Notices by Jeremy Kahn (trochee@dair-community.social)

LLMs lower the immediate cost of "fucking around"

and push "finding out" beyond management's forecasting horizon

which is Yet Another reason that everyone with actual expertise should Avoid At All Costs

#NedLuddWasRight

@aud

Tired: eating your seed corn
Wired: burning the library to drive off the chill on a brisk autumn day

Y'all this post I made blowing off steam is blowing up my phone and I'm not sure how to feel about that

*I* thought I was saying something obvious but it has apparently touched a nerve for a lot of us

https://dair-community.social/@trochee/114702598106507222

@grimalkina

oof too real, honestly.

@inthehands @glyph @dave @3psboyd

@grimalkina

yes, hard agree

automation has the potential to take us to "fully-automated luxury communism" but it also has the possibility of accelerating the machine that is already chewing some of us up

@inthehands @glyph @dave @3psboyd

@inthehands

100%

all of this.

zero-shot, or few-shot ,classifiers are pretty great, although they should be absorbed with caution because of embedded bias; serious users should take care to validate that the tool does what you expect on known examples.

@grimalkina @glyph @dave @3psboyd

@glyph

this kind of work is specifically _not_ LLMs, and as a language nerd I'm super annoyed that these two very different uses are conflated here

generated language from an LLM is _not_ problem-solving. it is an interesting language artifact, but does not involve thought or insight into anything but the weather system behind the chatbot

@grimalkina @dave @3psboyd

Seeing usually smart folks getting rope-a-doped into arguing for LLM utility like there's a moral justice zero-sum trolley-problem slider between "useful" and "ethical" and we're just arguing about the best setting

But the real problem is even dumber

-is its mere use a climate disaster? Yes
-is its data provenance founded on theft? Also yes
-will it be used to ruin ordinary workers' lives? Yup
-will it ruin countless organizations who think they're buying their way to cheap labor? That too

@clarity @xek

"Supply side democracy" is pretty great

@nixCraft

Attention @skinnylatte

the fish-themed pun battles have reached the international stage.

(I hate that I have to wonder if this is generated, though)

I get a kick out of talking to experienced software engineers just after they have encountered ML research scientists for the first time

@dalias @forteller
@Lazarou

Pretty sure this is AI slop, though :(

> The most distressing thing is that maybe it does work; if not well enough to actually do the work, at least ambiguously enough to fool the executives long-term.

-- @glyph via @tante

https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html

so, so many parts of this that resonate with me. Thank you for sharing these thoughts

@cwebber

how much better if the authors of the Talmud knew they could have been explaining the original texts back to Abraham himself

Now imagining the folks standing around the Golden Calf, saying "Well Actually" to Moses

No wonder he smote them to the ground

When @cwebber goes on a dunk-fest like this,

somebody should provide Talmudic annotated marginalia explaining each joke (I only understand about half of them.)

This commentary would provide a complete reference guide to the socio=techno-political history of the Fediverse

#archivists, get on it

https://social.coop/@cwebber/114621311866235080

@MisuseCase @paninid

Indeed, it does seem full of anecdote (which is not data)

And it jumps to blaming smartphones in a very Jonathan Haidt way

I wonder* what happened to 2024's incoming college students that made their four years of secondary education so different from the incoming students in, say, 2016, or 2020

*no I don't

@inthehands

Stephen and Katie did WHAT with Elon

i mean, Z-team gonna Z-team

https://dair-community.social/@trochee/114377963991674419

@jbowles @timnitGebru

This is one of many reasons I want the bubble to pop soon, even though a lot of stock value is gonna evaporate

The longer the bubble persists the greater the long term damage caused by this creativity-drought

I have even interviewed young programmers who tell me — *in the interview* — that they would solve problems by asking the AI to rewrite the code again until the bugs went away

Makes me want to *weep* in frustration

@timnitGebru

I also see a need for coverage of

(a) LLMs cannot do real knowledge work in practice, and why we can be sure it won't get better (though it may convert some jobs into "minders")

(b) why do executives and "thought leaders" keep telling us it's revolutionary (it's to keep the bubble inflated and exert labor discipline)

(c) how do they get away with this hype when there is not even ONE* profitable product line powered by any of the big LLM/AI companies

*Nvidia doesn't count

@futurebird
Ugh I hate this so much

Feels like an unpatched bug in the human wetware that is ruthlessly exploited by the YouTube recommender system

@KimberlyN @blogdiva