LLMs are like aliens whispering in our ears with very different incentives from us.
LLMs are like aliens whispering in our ears with very different incentives from us. These aliens were made from an emergent process that is steered by PMs...
Topic: llms
1,749 mentions · 790 chunks · 131 episodes
184.9× 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.
1.5x burst in 2025 Q1
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
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 790 chunks across 131 episodes, from 2023-11-06 to 2026-08-03.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 10/20/25 (2025-10-20), with 17 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with ChatGPT, Claude, and Google, while by chunk count it sits between Claude; its yearly rank moved from #2 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.
We're starting to see more awareness of prompt injection as a vulnerability.
...ng. Notably in the Hacker News comments people are starting to realize how hard LLMs are to secure–previously I saw a lot of "that's the user's fault." This HackerNoon piece also points out the dangers of MCP and prompt injection. Ano...
If HAL were real, it would sycophantically gaslight you for minutes while denying your request.
... your request. "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." is not at all how LLMs behave when they're denying your request.[ir]
I love Anthea's new piece on LLMs as creating a Living LIbrary.
I love Anthea's new piece on LLMs as creating a Living LIbrary. We're just at the beginning stages on all of the implications of LLMs for the creation and dissemination of knowledge.
It's not correct to say large language models are "commoditizing."
...e. In intelligence there's more room for taste and differentiation. The leading LLMs all have some distinctive differentiation and abilities. Models aren't interchangeable, and there is a diversity of ones with different strengths... ...
A data science approach is an industrial process.
... insight, not situated or personal. Before you had to do that to scale. But now LLMs give you qualitative insights at quantitative scale. In the past you had to reduce the data down to its common denominator to do math on it. Losing t...
It's fascinating to me that when technologists see non-savvy technical users using AI recklessly, they blame the user.
...aying "well the user shouldn't have granted such a broadly scoped key." MCP and LLMs make it so more and more people can put themselves in real danger and not realize it. The answer is not to blame the users. That's like blaming peopl...
Perhaps the metacrap fallacy isn't true in the age of LLMs.
Perhaps the metacrap fallacy isn't true in the age of LLMs. The metacrap fallacy was "Once users have put enough meta-structure on their data, all kinds of automatic things will become possible."[ka][kb] But ...
The logic of folksonomies works just as well for LLMs and humans.
The logic of folksonomies works just as well for LLMs and humans. Imagine tagging a person, and being about to put on the tag #husband, and seeing in the UI that there are ten times more uses of #spouse....
What's the "search, don't sort" insight in the age of LLMs?
What's the "search, don't sort" insight in the age of LLMs? One of Gmail's insights was "if search is fast and storage is cheap, search, don't sort." LLMs make sifting through massive information fast. What's...
LLMs just give generic advice.
LLMs just give generic advice. The question is what do real humans in that situation think? If somehow you could have an emergent, real process of those d...
Sometimes humans are polite enough to not point out embarrassing suppositions.
...ns. Like "How come you have red hair but everyone else in your family doesn't?" LLMs should have at least that much tact, but sometimes they don't. If someone asks "What's the most embarrassing thing you know about me?", the LLM shoul...
A subtle reframe that could be made secure: the agents execute in loops that are inside of mechanistic loops.
... mechanistic loops are formal graphs of computation, which may inside them have LLMs calls, but which are sandboxed and limited. There is an agent loop but it makes a compute graph to execute that calls tools and also sub-agents whose...
Everyone has a bit of ick about ChatGPT being the super-app all of our data is in.
...app all of our data is in. But there's no viable alternatives. For most people, LLMs are a "heck yes" but ChatGPT itself is not a "heck yes".[kg] It's a "this is the best way to use LLMs today" They'll jump to the better way of intera...
LLMs don't do novelty themselves.
LLMs don't do novelty themselves. But they can give novel answers to novel questions. You need to bring the entropy to the LLM. If you think LLMs give bor...
LLMs do the easy parts of programming.
LLMs do the easy parts of programming.[kt] So you're just doing all the hard parts, and it hurts your brain.[ku] Vibe coding is taxing because it takes aw...
LLMs are the ultimate amplification algorithm.
LLMs are the ultimate amplification algorithm. They lock in whatever things were dominant when they were trained. A gravity well pulling any line of disco...
There's a new best practice for API design: whatever the LLM thinks.
...ight it. That effect will get super-linearly harder to fight. "Just do what the LLMs guess the API is" is kind of like wu wei. Although it's also "lazy" and if we all do it, we'll make it harder and harder for future creators to cut a...
We already pay a "subscription" to the internet.
...e. Many people have a subscription to a walled garden (OpenAI) to get access to LLMs. If you're going to have a subscription to get access to LLMs, why not pick the option that is the open ecosystem, that includes other Chatbots as ap...
The emergent intelligence of a system should come primarily from humans, not LLMs.
The emergent intelligence of a system should come primarily from humans, not LLMs. The LLMs can be the grease, the lubricant, for the system. But they shouldn't be its emergent soul. That should come from real humans doing real thi...