this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I would not expect that.
Calculators haven’t been replaced, and the product managers of these services understand that their target market isn’t attempting to use them for things for which they were not intended.
brb, have to ride my lawnmower to work
Try asking my question to Google gemini a bunch of times, sometimes it gets it right, sometimes it doesn't. Seems to be about 50/50 but I quickly ran out of free access.
And google is planning to replace their search (which includes a working calculator) with this stuff. So it is absolutely the case that there's a plan to replace one of the world's most popular calculators, if not the most popular, with it.
Also, a lawnmower is unlikely to say: "Sure, I am happy to take you to work" and "I am satisfied with my performance" afterwards. That's why I sometimes find these bots' pretentious demeanor worse than their functional shortcomings.
“Pretentious” is a trait expressed by something that’s thinking. These are the most likely words that best fit the context. Your emotional engagement with this technology is weird
let me just slip the shades on real quick
checks out
oh so we've reached the gaslighting phase of the product life have we
Pretentious is a fine description of the writing style. Which actual humans fine tune.
Given that the LLMs typically have a system prompt that specifies a particular tone for the output, I think pretentious is an absolutely valid and accurate word to use.
Also, these bots have been deliberately fine-tuned in a way that is supposed to sound human. Sometimes, as a consequence, I find it difficult to describe their answering style without employing vocabulary used to describe human behavior. Also, I strongly suspect that this deliberate "human-like" style is a key reason for the current AI hype. It is why many people appear to excuse the bots' huge shortcomings. It is funny to be accused of being "emotional" when pointing out these patterns as problematic.