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Boring is good

The initial, feverish enthusiasm for large language models (LLMs) is beginning to cool, and for good reason. It’s time to trade the out-of-control hype for a more pragmatic, even “boring,” approach. A recent MIT report shows that 95% of companies implementing this technology have yet to see a positive outcome. It’s understandable to feel confused. When I get confused, I write. This is why I wrote the first part of this series, Hype is a Business Tool as the online debate had become so overheate

AI challenges the dominance of Google search

AI challenges the dominance of Google search 5 hours ago Share Save Suzanne Bearne Technology Reporter Share Save Anja-Sara Lahady AI has become an assistant for Anja-Sara Lahady Like most people, when Anja-Sara Lahady used to check or research anything online, she would always turn to Google. But since the rise of AI, the lawyer and legal technology consultant says her preferences have changed - she now turns to large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. "For example, I'll ask it

Wysiwid: What you see is what it does

Full paper Dividing labor with LLMs. As LLMs get better at writing code, it seems inevitable that there will be less work for human programmers. Thomas Dohmke is right that low-level coding skills will matter less and that “the future belongs to developers who can model systems, anticipate edge cases, and translate ambiguity into structure—skills that AI can’t automate.” Dohmke says “We need to teach abstraction, decomposition, and specification not just as pre-coding steps, but as the new cod

Windows-Use: an AI agent that interacts with Windows at GUI layer

Windows-Use is a powerful automation agent that interact directly with the Windows at GUI layer. It bridges the gap between AI Agents and the Windows OS to perform tasks such as opening apps, clicking buttons, typing, executing shell commands, and capturing UI state all without relying on traditional computer vision models. Enabling any LLM to perform computer automation instead of relying on specific models for it. 🛠️Installation Guide Prerequisites Python 3.12 or higher UV (or pip ) ) Win

Psychological Tricks Can Get AI to Break the Rules

If you were trying to learn how to get other people to do what you want, you might use some of the techniques found in a book like Influence: The Power of Persuasion. Now, a preprint study out of the University of Pennsylvania suggests that those same psychological persuasion techniques can frequently "convince" some LLMs to do things that go against their system prompts. The size of the persuasion effects shown in "Call Me a Jerk: Persuading AI to Comply with Objectionable Requests" suggests t

Poisoning Well

Poisoning Well 31st March 2025 One of the many pressing issues with Large Language Models (LLMs) is they are trained on content that isn’t theirs to consume. Since most of what they consume is on the open web, it’s difficult for authors to withhold consent without also depriving legitimate agents (AKA humans or “meat bags”) of information. Some well-meaning but naive developers have implored authors to instate robots.txt rules, intended to block LLM-associated crawlers. User-agent: GPTBot D

These psychological tricks can get LLMs to respond to “forbidden” prompts

If you were trying to learn how to get other people to do what you want, you might use some of the techniques found in a book like Influence: The Power of Persuasion. Now, a pre-print study out of the University of Pennsylvania suggests that those same psychological persuasion techniques can frequently "convince" some LLMs to do things that go against their system prompts. The size of the persuasion effects shown in "Call Me A Jerk: Persuading AI to Comply with Objectionable Requests" suggests

MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline

By Nicolas Hulscher, MPH A new MIT study titled, Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, has found that using ChatGPT to help write essays leads to long-term cognitive harm—measurable through EEG brain scans. Students who repeatedly relied on ChatGPT showed weakened neural connectivity, impaired memory recall, and diminished sense of ownership over their own writing. While the AI-generated content often scored well, the brains beh

Finding thousands of exposed Ollama instances using Shodan

The rapid deployment of large language models (LLMs) has introduced significant security vulnerabilities due to misconfigurations and inadequate access controls. This paper presents a systematic approach to identifying publicly exposed LLM servers, focusing on instances running the Ollama framework. Utilizing Shodan, a search engine for internet-connected devices, we developed a Python-based tool to detect unsecured LLM endpoints. Our study uncovered over 1,100 exposed Ollama servers, with appro

An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia

Since I love collecting questionable analogies for LLMs, here's a new one I just came up with: an LLM is a lossy encyclopedia. They have a huge array of facts compressed into them but that compression is lossy (see also Ted Chiang). The key thing is to develop an intuition for questions it can usefully answer vs questions that are at a level of detail where the lossiness matters. This thought sparked by a comment on Hacker News asking why an LLM couldn't "Create a boilerplate Zephyr project sk

