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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2891 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 12, 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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Is there a tactful way to ask your boss to lay off something? My boss, a smart guy whom I respect, has become obsessed with LLMs. Literally every conversation with him about work topics has become one where he says "I asked (insert model) and it said..." which adds no value to the conversation. Worse, he responds to questions with "have you tried asking AI?". For example the other day I asked him if he knows why multiple TCP streams are faster than one (when you would naively think they would be slower due to TCP overhead), and he asked if I asked AI. Which of course I didn't, because I actually wanted to know the answer, not get something plausible which may or may not be correct. And he's like that with every question posed lately, even when we had legal documents we had questions on he was like "did you try feeding it to Gemini and asking?"

It's frankly gotten incredibly annoying and I wish he would stop. Like I said, I actually have a lot of respect for the man but it's like he's chosen to outsource his brain to Grok et al lately. I suspect that my options are to live with it or get a new job, but figured I'd ask if people think there's a way I can tactfully address the situation.

I don't know if this counts as "tactful", but I got my boss to stop doing that by repeatedly pointing out errors in the LLM's output. After a few months, he got tired of being told that whatever source file it was talking about didn't exist, and now he only posts LLM output after verifying it, which is much less annoying.

That has happened a few times, but has not yet deterred him. He does generally accompany his "I asked $model and it says" statements with an acknowledgement that one needs to check because it might be hallucinating, but so far it hasn't really changed his habit to always ask AI first on every single topic.

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