More than AI, learn Discrete Math and Number Theory. Calculus it's fine, but it's more suited for mechanics/system control/continous stuff. Sets and relations will weight far more on how to sort and classify your data in a really fast way. The Nyxt browser uses that really well, no AI needed, both for user search and data clustering.
AI: Accelerated Incompetence
141–150 of 287 posts
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question, what type of CSV to SQL code are you doing whre correctness doesn't count? Perhaps my few decades in the industry have been in areas whree it is always the details, correctness, and fitness for purpose that tends to make those problems hard, not the work itself. I do see a use case for throw away spikes, or part of a red-green-refactor, etc.. but if accuracy and correctness aren't critical, data clea…
In my experience the difficulty in this kind of task is reading the docs of a bunch of packages I haven't used in months/years and probably won't use again anytime soon, testing things manually and creating all the little harnesses to make that work without running for minutes at a time, etc. Sure for someone who does ETL type work all day, or often enough anyway, they'd scoff, and true LLM won't really save them tim…
Similarly for me, my visualisation pipeline changed from "relearn matplotlib and pandas every single time" to "ask for code, fix up details later". In this case the time saving scales with how much I forgot from the docs and the last time. I need to do the review and debugging either way, so that's moot.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#143I think you could make similar arguments about mapping technology like Google and Apple Maps -- that using them decreases people's skills in navigating the physical world, atrophying our sense of direction and geography. And actually, that's not wrong. People really do often struggle to navigate these days if they don't have the crutch of something like Google Maps. It really has changed our relationship to the physi…
> I think you could make similar arguments about mapping technology like Google and Apple Maps -- that using them decreases people's skills in navigating the physical world, atrophying our sense of direction and geography. And actually, that's not wrong. People really do often struggle to navigate these days if they don't have the crutch of something like Google Maps. It really has changed our relationship to the phy…
Me too. It's not like i ever used to have a map with me when i was in city i thought i knew.
With map in my pocket i started to use it and memorized it much better. My model of the city is much stronger. For example i know proximate directions of neighborhoods i've never even visited.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#144> How often have you witnessed an LLM reduce the complexity of a piece of code? I would add that AI often makes far too clever code as well, and would defer to Kernighan's law: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
It's worse. If you weren't clever enough to write the code in the first place, and so you used an LLM to tell you what to do, you definitely aren't clever enough to debug it.
The LLM may or may not be clever enough, but you aren't clever enough to evaluate its debugging.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#145Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody? AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.
This is an easy quip to make, but it's also pretty wrong. 3D printing has been a massive breakthrough in many industries and fundamentally changed the status quo. Aerospace is a good example, much of what SpaceX and other younger upstarts in the space are doing would not be feasible without 3D printed parts. Nozzles, combustion chambers, turbopumps etc are all parts that are often printed.
Unless you believe that 3D printing is "going to replace all manufacturing" then the OP is not "pretty wrong" and you don't even disagree with them.
FWIW I think OP came up with an excellent analogy.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#146Power-accelerated imperfection. Your great-grandfather's combustion engine might run great on vegetable oil, but if you put vegetable oil in a race car, bad things will happen. The more powerful your tools, the more dangerous you are. But, that's the cynical way of looking at things. My prefered outlook is tools are great, and being an adult is great, and when you put these two things together: that's even better.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#147I think you could make similar arguments about mapping technology like Google and Apple Maps -- that using them decreases people's skills in navigating the physical world, atrophying our sense of direction and geography. And actually, that's not wrong. People really do often struggle to navigate these days if they don't have the crutch of something like Google Maps. It really has changed our relationship to the physi…
The reliability difference is so big that the analogy isn’t relevant.
Google maps is 90% of the time better than a taxi driver where I live.
AI isn’t better than some person that did the thing for a couple days
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#148Let's be real, 70% of staff are phoning in their jobs so badly that an AI often is just as good if not better. The real struggle will be, the people phoning it in are still going to be useless, but with AI. The rest will learn and grow with AI.
That's an extremely self-serving narrative. I assume you're part of the 30 percent?
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#149Why would the highest domains of critical thinking be out of reach for AI as models get bigger, better, and more robust? They've monopolized value-per-dollar for impulsive and low-medium horizon intellectual judgements, why wouldn't the depth of those judgements AI models can beat humans in not increase predictably, as they have so far over the past few years? Eventually all this tech debt and apparent unsolvable failures of AI will mean nothing once models are no longer inhibited by their growing pains, and can self-correct with an efficacy greater than humans.
Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence
#150I think you could make similar arguments about mapping technology like Google and Apple Maps -- that using them decreases people's skills in navigating the physical world, atrophying our sense of direction and geography. And actually, that's not wrong. People really do often struggle to navigate these days if they don't have the crutch of something like Google Maps. It really has changed our relationship to the physi…
> I think you could make similar arguments about mapping technology like Google and Apple Maps The problem is that mapping software is reliable and doesn't spit out a result of what is essentially a random number generator. You can rely on its output, the same way you can rely on a calculator. Not always, mind you, because mapping the entire globe is a massively complex task with countless caveats and edge cases, but…
>The problem is that mapping software is reliable and doesn't spit out a result of what is essentially a random number generator.
Actually, TSP is NP-hard (ie, at best, you never know whether you've been given the optimal route) in the general case, and Google maps might even give suboptimal routes intentionally sometimes, we don't know.
The problems you're describing are problems with people and they apply to every technology ever. Eg, people crash cars, blow up their houses by leaving the stove on, etc.