LLMs are like clay.
LLMs are like clay. [ael]Normal programming is like legos. Precise, unyielding, but flexible in combination. LLMs are inherently flexible. For some use ca...
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.
The outcome of disruptive changes are only obvious in retrospect.
... until after! Even a lot of people in the industry who are thinking a lot about LLMs are implicitly thinking about them as simply a sustaining technology (though they think they're thinking about things disruptively). Disruptive thing...
LLMs are a disruptive innovation that will change the world.
LLMs are a disruptive innovation that will change the world[afb][afc][afd]. On the same scope of impact as: The printing press Electricity The internet. T...
LLMs are human-level common sense with infinite patience, many orders of magnitude cheaper than real humans.
LLMs are human-level common sense[afl] with infinite patience, many orders of magnitude cheaper than real humans. It's impossible for that to not be disru...
We're now in the midst of a shovel-rush.
... for gold![afq][afr] Everyone's trying to do the meta play, not just using[afs] LLMs, a new, disruptive input.
A measure of the novelty of a thinker: how hard their insights are to predict.
... say based on the category they fit in.[afv] A similar test could be applied to LLMs: the novelty of an utterance has to do with the inverse of the likelihood[afw] that that next token would be predicted by the LLM based on the preced...
The power of LLMs comes from humans.
The power of LLMs comes from humans. Both the background knowledge that makes them smart is from culture[afy]. But also the thing that makes their output good is the q...
LLMs talk to us like they're a human, but they're a collective hive mind of society, presenting as a singular "person".
LLMs talk to us like they're a human, but they're a collective hive mind of society, presenting as a singular "person". Like the alien in Contact. "I'm as...
AI makes it easier to have hobbies.
...ake work. Many hobbies are very hard to start doing, and hard to get better at. LLMs are great at being an intellectual and creative dance partner, helping you grow in a forgiving environment.[agl][agm] LLMs make it "cheaper" to start...
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....
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.
LLMs shouldn't help you do less thinking, they should help you do more thinking
LLMs shouldn't help you do less thinking, they should help you do more thinking[ajn][ajo][ajp] They give you higher leverage. Will that cause you to be sa...
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...