feuerrot
eevee 🦊down with Whatever https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/
sristow
Luna Lactea
Wolf480pl@eevee
> I feel like I get a little dumber every time I accidentally start reading it [LLM output]
so much this!!
@eevee
> [The attitude about LLMs] feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. Bitcoin is the future. It’ll replace the dollar by 2020. You’re gonna be left behind.
> What do programmers get out of this?
I think you've struck something deeper, not tied to vested interest.
Isn't this similar to the smug "I use Arch btw" ?
I think I've seen this much earlier, in non-IT context, but I can't recall an example...
religion? 🤔
@eevee
Also you wrote that the LLM hype is rooted in the idea that "doing things is worthless".
To me that sounds awfully like burnout / depression / learned helplessness.
So maybe that's where this comes from? Maybe people have been doing tedious work without seeing any purpose or meaning in it, they got burned out, and now they want a machine to do that job for them...
> What are you all even writing that so much of it consists of generic slop?
IMO many jobs are like that :(
Kiloku@wolf480pl @eevee My lead dev who uses LLMs to "help" him (I've caught code with mistakes I know he wouldn't have made if he wrote it himself) tends to work until like 3 AM every now and then. I guess if you feel the need to overwork you also start resenting the work
Also, pressure to get the thing to work no matter what is such a killjoy.
It can be external, but it can also be internal - when you know a lot of people rely on you, they don't need to tell you, you just know it.
It makes it seem like the result is all that matters, and then the process itself is no longer enjoyable.
mirabilos@wolf480pl @eevee read up on what TESCREAL is (and the names behind that are the techbros you recognise from the AI crap). Religion is not too far off…
Arne Martin@eevee This was extremely good 🙌
IrgndSonDepp@eevee Your post is 🔥!!!
I'm still holding out hope that the bubble will burst sooo hard before my kids get into school. My head is close to falling off from all the head shaking whenever I read about the shit that's going on schools and universities with LLMs.
I hate the "whatever machine" with the passion of a thousand burning suns. 😬
🦁Lioness & 🐍Emma@eevee I had the strangest experience entering a comment on your post, using firefox for android on a pixel 2, using a really old version of (now Microsoft) Swiftkey (I'm afraid to update anything b/c of business-driven regressions like llm feature tumors)
entering text at the front reversed it character by character & reset the cursor to before the text, unless I typed too fast (I did the first line very slowly w/ much do over). entering text elsewhere or newline caused strange duplications.
@eevee "I mean, I get it. I was trying to do something that had never been done before. LLMs are fine at things that appear a zillion times in their training data — in fact, this is probably a big part of the trick, because the things that appear more often in their training data are the things people are more likely to ask about in general and thus the things people are more likely to ask an LLM."
I've tried to explain this sometimes and people don't seem to get why this makes it useless 😑
Joel Kin
Jocelynephiliac 
@eevee read the entire thing without skimming, fantastic essay that really nails everything I’ve hated about this tech. Bravo
lime!@eevee the devaluing of creation really is the crux of it, because that also stops adoption of these things for whatever stuff there actually is they could be useful for by saying "they can do everything for you". we'll likely not see actual uses for these things until the entire current cycle dies down, and at that point they will likely be so constrained that they're not recognisable as 'ai' tools.
like, i sometimes do single-pass image-to-image runs on digital paste-up artworks i try to do, so i have something to paint over without having to repeatedly hunt for the right colour combinations for shadows and such, which i'm really bad at. in that case it acts like a photoshop filter. that's where i see this entire thing going once the hype dies.
@lime image-to-image still seems pretty weird since aiui it's going through /two/ massive generalist databases so you have basically no idea what will come out the other side (or, of course, how much it will resemble someone else's extant artwork, which seems to be a much bigger problem with imagegen.)
@eevee more like one-and-a-half; since the process basically "de-blurs" an image from noise, i can add random noise to my own image and tell the model "okay we're on step 15 of 20, deblur the rest".
the fact that it's basically impossible to avoid plagiarism is why i only do these for myself, as experiments. i don't want to put more slop on the web.
@eevee but yes, it does still go through clip and the feature database, and still requires a prompt. it just skips most of the actual generation.
sometimes it can be fun to just give the model shapes and get it to find things in them, cloud gazing style, like the google thing that saw dogs everywhere.
