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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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Calling LLMs “wordcel technology” is backwards in 2026.

You can paste in a screenshot of a math problem that 99%+ of adults would fail, calculus, linear algebra, probability, geometry and it will solve it step by step, showing its work.

Not just arithmetic. Structured reasoning over formal systems. The same goes for logic puzzles, physics derivations, statistics problems.

They'll even teach it to you.

If your definition of wordcel now includes ‘solves multistep math from an image and explains it', then we're just not going to agree on the term.

Calling LLMs “wordcel technology” is backwards in 2026.

I disagree, LLMs remain pretty terrible at any task requiring strict precision, accuracy, and rigor. And from what I understand of the underlying mechanisms this is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

Imagine the full range of legal opinions that exist on the internet, intelligent, retarded, and everything in between. Now imagine what the average of that mass of opinions would look like. That's effectively what you're getting when you ask an LLM for legal advice. Now for some traditionally wordcel-oriented tasks like "summarize this text" or "write an essay about ____" this is more than adequate, perhaps even excellent. But for an application requiring a clear and correct answer that isn't necessarily the average/default (IE the kind of things a "shape-rotator" might be hired to calculate), they are worse than useless because they give you something that looks plausible but may very well be completely wrong, and as such you will still have to take the time to work out the correct answer yourself if only just to verify it.