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In another great piece about what LLM usage actually means in the workplace beyond promise of ‘efficiency’ and ‘profit’, Dave Rupert notes:

I’d rather have a human-to-human conversation with you, not a chat with Claude by proxy. What Claude said is an okay chunk of “anecdata”, but it’s not a substitute for our working relationship.

(From: I don't want a screenshot of your Claude conversation - daverupert.com)

As part of my work for the W3C's Advisory Board (AB), I co-wrote a short overview of reasons why or why not to use LLMs in the standards process.

My own personal opinions are a bit more extreme than what is captured here, and that's fine, the goal of this document is to capture what the AB mostly agrees on when it comes to usage of these tools. We wanted to be balanced, too, which is why a sceptic (me) and an enthusiast (Elena) decided to collaborate on it.

As we wrote:

we want to highlight considerations around different ways in which LLMs can be useful or problematic when it comes to leveraging them in standards work at W3C.

(From: Use of Large Language Models in Standards Work)

My opinion on "Artificial Intelligence" | ./axel.leroy.sh) gives an overview of developer's Axel Leroy's thought process on the question whether to use LLMs at work.

Dave wrote a great piece about friction, and Matthias pointed out something rather important that followed from this:

The frictionless version of creative work isn’t faster creative work. It’s no creative work at all.

(From: The Shape of Friction · Matthias Ott)

I could not agree more. Bringing in experience and judgment (and, imo, intentions) is what makes works meaningfully creative, removing that leaves us with very little left.

Simon P. Couch wrote about energy consumption of LLM usage and shares some of his napkin calculations (in lieu of data being made available my large AI vendors).

He concludes that it isn't too bad:

Personally, I don’t know that this scale of energy (and, ostensibly, water) use is significant enough to make me decrease my use of coding agents

(From: Electricity use of AI coding agents | Simon P. Couch – Simon P. Couch)

When you're not into ITC Garamond:

The most distinctive element of [ITC Garamond] is its enormous lower-case x-height. In theory this improves its legibilty, but only in the same way that dog poop’s creamy consistency in theory should make it more edible.

(From: I Hate ITC Garamond - DesignObserver)

(via Eric Bailey)

Robert Kingett was in a writing group when he realised what LLM vendors do is to gentrify our imagination and our language:

So the Tech Bros, in their infinite mediocrity, decided to bypass the human element entirely. They built a machine that scrapes our work—our pain, our joy, our very souls—without consent, grinds it into a mathematical slurry, and extrudes it as a flavorless, inoffensive paste that can be sold by the bucket.

They built a machine to gentrify the English language.

And the horror of watching my friend lose his soul almost eats me alive.

(From: The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles)

(via Matthias Ott)

Chris Adams went to Green IO and wrote up his notes

I figure it’s worth sharing a few takeaways from sifting through about a bajillion pics of slides, and all notes scribbled down over the last three days, for others and my future self. Off we go.

(From: Takeaways, trends and notes from Green IO Paris 2025 - Reads, Takes and Links)

Researchers from Anthropic, the UK AI Security Institute and the Alan Turing institute, found it is easier than thought to poison very large models:

we demonstrate that by injecting just 250 malicious documents into pretraining data, adversaries can successfully backdoor LLMs ranging from 600M to 13B parameters

(From: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size \ Anthropic)

Jenny:

The problem with AI “art” is that it was not the expression of a mortal being choosing to spend its one wild and precious life clawing its way through mediocrity to try and imperfectly communicate a feeling with other mortal beings who, by definition, can never fully comprehend it, and therefore it is fundamentally uninteresting to me.

(From: choosing friction | The Roof is on Phire)