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The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

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21–30 of 104 posts

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#21
Several weeks ago, I spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal. It accepts a mono signal and produces a stereo field using a 5-stage all-pass filter to mess with the phase without the use of delay (which sounds cheesy and creates a result that doesn't mix well back to mono).

I've not really worked with audio circuits previously, and I'd been intimidated to approach the domain. My journey was radically expedited by iterating through the entire process with a ChatGPT instance. I would share zoomed photos, grill it about how audio transformers work, got it to patiently explain JFET soft-switching using an inverter until the pattern was forced into my goopy brain.

Through the process of exploring every node of this circuit, I learned about configurable ground lifts, using a diode bridge to extract the desired voltage rail polarity, how to safely handle both TS and TRS cables with a transformer, that transformer outputs are 180 degrees out of phase, how to add a switch that will attenuate 10dB off a signal to switch line/instrument levels.

Eventually I transitioned from sharing PCB photos to implementing my own take on the cascade design in KiCAD, at which point I was copying and pasting chunks of netlist and reasoning about capacitor values with it.

In short, I gave myself a self-directed college-level intensive in about a week and since that's not generally a thing IRL, it's reasonable to conclude that I wouldn't have ever moved this from a "some day" to something I now understand deeply in the past tense without the ability to shamelessly interrogate an LLM at all hours of the day/night, on my schedule.

If you're lazy, perhaps you're just... lazy?

Anyhow, I highly recommend the Surfy Industries Stereomaker. It's amazing at what it does. https://www.surfyindustries.com/stereomaker

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#22
I think the risk is this; when non-technical users who've never shipped software in their life can dictate to a machine and get "instant results" it going to bring back managers not understanding that you don't just ship code. Especially these days where one bad dependency can mean downtime or worse.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#24

That's a different take than I've been considering AI to be genuinely useful. I try to not use it for deep work, infact I try to use it minimally but frequently for short checks on my own understanding. Using your research paper reading example, I would read the research paper, but then ask an AI tool specific questions about the work, frequently in new chats. Then at the end I might ask it to implement my descriptio…

Ironically, what you described is exactly using AI to help with deep work. You do the heavy lifting (reading), and use AI strictly for stateless verification and testing your mental model. That is the ideal synergy.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#25
Does this post feel AI generated to anyone else ?

But to actually answer the question: I’ve been putting research paper pdfs in notebook llm , and turning them into ~40 minute podcasts which I listen to on my walks. Yes it’s shallow learning, and it might have some hallucinations in there but I wouldn’t have read some of those otherwise.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#26

Several weeks ago, I spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal. It accepts a mono signal and produces a stereo field using a 5-stage all-pass filter to mess with the phase without the use of delay (which sounds cheesy and creates a result that doesn't mix well back to mono). I've not really worked with audio circuits previously, and I'd been intimidated to approach the domain. My journey was ra…

This is a phenomenal example of exactly what I am advocating.

Notice you didn't ask the AI to 'just design a stereo pedal for me.' You interrogated it, reasoned about netlists, and forced the concepts into your brain through intense friction. That is pure deep work.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#28
Getting your directions from Google Maps might make you seem more knowledgeable about a city's geography than you actually are.

However, what does it mean to say that's deceptive? It means you care more about social signalling than you do about arriving at the right destination on time. Showing that you're not the sort of person who gets lost isn't really the primary reason people use Google Maps. When it's not a test of your navigation skills, it's not cheating.

Similarly, doing Google searches before posting might be "deceptive" in that it makes you seem more knowledgeable than you are, but on the whole I would prefer more knowledgeable posts, so the social signalling seems like a secondary consideration.

Similarly for using AI. Sometimes it's just a way to get more information.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#29

Weird post given it looks like an LLM wrote it.

I'm sick of hearing about AI, but I'm significantly more sick of anyone who knows how to write English prose at a level higher than "typical rural American" being accused of using AI to write.

Re: The risk of AI isn't making us lazy, but making "lazy" look productive

#30
post #7

I have a nearly total opposite take. I can't tell you how many times I've read a book, a paper or something else and been confused by some ambiguity in the author's prose. Being able to drop the paper (or even the book!) into an LLM to dig into the precise meaning has been an unbelievable boost for me. Now I can actually get beyond conceptual misunderstanding or even ignorance and get to practice, which is how skills…

If you're not sure what something is saying, how can you be sure that the AI had picked the correct interpretation?
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