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The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

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Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#51

Post by daveguy »

schneems wrote: post #16
arkj wrote: post #5

Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user. What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support explora…

I feel that respecting the focus of others is also an important skill. If I'm pulled 27 different ways. Then when I finally get around to another engineer’s question “I need help” is a demand for my synchronous time and focus. Versus “I’m having problems with X, I need to Y, can you help me Z” could turn into a chat, or it could mean I’m able to deliver the needed information at once and move on. Many people these da…

> Many people these days don’t even bother to write questions. They write statements and expect you to infer the question from the statement.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Not even asking for help just stating a complaint.

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#52

Post by _Algernon_ »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #22
the_snooze wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way, I think it shows why "superfluous" things like sports and art are so important in school. In those activities, there are no quick answers. You need to persist through the initial learning curve and slow physical adaptation just to get baseline competency. You're not going to get a violin to stop sounding like a dying cat unless you accept that it's a gradual focused process.

> You're not going to get a violin to stop sounding like a dying cat unless you accept that it's a gradual focused process. You can sample that shit and make some loops in your DAW. Or just use a generative AI nowadays.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b9/MagrittePipe....

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#53

Post by asdlkjlidj »

qsort wrote: post #29
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #4

I'm definitely gonna get hate for saying this but: the rise of coding with LLM assistants is going to worsen an issue our industry is already struggling with: we have tons of developers out there who do not know their fundamentals in programming, who are utterly rudderless without heaps upon heaps of framework code doing lots of work for them, who are now being further enabled by machines that write even that code fo…

I don't think it's necessarily worsening, it's just becoming more evident. The way I conceptualize this is that there are two kinds of knowledge. The first is fundamental knowledge. If you learn what is computational complexity and how to use it, or what is linear algebra and why do we care, then you're left with something . The second is what I call "transient" knowledge (I made up the word). If you learn by heart t…

A guy I work with calls transient knowledge "arcana," I've come to appreciate the concept. Now I'm aware of when I'm generating arcana for other people to learn :)

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#54

Post by daveguy »

bob1029 wrote: post #36
arkj wrote: post #5

Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user. What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support explora…

> It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works This is really a tragedy because the current technology is arguably one of the best things in existence for explaining "why?" to someone in a very personalized way. With application of discipline from my side, I can make the LLM lecture me until I genuinely understand the underlying principles of something. I keep hammering it with edge c…

I'm not sure if hammering an LLM until it agrees with you is the best way to get to the truth.

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#55

Post by bikedspiritlake »

Phrasing LLMs as encouraging exploitation is important, because they can still be powerful tools for exploration. The difference comes in the interface for LLMs, which is heavily focused on exploitation whereas search engine interfaces encourage exploration.

Newer models often end responses with questions and thoughts that encourage exploration, as do features like ChatGPT's follow up suggestions. However, a lot of work needs to be done with LLM interfaces to balance exploitation and exploration while avoiding limiting AI's capabilities.

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#56

Post by dimal »

knallfrosch wrote: post #46

When I use LLMs, I quickly lose focus. Copy-paste, copy-paste. No real understanding of the solutions, even for areas of my expertise. I just don't feel like understanding the flood of information, without any real purpose behind the understanding. While I probably (?) get done more, I also just don't enjoy it. But I also can't go back to googling for hours now that this ready-made solution exists. I wish it would ha…

I’ve gotten into this mode too, but often when I do this, I eventually find myself in a rabbit hole dead end that the AI unwittingly lead me into. So I’m slowing down and using them to understand the code better. Unfortunately, all the tools are optimized for vibe coding, getting the quick answer without understanding, so it feels like I’m fighting the tools.

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#58

Post by AllegedAlec »

Telemakhos wrote: post #32
the_snooze wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way, I think it shows why "superfluous" things like sports and art are so important in school. In those activities, there are no quick answers. You need to persist through the initial learning curve and slow physical adaptation just to get baseline competency. You're not going to get a violin to stop sounding like a dying cat unless you accept that it's a gradual focused process.

Sports and art aren't superfluous: they teach gross and fine (respectively) motor skills. School isn't just about developing cognitive skills or brainwashing students into political orthodoxies: it's also about teaching students how to control their bodies in general and specific muscle groups, like the hands, in particular. Art is one way of training the hands; music is another (manipulating anything from a triangle…

With a bit more focus you might not have missed OP's point

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#59

Post by thih9 »

> LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does not work, but the first choice is always to exploit.

You can ask the llm to generate a number of solutions though - the exploration is possible and relatively easy then.

And I say that as someone who dislikes llms with a passion.

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#60

Post by ToucanLoucan »

exceptione wrote: post #47
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially. Did they? Like I have no data for this nor would I know how one would set about getting it, but like, from my personal experience and the experiences of folks I've spoken to for basically my entire career, the requirements we have for our software barely change at all. I do not expect…

MS produces some very good software, like .net core, garnet etc. Their biggest asset is however Marketing. They have perfected selling software, no matter how bad it is. Their end-user software ranges from "bad but could be worse" to "outlandish crap that should be illegal to ship". Their user base however doesn't know much better, and decision makers in commercial settings have different priorities (choosing MS woul…

> They have perfected selling software, no matter how bad it is.

I agree in general with that statement, but we also need to acknowledge that those sales occur within a market that unequivocally endorses their products as "the standard," irrespective of quality, and further still the vast, vast, vast majority of their sold licenses are in corporate environments, where the people making the purchasing decisions and the people utilizing the software are rhetorically different species. I would be shocked if you could find a single person who prefers Teams to Slack, yet tons of organizations use Teams, not because it's good, but because it comes bundled with 365 services, and you're already paying for Outlook, OneDrive, Word, and Excel at the minimum. And you're certainly not going to not have those pieces of software... and therein lies the problem.

> MS can continue focusing their efforts productising the clueless user that doesn't understand anything and doesn't give a shit about all the leaks, brittle drivers, performance degradation, registry cluttering etc.

But they do give a shit. There's just no meaningful alternative. I run into people who absolutely 100% give a shit and are incredibly frustrated at just how BAD computing is lately, even if they lack the vocabulary to explain massive memory mismanagement means their phone gets hot in their hand when they're just reading goddamn text messages, they still understand that it sucks and it wasn't always like this.

> MS follows the right $$ strategy, their numbers don't lie.

That statement however is so vague it's unfalsifiable. We do know Microsoft has previously "lost" battles with individual applications in individual fields, it is completely believable that they could again and more (the entire XBox division comes to mind). What Microsoft has truly mastered is anti-competitive business practices that hobble their competition from the word go, and make it more or less impossible to compete with them on a software quality axis.

The only office suites I know of that even have numbers that are visible next to Microsoft are LibreOffice and the Apple suite, neither of which are actually sold at all.

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