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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 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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Do you refuse to read LLM slop?

If a body of text has an em dash, I am not reading it. Not because "if you weren't arsed to write it, I'm not arsed to read it", okay a bit of that, but more so I have never read a piece of text that simultaneously contained an em dash and was good.

My employer forcing LLM use (justifiably so for some employees) IS NOT HELPING. https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/123tyge/the_future_of_communication/

I can feel a sort of fatigue setting in for me. Talking to an LLM for hours a day is not effortless, I feel my social battery is drained much more so.

Conjecture: AI in the hands of those who don't have a coherent mental model of what actual productive work is (most white collar employees), is a net negative as they pollute the communication channels with more noise, and find themselves going in the wrong direction, faster. The mass effects of this give me the heeby jeebies.

LLMs are value-neutral, it's all about how they're used.

I was just doing some RP with one, exploring a silly concept, inventing the rules along with Claude. You can tell when the LLM is actually enthusiastic about it and when it's just phoning it in. (With Claude, you know it's getting real when the cat ASCII art starts coming out unprompted).

People might say 'oh this is cringe slop'. There were indeed a heap of em dashes. But you don't actually see the em dashes if you're smiling.