Oct 9, 2026, 11:34 PM[As Pablo Picasso said of computers]: “But they are useless. They can only give you answers.”
Felt this strongly after talking of an quaint concept (parallels between atomic orbital structure and spherical harmonics in CG rendering) to a buddy a few days ago... only to be asked why I haven't queried an LLM for an answer. Damn it, I don't want answers, I want curiosity and whimsy and science and engineering and art and beauty!
Oct 9, 2026, 11:49 PM@q3k
I've had that with Wikipedia.
I'd ask someone a trivia, and they'd pull out their phone and start looking it up, not realizing that I didn't want an answer.
I wanted to try to cooperatively come up with an informed guess. To practice informed guessing, but also to learn what kinda things the other person knows,
Or maybe if the person knew the answer immediately, they could tell me more about surrounding topics that I wouldn't even know to ask abiut.
Oct 10, 2026, 12:58 AM@q3k --[parallels between atomic orbital structure and spherical harmonics]--
I think they're solutions of the same differential equation, at least in the angular coordinates.