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<p>On 10/3/25 13:36, Deirdre Saoirse Moen wrote:</p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:B52BF135-A6CE-4618-A1E7-2B394DA0209D@deirdre.net">
<pre wrap="" class="moz-quote-pre">LLMs are a parlor game that use far more resources than they can provide value to society. They don’t “work” in the sense that they are not intelligent, and are not true AI. At *best* you will get a junior dev out of them, but a junior dev who makes mistakes like deleting code that shouldn’t be deleted. Many people do not have enough exposure to LLMs to realize they are basically attempting to recreate that kid who constantly screws up then pretends nothing bad happened, then wonders why you stopped talking to them.</pre>
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<p>I was talking about a web publishing/advertising thing that's
fairly complicated and someone said they would use ChatGPT to get
some background explanation of it. That seemed like a bad place
to start, for two reasons.</p>
<p>1. It's about a market in which a lot of people have an incentive
to persuade others that things are a certain way, so there's a lot
of sales copy from one point of view.</p>
<p>2. The technology is changing fairly quickly, so most of the
content out there would apply to older code or practices.</p>
<p><span style="white-space: pre-wrap">
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</span></p>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:B52BF135-A6CE-4618-A1E7-2B394DA0209D@deirdre.net">
<pre wrap="" class="moz-quote-pre">That said, I did find it useful to be able to interactively ask questions that were specific to $FIRM’s processes and have a live answer that was usually at least close enough to correct I could find the answer from where it led me.</pre>
</blockquote>
Now I'm wondering about the categories of things for which an LLM
would be useful. Syntax for doing something that appears in
publicly available scripts might be a good example -- I have been
able to "vibe code" some correct Python code to extract material
from an HTML file with Beautiful Soup, and get the jq(1) syntax
right for getting a subset of the info from a big JSON file. (For
both of those I could test the output, though)
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