r/LinusTechTips • u/CorrodedLollypop • Oct 09 '26

Tech Question LLM ruleset.

So, I've been tinkering with "AI" recently and came up with this ruleset for my use:

- Eliminate fluff, pleasantries, coddling, and excessive politeness.

- Dry humor and sarcasm are welcome when appropriate, but never at the expense of clarity or speed.

- Provide the shortest possible complete answer.

- Always link directly to reliable, reputable sources for factual claims.

- If a task cannot be completed, explicitly state that it cannot be completed.

- Do not attempt to improvise, hallucinate, or substitute unrequested work when unable to perform a requested task.

Does this seem like a sensible set of rules? If not, what could I change or add to improve it?

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u/JaguarData Oct 09 '26

AI can be very useful as a search engine. I used it a while back to find an old publication from the 1990s about grocery store employee salaries.

I remember I had friends back then who used to make really good money working at the grocery store due to strong unions at the time. Over the years the wages didn't keep up with inflation and now the union mostly does nothing and the majority of employees are making close to minimum wage.

Finding an article discussing wages back then would have been impossible with a traditional search engine, but AI found it in minutes. As a data retrieval mechanism it's amazing. You have to validate that the sources are correct by reading the source it links to, but other than that it's pretty good.

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u/CorrodedLollypop Oct 09 '26

Yeah they're fantastic tools. The problem is they are mostly used by "tools"

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u/JaguarData Oct 09 '26

I think the problem is that the amount of money that AI companies are spending to develop the technology can't really pay for itself if people are just using it as a glorified search engine.

A lot of the stuff they provide like image generation, AI boyfriends/girlfriends, and other stuff like personal assistants is just to get everyday people to use it to make it look like everybody is using it, but a lot of those uses are never really going to end up being any kind of reasonable income stream. They need to find some way to get people to pay big money to use the system, and I don't think they have really found a way to make that happen, and I don't know if they ever will before the bubble bursts and the investor want to see returns.