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AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

koshyjohn.com

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Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#231

Post by operatingthetan »

joe_mamba wrote: post #219
operatingthetan wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you just lie about what you wrote? What you actually wrote in the comment four hours ago: >60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, basically before the Google and Meta found out ads and money printing run the world Your lie just now: >To which I replied "in the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's when they started in garages". --- >What did you fail to understand here? Nothing because you never said it. Wild behavior.

>Nothing because you never said it. You literally just quoted me saying before two comments above: "You are changing your argument by adding this: "when they started in a garage." and then pretend otherwise. Now you're pretending I never said and acting like you didn't read it. Are you unable to understand an argument made by adding the context of two sentence from two consecutive comments following up on each other(…

You made up a quote you never said and insisted that you said it, argument over, you lose. And no, you can't take little pieces of several of your comments and smash them together and pretend like that was the context all along. Bizarre behavior. Please read more about how this site works, this isn't acceptable.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#232

Post by dml2135 »

spacechild1 wrote: post #59
joe_mamba wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you graduate your engineering degree without being able to think? Even my colleagues who cheated their way through uni still needed critical thinking to do that and get away with cheating without being caught. People might hate this but being a good cheat requires a lot of critical thinking.

OP should have put "engineers" in double quotes. Many software developers like to describe themselves as engineers although they don't have an actual engineering degree. A lot of software development resembles plumbing more than engineering, so most devs don't really need an engineering degree anyway, but they should be more honest about what they're actually doing and not try to elevate themselves with fancy titles.…

You can do engineering without an engineering degree. A degree is just a piece of paper.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#233

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

vict7 wrote: post #97
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #24

There are plenty of engineers that couldn't work without a modern IDE or in languages without memory management. Or without the ability to use a library from GitHub / their package manager. It doesn't feel THAT much different to me. "Engineer" as a term might drift. There are "web developers" that can only use webflow / wordpress.

IDEs are free. Libraries are free. Languages are free. This is becoming more like an internet subscription where you’re at the mercy of Anthropic the same way you may be at the mercy of Comcast. I’m sure you can see the difference between a garbage collector and a nondeterministic slop generator But it feels good to equivocate, so here we are.

> IDEs are free. Libraries are free. Languages are free. This is becoming more like an internet subscription where you’re at the mercy of Anthropic the same way you may be at the mercy of Comcast.

Ollama/llamafile/vllm/llama.cpp are free. Qwen/kimi/deepseek are free. Pi.dev/OpenCode are free. If you're using a SaaS AI subscription that's fine, but that's hardly the only option.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#234

Post by dbalatero »

willhslade wrote: post #171
ua709 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, I just wonder how accurate it is. We basically never look at the output of the compiler, so I agree that tool allows one to operate at a higher level than assembly. But I always have to wade through the output from AI so I’m not sure I got to move to the next level of abstraction. But maybe that’s just me.

Are compilers deterministic?

Given the same compiler, I believe they would be the same between runs given the same inputs. I suppose that could not be true at the margins, but I would expect correctness out of whatever path it chose.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#235

Post by cindyllm »

1ncorrect wrote: post #192

‘AI’ is my newest litmus test for whether who I’m engaging with should be taken seriously or not. ‘AI’ doesn’t exist, and LLMs have vanishingly narrow legitimate justifiable use cases. Any output from one is intrinsically, explosively, imprecise, and can’t be trusted to be build upon without specialist treatment. I’m yet to identify any application of a LLM which can rationally be mistaken for intelligence. Anyone wh…

[dead]

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#236

Post by viccis »

apsurd wrote: post #191
viccis wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the medium is the message If you asked 100 Americans what this aphorism means, I strongly doubt a single one could capture McLuhan's original meaning.

You're right. ive struggled to understand what exactly this means, in large part perhaps it's so often misused? I think it means something like we're trapped in the constraints of the medium. Tweets say more about the environment of twitter than whatever message happened to be sent. but i think im off on that, ill look this person up and find out!

It's confusing because "message" is not using its lay meaning, and decades of "medium" and "media" meaning drift meant that it isn't either.

For "the medium is the message", "medium" refers to any tool that acts as an extension of yourself. TV is an extension of your community, even things like light bulbs (extends your vision) are included in his meaning.

McLuhan argued that all forms of media like that carry a message that's more than just their content. "The message" in that argument refers to the message the medium itself brings rather than its content. For example, the airplane is "used for" speeding up travel over long distance, but the the message of its medium itself is to "dissolve the railway form of city, politics, and association, quite independently of what the airplane is used for."

You can see it happening via online media that extend ourselves across the internet. Think of how, once easy video creation via Youtube became uniform, web comics stopped becoming a popular medium for comedy online. It's not like the web comics faded because they got worse; it's that they faded into a niche format because people didn't want to communicate via static images anymore. Or how, once short form videos on TikTok got big, you saw other platforms shift to copy the paradigm. McLuhan's point is that it's not just the content of those short form videos that matters; it's the message of the format itself. Peoples' attention spans grow shorter because of the format, and before too long, we saw the tastes and expectations of the masses change. Reddit's monosite-with-subcommunities format and dopamine triggering voting feedback mechanism were its message more than any actual content posted there, and it's why traditional forums are niche and dwindling.

If you want to get a pretty good understanding of it, just read the first chapter from his book Understanding Media. It's short and relatively straight forward.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#237

Post by canjobear »

ipython wrote: post #120
ctvdev wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is, we are not yet at the "aphorism" stage of the discourse we learn by doing

I’ve also seen along those lines “there is no compression algorithm for experience” - a nice summary of the hn posts from today.

There clearly is though. You don’t remember every detail of every moment that constitutes the experience.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#238

Post by lo_zamoyski »

Absolutely. When used correctly, it can become a tool for pulling our minds out of the gutter of pedantic pocket lint and distracting ephemera and keep it in a space where it is intellectually rewarding and fruitful. It can help you grasp a code base more quickly. It can help you debug things more effectively. But that's up to how you use it.

If all you do is point your LLM at your Jira tickets, then you are failing to be an engineer. I mean, if that's all you are doing, then who needs you? One of the most important things to learn is what the right questions to ask are and what the right decisions to make are when guiding the LLM, as well as the ability to judge the output it produces.

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#239

Post by ambicapter »

> There is No Shortcut to Judgment

> This is the part that some people may not want to hear --

> There is no generated explanation that transfers mastery into your brain without you doing the work. > There is no way to outsource reasoning for long enough that you still end up strong at reasoning.

This is in relation to early-career engineers, but I wonder why people think this won't apply to mid- and late-career engineers. Are they not also constantly learning things on the job? Are they not thus shortcutting their own understanding of what they are learning day-to-day?

Re: AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

#240

Post by rangestransform »

clutter55561 wrote: post #77

AI isn’t creating the problem, it is just showing the problem. Those who did not want to learn before AI did so reluctantly, mixing Google and SO. Now they ask AI. An existing problem found a new solution. Personally, I really enjoy using AI. I have created my own cascade workflow to stop myself from “asking one more question”. Every session is planned. Claude and Codex can be annoying as hell (for different reasons)…

Funnily enough, I learned to code “depth first” by putting together enough documentation examples and stackoverflow answers to reach a working Android app, long before I learned to code “breadth first” in school.
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