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Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

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Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#271

Post by lazide »

vidarh wrote: post #269
mythical_39 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wait, did you see the part where the person you are replying to said that writing the code themself was essential to correctly solving the problem? Because they didn't understand the architecture or the domain models otherwise. Perhaps in your case you do have strong hands-on experience with the domain models, which may indeed have shifted you job requirements to supervising those implementing the actual models. I do…

I saw that part and I disagreed with the very notion, hence why I wrote what I did. > Because they didn't understand the architecture or the domain models otherwise. My point is that requiring or expecting an in-depth understanding of all the algorithms you rely on is not a productive use of developer time, because outside narrow niches it is not what we're being paid for. It is also not something the vast majority o…

Most of the tests are BS too.

And nobody is talking about verifying if the AI bubble sort is correct or not - but recognizing that if the AI is implementing it’s own bubble sort, you’re waaaay out in left field.

Especially if it’s doing it inline somewhere.

The underlying issue with AI slop, is that it’s harder to recognize unless you look closely, and then you realize the whole thing is bullshit.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#272

Post by nindalf »

mountainb wrote: post #236
nindalf wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Homer Simpson I can't stress this enough, Homer Simpson is a fictional character from a cartoon. I would not use him in an argument about economics any more than I would use the Roadrunner to argue for road safety.

No, it's useful evidence in the same way that contemporaneous fiction is often useful evidence. The first season aired from 1989-1990. The living conditions from the show were plausible. I know because I was alive during that time. My best friend was the son of a vacuum cleaner salesman with a high school education, and they owned a three bedroom house in a nice area, two purebred dogs, and always had new cars. His m…

I read this as "anything can be used as evidence if it confirms my preconceived notions". Your anecdotes about a friend or two are just that - anecdotes.

This claim of "a single man could feed a whole family on one factory job" is misleading and untrue. It's usually the 1950s that people claim this was true and they wish we could go back to the 1950s. It's easy to show that that the 1950s were no picnic (https://archive.is/oH1Vx).

It's always some time in the past that the nation was great. They pick 1950s, you pick the 1990s. What you don't understand is that people are usually longing for a time when they weren't alive or when they were children. They want to go back to living the stress free life of a happy childhood, when your parents shielded you from all the vagaries of life.

You cite cartoons, they cite memes. If you ask them how a meme could possibly be used as evidence, they say much the same as you - anecdotes about their grandparents.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#273

Post by mcpar-land »

Difwif wrote: post #196
thefaux wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like it conflates problem solving with the production of artifacts. It seems highly possible to me that the explosion of ai generated code is ultimately creating more problems than it is solving and that the friction of manual coding may ultimately prove to be a great virtue.

This statement feels like a farmer making a case for using their hands to tend the land instead of a tractor because it produces too many crops. Modern farming requires you to have an ecosystem of supporting tools to handle the scale and you need to learn new skills like being a diesel mechanic. How we work changes and the extra complexity buys us productivity. The vast majority of software will be AI generated, tool…

This is the classic mistake all AI hypemen make by assuming code is an asset, like crops. Code is a liability and you must produce as little of it as possible to solve your problem.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#275

Post by morpheos137 »

I must use AI differently than most because I find it stimulates deep thinking (not necessarily productive). I don't ask for answers. I ask for constraints and invariants and test them dialecticaly. The power in LLM is in finding deep associations of pattern which the human mind can then validate. LLMs are best used in my opinion not as an oracle of truth or an assistant but as a fast collective mental latent space look up tool. If you have a concept or a specification you can use the LLM to find paths to develop it that you might not have been aware of. You get out what you put in and critical thinking is always key. I believe the secret power in LLMs lies not so much in the transformer model but in the meaning inherent in language. With the right language you can shape output to reveal structure you might not have realized otherwise. We are seeing this power even now in LLMs proving Erdos problems or problems in group theory. Yes the machine may struggle to count the 'r's in strawberry but it can discern abstract relations.

An interesting visual exercise to see latent information structure in language is to pixelize a large corpus as bit map by translating the characters to binary then run various transforms on it and what emerges is not a picture of random noise but a fractal like chaos of "worms" or "waves." This is what LLMs are navigating in their high dimensional latent space. Words are not just arbitrary symbols but objects on a connected graph.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#276

Post by stainablesteel »

i honestly can't understand people using AI to do things for them, the only real thing I'll have it do for me is write code if I'm feeling lazy, but I always know it's going to make mistakes and I'll have to manually skim through it depending how important it is

for me, it's purely a research tool that I can ask infinite questions to

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#277

Post by low_common »

TheColorYellow wrote: post #175
PatronBernard wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a hierarchical graph layout algorithm based on the Sugiyama framework, using Brandes-Köpf for node positioning. I am sorry for being direct but you could have just kept it to the first part of that sentence. Everything after that just sounds like pretentious name dropping and adds nothing to your point. But I fully agree, for complex problems that require insight, LLMs can waste your time with their sycophancy.

This is a technical forum, isn't pretentious name dropping kind of what we do? Seriously though, I appreciated it because my curiosity got the better of me and I went down a quick rabbit hole in Sugiyama, comparative graph algorithms, and learning about the node positioning as a particular dimension of graph theory. Sure nothing ground breaking, but it added a shallow amount to my broad knowledge base of theory that…

How are you applying what you learned to your business? I think that would be interesting to share if you can.

Re: Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant

#279

Post by vidarh »

wiseowise wrote: post #253
vidarh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "actual job" isn't to write code, but to solve problems. Writing code has just typically been how I've needed to solve those problems. That has increasingly shifted to "just" reviewing code and focusing on the architecture and domain models. I get to spend more time on my actual job.

So what happens when LLM provider and/or internet is down or you're out of credits?

If the internet is down I can't do most of my work with or without an LLM, and redundancy is a thing.

The only way I'll run out of credits is if my company isn't liquid any longer in which case I have bigger problems.

And there are plenty of LLM providers, almost only a few w/SOTA models but even for SOTA models there is no reason to be dependent on one.

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