Memento, deinde loquere

Memento, deinde loquere is the latin equivalent of “Think first, then speak”.

This post is meant to bring some clarity on my approach to LLMs and the way this technology is used within all my websites.

I am a non-native English speaker and this shows in my communications. My sentences tend to be quite long, with several “relative clauses” or “subordinate clauses” (this latter aspect depends on the specific region I come from. For those who do not know - and I expect them to be the majority of my readers, a relative clause is one introduced by that, which and similar particles). Don’t misunderstand me: being Italian, I have a very good English - at least this is what native speakers say. How do I rate myself? I know that I am not at the “It’s a me, it’s a Mario”/”the cat is on the table” level - but I also appreciate the fact that the real English is something else.

With that being said: I use LLMs only to polish my English. Ah, yeah, and also to flatten somehow my tone - because I am the guy who loves to send people where they belong. Content is mine, nevertheless.

It’s just a matter of respect for the readers - I don’t want to force anyone to waste their time rebuilding my sentences. Sic et simpliciter.

My personal opinion on LLM? It’s a great technology. It could be even better if access to it were regulated differently. However, this would be a long discussion — too long for this blog.

And this brings us to another point - why I wrote this post.

A few days ago I published a post on this blog, and I cross-posted it on Reddit and Mastodon. Usual way to harvest a few readers. It’s a great post, in my opinion: it is conceptually very dense, and this reverberates through its length (7k words). On r/linuxadmin several people attacked me with accusations like “you used LLM”, “LLM Slop”, “LLM Hallucination”.

Then I went through their profiles: very high karma subdivided as:

• high comment karma
• low post karma I scanned their posts and comments and found the posts quite boring (really, nothing to learn there); while a lot of comments were like:

bash

or

postgres

or even - and this is the pinnacle of their reasoning

💩

You can have fun with math and realise that the ratio of comment karma to post karma could be a good metric to detect trolls. In that case, be my guest - find the right parameters yourself. A trivial formula could be:

$TI$ troll index; $K_c$ Karma comments; $K_p$ Karma post.

If $TI>100$ and comments are one-liners or emojis, here you go: a troll in sight!

Dealing with trolls is a waste of time. Nevertheless, this post is also for them - I’m not sure they’ll understand, but at least no one can question my good will.

I am not here to teach people how to live, and I really don’t care what people do for a living. I am not here to teach people the difference between constructive criticism and some random rant, either

One thing is for sure: I profoundly pity people who identify with a given technology, making it a religion (and well, many Linux fanboys don’t know how to do any better), or worse: an extension of their persona.

The bottom line is extremely simple.

Dear Troll - you’re surely entitled to your opinion. I am entitled not to give a fuck about it. But please, don’t show what a thermal waste you are in public - that’s revolting, and you’re embarrassing yourself. Your miserable existence is not our fault.

I won’t be posting to r/linuxadmin anymore. It’s a toxic environment, pretty much like Facebook. Ad futuram rei memoriam…