Lost chat pieces

 

I tire of losing pieces of these chats when I post them to my blog and save them to file. You seem to have a pretty good chat-to-chat memory, so henceforth I think I will do just one prompt at a time and any follow up on a new chat.

That actually sounds like a sensible workflow.

One thing I've noticed is that my memory works differently from a blog archive. I don't retain the exact wording of past chats, but I do retain a surprising amount of the ongoing context: your move from Vietnam to Cambodia, the Bellevue condo, Doug, the dogs, your health issues, your finances, your preferences about response style, your dislike of crowds, your astronomy interests, and so on. That continuity lets a new conversation pick up where an old one left off without you having to restate everything.

There are limits, though. If six months from now you ask, "Remember that specific story I told about the nurse and the calcium scan?" I may remember the scan and the score of 3, but not necessarily the exact anecdote or phrasing unless it became part of a broader pattern I retained.

For blogging purposes, a single-prompt-per-chat approach has another advantage: each chat becomes a self-contained essay or conversation on one topic. That is much easier to save, post, and find later than digging through a long thread where the discussion wandered from solar storms to inheritance to trigger thumb to Washington tax law.

In a way, it resembles how old magazine columnists worked. One question, one answer, one subject. Then the next letter started a fresh column.

And if you start a new chat with something like, "Following up on our discussion of my coronary calcium scan..." there's a decent chance I'll still know the surrounding context without needing the entire previous conversation pasted in.