is the pope catholic? does a bear shit in the woods? does rust have the worst community of all time?
Looking at your posting history, you really dislike Rust, huh?
Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
91–100 of 512 posts
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#92Consider the following scenario.
You're a beginner or with very little experience go on a popular programming forum to ask a question, in the typical way someone with little experience asks, what do you get?
An answer?
No, you get bad manners, insults,
"you don't know how to ask questions",
"RTFM".
At best you'll get some people challenging you to clarify and refine your question,
which you can't do because you don't know the technology well enough.
Annoyed, you go find a popular programming chatbot, and ask the question. The chatbot will give you answer, no matter how poorly worded or nonsensical your question, and it will do it cheerfully and confidently. It may even tell you how great your question or idea is. Granted, the answer will be worthless, both because the question was poorly worded and because the chatbot is simply spewing statistically probable text, but you won't know. You're a beginner, without experience to know correct from bullshit. You try to use the answer the chatbot gave you, and when it doesn't work, you go back to the chatbot. It will continue to cheerfully answer your questions as long as you have tokens to spend. The chatbot will never give up on trying to help you, it will never be rude, it won't complain.
And people wonder why chatbots are so popular.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#93This is a load-bearing title.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#94I know that the common refrain is “think of yourself as a manager now” but I’ve actually taken the opposite approach and have been telling anyone I train the same. Diving deeper into technical understanding makes more sense to me at this point both as a way to make yourself more useful in the age of AI and also to use AI more effectively. I regularly tell the kids to grab a text book on a subject that interests them…
> the common refrain is “think of yourself as a manager now”
One of the many reasons I'm determined to remain a luddite wrt AI. I hate the idea of being a manager and have refused promotions to avoid it in the past. I don't want to manage automatons any more than I want to manage people. I want to do stuff, not manage.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#95I don't know if this is a good framing. "Too much" is subjective, and every heavy AI user will assert that they're just unlocking their potential, that calculators didn't make us dumber, etc. But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's left? We have people here who use LLMs to raise t…
> In my mind, it's pretty simple: I'm a human, LLMs are not. If a human writes a novel, it's inherently worth more. While I appreciate you laying it out so plainly, I disagree. A novel is a bunch of words and I don't care if they were written by one person, five, an AI, or infinite monkeys on typewriters. What's valuable in a novel (or a poem) is in the words.
I think there is both value that comes from the work being authored by a human, and value which does not?
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#96I know that the common refrain is “think of yourself as a manager now” but I’ve actually taken the opposite approach and have been telling anyone I train the same. Diving deeper into technical understanding makes more sense to me at this point both as a way to make yourself more useful in the age of AI and also to use AI more effectively. I regularly tell the kids to grab a text book on a subject that interests them…
> deep understanding is going to become a commodity soon
How does the text generated by LLM make “our” understanding deeper compared to text written in the books?
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#97is the pope catholic? does a bear shit in the woods? does rust have the worst community of all time?
> does rust have the worst community of all time?
Of all time? Nah.
That would be either emacs of vi. I'll let them fight with each other over which!
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#98I'd rather hire a clankers these days
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#99This is something I see and feel everyday. And it’s very frustrating and annoying.
For example I send some doc asking for a feedback and someone without reading it generate a feedback with llm with so much ambiguity that I have to get back and wait couple of more days to get a reply.
One of the most silliest thing I see is a middle manager feeding Microsoft planner to Claude to generate a report and generate future steps and sometimes it makes no sense what he present couple of weeks ago because what he present today is contradicting to the one before.
At this point I feel it’s cheaper to replace them with AI. They are just physical vessels for AI.
It’s just not that maybe they were not good enough. But now they just fully depend on AI.
Re: Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
#100I don't know if this is a good framing. "Too much" is subjective, and every heavy AI user will assert that they're just unlocking their potential, that calculators didn't make us dumber, etc. But to latch onto the calculator argument: if you outsource adding numbers to a calculator, you're still you. On the flip side, if you use an LLM do most of your thinking, what's left? We have people here who use LLMs to raise t…
Have you read the "Whispering earring" essay? I love it for the LLM era.[1] You can treat AI as a whispering earring - "What should we do now? How do we fix this? What do you think?" Or you can treat it like an exoskelton - "Implement kd-tree with metric space xyz for this problem, mapping this to that blah blah". That's pre-thought execution automation that makes review much simpler - you already know the shape of t…
Thank you for the surprising read