LLMs allow a new medium for communication.
LLMs allow a new medium for communication. Don't use LLMs to write books. Books are a static communication medium, one-size-fits-all, frozen for all time....
Topic: llms
1,598 mentions · 615 chunks · 117 episodes
169.8× distinctiveness vs baseline
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How much more common this term is here than in ordinary English. Higher values mean the topic is more characteristic of this corpus.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- llms appears in 615 chunks across 117 episodes, from 2023-11-06 to 2026-04-20.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 2/2/26 (2026-02-02), with 15 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with ChatGPT, Claude, and prompt injection attack, while by chunk count it sits between Claude; its yearly rank moved from #3 in 2023 to #1 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
Working with LLMs is like working with a recently tamed animal.
Working with LLMs is like working with a recently tamed animal[agu].
Are you using LLMs right?
Are you using LLMs right? The test is, are you thinking more or less? If you give its answer directly to others (without curation), you are giving an average, eroding y...
A nice piece from my friend Dimitri about two patterns for using LLMs.
A nice piece from my friend Dimitri about two patterns for using LLMs. One pattern is the open-ended conversation. One is a recipe for generating insight from interactions.
What would an OS look like that took LLMs for granted?
What would an OS look like that took LLMs for granted? Not a patch job on top of the OSes we have today, but a new kind of "OS" that was AI-native, and built in a world that assumed high-qual...
Talking to an LLM feels not like talking to a person, but talking to the collective hive mind of humanity.
... talking to a person, but talking to the collective hive mind of humanity.[ajm] LLMs give great guacamole recipes, because they've seen every guacamole recipe and can triangulate what they all have in common.
People who think LLMs can't be useful either haven't tried them or aren't curious enough.
People who think LLMs can't be useful either haven't tried them or aren't curious enough. Curious people (especially ones with a need for cognition[ajv][ajw]) will keep pu...
Google-fu is a temporary phenomenon.
...ge evaporates. Prompt-fu is the equivalent for getting much better results from LLMs. That implies that people with prompt-fu will get less and less differentiated results as the systems we all use get more mature. But presumably ther...
Transformers are unreasonably good at extracting patterns.
...y do a surprisingly great job at predicting what a given sequence will fold to. LLMs are tapping into a hidden structure of the universe that reveals itself only if you are patient enough to sift through it.[akb][akc] LLMs are patient...
There are a lot of new techniques to "frack" LLMs to squeeze more out of them.
There are a lot of new techniques to "frack" LLMs to squeeze more out of them. If you get just a single english-language append-only log designed for a human, you make the LLM take its rich understan...
You can view LLMs as a lemon to squeeze.
You can view LLMs as a lemon to squeeze. The quality of an LLM's juice is tied to who is doing the squeezing. An implication of all outputs from LLMs being co-created ...
A model being trained on data or using RAG at inference time has wildly different characteristics.
...ference time has wildly different characteristics. But a lot of discourse about LLMs doesn't differentiate the two. I see even technical people muddle this all the time. There's a difference between an LLM in training absorbing a holo...
Last week I compared LLM providers to electricity providers.
...viders to electricity providers. Capital intensive, but commodity. But actually LLMs are a worse business than electricity providers[ako]. Electricity providers typically have a geographic monopoly; end consumers only have one option ...
Someone got an LLM to create a pretty good stand-up routine for other LLMs.
Someone got an LLM to create a pretty good stand-up routine for other LLMs. My first reaction was: wow, the LLM is pretty funny! But I realize that that's partially an illusion. The LLM, working in tandem with the human, is ...
The append-only conversation log to interact with LLMs leaves me wanting more.
The append-only conversation log to interact with LLMs leaves me wanting more. In the past few months I've had a number of revelatory, multi-hour conversations with LLMs where I explore and pull on thread...
Interacting with LLMs today is like doing computing before the GUI.
Interacting with LLMs today is like doing computing before the GUI.[ami] Clear raw potential that it takes specialist skills to unlock and apply. The command line was a re...
A nice little use for LLMs: discovering best practices.
A nice little use for LLMs: discovering best practices. For example, download three different popular templates for Project Management from Notion, and provide them to the LLM,...
LLMs are unlike normal programs in that they allow open-ended output.
LLMs are unlike normal programs in that they allow open-ended output. Normal programs are close-ended[amm]: given similar inputs they will behave similarl...
An insightful quote from Ilya Sutskever via an old Less Wrong post about why LLMs are so powerful: "to learn to predict text, is to learn to predict the causal processes of which the text is a shadow,"
An insightful quote from Ilya Sutskever via an old Less Wrong post about why LLMs are so powerful: "to learn to predict text, is to learn to predict the causal processes of which the text is a shadow,"[amo]
LLMs are the input to the next big thing.
LLMs are the input to the next big thing.[amq] LLMs are like electricity[ams]: a general technology that reconfigures the costs of key inputs, making wild...