Post

What are LLMs and how do ppl use them?

Introductory rates are artificially low to drive adoption rates. (e.g. streaming) UI is continually optimized to maximize corporate profit. (e.g. web search) *It is not a good idea to make yourself dependent on tools that will only get more expensive and worse.* 2/2

I’d love the idea of a little robot pal (I’m silly like that) if it wasn’t so unignorably connected to corporate interests.

Not necessarily. Because within search engines there is (or at least was) a method to follow regarding organization. And within subspaces (ex wikipedia) there are organization structures as well. The organization of library resources is a good skill to know. But it is by no means the sole method

Maybe, but the lack of critical awareness in the face of technological change is consistent; and Google replaced a system designed around a known model of information with a popularity contest, all 'good enough'.

Nahhhhhh.... Google started to go to heck a number of years ago.

In other words, marketing is a separate problem and IT is not nearly so resilient to LLM abuses so there will be a lot of money behind marketing people to pretend to be you. 'ChatGPT, tell me how to look like totally not a ChatGPT user' is a tactic. Hence the culty vibes of it all.

Yup. Totally this.

Jaycoding.. the new crime

Your lips to gods ears

I type email fast like no need clippy do for me

I’m hearing folks start to coalesce around the word “slop” in reference to AI/LLMs and it’s genius—just right.

My sole use case for LLM is writing emails to my boss with a 'light and professional' tone.

I think about that a lot and compare it to my past life as a living, walking memory bank of birthdays/appointments/anniversaries/addresses/phone numbers, and now I can hardly remember my OWN phone number because my computer remembers it for me. God help me if I lose the computer. THIS IS BAD.

Well put homie.

Just got confirmation on Friday that one of my clinicians is using ChatGPT for resolving medication questions. If I had my way they'd get a warning and then fired. Beyond holy hell pt safety, they're not being paid six figures to copy paste from an LLM, they're paid that for their knowledge/skills

I dunno. The cynic in me says all it will do is cause increasing frustration from dealing with stupider and stupider people.

Absolutely. The consequences are visibly apparent. I do not want to become like that when the agent in question is so limited and broken in important ways, while creating an illusion of competence. I'm a huge believer in transhumanism but this is not the way to accomplish it.

Knowing how words work is important, and I guess we are all getting a reminder of that the hard way.

It's a circle.

Intense AI users = NFT = crypto bros

📌

As the average summers will also be 135 degrees…..we”ll be lucky to be here in a few years.

Yes, we learned more about data privacy and got rid of our Alexa, even though it only ever set alarms and kept the grocery list.

Being educated and employed before the age of LLMs is such a boon. Having actual understanding of a domain shows you how much LLMs miss and gives you a better model of what tasks they can and can't be used for. But those that fall to the sirens song won't ever think they have an incentive to learn.

In this case the Luddites will be the only ones left who know what that means. bsky.app/profile/fain...

Read a book. Read another book. That's not enough. Read more books.

I believe that too. Poor suckers.

This seems like incredibly wishful thinking, but I hope you are right.

Are there other ideas and institutions that people have historically outsourced cognitive functions to or is this over reliance on llms unique?

My brain will have more ridges than the smooth-surfaced LLMers

Sure, if by "pay off" you mean, leave us feeling even more isolated as the last vestiges of a former age I'm looking forward to that

I've seen and regularly use amazing implementations of this tech (e.g., assistants for writing code, language translation), and obviously dumb ones (generated legal filings / judicial opinions with fake citations). I think one of the lessons of this AI age is that you have to use sound judgement.

Brain function is like mobility - taken for granted until it has been lost.

There have been rewards for some people just repeating what those more powerful than them. Critical analysis would make you persona non grata in some circles

Half my job has turned into AI related work, due to being a data wrangler. There are a lot of legitimate uses. But I'm also seeing a LOT of ceding work that isn't best served by being done by an LLM.

This, but folks seems to be very binary in their approach: either LLMs run my life or LLMs are the antichrist.

Slippery slope from using an LLM to sort/cat data to slopping yourself. As with everything else free on the internet YOU are the product and addiction to it is the point. Agree to disagree with you and OP. Stay away from this shit unless all it does is check your PowerShell for errors.

That tiktoker who came up with "slopper" to describe someone who constantly talks about using LLMs was truly inspired That word/framework is pure gold & I'll be using it daily

LLMs suck ass. They’re cloying and annoying and wrong a lot.

using tax lawyers?? huh?

Partners company have a hiring freeze while they look into how they can utilise LLMs. Hoping it comes back to bite them, has pissed off many who have been denied leave & transition to retirement. Real possibility some will just quit which is a problem as takes 6 months+ to train replacement.

Yup, use of AI is now a thing to detail at my company. I had to invent a use for it and I’m not actually going to do it

Very much yes to this.

Meanwhile if I were a hiring manager, an employee distrusting LLMs would be a MASSIVE, HUGE green flag because that means they understand what LLMs are and why it's a terrible idea to lean hard on them for your work.

I’ve literally only found them useful in drafting resumes and cover letters because ironically the less human you sound, the more likely you are to get through to a person

The thing I'm describing is roughly the value add of some kind of free addon for the intermediate tier of a Salesforce plan or something, it doesn't justify any of the enormous time or money or environmental damage, and it's like a x0,000 dollar business not a trillion dollar one

Given its problems with accuracy, feels like you could just do this with random selection

Converting random data to json.

The seven deadly regexes

Please do not. They will end up doing crazy unexpected matches. That is a place *not* to use LLM. Crappy FastAPI interfacing to internal libraries, sure. Or generation of fast & cheap dashboard sites.

