s20e08: Efficiency Gains; I Understand You, But Could Never Be You; Can You Teach A Machine To Be Human?

0.0 Context Setting

Wednesday, 3 September 2025 in Portland Oregon and we’re back through a hot spell. Also it’s the first day back of school, and that’s an entire thing.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Efficiency Gains

It is a bit of a cheap shot to say that LLMs aren’t great. That’s like describing the electric motor as “not great” -- there are a lot of things you can use it for! There are also a lot of things where sure you could stick an electric motor in there but in retrospect... it didn’t need one?

The field is also changing so quickly that there’s lot of context collapse around terminology. Usually you can figure out what someone means through context, but that’s an educated guess. That’s what LLMs do, too! What’s the likeliest thing that people mean when they talk about AI in a given context? When it’s photography? When it’s customer service? When it’s coding? The handwaves creative arts?

“AI” worked pretty great when I used it in Lightroom the other day. I had a bunch of pictures and it was good enough for removing some objects in the background.