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The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

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Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#251

Post by dagmx »

erichocean wrote: post #205
dagmx wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’ve made a decision based on three months of use. I am legitimately interested in your experience though. What are you creating where you can see the results in that time frame to make entire business decisions like that? I would really like to see those kinds of productivity gains myself.

I'll give you an easy example. LMDB has a (very) long-standing bug where "DUPSORT" databases become corrupted over time. Separately, I wanted to make some changes to LMDB but the code is so opaque that it's hard to do anything with it (safely). So I gave the entire codebase to Gemini Pro 2.5 and had it develop a glossary for local variable renames and for structure member renames. I then hand-renamed all of the struc…

While your lldb use is interesting,, I’m very much interested in what you said you’re doing greenfield. What is the scope of that?

Clojure has enough code out there that it’s well covered by the major LLMs.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#252

Post by dagmx »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #243
dagmx wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your scenario though, how do you avoid hiring based on blind faith? How do I know you aren’t just a lead with a very good team to pick up the slack? How do I separate you from the 20 other people saying they’re also good? Why would I hire someone who can’t hit the ground running faster than someone else who can? Furthermore, why would I hire someone who didn’t prepare at all for an interview, even if just mentally…

You invest time into actually looking at applications properly and look at their previous work and ask them questions about that. The curious and learning mind will probably have some projects, because they are not only into the job for the money, but because they have a passion for the job. That's not a requirement, but it distinguishes the great ones from the mediocre ones.

That’s also something any number of people can fake easily. There’s a ton of smooth talkers who can hype up a project and talk in abstract about their previous projects but weren’t on the side of delivering it.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#253

Post by DrewADesign »

dns_snek wrote: post #131
DrewADesign wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A refusal to even acknowledge that AI might work isn't a very sensible refutation of the risks we're going to face. That's probably why they're not doing that. The core premise-- we will rely on AI so much that we will de-skill ourselves-- requires acknowledging that AI works.

> The core premise-- we will rely on AI so much that we will de-skill ourselves-- requires acknowledging that AI works. No it doesn't require that because the vast majority of people aren't rational actors and they don't optimize for the quality of their work - they optimize for their own comfort and emotional experience. They'll happily produce and defend low quality work if they get to avoid the discomfort of havin…

It doesn't have to be perfect, or even good, to 'work': it just has to perform the expected function well enough to satisfy their use case, which is low-effort text generation without significant quality requirements. Therefore, it absolutely works.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#254

Post by johnnyanmac »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #248
johnnyanmac wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does the engine get rewarded for its steam?” That was the anti-automation line back then Sure, and it was wrong because it turns out the conductor does get rewarded. Given train strikes that had to be denied as recently as a few years ago, it's clear that's an essential role 150 years later. With how they want to frame AI as replacing labor, who's being rewarded long term for its thinking? Who's really being service…

Then its firmly an organizational problem with how reward is allocated in human society. Humans haven’t figured out how to include all humans and ecological systems into the same “tribe” and therefore the infighting between artificially segregated human groups, disconnected with ecological “externalities” which prevents a sustainable cooperative solution. So most likely it will continue to be a small number of humans…

Yes. And do we know what this leads to in history? Conflicts, violent uprising, coups, and wars. At some point, the population reaches a breaking point and outs the oppressors. This happening as recent as last month, so 2025 isn't any different from 1525.

The tool itself doesn't matter, but the people are falling into the same cycle once again. I can see LLM's used ethically and carefully managed to assist the populace. That's clearly not what's happening and is the entire reason I'm against them. It's tiring being dismissed as a luddite just because I don't want big tech to yet again recklessly ransack the populace with no oversight.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#255

Post by lisbbb »

mcny wrote: post #83
jstanley wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to figure things out myself. I still use StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things were available when I was learning I would probably not have learnt as much.

I started programming before stack overflow, was never any good (still am not to this day), but I was always scared of asking questions on stack overflow. I felt like there was a certain amount of homework expected when you ask a question and usually by the time I did enough work to post a question, it was moot because I would have solved my problem usually by stringing together two or more stack overflow questions t…

That's interesting. When SO came out, I was a big contributor, all in on getting the karma points and whatnots. Eventually, I realized I was being bullied by a bunch of Europeans who had never actually worked a real job in their entire lives and were, for lack of a better term, "software enthusiasts." Invariably, I would answer something based on actual experience only to get downvoted because some idiot hobbyist thought it was incorrect. The thing about this biz is that there are things that are blatantly incorrect for sure, but all correctness is some shade of gray, highly dependent on particular situations. People who lack experience have no sense of any of that, though.

A second major issue with SO is that answers decay over time. So a good answer back in 2014 is a junk answer today. Thus, I would get drive by downvotes on years old discussions, which is simply irritating.

So I quit SO and never bothered to answer another single question ever again.

