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Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

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Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#151

Post by lelanthran »

Jtarii wrote: post #140
lelanthran wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. You aren't learning anything. Learning involves doing . We've known this for ages: simply reading a maths book without drilling on the problems will not get a student to pass. Best case scenario, you're reading stuff. For users of coding agents, they're not even doing that.

>You aren't learning anything. Learning involves doing. You can have it write a program that generates drills for you. I wanted to become better at reading sheet music so I generated a sheet music reading program. You can have it generate maths drills, then ask questions about it if you get stuck or whatever. If you genuinely want to get better at something then AI will help you learn it faster. Obviously its going t…

The people who say they are learning faster with it aren't mentioning drills, they're mentioning outcomes.

I actually did have an LLM ingest some material and generate drills. It worked well. It's rare that happens, though.

The difference between humans and other animals on the planet had always been the ability to reason. If we, as a species, lose that ability, we're looking at an extinction-level event.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#152

Post by hodder »

lelanthran wrote: post #146
oulu2006 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm learning by doing things. For example: AI has helped me get into restoring retro tech, specifically resoldering leaky caps on retro Macintosh logic boards. Before AI, I didn't know how to use a multimeter (I knew theoretically how it worked), I didn't know how to use flux, solder wick, heat gun. I also didn't understand how bromine radicals yellowed plastic and how to reverse it by using blue light similar to wha…

You realise that every single one of those things had easily accessible videos to learn from, right? You're happy using AI instead of other material because it will constantly tell you how brilliant you are, or how quick you're learning.

You are very closed minded. LLMs can absolutely give pragmatic and fast information in a useful (non-sycophantic form). You need to examine your extreme biases here.

Just because you can't use a tool doesn't mean the tool isnt useful.

Your bias on display here is frankly silly. Im not saying LLMs are ALWAYS the best way of learning something just like they aren't always the best at anything. They are a valuable tool though. Yes so is youtube and textbooks, and professsors, and peer review literature, and pen and paper, and block training etc.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#153

Post by j45 »

Technology like many things is about _how_ you use it.

If social media is consuming first, or primarily consuming, anyone can scroll their way to a negative rabbit hole that never ends.

If creation is the use it's something else entirely.

AI in the form of interactive chats, can be a novel kind of consumption.

You can have passive conversations in terms of asking a magic genie, or more active ones.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#154

Post by bluefirebrand »

arbitrary_name wrote: post #82
ForHackernews wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

I'm using it to learn coding. i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before. now i am learning basic scripting and data modeling etc. it is phenomenal for learning languages. i built a chicken coop and some furniture. the skills and confidence i gained are real. am i failing to learn certain skills in the process? of course. but I'm getting further then i would on my own, and t…

> i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before

You want us to believe you couldn't overcome the puddle-deep challenge of installing an IDE and using Pip or Node in the past, but now you're actually learning how to write functions?

Cool for you if true I guess but I'm pretty seriously skeptical

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#155

Post by jcgrillo »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #80
ianbutler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk man my system design game is better than its ever been because I put in the effort to use these tools and recognize they can't do software design better than I can and because I've increased the scope of what I'm building I often have to think more deeply about the problem up front. A typical speccing sessions lasts a few hours for me on big work before I have AI start writing that work where I'm just going back…

I strongly believe that you cannot evaluate how good a system design is if you don't implement it by hand. LLMs will implement what you ask them to, even if it is the wrong approach. They can be lazy and take shortcuts all the time, but they do not feel PAIN (obviously they don't feel anything and aren't lazy, I'm just personifying them but you get the point). Only when you implement by hand can you feel if the imple…

> Only when you implement by hand can you feel if the implementation of your design is painful or not, and only this signal can tell you if your design if truly good or not.

