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snkon Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

Well, no. If I can get an LLM to write like Asimov, that's better than I will ever do, honest.

snkon Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

Yeah, for some of us, that is bad advice. The version I can most safely implement is, "Be your best self."

snkon Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

If you never used any particular tool, you probably wouldn't find it useful, right?

I asked Gemini about my unicycling this morning, and it coached me on weighting the seat; e.g., looking ahead instead of down helps unweight the pedals.

snkon Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

The title, for example, should likely be Nginx for Nerds, and that error was human, not AI, right?

snkon Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

So connecting with them on a call and cutting out the LLM was an error?

snkon Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

That's privacy.

snkon Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

When I can get an LLM to write like Isaac Asimov, I'll consider some artificial literary experiments; there were books I wanted him to have written that he did not get around to, quitting at 458.

snkon Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

Good for privacy and productivity.

snkon Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

Really? How do they distinguish perfect copies from originals?

snkon Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

I'm quick-witted, outspoken, playful, clever, apparently intelligent; Mensa, Colloquy, like that; not quite clever enough for the triple 9 societies. Morning pages readily enough dispel the illusion. Or coding. I scanned six years of morning pages into a PDF and fed it to Claude to distill for me; apparently, I have several thoughts per year. Damn, I'd hoped for more. Asking Claude Code to critique my code is, ah, good coaching. Ouch.

snkon Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)

Kinda. Walking the dog with me this evening, Christa saw the license plate 8531 PRI and asked me if 8531 really was prime. The 2, 3, 5 checks are automatic, and 8531-8400 = 131, which obviously isn't divisible by 7, but I would've had to check the rest of the two-digit prime factors except 97 - 8531 is greater than 90 squared, less than 97 squared, though, I reckon. So I said I don't know. But Google would know, you know? If your LLM buddy is hanging out active on your phone all the time, it can - maybe not yet, but foreseeably - answer every question, no thought required, and carry out any expressed desire.

snkon AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_invention...

snkon AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.14372

snkon AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

I'll note that having countless superintelligences handy will accelerate problem-solving e.g. dystopia.

snkon The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

A couple of possibilities spring to mind. Likelier that Karen lied, but maybe the 512 page fax changed the system.

snkon The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner

You mean, Karen lied?

snkon Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective

I'm old. Back in the olden days - the 1900s - 2-ton cars were not lightweight, the so-called heavy Chevys.

snkon Rich Hickey: Thanks AI

Writing is used to defraud people, to propagandize them, to steal their intellectual property and livelihoods, to systematically deny their health insurance claims, to dangerously misinform them (e.g. illegitimate legal advice or hallucinated mushroom identification ebooks), to drive people to mental health breakdowns via "internet psychosis" and much more. The harm is real and material, and right now is causing unemployment, physical harm, imprisonment, and in some cases death...

snkon Rich Hickey: Thanks AI

Small? GPLv3 is ~5644 words, and not particularly long for a license.

snkon AI is not our future

Sturgeon's Law predates LLMs by decades: 90% of everything is crap.

snkon AI is not our future

Fair use?

snkon AI is not our future

No, it isn't, wealth is good. More readily creating and delivering value is good.

snkon Dropbox Engineering Career Framework

Planning is very useful even though things never go according to plan, honest.

snkon My favourite computer ergonomics hack

Sitting on a Swiss ball hurts me less than a chair. For the first few days it even enforced perfect posture, but that effect went away pretty quickly.

snkon The Right Kind of Stubborn

Fixed goals and flexible tactics, I say. PG comes along and says it much better...

snkon Primel – guess a 5 digit prime number – each guess must be a prime

N = 100000 prime = [False, True] * (N // 2) primes = [] for i in range(3, N, 2):

    if prime[i]:
        primes.append(i)
        k = i ** 2
        while k < N:
            prime[k] = False
            k += i * 2

useful = [ str(i) for i in primes ]

# Enter your clues

for i in useful: if i[0] == '6' and ('3' in i) and len(str(i)) == 5: print(i)

snkon Primel – guess a 5 digit prime number – each guess must be a prime

Or 5.

snkon Primel – guess a 5 digit prime number – each guess must be a prime

Nice solver! I did optimize the sieve a little...

N = 100000 primes = [False, True] * N // 2 for i in range(3, N, 2):

    if primes[i]:
        k = i ** 2
        while k < N:
            primes[k] = False
            k += i * 2