this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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Why are you describing me so well?
The number of times I've seen eyes glaze over after someone asked a question they shouldn't have and didn't want the answer to, is too damned high.
Also, sometimes, I'll go into a ridiculous level of detail just to intellectually beat someone over the head with how much I know so they'll stop asking questions. They seem to think they're being clever and trying to "prove" that tech guys don't know much more than the rest of the "tech literate".
I'll tell you, the amount of information in my brain from working IT support for a decade would make most people's head spin for hours. And that's not including the countless years of time in college, and doing personal/independent research, simply because a fancy new technology captured my ADHD hyperfocus.
I've gone from being a novice with a technology, discussing it with someone who seems to know a lot about the topic, to researching everything about it, and the next time I meet them, they don't have half of the knowledge of the subject that I do by that point. It happens... A lot.
If you don't want a lecture, and just want things to work stop asking questions, just tell me what you expect as the outcome and I'll figure out everything in-between.
When someone asks me a very technical question, I provide a vague and ambiguous response. I learned this habit in grad school. No one unless they are a knowledge domain expert in the field cares about the specifics. Often people ask me about AI. I say that it's worrying for many reasons but mainly that AI demands so much energy. This is enough for them to pick up and carry the conversation. I could lecture them on many aspects of AI. But you'd have to pay for this torture. ๐
I generally explain to people that the current state of technology for LLMs is that they're larger and more complicated versions of the text prediction on your phone, you know, when it guesses what word you want to put next, but with whole sentences using the entirety of the public Internet as the base of reference for that information.
And they basically burn through kilowatts of power per inquiry.
Ah yes, but my work applies to policy more than design. So I get asked questions like are AI gfs okay, etc. ๐