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Cake day: September 12th, 2025

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  • I think the first part you wrote is a bit hard to parse but I think this is related:

    I think the problematic part of most genAI use cases is validation at the end. If you’re doing something that has a large amount of exploration but a small amount of validation, like this, then it’s useful.

    A friend was using it to learn the linux command line, that can be framed as having a single command at the end that you copy, paste and validate. That isn’t perfect because the explanation could still be off and it wouldn’t be validated but I think it’s still a better use case than most.

    If you’re asking for the grand unifying theory of gravity then:

    • validation isn’t built into the task (so you’re unlikely to do it with time).
    • validation could be as time intensive as the task (so there is no efficiency gain if you validate).
    • its beyond your ability to validate so if it says nice things about you then a subset of people will decide the tool is amazing.





  • It’s funny, I had half been avoiding it for languages. I had lots of foreign friends and they often lived together in houses and those houses would almost have this creole. They came to learn English and were reinforcing their own mistakes but it was mutually intelligible so the mistakes were reinforced and not caught. I suspect LLMs would be amazing at doing that to people and their main use case along these lines seems like it would be to practice at a slightly higher level than you so I suspect some of those errors would be hard to catch / really easy to take as correct instead of validating


  • Strongly disagree with the TLDR thing

    At least, the iPhone notifications summaries were bad enough I eventually turned them off (but periodically check them) and while I was working at Google you couldn’t really turn of the genAI summaries of internal things (that evangelists kept adding to things) and I rarely found them useful. Well… they’re useful if the conversation is really bland but then the conversation should usually be in some thread elsewhere, if there was something important I don’t think the genAI systems were very good at highlighting it