Tootfinder

Real-life Her, but make it Black Mirror.
#AI #LLMs

I’ve been testing a theory: many people who are high on #AI and #LLMs are just new to automation and don’t realize you can automate processes with simple programming, if/then conditions, and API calls with zero AI involved.
So far it’s been working!
Whenever I’ve been asked to make an AI flow or find a way to implement AI in our work with a client, I’ve returned back with an automation flow that uses 0 AI.
Things like “when a new document is added here, add a link to it in this spreadsheet and then create a task in our project management software assigned to X with label Y”.
And the people who were frothing at the mouth at how I must change my mind on AI have (so far) all responded with resounding enthusiasm and excitement.
They think it’s the same thing. They just don’t understand how much automation is possible without any generative tools.

Ollama on Windows 11 vs WSL: two brilliant ways to use local #LLMs
https://www.windowscentral.com/artificial-intelligence/ollama-on…

Imagine ChatGPT but instead of predicting text it just linked you to the to 3 documents most-influential on the probabilities that would have been used to predict that text.
Could even generate some info about which parts of each would have been combined how.
There would still be issues with how training data is sourced and filtered, but these could be solved by crawling normally respecting robots.txt and by paying filterers a fair wage with a more relaxed work schedule and mental health support.
The energy issues are mainly about wild future investment and wasteful query spam, not optimized present-day per-query usage.
Is this "just search?"
Yes, but it would have some advantages for a lot of use cases, mainly in synthesizing results across multiple documents and in leveraging a language model more fully to find relevant stuff.
When we talk about the harms of current corporate LLMs, the opportunity cost of NOT building things like this is part of that.
The equivalent for art would have been so amazing too! "Here are some artists that can do what you want, with examples pulled from their portfolios."
It would be a really cool coding assistant that I'd actually encourage my students to use (with some guidelines).
#AI #GenAI #LLMs

I'm not sure if this is going to make a difference ( #LLMs weren't able to read #licenses or terms & conditions before when these were not formalized in a "machine-readable" way (plus, besides licenses we already had the robots.txt declarative files; even if those were not as expressive as this new proposal).
So, is this extra work for web developers and maintainers? Are we going to operate under the new assumption that if we didn't do the work of implementing this then we are granting permission to scrapper bots to steal all our online creations?
Or can this be a net gain for creators in some specific way?

LLMs are a fundamentally useless technology because their applications (supposedly) boil down to humans not having to think for themselves or do their own writing / drawing / filming.
But if you can do it on your own - why would you need a robot to do it? It’s, at best, a novelty.
That’s why this shit only resonates with executives and capital owners. “Get things done with fewer people and expenses” is at least an actual pitch. “Get things done faster for yourself” isn’t.
The individual angle really works for things you already were trying to avoid doing because you’re either disinterested or don’t have enough time to do things right.
“Avoid your work” as a value proposition doesn’t work when you’re dealing with intellectual labor rather than commodities. Not large scale, not long term.
Sorry for the rant, I saw some Notion ads on the subway and got irritated 😅
#AI #llm #LLMs

#AI with its #LLMs is cool and all, but what is this supposed to be #LLMBros?
#LLM…

#Maunderings of a doddering fool. Caveat emptor. #AI #LLMs #intelligence… (1/9)

New preprint article based on an open letter (which I've signed onto) against the uncritical adoption of AI:
#AI #LLMs #GenAI

"The [Wall Street Journal] writers compare the #AI bubble to other bubbles, like Worldcom's fraud-soaked fiber optic bonanza (which saw the company's CEO sent to prison, where he eventually died), and conclude that the AI bubble is vastly larger than any other bubble in recent history" -- @pluralistic
#LLMs

A bit late to the party sharing this, but as usual Mike Cook has excellent opinions:
#AI #LLMs

I'm continuing to explore the "#LLMs for everything" paradigm that is forced upon us by ... err why exactly?
I often hear that students should be "smart" about their #LLM usage and not have the LLM produce the solutions but use it as a tutor. I may have even said that myself 2 years ago, but hey, we are all learning. So I tried AI tutoring and it was not great.
First thoughts on the #math perspective are documented in this new blog post:
https://www.thomas-kahle.de/blog/2025/ai-tutor/

One other pattern that I kept experiencing last year when I was actually trying these tools in my work (because I had so many people pushing them on me I started to think I was crazy):
Them: “oh you are struggling with X? I have been using AI to solve it and it gives me the solution in less than 10 minutes! You HAVE TO try it!”
Me: “X is really annoying, I’d love to get help with it. I’ll try that, thanks!”
* I go and try to do X, spend hours prompting AI back-and-forth as it keeps messing up and doing things wrong. I give up and do the thing manually, spending 2-3x the time I would have spent if I did it myself from the start.*
*days / weeks later*
Me: “hey, person, I tried to do X with AI and it didn’t work. I kept getting issues like Y and Z. Did I prompt it wrong? This is what I tried.”
Them: *nods, maybe chuckles* “oh yeah, it does that. I still haven’t been able to figure out how to reliably do X. I tend to redo the output completely too. But sometimes it helps me do like this tiny part. Anyway, these tools will improve soon and we won’t have to do so many manual revisions. “
I kid you not, this stuff happened every other week.
#AI #LLMs #work #tech #AIBubble

Curious that whenever someone shows me “the cool #AI flow” they built that’s supposed to be impressive, the conversation goes the same way:
Stage 1: “But you don’t understand. You don’t like AI because you haven’t used it right. Let me show you how much you can do it with.”
Stage 2: “Here are the steps in the flow and the instructions I feed to this agent / custom GPT / Claude project. I tell it to do X, reference document Y, and aim for Z.”
Stage 3: “Now, let me show you the results it gives.”
*Writes task, presses to run the prompt.*
Stage 4: “Umm sorry it’s taking a while. It’s fast but not instant. And by the way, the prompt isn’t perfect, you can definitely make it better. I just threw this together real quick the other day. It makes some mistakes, but it’s really good.”
Stage 5: “Uuuuuuh actually don’t look at the output.” *scrolls or stops screen share or pulls device away.*
“You know it’s already doing so well, if I do more prompt engineering it will get really good but I need to give it better instructions. And it ran just fine last night, I don’t know what’s up with it. And this is a cheap model, if we use another model it will be better.”
Stage 6: “You know, you really shouldn’t judge this so much. The technology will improve, it will get there sooner than you know and then you’ll regret not trying it sooner.”
So curious that this keeps happening 🤷‍♀️
#LLMs #work #tech #AIBubble

Finally finished throwing together a central place for my own posts on the AI Hype Movement plus links to other good stuff. If you need a central place to point someone curious as to why you don't use AI and/or why they shouldn't, feel free to send people here:
#AI #LLMs #GenAI