@lime noise on an existing image is interesting at least. that's certainly more directed than "give me Whatever"
@eevee it's Guided Whatever. so it's basically the same thing as all the chatbots everyone is getting, but for images.
tangent:
other than doing art experiments just for me, i'm currently studying llms at work so i can stay employable, and going through the code of these systems is depressing. like, i don't have the math brain to actually decipher the vector calculus at the base of the system, but i can churn through all the structure of the system, and... there is none. no organisation, no security consideration, no nothing. it's all research code that escaped.
in no other production ready system have i encountered a function named essentially "load_local_file" which, when called with a string argument representing the path of a local file, does a http call to a proprietary service with an api key embedded in the library, that basically only _looks at the file name_ and says "ok here is 5 GB of extra files for that one file".
deploying these systems in secure contexts (which i know people do) mus be a nightmare.
Filip@eevee
The fact that you have no idea what will come out the other side actually seems to be part of the appeal − as @davidgerard recently wrote, it's like playing a slot machine: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/
@lime
The fact that you have no idea what will come out the other side actually seems to be part of the appeal − as @davidgerard recently wrote, it's like playing a slot machine: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/
@lime
Philipp
Phil Giammattei@eevee this is so good, thank you for writing it
Bel Tamtu
fraggle@eevee agree so much with everything you said here, thank you. You call it Whatever, I call it bullshit. We're living in the Age of Bullshit. I've come to believe it's the defining characteristic of the time we're living in, and AI is only one aspect of it but it's certainly becoming a big part
das-gBullshit makes
the flowers grow
& that's beautiful.
AI slop can't do that.
Hazelnoot
Damon L. Wakes@eevee It's so good to see someone else address this. It's been driving me nuts. I mean, how much effort does it save to throw in an end bracket for me if I then have to hit an arrow key to skip past the thing ~even if it's in the right place~?
Rémi Dupré@DamonWakes @eevee hm, maybe it helps with keeping a parsable code while typing so the syntax coloring and linters don't panic?
@remidupre @eevee That would make a certain amount of sense, but if that's the reason I'd vastly prefer syntax highlighting to hold off updating while I'm actively typing. I want my tools to draw attention to errors, not try and prevent them from ever existing even for an instant.
Phil Ashby 
🍵@DamonWakes @remidupre @eevee
This, I think the tooling is trying to "shift left" too far (into my head perhaps?). I like the integration of language servers and linters into Vim, they don't run until I drop out of insert mode, or at least until I hit <CR>.
This, I think the tooling is trying to "shift left" too far (into my head perhaps?). I like the integration of language servers and linters into Vim, they don't run until I drop out of insert mode, or at least until I hit <CR>.
Yuna
Omega 
QuARC-08380@eevee '(v0160 (TANG (ST "I die inside whenever I have to close brackets manually (colour coded brackets make it a bit easier, I guess)" )
(ST "that said I did have to write this post without either of those" `)))
(ST "that said I did have to write this post without either of those" `)))
(v0160 (EXT (ST "(for context, watch the old SICP lectures where they spend way too much time closing brackets)" ))) 
Niku
Pavel Machek@eevee I used LLM to translate into czech and get summary. Should I feel bad? :-). There are good uses for LLM, and yes, that includes "startrek", but someone will have to do that. And yes, I tried to start (but did not get far, so far).
@mirabilos @eevee Yeah, because LLM clearly use more resources than human doing same job would.
@mirabilos @eevee Actually, you'd be surprised. I ran the modem locally on a cellphone, so I know the power consumption.
ceb
Ozzelot@eevee "There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though. That’s management, a fairly different job."
This goes hard.
This goes hard.
Random
Daniel Brahneborg, PhD 🇸🇪@eevee One of the most well written things on this topic I've ever read, I think. Thank you.
dasgrueneblatt@eevee Very good text, thank you
Akari Mekahime@eevee this is literally exactly how I feel articulated much better than I can tysm 
raphael
Jared White (🏳️⚧️ ally)
Bunny's Precarious Little Life@eevee Bitcoin will never be good at being a real currency. The value of it is too unstable. Transactions take too long. Whoever controls the most/biggest mining operations controls the ledger. These are all things caused by it's design which prevent it from being useful currency.
Unfortunately, I think the problems with payment processors is a political problem not a technological one.
Jef Poskanzer@eevee Good rant, but when I got to this part I nearly injured myself in my haste to do it. Thank you!
BSM (sw.s) 🇨🇭
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦> This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.
Yes! Argh! I sooo feel this!