Similarly, I was really excited when I read the headline here on HN and thought this would be about the electrical device. I wonder if the LLM meaning has eclipsed the electrical meaning at this point, as a default in the absence of other qualifiers, in communities like this.

It does seem to. I’ve been working on some personal projects where I’ve needed to look up and research transformers quite a bit (the kind that often has a ferrite core) and it has been frustrating. Frustrating not just trying to search for the wire datasheets, etc., but also because I often have to use the other transformer via service to find what I’m looking for because search is so enshittified by the newer definition.