u/chat-lu

I’m tired of the fucking dumb argument “The monarchy protects democracy because if a tyrant rises up, the monarch can disolve parliament.”

So the challenge I propose and that I invite you to bring to monarchists you meet is name one time when that happened. At any point in history when a tyrant said “Well, I was going to rule with an iron fist but now that Cunty McInbredFace asked me to step down, I will!”

Last time I did, I got “Akshually, you don’t understand how Canadian law works, the king has the power to dissolve the government at any time.” Dude, I do. You don’t understand how tyrants work.

Since the doordash LLM CLI has been mentionned on the show, it running in my head because something was bothering me about it and I couldn’t figure out why until now.

It’s not the idea of ordering food from the command line. We already had pizza_party in the 90s to order pizzas from Domino’s. And Doordash is continuing this tradition with their own non-LLM CLI. So now there are two of them, one with and one without a LLM.

The point of using a CLI tool even now that we have graphical interfaces is that if you know how, you can just ask for something and it will be done, or it will provide an answer. You can also easily combine them, as in “download this thing from the internet, decompress it, extract the bit that’s relevant to me, and stuff it in my database”.

GUIs are much more discoverable (you don’t need to read the manual when you find a new graphical tool) but they are not as efficient to ask questions to (you need a few clicks, write the input in the right place and so on) and you certainly can’t combine arbitrary GUIs tools to make them more powerful. And it drives people heavily using CLIs banana.

If you routinely use CLIs, you don’t find them harder, it’s the GUIs that have too damn much friction. Hence the joke “UNIX is userfriendly, it’s just picky about its friends.”

So back to why the idea of why the LLM CLI bothers me : the whole idea of the agentic workflow nonsense is that just like with a CLI you can just ask and get an answer or some work done. But unlike with a CLI you don’t have to learn shit, and the job will be half-assed.

And that’s the merging of those two concepts (deterministic/needs knowledge, and sloppy/can be ignorant) in the same tool that is so wild to me.

I just read a Smurf album and had it not been written before LLMs, you’d think it’s a condemnation of LLMs.

The title is The Smurfs and the Book that Tells Everything.

The plot is that Brainy Smurf finds SmurfGPT a book that answers any question you can ask. For some time anyway, if you ask too many questions it runs out of tokens needs to rest a bit.

The Smurfs then start to prompt the book for absolutely anything no matter how trivial and follow its advices. Papa Smurf tells them that while the answers may all sound good, they can actually be very dangerous. He’s told that he’s against progress and just wants to keep his power.

It turns out that it is dangerous to follow the book’s advice. You can get poisoned if you follow one of its recipes for instance. Which does not stop the Smurfs to keep following its advice because they keep blindly trusting it and lost the ability to think on their own by that point.

After massively destroying the environment, the book is dumped in the river when Brainy Smurf gets a choice between saving it or Baby Smurf.