epihelix

> It's only going to be nice and helpful and always available to you.

You could always try "You are a thorny internet troll" as your system prompt instead. Works wonders.

> social skills like tactfulness and navigating conflict.

We're not still talking about social media, are we?

(I agree that substituting AI for human interaction is bonkers, btw. But I'm not sure social media helps, or doesn't also involve mostly AI interactions these days.)

Surely there is no universe in which Emacs hits the definition of a minimal anything?

The EC (embedded controller) controls the hard power off on a modern laptop, not the OS at all. That's why you can still power down in the event of a device lockup (thankfully).

Well, when you name your company "Anthropic", what do you expect? I remain surprised that this continues to get a free pass.

Quoting Wikipedia:

> The word is from the Latin flos (flower) and legere (to gather): literally a gathering of flowers, or collection of fine extracts from the body of a larger work.

There's obviously the scholarly allusion and the literal floral allusion here, so even if it is AI generated it's right on the money in this case :) You would struggle to find a more apt name.

Why would AI-generated explain LaTeX? Pretty sure most people still use LaTeX around here.

(I'd never heard of Typst until your post, personally. But I'd guess it would be easy to port over to that platform with an LLM if you wanted to.)

You are not the only one. I think it's a very vocal minority, who mostly, sadly, seem to equate obsequious flattery with consciousness and sentience (see, e.g. Richard Dawkins).

There's also the problem that to lay people, LLMs are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that colours many of these responses.

Add it to your system or developer prompt, and it still can be.

Given the amount of angst being expressed in this thread about particular LLM-isms, I wonder why people don't simply prompt against the traits they hate. Yes, it will reduce output quality very slightly in some circumstances, but if it really gets your goat like this, surely it's worth it.

Technically, in latex (and what other format is there?) an en-dash is `--` and an em-dash is `---`. So that was just an em-dash. A `-` is a hyphen.

Us oldies learnt to type these with multiple dashes automatically, as unicode hadn't been invented yet.

> This presumes an LLM has something to say. The reason the text doesnt make much sense, is because it doesnt. It isnt "on topic" because it has no topic to be on. Sentences go on, are joined irrelevantly, and so on because theyre sampled from a distribution of "possibly relevant sentences". They aren't being addressed to a reader (whose mind is being modelled), on a topic the writer wishes to express.

While I don't like LLM voice either, I'd strongly disagree with this. LLM writing can be very tight these days -- sentences do not "go on" and are not "joined irrelevantly". I'm not sure when you last used an LLM, but it must have been a very long time ago; this hasn't been the case since late 2024 for frontier models, in my experience.

Obviously there's no underlying consciousness behind it all, but the verisimilitude is good enough for stimulating conversations on the recent research literature in my field, which I appreciate. For me, at least, the communication level is absolutely fine.

(YMMV, of course, and perhaps my bar for this is lower than yours.)

The models don't know or need permission to make up references. References are just complicated things to predict in terms of next tokens -- Author names are found in many references, with many journals. Most hallucinated refs use researcher names in the field and credible article titles related to their research.

Agentic models now, however, can correctly search pubmed or OpenAlex and obtain valid refs, so that tell is mostly gone.

Wait until we get the first retractions of papers with AI generated micrographs or blots, and synthetic data plots. That's the bit that really scares me.

Perl was my first love as a language, and I don't recall any hostility towards Perl users. On the contrary, the environment in the early 2000s was very supportive.

Perl likely declined because Perl6 did a Duke Nukem Forever, and Perl5 was dated and not incredibly well-adapted to OOP. Then Python got taken up for teaching, and it was all over.

(I still love Perl5, still use it in one-liners all the time, and still code up quick CLI tools with it.)

Ideally, Google would have run with:

Argon > Neon > Helium

That would have been the noble thing to do.

Technically not true any more (for some versions of copilot chat, at least) -- my workplace's version has a "GPT 5.6 Sol" selector with "Answer faster" or "Think Deeper". ("Think deeper" appears to represent the lowest reasoning effort).

But you have to select it each time; otherwise "Auto" sends you to a lobomised model that is probably Phi-4 :(

One of the unexpectedly useful aspects of Simon Willison's pelican benchmark is that you can estimate what model you're using via the pelican it generates:

"GPT 5.6 Sol": appears genuine, albeit low reasoning. -> handed off agentically: appears to be using Luna for agentic tasks.

"Auto": very low quality, does not appear to be an OAI model.

> The terminal ecosystem needs to change

What is your justification for this statement? Why does it need to change, and what does it need to change to? Personally, I've not felt this (and I spend a lot of time in the terminal). Fish shell and Byobu give me everything I've ever wanted.

Like the poster you were replying to, I don't understand what these new terminal emulators bring to the table, other than potentially more resource usage.

I feel that there's something here that I'm missing (ghostty is clearly popular, so it must bring something both new and useful to the table), but I'm genuinely not sure what that is.