Too simple, too dogmatic
at the start and at the end (“don’t use LLMs” and “then they are poison”). The middle section is all good.
Writing with a LLM is a boon if you are trying to write while mastering a new field. Imagine a neuroscientist entering robotics or an electrical engineer trying to enter the field of neuromorphic systems. In these cases a human will need help from an LLM to think and write more deeply AND broadly. I sure do.
You could object that this form of human-LLM collaborative writing is just for one reader; the writer. True at the start but not true toward the end.
I do agree that even the frontier models do not touch a really strong human writer. Way too much gimmickry. They do not yet match individuals such as Leslie Lamport, Terry Winograd, John MacArthur, Richard Rorty, Humberto Maturana, William James, Rodney Brooks. They don’t have the depth of understanding to simplify. But give them a few more years and excursions in the real world and a concept if “now” and the situation may improve.
I often ask Fable and Opus to explain difficult topics to me as if I were the canonical dog Rover. It works.
No, you need to learn the new field you’re entering enough to write about it. Having incomplete knowledge and writing for others utilizing an llm that you do not know enough to fact check is about the worst way I can think of to use an llm for writing.
100% disagree. The more you don't know an area, the more LLMs will lead you astray.
Explaining difficult topics or summarizing to you is fine. But that's a world of difference from having an LLM write for you. You THINK the LLM is helping you write above your level, but that's because you are not in a position to tell it's bad.
A more facetious way to put "don't use LLMs": share your input prompt. The people who don't want to read LLM output won't have to see it, and those who do can enjoy using an LLM the same way the author would've. This actually saves a loss/noise step as the consumers won't need to deploy an llm to summarize the authors llm expanded output.
A person isn’t becoming a master in the new field if the LLM is doing all that for them.
New areas are where it is most dangerous to use an LLM, as a person can’t tell when it doesn’t align with their views (because they don’t have any yet), is misleading, or flat out wrong.
If I want to know what an LLM thinks, I’ll ask an LLM. If I’m reading a paper from a human, it’s, because I want to know what that human thinks. If they need the LLM to fill in the gaps in their knowledge, then they don’t know enough to write about the topic yet. Doing that work to write something themselves could help move them learn enough to write something that is hopefully worth reading.
This is explicitly the problem people notice with LLMs. The text they produce sounds fine only if you are so ignorant of the subject that you can’t properly read it yourself. That’s not a “boon” it’s a flaw.
Yes, and genetic variant generally do not act in isolation. We currently focus on the small additive effects of variants because we can with small sample sizes—and 1 million humans is marginal using a GWAS cohort to dive into epistasis. But these interaction effects among variants are critical. Now almost completely deprecated.
Poor commentary with no documentation or citation. At least point to the source of data for 200 plus countries. Presumably from IHME at the University of Washington.
This paper is worth reading. The caricature is not.
Global, regional, and national trends in the morbidity gap and contributing diseases, injuries, and risk factors, 1990–2023: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2023,” The Lancet Public Health, 2026, DOI: 10.1016/S2468-2667(26)00098-8
Also lovely new longitudinal data on centenarian heath across lifespan for a very large Swedish population that demonstrates persistent morbidity advantages compared to very well matched non-centenarians. Fun papers too:
DOI:
10.1016/j.eclinm.2025.103396
DOI: 10.1093/geroni/igaf050
DOU: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003784
And these conditions account are major contributors to the change:
depression, anxiety, hearing loss, and low back pain. All are highly subject to diagnostic drift.
>This paper is worth reading. The caricature is not.
AI, is that you?
Carricature of what?
It's a commentary post. Doesn't need to cite everything, the numbers can easily be googled, and are not some cryptic, disputable, numbers to begin with, but widely available.
I have started beating the hell out of Claude with stylometric analyses of writers I admire; usually technical writers like Terry Winograd, Leslie Lamport, Rodney Brooks. Then the “no or minimal rhetorical flourishes” rule; no British em-dashes, and minimize the negative phrase thesis-antithesis fun”. It helps.
I think you are right that in a year or two LLMs will be able to do a good impression of many technical styles. But not Nabokov, Kundera, or Kafka for subtlety.
If one manages to channel Edsger W. Dijkstra I will be impressed and rank it high on my leaderboard.
Yep. Such a classic Claude flavored product. Good ideas wrapped in cotton candy.
I often read as much as 1000 words thinking to myself: “this is smooth”, but then think to myself “Is this my friend Opus 4.8 or now Opus 5?.
In this case the rhetorical neatness is unmistakable especially in the beginnings and endings of paragraphs: “Here is the constructive turn, honestly ranked, with no silver bullets on offer.”
Easy enough to change. I have a Stylometry Skill fit to my preferred style—a mix of me and Terry Winograd. Give Opus 10 of your best paper thst you wrote and tell it to build a model of your style. hHard to distinguish except I make way more typos.
You patent and protect (as best you can) the missing ingredients needed to get to AGI. Only half joking and also scary to contemplate. Qualcomm’s CDMA patent is on example. ARM and Texas Instruments two other examples.
There isn't, but everything that they said above is absolutely true and people who try to fight it will suffer. There is lots of flexibility within those constraints, but the constraints aren't imaginary.
If you want to use LLMs effectively, everything OP said is true. It has been this way since the beginning. There will be a time when long context and compaction will be effective, but now isn't it.
For my quirky workflows I need 100K even to prep Opus 4.8 or higher to begin good work. Not programming, but a complex synthetic architecture for implementing more attentional autonomy for machines.
Writing with a LLM is a boon if you are trying to write while mastering a new field. Imagine a neuroscientist entering robotics or an electrical engineer trying to enter the field of neuromorphic systems. In these cases a human will need help from an LLM to think and write more deeply AND broadly. I sure do.
You could object that this form of human-LLM collaborative writing is just for one reader; the writer. True at the start but not true toward the end.
I do agree that even the frontier models do not touch a really strong human writer. Way too much gimmickry. They do not yet match individuals such as Leslie Lamport, Terry Winograd, John MacArthur, Richard Rorty, Humberto Maturana, William James, Rodney Brooks. They don’t have the depth of understanding to simplify. But give them a few more years and excursions in the real world and a concept if “now” and the situation may improve.
I often ask Fable and Opus to explain difficult topics to me as if I were the canonical dog Rover. It works.
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