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Madame Claude Will See You Now
May 12, 2026
Posted 2 hours ago by
The power of the LLM, in the palm of your hand AI chatbots have a setting engineers call “temperature,” writes Herbert Lin, a senior research scholar at Stanford University and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. It defines how engaging a chatbot’s output will be. Set too low and it’s boring. Setting it too high produces noise (Washington Post gift link): The sweet spot places the output just beyond what you could have anticipated — familiar enough to seem plausible, unexpected enough to seem insightful.
That gap between what you expected and what the system produced is where something remarkable happens: You supply the meaning. AI “knows.” It “understands.” It offers comforting, self-reinforcing advice on health, relationships, careers, etc. Not unlike “Mrs. King” who, like the Dread Pirate Roberts, has been in business at the location seen at the top since I was in college, if not before. Chatbots work like palm readers, Lin suggests: Consider how a skilled palm reader works. She does not divine your destiny from the lines in your hand. She reads you — your affect, your posture, your anxieties, the cultural clues in your clothing and speech. The palm is just a prop, a frame that gives her permission to speak and you a reason to listen. Her authority comes from carefully cultivated performance. The reading is improvisation guided by cues you have already given. When the reader lands on something true, it feels revelatory — not because of hidden knowledge but because the frame itself feels mysterious and
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