I make my own regexes and never thought to have an LLM do that. I use them to extract tabular data from PDFs, except often they are confidential

Seriously, like mostly transforming structured data not much else in my domain

.*

nvr seen sum1 pluralize regex b4

10/10 would use for regexes, they annoy me

lmao exactly

LLM can organize these 100 messages into similar buckets so I don’t have to do it myself. I still have to double check all of it and make sure it makes sense but it’s easier than starting from scratch

I would pay actual money to hear any one of these AI hyping fops to give an honest breakdown of costs and benefits. Like here's the real cost of compute in 2025 dollars, and this is the real use case that would at $15 minimum wage cost X. But it's all just incomprehensible gobledigook.

Don't get me wrong, I tremendously enjoy trying to get AI image generation to add cookie monster or oscar the grouch into scientific imagery, but it's not exactly worth the real cost (be it old growth forests or poisoned minority neighborhoods) to justify keeping it.

I refuse voluntary cognitive decline (bullshit machine edition).

I still personally refuse to use them for anything out of protest. I know I am robbing myself of some use cases but I still personally believe the energy costs and pollution just isn't worth anything I encounter in my day to day

And you never learn how to do that if you let the AI do all your thinking for you.

On the flip side investing time to learn how LLM actually works is a good brain exercise and helps sharpen cognitive skill.

Anyone who got a Ti-89 way too young and then failed to learn much of Calculus (while of course still passing due to said Ti-89) will understand this.

Agreed. I really see it as so spotty and more of a pain sometimes to use for anything complex. Basically use it like for assistant low level internship work and I think you're fine. I like using it for making simple Excel charts or just drafting an email before I go back and revise that shit again.

Unless you have a human knowledgable on the subject vetting a machine's output, you can't trust anything that the machine confidently says is right, or even real. I can hallucinate perfectly well by myself, thank you; at least I can tell when I am hallucinating.

I would call it a "bullshit machine", in the sense of bullshit described in Harry G. Frankfurt's treatise "On Bullshit". The LLM can neither lie nor tell the truth because it doesn't have intention. It's bullshit in its purest form.

(I probably botched it, a lot's been happening in my life since I heard this talk and frankly keeping my eyes open and putting one foot in front of the other has been tough work. But I still do insist on knowing things. Also, Ken is a great, engaging speaker, as it turns out.)

Em-dashes and I have an insane love affair that goes back decades now. Pry them from my cold dead hands— they're excellent.

i remember confusing someone once by using pronouns. as in they couldn't follow that the subject named in one sentence was the object of the pronoun in the following i remember because it took me a good 10 mins or so to finally realize that was the issue for them

I almost feel even calling it the "Lying machine" gives it more credit than it's due, since lying at least implies intentionality and understanding.

We still have not come to any terms with AI with how to deal with its implicit bias, or anything that seems to be hate speech, crime, or violence. Where’s the ethics in these stupid things??

I remember someone once posting "I want AI that will do my dishes and my laundry to free me up for art and music, not the other way around."

and by interesting I mean that sucks

But, but... we MUST work 996 workweeks so that our AI overlords are free to write shitty, derivative Bulwer-Lytton novels, and generate Thomas Kincade-style paintings of women with five boobs.

So, damned if you do, damned if you dont?

This. Even if you do not get smarter in the meantime, huge numbers of people are literally making themselves stupider every day, making you smarter relatively to them.

The only time I engage with AI is out of sheer curiosity I will ask Deepseek a question or two

If you're trusting a chatbot over your own brain, you need to work on your brain.

True but I mean just jobbing out a basic executive function to tech

Right. That's why I said in a few years. Lawyers are actually one of the main and most vulnerable targets. Currently, the tech isn't there. Except at boutique firms who have paid good money for it to be and given it direct access to case law in their specialty.

I worry further about the kids using it to get through school too. I'm not an expert in education or child development or anything, but frying your brain like that while it's still developing seems extra bad. Will they even learn to learn?

Even the VCs know this: paulgraham.com/writes.html

Oh, easily. And it could be, I think, in a much more dangerous part of people's brains!

"My typewriter brings all the Luddites to the yard! Meet me in the back and we'll go clackity-clack!"

Yup, same.

BRAWNDO AI: THE THOUGHTS MUTILATOR! IT'S WHAT PLANT-BRAINS CRAVE

Same

I test AI all the time just to learn more about when and why it fails, and train myself to spot it quickly when it does fail. I think this will be a useful skill in the years ahead. bsky.app/profile/sara...

I was kicked out of a FB community for trying to tell people that having ChatGPT write your posts makes it look like a scam/bot post. I got yelled at because the post “couldn’t be a scam since it’s not selling anything”. 🫠

My CEO -- who hired me as an SME and company-wide curriculum manager -- once told me to stop sweating the details of our product. "No one's going to read this, you know." That was almost 15 yrs ago. What he meant was, "It's ok to fudge everything, no one cares." The OG pig in slop, that guy.

I'm interested to see what effect this will have on language, in certain spheres; the LLMs are trying to meet standards defined in the past, so change future expectations to 'not sounding like an LLM' and they're already left behind.

I spend too much time telling people that the unedited LLM stuff looks cheap and like we don't give a shit. Granted, I know a lot of them don't give a shit but for public facing stuff I'd prefer we didn't like goobers

Oh, that must have been very aggrieving!

😬

Yep. Last week I was asked to look at a thing the CEO wrote and discovered that it was the four or five things I'd worked on previously that had been blended together for content.