41–50 of 82 posts
"read Kant and found it to be dense and impenetrable...an AI generated summary would have helped"
followed by "Would it have improved comprehension? No."
Why? Because "research says so."
Wut?
(still waiting for one or more HN commenters to freak out because the article has gasp! multiple em-dashes)
"Everybody's Weirded Out by AI-Except the People Who Live in Zip Codes Starting with 940, 941, 944, 950 and 951"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Everybody…except [those advocating for it]” –– rhetoric that borders on tautology but, regardless, the author cites the Gallup poll showing 7 in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers and alludes to other widely-held sentiment. But it’s not about your feelings (or their feelings). This piece, by a defense analyst formerly at RAND, expands its concerns out from public sentiment and is mainly drawing attention…
What makes you think that opposition to data center construction in their local area is proof that locals are 'weirded out' by AI generally, rather than just opposed to eyesores that drain their water and put up power prices?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to see the 'AI as personal tutor' approach. Even incorporating things like spaced repetition or the testing effect, or evaluating free-written responses. A lot of potential that's currently unrealized. It takes a student to swim upstream to get there. The convenience of cognitive offloading is difficult to say no to. For evidence, I see it everywhere at work, including (at least in some cases) in my own work…
I don’t think this is likely to happen in the foreseeable future, because learning still requires struggling even under the best of personal tutors. For most of the “80%” it requires some level of compulsion and submitting to authority that would be bad PR for a product, and that people won’t be very accepting of, coming from an automation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Interacting with an LLM feels like stepping on a slug. It's just gross.
Do you mean like inadvertently interacting with an LLM like when you call a customer service line and you get AI? I find it hard to imagine having a chatbot fix your broken SQL query or summarize some event be experienced as gross.
I'll give the author a pass because he's not in the industry, but even an outsider looking closely enough would know that this is not true. Companies have been laying off while using AI as an excuse, but before AI it was the end of ZIRP, and before that it was something else. Also the layoff peak was 2023.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think this is likely to happen in the foreseeable future, because learning still requires struggling even under the best of personal tutors. For most of the “80%” it requires some level of compulsion and submitting to authority that would be bad PR for a product, and that people won’t be very accepting of, coming from an automation.
I'd say "some learning" -- I've learned how to operate and maintain an excavator from YouTube without significant struggle. otoh it might be difficult to learn linear algebra that way. But otooh an LLM might be far better than YouTube at teaching mathematics, while being orders of magnitude less costly than a real teacher. Even in the USA proper mathematics teachers are unavailable in many areas.
> But would it have improved my comprehension? The research says no. I don’t know, I find myself doing things I would’ve never done before AI. I find myself doing more projects outside of work. I discover new problem domains and are less afraid of tackling the unknown. I code in languages I don’t know and start learning how they work. I can get anything explained to me, at any time, in a somewhat coherent manner, by…
> it’s definitely a revolution in access to information Did you mean: Google?
If I ask an LLM, it tells me “your usage is pretty low for an apartment, good job!”
The latter is exactly the question I had in mind. Not even close.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it’s definitely a revolution in access to information Did you mean: Google?
An example from last night. If I Google “how much is 7KwH”, I get a list of calculator websites for converting units. If I ask an LLM, it tells me “your usage is pretty low for an apartment, good job!” The latter is exactly the question I had in mind. Not even close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour
Obviously, LLMs are quite tolerant of typos, and even ignore mis-capitalization, or it may have at least tried to correct your improper usages.
That was not a very insightful article. It's super easy, and in most cases, correct to hate on AI. But that ignores a couple key facts: * It's not going to go away and will only get more sophisticated whether we like it or not. * It has legitimate super powers that can enable people do things that would either be impossible or insanely expensive. I've been fascinated by tech my whole life and have watched various wav…
> It's super easy, and in most cases, incorrect to hate on AI. There, fixed that for you. I'm not saying the haters have zero point, but I find AI far more useful than not. I think so do most people. If I walk into any coffee shop and look over the at the screens of the people next to me, I see all asking AI questions and getting something positive from it. So I don't think "most cases" is correct.
Smartphones are cool, but do you think that they don't have issues?
* Distracted driving
* Attention span decimators
* A culture of zombies staring at their screens?
The list goes on for everything I mention: virtually all of them had some sort of cost to society and it's important to recognize that.
Are you capable of dialectical thinking?