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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 10, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How do you all interact with LLMs?

Two ways:

  1. as a search engine where I don't have to think about how their algorithm works to construct a query that would find what I need. Very successful usually, unless it's too obscure for it to be actually indexed.

  2. As a simple code generator when the task is too simple to bother learning about it myself. Worked in about 90% cases for me - I only use it if I can describe the task in one or two clear sentences. If it's more complex than that, I'd usually have to design it myself - though I could split it into elementary tasks that could be generated.

Failed attempts:

  • Getting instructions on doing something that I couldn't verify if the instructions are correct or not until the final result. The final result came out not at all what I wanted pretty much always. I've given up on using it that way.
  • Writing some texts I am too lazy to write myself. Usually the result had AI stench so horrible that I ended up trashing the whole thing and writing it myself anyway. Gave up on that too.

The thought of having "conversations" with it seems to me as weird as the thought of having conversations with a refrigerator. I mean, I love having one - in fact, I have multiple ones (OK, it's more correct to say my wife has multiple ones because it was her request) and I would be greatly inconvenienced if I had to live without one - but "conversations" is not part of the picture here. I usually set up a system prompt explicitly instructing it to stop being chatty and just give me the dried out info.