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Reply to @toast@donotsta.re
Blurry Moon@sun@shitposter.world (2026-08-06 16:49:29)
@toast isn't it kind of unusable now, usage has massively dropped off for various reasons. I think it's a great idea that deserves to exist in perpetuity but something really bad has happened to it.
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(eval 'Toast)@toast@donotsta.re (2026-08-06 16:52:36)
@sun I haven't really used it much? When I was new I made an account and posted answers (if you see any answers from deleted accounts with like 14k points there's a solid chance it's one of mine), but I quickly realized it's pointless.
The posters are not trying to help you learn something, they're pointfarming with the target audience being other pointfarmers. And even if they were trying to help you, it's just the blind leading the gullible.
Your post was a good insight though in that it's the same kind of failure category, just with a different modality, in that both SE and LLMs tend to produce poor quality answers with hidden faults that you need to already know about the thing to identify.
The difference is that LLMs will make things up wholesale or push towards sycophancy while SE will push towards "I know the answer but you haven't earned it" (they do not in fact know the answer).

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Blurry Moon@sun@shitposter.world (2026-08-06 16:58:47)
@toast I don't want to sound like "prompt engineer" is a real job but asking questions to an LLM is in fact a skill and can produce wildly different results depending on the quality of the questioning. there is basically probably ten people on Earth that could synthesize concepts from both Fuschia and SEL4 OS and none of them have time to talk to me, but the LLM at all their source code and gave me actionable insight. Sometimes it's wrong, but the gains are way bigger than the downsides. you learn how to mitigate that too.