SO has suffered from enshitification, and though I despise that term, it does sort of capture how sites like SO went from excellent resources into cesspools of filth and fools.

That LLMs are trained on that garbage is amusing.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#256

Post by lisbbb »

crazygringo wrote: post #184
jstanley wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to figure things out myself. I still use StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things were available when I was learning I would probably not have learnt as much.

Good lord, I'm not glad. It was horrible . Because it wasn't about "figuring things out for yourself." I mean, if the answer was available in a programming language or library manual, then debugging was easy. No, the problem was you spent 95% of your debugging time working around bugs and unspecified behavior in the libraries and API's . Bugs in Windows, bugs in DLL's, bugs in everything. Very frequently something ju…

All the while having some dolt of a PM asking for status updates.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#257

Post by 1718627440 »

dagmx wrote: post #245
1718627440 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> including iterating iterables I would've chosen a language without iterators, what would you do then??

It doesn’t need to explicitly be an iterable. But can you loop through an array as part of the problem solve.

That sounds really hard, you can only hope to solve that with AI. /s

Good luck, sounds like a fair hiring process.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#258

Post by ACCount37 »

logicchains wrote: post #232
obscurette wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a parent? Have you ever seen a kid growing up? 90%+ of kids wouldn't care at all about any work or learning without social pressure from parents, teachers and peers. That's the whole point of schools – to create a social pressure to put all this knowledge into heads of kids in hope that some of this would be useful for them. And to do it through all these awfully messy years we call childhood and adolescence.

I don't know where you grow up but in most of the developed world kids mock kids for putting effort into study; peers provide social pressure against learning, not towards it.

That depends on peer quality. And it's why so much of education outcomes depends on peer quality.

It's also why there's a considerable opposition to tracking.

If you evaluate academic ability, inevitably, the students who want to learn things are going to be closer to the top, and the ones who don't want to learn things are going to be closer to the bottom.

Now, group students up by ability aggressively: the "top end classes" are going to devour the school program - while the "bottom end classes" would devolve into a pandemonium.

Naturally, the parents of the bottom end students would want there to be zero tracking, so that the average "peer quality" pulls their children up, and the parents of the top end students want there to be the most aggressive tracking possible, so that the average "peer quality" doesn't drag their children down.

A big part of what the rich parents pay for when they send their kids into those expensive private schools is access to better "peer quality". "If a kid's parents are rich" isn't a perfect proxy for "if the kid wants to be learning things", but it outperforms the average. And if a private school is actually willing to expel the most disruptive students, then it's going to tip the scales even further.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#259

Post by lisbbb »

crazygringo wrote: post #211
johnnyanmac wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm so happy people today don't suffer the way we used to suffer. TBF Ali bugs in some framework you're using still happens. The problem wasn't eliminated, just moved to the next layer. Those debugging skills are the most important part of working with legacy software (which is what nearly all industry workers work in). It sucks but is necessary for success in this metric.

My point wasn't that the bugs don't exist anymore. Obviously they still do. My point is that I can frequently figure out how to work around them in 5 minutes rather than 2 days, because someone else already did that work. I can find out that a different function call is the answer, or a weird flag that doesn't do what the documentation says, or whatever it is. And my problem of it taking two days to debug something i…

I don't know that it's that much easier today. I ran into lots of odd issues with Next.js and authentication and there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of useful info out there about it. Github does help, but you have to wait for the devs to reply.

There are tons of obfuscated Java jar libraries out there that are not upgradeable that companies have built mission critical systems around only to find out they can't easily move to JVM 17 or 25 or whatever and they don't like hearing that.

Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds

#260

Post by ben_w »

mtillman wrote: post #33
mnky9800n wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It fulfills steve jobs promise that a computer is a bicycle for your mind. It is crazy to me that all these poeple think they are going to lose their ability to think. If you didn't lose your ability to think to scrolling social media then you aren't going to lose it to AI. However, I think a lot of people lost their ability to think by scrolling social media and that is problematic. What people need to realize is th…

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/255603105_The_Effec... 2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25509828/ 3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392560878_Your_Brai... I’m pretty convinced it should be used to do things humans can’t do instead of things humans can do well with practice. However, I’m also convinced that Capital will always rely on Labor to use it on their behalf.

> I’m pretty convinced it should be used to do things humans can’t do instead of things humans can do well with practice. However, I’m also convinced that Capital will always rely on Labor to use it on their behalf.

When computers were new, they were on occasion referred to as "electronic brains" due to their capacity for arithmetic.

Humans can, with practice, do arithmetic well.

A Raspberry Pi Zero can do arithmetic faster than the combined efforts of every single living human even if we all trained hard and reached the level of the current record holder.

Should we stop using computers to do arithmetic just because we can also do arithmetic, or should we allow ourselves to benefit from the way that "quantity has a quality all of its own"*?

* Like so many quotes, attributed to lots of different people. Funny how unreliable humans can be with information :P

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