21–30 of 93 posts
LLMs haven't made me dumber, but they have made me lazier. I think about writing code by hand now and groan.
thats kinda embarrassing
If you love to knit that's cool but don't get on me because I'd rather buy a factory sweater and get on with my day.
I love creating things, I love solving problems, I love designing elegant systems. I don't love mashing keys.
Plato was against writing, as it makes us dumber. https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-wor...
Not really sure why the geometry and color gradient of the world needs to be captured in a skeletonized syntax and semantics when our body is evolved to experience them directly.
Dumb is accidental or genetic.
AI won't affect how dumb we are.
I think they will decrease the utility of crystalline knowledge skills and increase our fluid knowledge skills. Smart people will still find ways to thrive in the environment.
Human intelligence will continue moving forward.
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That's wild. My experience has been vastly different. ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, Gemini, etc whatever it may be even the simplest scripts I've had them write usually come out with issues. As far as writing functions is concerned, it's way less risky for me to write functions based on my prior knowledge than to ask ChatGPT to write the entire thing for me and just paste it in and call it good. I do use it for learn…
I don't know what you're having it write; I mostly have it write Go. When I ask it to write shell scripts, its shell scripts are better than what I would have written (my daily drivers are whatever Sketch.dev is using under the hood --- Claude, I assume --- and Gemini). I've been writing Go since ~2012 and coding since ~1995. I read everything I merge to `main`. The code it produces is solid. I don't know that it one…
From the article "Muscles grow by lifting weights" yet we do that now as a hobby and not as a critical job. I'm not sure I want to live in a world where thinking is a gym like activity, however if you go back 200 years it would probably be difficult to explain the situation today to someone living in a world where most people are doing physical labor or using animals to do it.
Similar fear mongering when calculators came about. No one got dumber, we just got faster at doing simple math. WOrking out complex math will always be interesting to those who really want to do it, and the rest likely wont contribute mu ch anyway - thier just consumers. Let the kids have thier wordy calculators, it actually may unblock critical paths of success needed for someone to really go deep.
It was helpful, I got pretty far along in collegiate math without tutors or assistance thanks to the hard calculation skills I drilled into my head.
But, counterpoint, if I leave my calculator/computer/all in one everything device at home on any given day it can ruin my entire day. I haven't gone 72 hours without a calculator in nearly a decade.
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Because they do it all for us and they frequently do it wrong. We're not offloading the calculation or the typing to the thing we're using it to solve the whole problem for us. Calculators don't solve problems, they solve equations. Writing didn't kill our memories because there's still so much to remember that we almost have to write things down to be able to retain it. If you don't do your own research and present…
I guess my point is that the argument being made is "if you lift dumbbells with a forklift, you aren't getting strong by exercising". And that's correct. But that doesn't mean that the existence of forklifts makes us weaker. So, I guess I'm just saying that LLMs are a tool like any other. Their existence doesn't make you worse at what they do unless you forgo thinking when you use them. You can use a calculator to ef…
I'd argue we're using them "right" though.
Plato was against writing, as it makes us dumber. https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what you're having it write; I mostly have it write Go. When I ask it to write shell scripts, its shell scripts are better than what I would have written (my daily drivers are whatever Sketch.dev is using under the hood --- Claude, I assume --- and Gemini). I've been writing Go since ~2012 and coding since ~1995. I read everything I merge to `main`. The code it produces is solid. I don't know that it one…
That makes sense! I frequently have it write python. I'll say though, working on Go for more than a decade and coding for more than a lot of people have been alive is likely proof you're not one of the people this article is talking about. I don't think I've been made stupider by LLMs either but, like someone else said, maybe a bit lazier about things. I am not the author so I should stop talking as if I know their t…
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thats kinda embarrassing
Would you groan if you had to take public transit while your car was broken down? If you love to knit that's cool but don't get on me because I'd rather buy a factory sweater and get on with my day. I love creating things, I love solving problems, I love designing elegant systems. I don't love mashing keys.