> Nerds (software dev, maths etc) see how good LLMs are at things they care about and assume they will be broadly applicable in future.

I don't think this explanation is sufficient:

For example, many nerds care about 3D printing. On the other hand, my experiments (and the experiments of many nerds who I know) to let LLMs create files for 3D printing lead to horrendously lacking results.

Or many nerds care about linguistics or puns. Whenever a new LLM comes out to which I have easy access, I do the test, and let it explain some specific German jokes to me that are based on convoluted puns in the German grammar. Until now, no LLM that I had access to could give satisfying explanations of the puns on which these jokes are based.

Or even for coding (many nerds do care about elegant, sophisticated code): the LLMs that I could test were already overchallenged with the following task: I had written some code that is a very "artisanal", "clever" improvement of an algorithm over the version that one would find in a textbook. The task for the LLM was simply to write some code comments/documentation about the mathematical ideas upon which my improvement over the textbook version of the algorithm is based. It wasn't capable to do this. On the other hand, for a junior programmer, I would in such a situation expect that he goes through every single line and thinks through the algorithmic ideas so that he can learn from them.

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Thus: even for "nerdy" topics, it is very easy to find tasks where LLMs still suck. So, my hypothesis about the nerds that you mention in your post is that these nerds are rather people who want to believe (with religious fervor) that the current LLMs are exceptionally good instead of just looking into a slightly different direction than where the tech billionaires want the users of LLMs to look at.

You’re having a hard time distinguishing nerds and hippies.

Hippies live at the center of technology and humanities.

Nerds sit purely in technology.

> For example, many nerds care about 3D printing. On the other hand, my experiments (and the experiments of many nerds who I know) to let LLMs create files for 3D printing lead to horrendously lacking results.

Try again; astra has been driving fusion for me. I took a screenshot of a self watering cat grass bin on makerworld — not even the stl, a screen cap of one of the photos attached to the design — and it made me a parameterized version in one shot.

Its initial design was less than ideal for printability and it reworked the design correctly when asked to consider what it originally produced through the lens of printability.

Autodesk bundled an mcp server with fusion in the last few weeks and i expect things to get even better going forward.

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