That's totally reasonable, imo. You also can't look up the answers using a search engine during your application to work at Google
That's actually not reasonable.
Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
131–140 of 419 posts
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is if the way to learn is doing it without a tool. Imagine using a robot to lift weights if you want to grow your own muscle mass. "Robot is a tool"
"Growing your own muscle mass" is an artificial goal that exists because of tools. Our bodies evolved under the background assumption that daily back-breaking labor is necessary for survival, and rely on it to stay in good operating conditions. We've since all but eliminated most of that labor for most people - so now we're forced to engage in otherwise pointless activity called "exercise" that's physically hard on p…
Said no one with ever with a even remote knowledge in healthy benefits of fitness.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…
AI is a tool, and tool use is not lazy.
Tool use is fine, when you have the education and experience to use the tools properly, and to troubleshoot and recover when things go wrong.
The use of AI is not just a labour saving device, it allows the user to bypass thinking and learning. It robs the user of an opportunity to grow. If you don't have the experience to know better it may be able to masquerade as a teacher and a problem solver, but beyond a trivial level relying on it is actively harmful to one's education. At some point the user will encounter a problem that has no existing answer in the AI's training dataset, and come to realise they have no real foundation to rely on.
Code generative AI, as it currently exists, is a poisoned chalice.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly agree with this comment. Anecdotal evidence time! I'm an experienced dev (20 years of C++ and plenty of other stuff), and I frequently work with younger students in a mentor role, e.g. I've done Google Summer of Code three times as a mentor, and am also in KDE's own mentorship program. In 2023/24, when ChatGPT was looming large, I took on a student who was of course attempting to use AI to learn and who wa…
What about people who don't have access to a mentor? If not AI then what is their option? Is doing tutorials on your own a good way to learn?
Not sure! My own path was very mentor-dependent. Participating in open source communities worked for me to find my original mentors as well. The other participants are incentivized to mentor/coach because the main thing you're bringing is time and motivation--and if they can teach you what you need to know to come back with better output while requiring less handholding down the road, their project wins.
It's not for everyone because open source tends to require you to have the personality to self-select goals. Outside of more explicit mentor relationships, the projects aren't set up to provide you with a structured curriculum or distribute tasks. But if you can think of something you want to get done or attempt in a project, chances are you'll get a lot of helping hands and eager teachers along the way.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#135Half way through a recent interview it became very apparent that the candidate was using AI. This was only apparent in the standard 'why are you interested in working here?' Questions. Once the questions became more AI resistant the candidate floundered. There English language skills and there general reasoning declined catastrophically. These question had originally been introduced to see see how good the candidate was at thinking abstractly. Example: 'what is your creative philosophy?'
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#136That's totally reasonable, imo. You also can't look up the answers using a search engine during your application to work at Google
Why not
This probably depends on the questions.
When applying for a college math professor job, it's understandable that you'll use mathematica/matlab/whatever for most of actual work, but needing a calculator for simple mutliplication-table style calculations would be a red flag. Especially if there is lecturing involved.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is if the way to learn is doing it without a tool. Imagine using a robot to lift weights if you want to grow your own muscle mass. "Robot is a tool"
When you go for a job as a forklift operator, nobody asks you to demonstrate how you can manually carry a load of timber.
Equally, if you just point to your friend and say "that's Dave, he's gonna do it for me", they won't give you the job. They'll give it to Dave instead.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is if the way to learn is doing it without a tool. Imagine using a robot to lift weights if you want to grow your own muscle mass. "Robot is a tool"
"Growing your own muscle mass" is an artificial goal that exists because of tools. Our bodies evolved under the background assumption that daily back-breaking labor is necessary for survival, and rely on it to stay in good operating conditions. We've since all but eliminated most of that labor for most people - so now we're forced to engage in otherwise pointless activity called "exercise" that's physically hard on p…
And guess what, people's overall health and fitness have declined. Obesity is at an all time high. If you're in the US, there is a 40% chance you are obese. Your body likely contains very little muscle mass, you are extremely likely to die of side effects of metabolic syndrome.
People are seeing the advent of machines to replace all physical labor and transportation, not gradually like in the 20th century, but withing the span of a decade going from the average physical exertion of 1900 to the average modern lack of physical exertion, take a car everyday, do no manual labor do no movement.
They are saying that you need exercise to replace what you are losing, you need to train your body to keep it healthy and can't just rly on machines/robots to do everything for them because your body needs that exertion - and your answer is to say "now that we have robots there is no need to exercise even for exercise sake". A point that's pretty much wrong as modern day physical health shows.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't disagree more. Talent is built and perfected upon thousands hours practice, LLMs just make you lazy. One thing people with seniority in the field don't realize, as I guess you are, is that LLMs don't help develop "muscle memory" in young practioners, it just make them miserable, often caged in an infinite feedback loop of bug fixing or trying to untangle a code mess. They may extract some value by using it for…
You sound like the sort of person of old who “Why would you use the internet. Look in an encyclopaedia. ‘Google it’ is just lazy” This trope is unbecoming of anyone sensible.
It's 2025, not 2015. 'google it and add the word reddit' is a thing. For now.
Google 'reflections on trusting trust'. Your level of trust in software that purports to think for you out of a multi-gig stew of word associations is pretty intense, but I wouldn't call it pretty sensible.
Re: Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can't ask people to not use AI when careful, responsible use is undetectable. You can't make a rule, if people can cheat undetectably?
You can, but it would be pointless since it would just filter out some honest people.
But this is exactly what we already do. Most exams have a "no cheating" rule, even though it's perfectly possible to cheat. The point is to discourage people from doing so, not to make it impossible.