101–110 of 341 posts
Do you think we could have progressed to this level if we were still calculating stuff by hand? Log tables??
It's happened to me recently, I've relied so much on LLMs for coding and after hours of spinning the wheel, I realized, it has no idea, when it fixes something it's mostly a guess, most I've the time we're just debugging by adding logging statements and the code we've created looks crap and is mostly wrong, full of fluff, or hard to understand. I've been coding without my LLM for 2 hours and it's just more productive…
> the code we've created looks crap and is mostly wrong, full of fluff, or hard to understand I don't disagree in general but I've had a lot of success asking the LLMs to specifically fix these things and make things more maintainable when specifically prompted to do so. I agree debugging and getting things working it often needs supervision, guidance and advice. And architecture it often gets a little wrong and need…
For an example of where this already happened, look at the number of people who literally don't have a minor inkling of how to plan a route or navigate without a GPS and mapping software. Sure, having a real-time data source is nice for avoiding construction/traffic, and I'd use a real-time map, but going beyond that to be spoon fed your next action over and over leads to dependency.
I don’t have an inkling of how to navigate. I don’t really see the problem.
This is already happening. In spite of all of the disclaimers that the AI make mistakes the fact that it is given higher billing in for instance google search results (but also lots of other similar places) means people will interpret it as having a higher reputation because that's how we were conditioned to consume search results. This is doing massive damage already, for instance, essay writing, making summaries, r…
School will have to rely on homework less. It ia nkt that deep or complicated. It does not require super radical reform. Ypu can still make the tests and exams checking what students know. There will be less "generate bs at home" tasks and more "come back with a knowledge" which will likely be an improvement.
They are the same picture!
Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for good senior engineers. 80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them. We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do. But these people are struggling to…
I was actually thinking about this the other day while vibe coding for a side project. I am a lead engineer, but I’ve been using AI in much of my code recently. If you were to ask me to code anything manually right now, I could do it, but it would take a bit to acclimate to writing code line by line. By “a while”, I mean maybe a few days. Which means that if we were to do a coding interview without LLMs, I would prob…
Can’t say the author’s fixation on reading long texts resonates with me. I’m sure Newton’s Principia is interesting and all but… no I’m not going to read that. Conciseness is a valuable thing. It wasn’t practical to convey knowledge in a short form previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth of info was too expensive. On some level long form content just seems… poorly written. It’s long for the sak…
It’s an attention and working memory test.
I don’t think I’ve ever prided myself on focus. But signing off social media ten years ago has absolutely left me in a competitive place when it comes to deep thinking, and that’s not because I’ve gotten better at it.
> It wasn’t practical to convey knowledge in a short form previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth of info was too expensive
This is entirely ahistoric. Pamphlets and books published in volumes, where each volume would today be a chapter, was the norm. The novel is a modern invention.
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Pair a senior with an agent LLM, pair a junior with an agent LLM, measure the output over some cycles. You will find your answer in the data, one way or another.
Truthfully, in my experience, they both end up performing near the level of the LLM. It’s an averaging factor not an uplifting one.
Before the advent of smartphones people needed to remember phone numbers and calculate on the fly. Now people don't even remember their own numbers and save it on somewhere and open the calculator app for smallest of things.
But there are still people who can do both. They are not luddites rather not fully reliant on smartphones.
Same thing is going to happen with LLMs.
At some point restricting LLM usage is going to be considered good parenting just like restricting phones are today. Use it for some purpose but not all.
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It fulfills steve jobs promise that a computer is a bicycle for your mind. It is crazy to me that all these poeple think they are going to lose their ability to think. If you didn't lose your ability to think to scrolling social media then you aren't going to lose it to AI. However, I think a lot of people lost their ability to think by scrolling social media and that is problematic. What people need to realize is th…
1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255603105_The_Effec... 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25509828/ 3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392560878_Your_Brai... I’m pretty convinced it should be used to do things humans can’t do instead of things humans can do well with practice. However, I’m also convinced that Capital will always rely on Labor to use it on their behalf.
Compare this body of work to the body of work that has consistently showed social media is bad for you and has done so for many years. You will see a difference. Or if you prefer to focus on something more physical, anthropogenic climate change, the evidence for the standard model of particle physics, the evidence for plate tectonics, etc.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be skeptical that these technologies might make us lazy or inable to perform critical functions of technical work. I think there is a great danger that these technologies essentially fulfill the promise of data science across industries, that is, a completely individualized experience to guide your choices across digital environments. That is not the world that I want to live in. But, I also don't think that my mind is turning to mush because I asked Claude Code to write some code to make a catboost model that would have taken me a few hours to try out some idea.