based purely on it telling you, you are polluting your own mental training data with unverified technohaikus. The downstream effects of this don't seem very good to me.
Of course, we internalize lies all the time, but chatbots have such a person-like way of interacting that I think they can end run around some of our usual defenses in ways we haven't really figured out yet.
I think some of the most important problems get hidden if there is a culture where you expected to also want a specific solution before you complain. People avoid reporting difficult, complex problems without obvious solutions. Maybe they just see somethings as "the way things are" at that org or that leadership doesn't want to hear their needs.
Better to have a free, easy ability to complain about things, and if there is a good manager hanging around somewhere, they can synthesize the complaints and discover if there are solutions possible at the org level, which individual contributors might not know about or even be functionally able to own.