Use the fucking flippers
It astonishes me when people say things like “I tried AI but it kept giving me bad information”, or “I hear it just makes stuff up.”
I ask, “What happened when you told it it was wrong?”
“I can do that?”
Yes, you can do that.
Back around 1972 my family would spend weekends at our summer cottage. Which was a travel trailer permanently parked in a KOA campground in the Texas Hill Country. The campground had a building that held the campground office, the laundry room, and a small rec room. The rec room had the usual amenities: pool table, ping pong table, two pinball machines.
The machines were 100% mechanical. Every jolt, ding, and buzz came from chunks of metal hitting each other. It was a dime a game, three games for a quarter. I would spend most of the weekend and all of my quarters at the rec room at one of the pinball machines.
One Sunday a guy comes in with his daughter and two quarters. He puts the quarter in the other machine, presses start, and shows her how to pull back the plunger to launch the ball.
Both watch as the steel ball hits the bumpers at the top a few times, rolls down, hits a side bumper, shoots to the other side, and gently rolls to the bottom, where a relay clacks the ball for the next turn.
The father never touched the flippers.
The girl looked up and asked, “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” the father said and carried the laundry bag to run the weekend’s towels.
I watched her pull the plunger two more times, never touching the flippers. The machine, usually vocal with bells and buzzers, sounded a little embarrassed, making a halfhearted ding now and then.
She put in the second quarter, and pressed start. Just before she pulled back the plunger, I tapped the flipper button. She saw the flipper move. I smiled.
Two quarters usually lasted me half an hour. She went through hers in ten. Six balls up, six balls down. She never touched the flippers.
Instead of just tapping the flipper, I should’ve said, “It’s a lot more fun when you use the flippers.”
When you type “write a wedding toast” or “plan a vacation” to an LLM without pushing back, without steering, without insisting on better, you’re playing without the flippers, and you will end up with beige paragraphs of LLM tells and whistles.
Use the fucking flippers!
- ← to the past
you imagine that nature will welcome you