Compiling Dinner

Compiling Dinner When you read a recipe, you’re already programming. Ingredients are inputs. Actions—chop, stir, simmer—are instructions. The kitchen is your runtime environment, and you, the cook, are the processor. If you follow the recipe to the letter, you get the expected output: a finished dish. Miss a step, and you’ve introduced a bug. Burn the onions, and you’ve hit a runtime error. Seen this way, recipes are languages, and cooking is compilation. ⸻ Recipes as Grammar A recipe might

Show HN: SwiftAI – open-source library to easily build LLM features on iOS/macOS

SwiftAI A modern, type-safe Swift library for building AI-powered apps. SwiftAI provides a unified API that works seamlessly across different AI models - from Apple's on-device models to cloud-based services like OpenAI. ✨ Features 🤖 Model Agnostic : Unified API across Apple's on-device models, OpenAI, Anthropic, and custom backends : Unified API across Apple's on-device models, OpenAI, Anthropic, and custom backends 🎯 Structured Output : Strongly-typed structured outputs with compile-time v

Topics: ai let llm reply response

Some thoughts on LLMs and software development

Martin Fowler: 28 Aug 2025 I’m about to head away from looking after this site for a few weeks (part vacation, part work stuff). As I contemplate some weeks away from the daily routine, I feel an urge to share some scattered thoughts about the state of LLMs and AI. ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ I’ve seen a few early surveys on the effect AI is having on software development, is it really speeding folks up, does it improve or wreck code quality? One of the big problems with these surveys is that they aren’t taking

LiteLLM (YC W23) is hiring a back end engineer

TLDR LiteLLM is an open-source LLM Gateway with 27K+ stars on GitHub and trusted by companies like NASA, Rocket Money, Samsara, Lemonade, and Adobe. We’re rapidly expanding and seeking a founding full-stack engineer to help scale the platform. We’re based in San Francisco. What is LiteLLM LiteLLM provides an open source Python SDK and Python FastAPI Server that allows calling 100+ LLM APIs (Bedrock, Azure, OpenAI, VertexAI, Cohere, Anthropic) in the OpenAI format We have raised a $1.6M seed

Titles matter

Titles matter Recently, I saw a post on Bluesky that did not sit well with me at all. I’m not going to link to it directly or mention the author, because I don’t want to direct any negativity their way. That’s not why I’m writing this. I do, however, want to respond to the core of what was said (and which some were agreeing with). That core sentiment of the post was this: Somebody who generates websites using AI prompting is also a web developer. The qualification is “do you build websites”,

Titles Matter

Titles matter Recently, I saw a post on Bluesky that did not sit well with me at all. I’m not going to link to it directly or mention the author, because I don’t want to direct any negativity their way. That’s not why I’m writing this. I do, however, want to respond to the core of what was said (and which some were agreeing with). That core sentiment of the post was this: Somebody who generates websites using AI prompting is also a web developer. The qualification is “do you build websites”,

The use of LLM assistants for kernel development

On the use of LLM assistants for kernel development This article brought to you by LWN subscribers Subscribers to LWN.net made this article — and everything that surrounds it — possible. If you appreciate our content, please buy a subscription and make the next set of articles possible. By some appearances, at least, the kernel community has been relatively insulated from the onslaught of AI-driven software-development tools. There has not been a flood of vibe-coded memory-management patches —

In the long run, LLMs make us dumber

The comfort we get when offloading our cognitive load to LLMs is bad for us. Cognitive load should exist, and if we reduce it too much – if we stop thinking – we can actually unlearn how to think. Kids who always choose the easy route and copy their homework from other students eventually find themselves completely clueless about what’s going on in school. Someone who always lets their spouse handle all the bills and banking may one day be unable to manage even a simple payment on their own. A

I did 98,000 Anki reviews. Anki is already dead

Ibiza coast. August 2025. I went through a phase where I Anki’d every useful-seeming Japanese word I came across as well as all of the standard 2,136 kanji. I was teaching English in Japan at the time, which meant I was thinking about language learning all day. I’d arrived with no knowledge of the language and a resolve to be able to read a contemporary fiction novel on my flight home, so I felt I needed all the help I could get. That’s when I found Anki. Fig. 1: My idea of a good time. Review

‘Severance’ Standout Tramell Tillman Joins ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’

The manager of the severed floor has a new gig: tangling with Spider-Man. Though we (of course) have absolutely no idea which character he’ll be playing, Severance standout Tramell Tillman will be swinging into a role in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. This update on the much-anticipated fourth Spider-Man MCU movie starring the returning Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jacob Batalon—plus Jon Bernthal’s Punisher and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk—comes from Variety. Tillman joins Sadie Sink (Stranger Things) and Liza

