When it comes to AI, it seems like the vast majority of people I talk to believe large language models (LLMs) are either going to surpass human intelligence any day now or are a crypto-scale boondoggle with zero real-world utility. Few people seem to land in-between.

Not a ton of nuance out there.

The truth is, there are tasks for which LLMs are already phenomenally helpful, and tasks for which today's LLMs will invariably waste your time and energy. I've been using ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and a dozen other generative AI tools since they launched and I've had to learn the hard way—unlike with web search engines, perhaps—that falling into the habit of immediately reaching for an LLM every single time I'm stuck is a recipe for frustratingly inconsistent results.

As B.F. Skinner taught us, if a tool is tremendously valuable 30% of the time and utterly useless the other 70%, we'll nevertheless keep coming back to it even if we know we're probably going to get nothing out of it. Fortunately, I've been able to drastically increase my success rate by developing a set of heuristics to determine whether an LLM is the right tool for the job before I start typing into a chat window. They're based on the grand unifying theory that language models produce fluent bullshit, which makes them the right tool for the job when you desire fluent output and don't mind inaccurate bullshit.

Generative AI is perhaps the fastest-moving innovation in the history of computing, so It goes without saying that that everything I suggest here may be very useful on June 9th, 2024, but will read as a total farce in the distant future of November 30th, 2024. That said, if you've been sleeping on using LLMs in your daily life up to this point and are looking to improve your mental model of how to best relate to them (as opposed to one-off pro-tips on how to accomplish specific tasks), I hope you'll find this post useful.

So here they are, three simple rules to live by.

You'll never guess what happens next…

Every year, Japan's convenience stores and packaged food companies attempt to sate the nation's voracious appetite for novelty goods by releasing a slew of products that you or I might consider weird as fuck.

I just spent a month there, and snapped a photo of my favorite head scratchers:

If it's not clear what you're looking at, here's a brief rundown of what each of these is (or purports to be):

1. Candy that's shaped, sized, and flavored like peanuts and which features peanut-like crunchiness. (Why not just eat peanuts, though?)
2. "Chiizu-tara", a common Japanese snack that sandwiches cheese with fish paste. This one is co-branded with a popular delivery pizza chain and flavored like spicy sausage
3. Gummies colored and shaped as sliced bell peppers (always referred to as paprika in Japanese), flavored as savory consommé broth, with vegetable content equivalent to one serving of lettuce
4. "Delicious tomato" flavored alcoholic chuuhai cocktail in a can, exclusive to Japan's northern Touhoku region
5. Gummies shaped like salmon nigiri, where the salmon pieces are orange-flavored and the rice is yogurt-flavored
6. Another alcoholic chuuhai, this one flavored after Suntory's Dekavita C beverage, a long-running vitamin C, B, niacin, and amino acids supplement. Get healthy and drunk in one step!
7. Toma'nade, which is like a cursed Arnold Palmer and contains a full tomato but an unspecified amount of lemons
8. Gummies shaped like bisected soft-boiled eggs. They're flavored like white grapes, and the package reassures the consumer that they are not egg flavored
9. Jelly sparkling grape drink. You are meant to shake it ten times and then let the juicy-jelly find its way down your gullet, I guess
10. French fry and hamburger flavored potato chips are all the rage this year (I found at least three kinds of each), but far-and-away, the winner was this one modeled after Wendy's limited edition "Wild Rock" burger from 2017, which featured two burger patties in lieu of buns (like a beef equivalent to KFC's Double Down). Again, this isn't that, these are potato chips modeled after an off-brand hypothetical burger that looks just like the Wendy's Wild Rock burger. Also, to be clear, the potato chips are neither a low-carb or high-protein snack, they are simply meant to have a taste that's evocative of burger meat. I can't stress that enough

Humane, of overpriced AI tchotchke and parting-foolish-VCs-with-their-money fame:

Our investigation determined that the battery supplier was no longer meeting our quality standards and that there is a potential that certain battery cells supplied by this vendor may pose a fire safety risk.

I would normally be worried about people's safety here, but I'm pretty confident that all of Humane's customers had already stopped using it months ago.

This is a copy of the Searls of Wisdom newsletter delivered to subscribers on June 5, 2024.

During his closing keynote at RubyKaigi, Matz joked that it's really confusing why people would want a picture with him. "Why would you want that?" So a couple hours later I made sure to explain that I don't know why I want it, but could I please have a picture anyway and he obliged after a mock protest:

I'll be honest, I struggled a bit over what to write this month. I spent the entirety of May traveling all over Japan and had so many novel experiences that the only thing more difficult than picking a few favorites to write about would be to arrive at some kind of overarching theme to summarize the entire trip. Searching for the right thing to discuss here put me in an uncomfortably contemplative state, for better or worse.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading this decidedly middle-aged edition of Searls of Wisdom.

Keep reading…