Like most Americans with a university degree, I have student loan debts. This means that periodically, I get an email from my loan servicer that there is a special correspondence for me. The actual correspondence never appears in the email itself, of course, because that medium isn’t secure. Instead, it is hidden away in a Federal government website that has eschewed both security-through-obscurity and security-through-cryptography, in favor of the novel approach of security-through-a-user-interface-so-infuriating-that-attackers-just-give-up-and-also-the-intended-recipients.

I have a sneaking suspicion that when future generations look back on the era from the mid-1990s to some time in our not-too-distant future, they will be struck by how much our culture was dominated by advertising, and how ineffective it all was despite its ubiquity.

For as long as there have been businesses, there has been a need to, at the very least, let people know you have something to sell. There was also always an incentive to convince people to buy your product rather than a competitor’s. But to me, advertising didn’t really become the cultural juggernaut that it is until the twentieth century, when new forms of mass media arrived that were unable to survive without it. There had been newspaper ads before then, of course, but they were more of a supplemental revenue stream; you still, as a general rule, had to pay for newspapers and magazines. But radio and television were indiscriminate in their reach. Anyone with the proper receiver could consume any broadcast content, and there was no way to bill them for all and only the programs they consumed. There wasn’t even a reliable way to know which programs they consumed. So in order to make money, radio and TV stations had to give their content away for free, but charge businesses money to air their marketing messages. This made advertising virtually inescapable.

Searching for a job has become even more difficult than usual lately, and it seems that much of the problem is due to applicant tracking software (ATS). This is software that is designed to filter through applicants’ résumés looking for exactly the skills and experience the role requires. This is intended to make things easier for hiring managers: rather than sort through thousands of résumés by hand, they can instead sort through the dozens that survive the filtering process. This means a lot of applications are cut before any human being even sees them, and no feedback is given. At best, you get an auto-generated email that says “you’re not exactly what we’re looking for at this time.” At worst, you get ghosted.

More than once I’ve seen the claim made that something or other done by LLMs is “just like” what human minds do. For example, there’s the oft-repeated insinuation that LLMs trained on copyrighted material don’t really plagiarize, because their output is based on exposure to multiple sources, just as human writers reflect their own influences. Or there’s the occasional response to the criticism that LLMs are just glorified autocorrect, merely predicting the next word in a sequence. This, I’ve been told, is not really a criticism, because next-word-prediction is “just like” what humans do.¹ I find the claim that anything is “just like” what happens in the human brain to be astonishing given that our knowledge of the brain is still in its infancy; tellingly, I have never heard an actual neuroscientist make such a claim. Still, there’s one thing we can do given the current state of knowledge: look at the features of LLMs that definitely aren’t like what happens in the human brain.

This is a rather long post describing the steps I took in implementing a small project in a domain I’m not especially familiar with, using libraries I’m not especially familiar with. Rather than showing off a polished finished product, it details the steps I took along the way, false starts and all. Nor do I claim that my final version is the best possible version; there are no doubt more efficient and clever ways to do what I did. But I wanted to illustrate my thought process, and how I learned from my mistakes, and I thought it might be useful for other learners to follow along with my journey.