Why was the title truncated and its casing changed? The original title is
> Your intellectual fly is open
which makes more sense.
Your title made think that a software project was open sourced or something.
Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
21–30 of 455 posts
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#22Your fly is also open when you indiscriminately fling accusations of LLM writing around. I know it isn't that easy to detect because I get falsely accused of it. To some people it seems to mean text written in complete sentences without glaring errors and maybe a few uncommon word choices. It has become an all purpose excuse for declining to engage with the meaning.
One of my neighbors sent a letter to the HOA president, who refused to even acknowledge it, on the grounds that it was written too well and so must have been AI assisted. I don't know if that was true, and don't much care, because I do know it contained valid issues that deserved a response.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#23Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post.
The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader.
And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM.
I am a technical guy at heart; also an introverted extrovert. I hate writing docs that are to be written to satisfy someone else's metrics. For it to be a tickbox'ed item.
I delegate that to an LLM. I want to spend my time solving interesting challenges instead.
So, Mr. Cantrill, you got a problem with that? So be it.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#24(2025)
Also in the author's latest post[0], they took this[1] self-reported preference poll seriously, which makes it very hard for me to take their articles seriously.
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...
[1] https://writethatblog.substack.com/p/dev-reaction-to-ai-blog...
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#25Your fly is also open when you indiscriminately fling accusations of LLM writing around. I know it isn't that easy to detect because I get falsely accused of it. To some people it seems to mean text written in complete sentences without glaring errors and maybe a few uncommon word choices. It has become an all purpose excuse for declining to engage with the meaning. One of my neighbors sent a letter to the HOA presid…
> Your fly is also open when you indiscriminately fling accusations of LLM writing around
Not.. really?
I kinda see the point you seem to want to make, but the "no U" opener makes it hard to do that.
Beside that, HOAs - from what I heard of them - will use any reason they can make up to ignore what you want from them, so I'm not sure if that has anything to do with LLMs.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#26Why was the title truncated and its casing changed? The original title is > Your intellectual fly is open which makes more sense. Your title made think that a software project was open sourced or something.
I assume the filter deletes "Your" if its at the start of the title.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#27I worked at LinkedIn (briefly, before retirement) and the product had been useful to me for years before that, so I used it a fair bit but not much anymore since it doesn't serve any of my current needs. There were always awful million-view posts written by humans, useless influencers promoted by the algorithm. That was always garbage, but to an LLM those posts look like success, because engagement, so the LLM tries to replicate that garbage, does a mediocre job, and the result is this sort of weird garbage. Basically the LLM appears to be high on its own supply. Problem is the viral stuff was always what made me want to run out of the room and lock the door, so even if the LLMs did a better job of replicating that garbage, it would still be garbage, just a little less weird.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#28The only place where I use AI for writing is to summarize press articles; this allows me to legally have a mirror of a press article I am commenting about in my blog (whenever I use AI, I make a disclaimer that the prose is AI-generated; EDIT: I also link to the original article, and an archived copy if available). Now that archive.org doesn’t mirror many press articles, and now that archive.today is having a lot of reliability problems (right now its CAPTCHA is down because it has gone beyond Google’s limit for CAPTCHA use), an AI summary of a news article (along with a link to the real article) is the only way to guarantee the reader will get this gist of the article I’m commenting on.
I also use AI to colorize old black and white pictures when discussing historical events in my blog, as well as the occasional AI enhancement of an old grainy and/or blurry photo.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#29Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post. The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader. And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM. I am a technical guy at heart; also an introverted extrovert. I hate writing docs that are to be written to satisfy someone else's metrics. For it to be a tickbox'ed item. I delegate that to an LLM. I want to spend my time solving interesting challeng…
Some people actually want to enjoy their moment to moment existence on this planet and not read garbage someone shat out.
It's just digital pollution.
Re: Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
#30I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing." My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK? Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus,…
Some people type 100x more words than the final article just digging into a topic and turning it on all sides. The final article being generated tells you nothing of the size of the effort going in.