Why I balk at soccer

Hey there, Like many people, I watched a lot of World Cup games during the recent tournament. Unlike many people, I'm not really a soccer fan, which had me frequently confused. They'd pass the ball from player to player, never really gaining any ground... it's a whole lot of activity for not much payoff. Most of the time, it ended with a weak shot or a deflected pass. Then the other team would go to the other end of the field and do the same thing. I'm not going to call soccer boring. Mainly because I'm a baseball fan and I know people throw that same word back at my sport. Let's say I don't appreciate the finer points of soccer. Often, my misunderstanding would make me the only one cheering. After 40 minutes of what seemed like nothing happening, suddenly there's a guy with an open shot and he pushes it past the keeper. GOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL!!! Except nobody else is cheering. They saw the offsides. From my layfan perspective, the most exciting thing I've seen all game didn't even count. The rules say a player's body can't be in front of the ball. The violation seems to be called inconsistently, at least based on how many times I hear soccer fans yell "offsides" while the refs stay mum. Frustrated, I was happy to switch over to my beloved baseball every time one of those World Cup games ended. Then I watched my baseball team get scored on with what felt like a pretty dang arbitrary balk call. A "balk" is any illegal motion made by the pitcher with runners on base. Everyone advances a base when it happens. Even a runner one base away from home plate! The TV showed the replay a half dozen times. I never saw the balk that the umpire did. Like offsides, there are very specific rules to a balk. Officials often choose not to call these infractions, despite the clear definitions. And other times they see something that might have barely been there. The point is not that refs and umps are stupid, because they aren't. They make subjective decisions based on their interpretation of the rulebook. We're all living this reality, but not just in sports. Developers write deterministic code with LLMs that act more like refs and umpires. We expect yes/no booleans and we end up with maybes. If you've interacted with AI, you're probably familiar with these patterns: Models that generate writing that you think is “slop” LLMs that might recommend your competitor instead of your product AI chatbots that can't follow your instructions because they have to ask for one more clarification, insert a caveat here or there, and waffle their way toward saying absolutely nothing while moving the task you sent them not a single iota forward 😬 Or is that last one just me? Developers are still wrestling with these new tools, finding the best ways to use them. And you want to help them get your product into that workflow. That means understanding enough to call the game the way developers see it. And not cheering too hard when it's CLEARLY offsides.