Engineers try to force LLMs to behave like normal computers.
Engineers try to force LLMs to behave like normal computers. The entire reason they're so useful is that they're not normal computers. They're unruly, squishy computers. Lean in...
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.
I was talking to someone who said they didn't trust confidential computing.
...e who said they didn't trust confidential computing. Confidential computing and LLMs are both technologies that are useful ingredients, imperfect though they may be, to iterate towards something better. If you were a security absoluti...
If you ask an expert if LLMs are good at a task, they'll say it's insufficient.
If you ask an expert if LLMs are good at a task, they'll say it's insufficient. But what you should do is ask the person who isn't good at the task if it's better than them! You ...
LLMs aren't just fluent in English, they're fluent in all languages in their training set!
LLMs aren't just fluent in English, they're fluent in all languages in their training set! Spanish. JSON schema. Mermaid diagrams. A universal babelfish!
The pipeline of reasoning that powers society… and LLMs.
The pipeline of reasoning that powers society… and LLMs. The vast majority of "reasoning" is actually a fuzzy interpolation of previously cached answers. The caching is not just in a single brain, but in t...
If you come up with a definition of a task LLMs can't do...
If you come up with a definition of a task LLMs can't do... can humans? When you understand a machine or animal better, it causes you to reflect on your own human skills. What makes us human? "LLMs...
Language isn't just a large mush of words, it's a high-dimensional fractally structured crystal.
... over time, entropy eroding it. Humans absorb knowledge into language. And then LLMs can come along and slurp up that knowledge. LLMs and neural nets are extremely rudimentary processes, just in an extremely large scale system soaking...
Time and space are very hard to capture in language, which is one-dimensional.
...hat a weird distillation, what a compressed pipe of information. That's the way LLMs see the world!
In the last 25 years we've pushed software to its engineered limits.
...ighting the transition because we want the control that comes from building it. LLMs get their abilities organically, not via engineering. To unleash the power of LLMs, we have to move to a gardening mindset, not a builder mindset.
LLMs are like a magical photo copier.
LLMs are like a magical photo copier. They can do a surprisingly good copy of things they've never seen before. But each thing they generate is slightly d...
LLMs have a "cool teacher" voice and say the most bland things.
LLMs have a "cool teacher" voice and say the most bland things. (Riffing off of Molly White's excellent https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/) ...
LLMs are inherently bland.
LLMs are inherently bland. If you ask ChatGPT to ask you an interesting question it'll say something super generic like: "What movie or book do you think ...
LLMs don't reason, they intuit.
LLMs don't reason, they intuit. With enough scale, this can do an extremely convincing facsimile of reasoning. LLMs appear to be possibly incapable of ori...
A pattern: use LLMs for a rough and ready version.
A pattern: use LLMs for a rough and ready version. A quick and dirty, good enough answer on demand. The more that procedure is depended on, the more you factor out commo...
Design a system with humans in the loop.
...e whole system should be possible for humans to do, even if it's a lot of work. LLMs then provide some good-enough starter ability. The LLMs are the floor and the height of that floor is how good the LLMs are. The higher the floor, th...
The app model has no wiggle room.
The app model has no wiggle room. Users being able to use LLMs to jury rig solutions doesn't change anything inside the app model. But outside the app model, being able to jury rig solutions is obviously useful.
LLMs are magical duct tape that are made out of crystallized society-scale intuition.
LLMs are magical duct tape that are made out of crystallized society-scale intuition.
Every new tech paradigm, in the Carlotta Perez sense, has a new radically lower-cost-than-before input.
...ally lower-cost-than-before input. The low-cost input for this next paradigm is LLMs. LLMs look expensive compared to normal compute. But they look radically cheap compared to generic human mental labor.
LLMs mean that anything with an API can now be controlled in plain english.
LLMs mean that anything with an API can now be controlled in plain english. There are a ton of amazing open source tools and frameworks that previously we...
LLMs in the computation loop can create more resilience.
LLMs in the computation loop can create more resilience. Last week I riffed on the idea that systems with humans embedded are more resilient. Systems with...