I think this touches obliquely on a point I keep coming back to, that one of the most important things a codebase does is to communicate ideas about how a process should work. Yes, it also produces some binary that runs on a bunch of servers or whatever, but that's a really temporary, ephemeral artifact. The lasting thing is the idea. Making your ideas (expressed in code) easy to understand, easy to work with, and easy to evolve in time is the art of software engineering. I 100% agree, from my own experimentation with LLMs, glancing at something a model has produced and checking that it has some test coverage isn't enough to know whether it's well-engineered. You'll only find out later when you try to work with the code.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#156

Post by akomtu »

I call it Alien Slop Intelligence (ASI) that gradually turns your mind into slop. AI is sloppy on details, so at first you polish its slop by hand, then you start ignoring small imperfections, and eventually you lose taste and skills to evaluate AI output. At that point your mind has become slop.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#157

Post by oulu2006 »

lelanthran wrote: post #146
oulu2006 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm learning by doing things. For example: AI has helped me get into restoring retro tech, specifically resoldering leaky caps on retro Macintosh logic boards. Before AI, I didn't know how to use a multimeter (I knew theoretically how it worked), I didn't know how to use flux, solder wick, heat gun. I also didn't understand how bromine radicals yellowed plastic and how to reverse it by using blue light similar to wha…

You realise that every single one of those things had easily accessible videos to learn from, right? You're happy using AI instead of other material because it will constantly tell you how brilliant you are, or how quick you're learning.

No, not everyone, there's no easily accessible video showing how to setup aquarium lights to slowly de-yellow ABS plastic -- at least I didn't find one; AI helped me find an obscure reference to it and I then read a few message boards where it was mentioned.

I also use AI to take in-progress pictures as I desolder to help me check for traces that need to be repaired or help identifying specific chips. I probably could try and find a video where the same chip is featured and someone explains it, and/or retrieve the schematic for the specific logic board, but that's very painful and does slow the process. Think of AI, in this specific case, as enabling skill development for me in a field I wouldn't have necessarily have gotten into, because of being short on time and AI helps me consolidate that information quickly.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#158

Post by bee_rider »

ilaksh wrote: post #105
cortesoft wrote: post #77

I wonder if this same effect happens for very wealthy and/or very senior executives? Those sorts of people have always had numerous people they could 'outsource' their thinking to; delegating work, asking for research/summaries, assigning tasks. Does handing off that sort of work to people also ruin your skills in the same way? Or are AIs fundamentally different, and if so, why? Because we have no moral or social pre…

The ownership class does not really do work. What they delegate (high level plans) is generally easier to do for AI agents than things like software engineering because it does not need to be as precise or executable. However, there the work has very broad scope scope and the roles are very high risk, so it might need a Fable 5 or Fable 6 level vision language model to remove the jaggedness to make it 'safe' enough t…

It will be interesting to see how AI and company leadership/ownership stuff shakes out. In some sense I would expect it to be quite different than what exists currently, because an AI can’t be responsible for anything legally, and (arguably?) can’t own anything. But then, C-levels don’t actually seem to have much personal legal liability toward their company’s decisions, or maybe it won’t be so big of a deal.

I’d be curious to see alternatives ownerships structures. Like an AI-coordinated collection of guilds, unions, or co-ops. If it can’t accumulate upwards, maybe the fundamental unit of ownership will stay with the workers.

Re: Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

#160

Post by warkdarrior »

lelanthran wrote: post #146
oulu2006 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm learning by doing things. For example: AI has helped me get into restoring retro tech, specifically resoldering leaky caps on retro Macintosh logic boards. Before AI, I didn't know how to use a multimeter (I knew theoretically how it worked), I didn't know how to use flux, solder wick, heat gun. I also didn't understand how bromine radicals yellowed plastic and how to reverse it by using blue light similar to wha…

You realise that every single one of those things had easily accessible videos to learn from, right? You're happy using AI instead of other material because it will constantly tell you how brilliant you are, or how quick you're learning.

Should we also go to ancient scrolls for learning, because videos are too easy? The poster showed you how they learn with the help of AI. You can learn from videos, they learn from AI. What's the problem?
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