this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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What an unhinged thing to rely on an llm for.
So they set up a Cron job to ask an llm to remind them of something that the cron job itself could have just reminded them?
Everything about this is so wrong lol
But a simple reminder is so... impersonable...
Why settle for a basic reminder when you could have a personal AI agentic assistant tailored toward your needs to remind you things like "buy milk" or "wash your hands after going to the bathroom"?
Your personal AI agentic assistant gets to know you on a deeper level, learning your preferences and adjusting to your unique needs, so that it feels more like having a loyally devoted butler to gently wake you and remind you to wipe your ass.
Some day, as the technology matures, maybe your personal AI agentic assistant will even wipe your ass for you, or buy your milk. But only after washing its hands in between!
-him, probably
It only makes sense if it was checking for it being daytime (i.e. after sunrise and before sunset) which you cannot do in cron, rather than check for a specific hour.
Even then, using an LLM is about the stupidest way imaginable to do it since it's not as if "when is it sunrise/sunset at a specific latitude and longitude and day of the year" can't just be calculated with a formula or looked up in a table of values - its not as if the sunrise and sunset hours given latitude, longitude and day of the year change from year to year.
It's just astonishing how many thoroughly solved software problems are now being delegated to LLMs.
It shows a fundamental misunderstanding/delusion about what an LLM actually is.
It's like people are trying to outsource the "figure things out" part of the process to the automated parrot which is the LLM.
Couldn't you make whatever script your cron job runs also adjust the timing of the cron job to move with the sunrise / sunset?
You could.
It just makes the design more complex (there's at least one extra nasty corner case I can think of) and generally doesn't add that much a performance improvement vs "run every 30 minutes", to be worth it, IMHO.
Well, now I'm curious about what that corner case is.
The script can be triggered just before and run during the time that's calculated as the transition from nighttime to daytime.
If that possibility is not taken in account in the implementation there's a risk that the cron job is scheduled for a bit under 24h later.
It's basically a critical race condition.
Eh, if the script always just calculates the sunrise time for the next day and overwrites the cron job, then its runtime shouldn't matter — unless it gets stuck for 24 hours.
Yeah, if the script only ever schedules the next day's run, that would work fine.
Doubt he used the term cron job correctly. He didn’t setup up an actual cronjob and even if he did he probably let the LLM set it up for him.