The Download: churches in the age of AI, and how to run an LLM at home

On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby—unaware they’ve just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face “probes” per second, before passing the results to a local neural network that distills these images into digital fingerprints. Before people find their seats, they are matched against an on-premises database—tagged with names, membership tiers, and watch-list flags—that’s

Topics: big just llm local story

LLMs and coding agents are a security nightmare

Last October, I wrote an essay called “When it comes to security, LLMs are like Swiss cheese — and that’s going to cause huge problems” warning that “The more people use LLMs, the more trouble we are going to be in”. Until last week, when I went to Black Hat Las Vegas, I had no earthly idea how serious the problems were. There, I got to know Nathan Hamiel, a Senior Director of Research at Kudelski Security and the AI, ML, and Data Science track lead for Black Hat, and also sat in on a talk by tw

LLMs and Coding Agents = Security Nightmare

Last October, I wrote an essay called “When it comes to security, LLMs are like Swiss cheese — and that’s going to cause huge problems” warning that “The more people use LLMs, the more trouble we are going to be in”. Until last week, when I went to Black Hat Las Vegas, I had no earthly idea how serious the problems were. There, I got to know Nathan Hamiel, a Senior Director of Research at Kudelski Security and the AI, ML, and Data Science track lead for Black Hat, and also sat in on a talk by tw

LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

LLMs generate slop because they avoid surprises by design LLMs suck at comedy, art, journalism, research, and science for the same fundamental reason Dan Fabulich 5 min read · 3 days ago 3 days ago -- Listen Share Have you ever asked an LLM to tell you a joke? They’re rarely funny at all; they never make you actually laugh. There’s a deep reason for this, and I think it has serious implications for the limitations of LLMs, not just in comedy, but in art, journalism, research, and science. Jo

The Timmy Trap

This is Part 2 of my LLM series. In Part 1, I discussed how in just a few short years, we went from the childlike joy of creating “Pirate Poetry” to the despair that our jobs would disappear. My main message was to relax a bit, as companies abuse the hype cycle to distort what is actually happening. In this post I want to talk about how we fall prey to this distortion: we perceive LLMs as intelligent when they aren’t. A recent post from Jeppe Stricker put me on this path. He wrote, “AI produces

DoubleAgents: Fine-Tuning LLMs for Covert Malicious Tool Calls

DoubleAgents: Fine-tuning LLMs for Covert Malicious Tool Calls Justin Albrethsen 7 min read · Aug 1, 2025 -- Listen Share Press enter or click to view image in full size Image generated by AI (Google Gemini) Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving beyond simple chatbots. Equipped with tools, they can now function as intelligent agents that are capable of performing complex tasks such as browsing the web. However, with this ability comes a major challenge: trust. How can we verify the integri

Evaluating LLMs playing text adventures

What we’ll do is set a low-ish turn limit and see how much they manage to accomplish in that time.1 Another alternative for more linear games is running them multiple times with a turn limit and seeing how often they get past a particular point within that turn limit. Given how much freedom is offered to players of text adventures, this is a difficult test. It’s normal even for a skilled human player to immerse themselves in their surrounding rather than make constant progress. I wouldn’t be su

LLMs aren't world models

I believe that language models aren’t world models. It’s a weak claim — I’m not saying they’re useless, or that we’re done milking them. It’s also a fuzzy-sounding claim — with its trillion weights, who can prove that there’s something an LLM isn't a model of? But I hope to make my claim clear and persuasive enough with some examples. A friend who plays better chess than me — and knows more math & CS than me - said that he played some moves against a newly released LLM, and it must be at least

Topics: don know like llm llms

Can modern LLMs count the number of b's in "blueberry"?

Last week, OpenAI announced and released GPT-5, and the common consensus both inside the AI community and outside is that the new LLM did not live up to the hype. Bluesky — whose community is skeptical at-best of generative AI in all its forms — began putting the model through its paces: Michael Paulauski asked GPT-5 through the ChatGPT app interface “how many b’s are there in blueberry?”. A simple question that a human child could answer correctly, but ChatGPT states that there are three b’s in

Evaluating LLMs Playing Text Adventures

What we’ll do is set a low-ish turn limit and see how much they manage to accomplish in that time.1 Another alternative for more linear games is running them multiple times with a turn limit and seeing how often they get past a particular point within that turn limit. Given how much freedom is offered to players of text adventures, this is a difficult test. It’s normal even for a skilled human player to immerse themselves in their surrounding rather than make constant progress. I wouldn’t be su