Can Fat Mike Skate?
Large Language Mixups
October 2025
This short text is intended as a companion piece to the longer Jonesing For The Next Disruptor, but is also amusing in its own right.
Fat Mike?
When writing, I do research on many different subjects even if they're just minute digressions. One such digression made me wonder if Fat Mike, front man of skate punk group NOFX, actually is a skateboarder. If the 1990s taught me one thing, it's the importance of not being a poser, so let's ask Google!
Googling Around
What with the ongoing AI hype and all, Google are fervently pushing their LLM answers onto the unsuspecting public. They're shown above all the other results, front and center. Surely a product they must be proud of!
Google's AI Overview says that Fat Mike's trick days are over. Which is curious, because the linked article is in fact an interview with Erik Ohlsson, from Swedish skate punk band Millencollin.
Let's try the full-blown AI mode instead! This time, Fat Mike can clearly not skate, based on a 2,000 post Reddit AMA there's no way in hell I'm going to sift through. Still, I'm curious about this mixed messaging. Let's try something different.
See what I did there? I rephrased the question. Prompt engineering! So, did Fat Mike use to skate? Nope, he does not and has never skateboarded.
Except, of course, if we ask the same question in Chromium instead of Firefox, just seconds later. In that case, Fat Mike was an avid skateboarder.
Then again, we could just skim through the normal search results, in which case we find an interview in Italian Vogue where Fat Mike says, "We weren’t that good, but I found a pool in Beverly Hills and we would skate it every day." And another interview in University Observer, where he says "We used to skateboard a lot when we were teenagers," and that "I stopped when I was 18, I had an accident. I fell into a pool... It hurt a lot."
Whenever someone suggests using an LLM to summarize a piece of text, I cringe: We'll never know what it possibly messed up without reading the actual text ourselves. What a time-saver! But, you know, search results are so 2023.
That's all
The fact that LLMs often suck at what they're tasked with doing isn't new information. I just find it amusing - and simultaneously scary - that this technology is now the foundation of a trillion dollar hype.