Ask HN: To what extend have you stopped or limited your use of AI?

The LLM models are something. To me they look like knowledge holograms. Or maybe just a huge pattern inference machine.

And they are ODD. Like a fragment of smarts. Dangerous and for sure not something we can rely on.

But i’m giving it a goal with a fairly distant milestone where it needs to hit 5-10 smaller milestones and even for advanced ai mixing the system languages I’m mixing in this large project there are build errors it powers through on its own (fixing the building, linking, or syntax, or using the apis for the versions of all the things i’m using) and there are some combinations of tech (windowing, webviews, etc.) and some architectures of things that require it to try multiple approaches to succeed.

Sometimes it will ask like “how am i doing so far should i continue”, or can you run this visual thing and report back. But there can be 30-60 mins between it doing that.

It also has to scan a lot of files and find the things it needs to find to fill its own context. Like “let me examine how you implemented that on mac and windows and come up with a solution for linux”

Other times while it’s reasoning if i notice it’s going down a rabbit hole I’ll point it out and set it in the right direction without interrupting it and when it moves onto the next thought it’ll incorporate my suggestion but it didn’t really stop or need another big prompt or goal.

There are plenty of times where I do need to step in and baby it with small goals through something tricky or obscure. But even in those cases I don’t have to write any code directly i just ask it to do xyz small change and hand it back for me to test

I took a course awhile back taught by a retired military professor on communications and it was eye-opening. He covered what you would expect but with a slant towards 5GW, irregular warfare, political warfare; and heavily referenced Gershanek as a supplemental book; which is published by Navy Press. (https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/Political%20Warfare_web.pd...)

Communications holds a privileged position that is tied strongly to and influences our individual psychology and identity.

Reflected appraisal is how we adopt culture from our parents, and it can be manipulated to distort that in ways that are harmful, if you understand the mechanics; and distortions cause psychological stress (the basis for torture), which can be used for malign influence, destructive interference of core identity, compulsion, or torture.

This along with other structures, elements, and clustering, can cause changes where if you aren't mindful of your environment, you don't recognize its happened, all you have is confusion, as your identity/soul gets pealed back and hollowed out, and this is the basis for how cult programming, and the related involuntary hypnosis works in practice. The same goes for PoWs from the 1950s.

There's quite a lot of material on this if you know where to look.

> Some ways in which you have seen the perceptual abilities of coworkers erode over time?

This is going to sound very subjective, but their overall cognitive speed has decreased dramatically. When you learn a skill to the point where its automatic, you can get a good flow going from a to b to c pivot to e, etc with no delays; and they struggle with each step/connection, each reasoning portion. Almost like there's interference, but its persistent and consistent; and they either don't notice, or they get defensive.

When they need to make a determination or design decision, they will miss the pivots, and not account for things that lead to significant mistakes which would never have happened before.

The solutions they come up with are for the most part no longer creative. They used to take functional structures they had collected and knew well that worked, and repurpose them, or apply them in ways that were quite creative towards a problem that they defined. Now they largely don't; and the definition of the problems they define are only slightly better than the LLM at this point; it used to be much better.

A lot of due diligence is also no longer being done. When asked about specific things, instead of being able to answer, they get confused, sometimes even incoherent, behaviors that seem very dementia-like, but these are guys almost fresh out of college in their mid 20s, and they aren't on drugs (we are all tested regularly).

There are ways people can be blinded, where they will adopt a misleading stance based upon structure (without any reasoning), even very intelligent people.

I'm of the opinion the inconsistency of the LLM's responses which are treated as communication, are gradually damaging people. Incidentally, people who have had a lot of exposure also have stopped taking on the more difficult or challenging tasks.