2025 • July • 23

Miscellanea for 2025-07-23

miscellanea

Hello world!
I've been trying (and often failing) to be careful about my language around the current wave of LLM-powered tech that folks are calling "AI"
- Like, the following things can all conceivably be called "snack chips":
  - Potato chips
  - Corn tortilla chips
  - Cheez-It® Original Snack Crackers
  - CHEETOS® Crunchy Cheese Flavored Snacks
  - Banana chips
  - Baked kale chips
- But, I'm sure most would agree that each of these things have significant differences between each other.
- Just like a bunch of these things could be called "AI":
  - Video game NPC behavior
  - AlphaGo
  - Large language models
  - Movie & music recommendations
  - Self-driving cars
  - Weather forecasts
- But, we should be able to agree that each of these things have significant differences.
  - They also have significantly different means of production, appropriate applications, and defining characteristics that builders and operators need to know inside & out.
- Just calling this stuff ✨AI✨ for the sake of simpler marketing does us all a disservice.
  - Especially when folks get it tangled up with fictional depictions like Her (2013) and the computer from the USS Enterprise.
  - That means the tech inherits a halo of expectations and enthusiasm that it hasn't necessarily earned.
  - And that obscures understanding of the real operating characteristics of the thing.
- I feel like there's a longer blog post here, but I don't have the rest of it right this moment.

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