Jan 2, 2026
I like microwaves/LLMs as much as the next person, but don’t forget what they do and don’t mean to people.
Microwaves/LLMs are magical technologies. Put your food/request in a little box, connect it to power, and it comes out just the way you wanted. Microwaves/LLMs have a tendency to overcook or undercook, which sounds bad when the goal is “regular cook,” but there’s a lot of things that just aren’t that sensitive. Once you get the hang of using all the settings on your microwave/LLM, it’s honestly pretty amazing what it can do.
That said, microwaves/LLMs are best in the privacy of your own home. Go wild, multiple times a day even. When hosting people for an event, it’s a different story. Are you really just going to take what’s lying around your fridge / the Internet and reheat it for me? I can do that at my own house, don’t be impolite.
All the more so in industry. Microwaves/LLM have important applications, and skillful workers use them, but businesses get a lot of value from hiding that from consumers. Restaurants don’t advertise “we just got a new microwave!” It’s uncomfortable for everyone. Even in the case of airplane food, which is the most unimpeachable use for microwaving in public that I can think of, microwaves are something passengers tolerate, not look foward to. Businesses haven’t adopted the same paradigm, and look ungainly when they promote what their LLM is doing. “We just upgraded to a new AI experience!” Consumers are making faces, trying to look the other way —it’s a wildlife documentary about how primates express embarrassment, visible off the glow of millions of facebook feeds.
As for nutrition, it's a bit unfair. Microwaveable meals are considered a stand-in for “real” food, even when they’re tasty and cost-effective. You buy them in a special aisle, conspicuously packaged: single portions entombed in plastic film, ready to be stacked in your freezer with the other ready-mades. Likewise, LLM output is considered slop compared to “authentic” human interaction, even when the response is well-researched or the code is elegant. The queries are manufactured to be disposable; whatever you don’t like about a response, you can just throw away, old one-offs stacked in a list in the sidebar.
Microwaves/LLMs are so fast, reliable, powerful! Train up the next generation for this overpoweringly convenient future. Sure, microwave spectroscopy, cosmic microwave background detection... not your kitchen. If your expertise is preparing meals in a microwave, people think it’s a bit pathetic, you know what I mean? “Unskilled at basic tasks of the human experience.” “Probably unhappy in life in general.” If the consumer and governmental applications of LLM-like technology diverge similarly, then LLMs might be most powerful at a society level that’s not interesting or accessible to regular people.
Image: A photo of my own microwave. I am a bit particular about the UX of microwaves and this one meets my standards. In the course of asking GPT 5.2 for ideas on an image for this blog post, I learned that this analogy has already been made and apparently I am what has been warmed over. (Solidarity, LLMs.)
