Pamar

I have just sent a sort of "feature request" to ChatGPT (but my question is generally applicable to most LLMs).

Here is the text, written by ChatGPT itself:

Feature request: Optional temporal awareness per conversation/project. Allow the model to receive relative elapsed time between messages (e.g. +5 min, +4 h, +2 days). This is particularly useful for long-running narrative, journaling, project-tracking, and relationship-oriented conversations where elapsed time itself carries semantic meaning.

I mostly use it for journaling, and the fact that the system is completely unaware that if I have interacted with it for 1 hour and the next message comes ... 6 hours later, something happened in between. Maybe I dozed off. Or maybe something more portentous has happened.

I suppose that not implementing this was a conscious decision, considering that any client can just send either the time with TZ or decide that only relative time is important and provide it by some other mechanism.

So what could be the reason?

- privacy concerns? - efficiency (if I use an LLM mostly to get more complete answers than I can get from Google, or to do vibecoding... then it is pretty much useless)

Or maybe it is because this time feature would impact the answers too much/consume more resources (even if this is tiny, if EVERY MESSAGE FROM EVERY USER has a slightly bigger payload or token usage, I am sure it could become a burden).

For both reason I would make this configurable at the user profile/project/thread level. But maybe I am missing other elements (including: we have already answered this 72 times and it is only thursday) and this is why I am asking here.

Recently someone was surprised that I had some minor interest in foreign languages and I tried to explain that linguistics and computing are far from orthogonal.

I'd like to give this person a more general overview of contacts between these two fields, but I do not want to just carpet bombing them with links. Ideally something like a blog post or a average length magazine article would be ideal, as long as it is not targeted to CS people only.

I suppose I could use ChatGPT and try to whip together something on my own, but I would really prefer to find something written by a human being.

(English would be ideal, but French and German are perfectly acceptable, too)

If you cannot provide a direct link to such an article but you want to add something about the topic please feel free to do so... it might come handy when I realize that I have actually to write something on my own.