The first microprocessors went into calculators.
...nowable. Afterwards, it feels obvious, like it's impossible to unsee. The first LLMs are like word calculators. We haven't come up with word computers.[fb]
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.
Stratechery: "it seems likely that LLMs have already generated more text than all of humanity ever has; the reason I cannot know is the same reason why it hasn't left a mark: AI content is generated individually for each individual user of AI."
Stratechery: "it seems likely that LLMs have already generated more text than all of humanity ever has; the reason I cannot know is the same reason why it hasn't left a mark: AI content is ...
A key question about a system: does it work without LLMs?
A key question about a system: does it work without LLMs? Are LLMs just lubrication for the system? Or are they the fundamental enabler? LLMs are expensive and slow. Systems that use them as lubrication can...
The meta-game can shift rapidly even from small changes.
...one to make bots to create the appearance of momentum. Especially in the age of LLMs. Keep that in mind when you see what looks like momentum.
Hollowed out things are about unthinking execution.
...llowed out things are about unthinking execution. "Just turn the crank faster." LLMs applied naively just turn the crank faster. It's even more important than ever before that the crank is attached to something resonant!
Centralization + LLMs + Authoritarianism will be an explosive combination.
Centralization + LLMs + Authoritarianism will be an explosive combination. LLMs aren't going anywhere. The push towards authoritarianism might be hard to reverse in the sh...
To use LLMs to their fullest potential today requires working in the terminal.
To use LLMs to their fullest potential today requires working in the terminal. If you aren't using tools like Claude Code every day, you will have no idea what t...
A friend points out that code is better seen as an exoskeleton to LLMs' muscle.
A friend points out that code is better seen as an exoskeleton to LLMs' muscle. Exoskeleton is both support and containment. LLMs benefit from both. LLMs aren't great at constraints, but old-school code is great at it.
Product surface discovery happens much slower than technical capability improvement.
...el performance is clearly seeing a plateau. But the interesting applications of LLMs are just at the very beginning.
Trade is only valuable if you have non-infinite time and different abilities than the entity you trade with.
... never noticed that "trade is good" is downstream of these assumptions. But for LLMs these assumptions don't obviously hold. LLMs have infinite patience. Agents that use the same model also have precisely the same capabilities. This c...
Last week I talked about humans at "liability meatbag" for LLMs.
Last week I talked about humans at "liability meatbag" for LLMs. Also known, in any system, as a "liability sink." I like Ethan Mollick's colorful frame: "sin eater." The entity that eats the sin allows progress t...
Don't train an agent to use Excel.
...se statistics in whatever way is natural to it. The affordances that humans and LLMs need might be disjoint.
A situation good for society is "all of the model providers have to compete and none of them win" for LLMs.
...ociety is "all of the model providers have to compete and none of them win" for LLMs. Great for everyone but the LLM model providers, who are in a never-ending red ocean battle. But the rest of us benefit from the significant competit...
Deterministic code and LLMs both have a place.
Deterministic code and LLMs both have a place.[fk] Asking an LLM to do a thing computers are already good at is expensive, inefficient, and fragile. Deterministic Code is like a...
Ben Thompson says OpenAI does have a business model they aren't embracing: ads.
...f quality, a pitch becomes a "phish". Humans can't often get to that point, but LLMs with extensive memories can do it "Conman" comes from "confidence man", where they gain your confidence it's all principal agent problems all the way...
With LLM on the scene, now we have to decide: do we slide further into cynicism and nihilism, turbocharged?
...ide: do we slide further into cynicism and nihilism, turbocharged? Or do we use LLMs to reboot the industry, to come home to the hacker ethic we lost?
Do corporations have emotional states?
...ations have emotional states? This Hacker News comment parodying the "I believe LLMs may have functional emotions in some sense": "I believe Anthropic may have functional emotions in some sense. Not necessarily identical to human emot...
Problems that can be reframed as coding problems will be able to be easily tackled by LLMs.
...ms that can be reframed as coding problems will be able to be easily tackled by LLMs. LLMs are great at coding, and will only get better. It's so easy to create ground-truthed synthetic data that the major labs are doing a ton of it. ...
When you're stuck with something for life, you don't just give up as easily.
...ght, you don't just shrug and say "that'll never work, I'll just write it off." LLMs give up more easily on software problems than humans might. "Meh, it's fine, just leave it." A version of the principal agent problem.
The quality of LLMs is model + harness.
The quality of LLMs is model + harness. Model quality is getting saturated. The differential quality comes from the harness now. It's gotten way harder to do a vibecheck...