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Cake day: January 15th, 2024
  • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th May 2026English
    8·
    3 months ago

    Yeah, the comparison to a metal lathe (I’m assuming that’s what is meant by “machine lathe”) irks me. Metal lathes are useful tools that come in a variety of sizes, can be operated independently of their manufacturer’s wishes, and on the bigger ones, a sufficient lack of respect will kill you and it will hurt the entire time you are dying.

    I wouldn’t compare llms to any sort of useful physical tool. I don’t have to plead with my screwdriver to not cam out screw heads, I just need to be cognizant of how I am using it. I don’t have to beg my hammer “please don’t hit my thumb”, I just need to not be an ape/buzzed while swinging it. I respect physical tools and their use in part because they do work and in part because improper operation will cause you to have a bad time. Nobody at Estwing has publicly said “well mate, we’re going to capture all your hammering and rent it back to you”. Nobody at Bridgeport gleefully reported that their tooling will cause massive unemployment because it is so good.

    I do not respect LLMs because LLMs might still kill you but only in the stupidest way possible, and because their main proponents have no respect for anything and this has been made painfully obvious over and over again. Would using them allow me to craft better sneers about them? Perhaps, but I shouldn’t need to do that because the people at the top of these things are evil and while that alone should be enough, their biggest boosters are credulous idiots and many of them were already awful well before we were playing enterprise pretend on the scale of billions of dollars.

    In conclusion, I would ask software people to stop comparing shit software to useful tools.