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

news.ycombinator.com

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

#61

Post by itmitica »

You are here. You know what you want. You know what are the correct rules and constraints. You know what the correct path looks like. You are able to spot drifting. You are able to objectively review the outcome. AI is the tool to go from here to where you want to arrive. There.

If not. AI is the tool to get "here" faster. And then go from here to there.

All you need is to take a little time to learn how to use this new tool: AI.

Take time to learn.

Have you taken the time to document what mathematicians were able to do with AI? What researchers were able to do with AI? They took the time to learn the AI tool. Then they used it with great results.

What are you waiting for? Learning is something you should also do. Go do it.

No mystery here.

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

#62

Post by skeledrew »

> nothing actually sticks.

And it doesn't matter. To each their own. Take one example: cooking. Some may choose to be a gourmet chef, whether professionally or just on their own time. Some will just regularly cook their food. Some will cook only when they have to. And some will avoid cooking no matter what, leaving it to family or going out to buy food, etc.

Now apply to every task and endeavor that one may be involved in. It doesn't matter if any particular thing sticks or not. Some may care and dive deeply, and some may prefer a hands-off approach. Nothing changes either way; life goes on.

The primary reason to get into anything deeply before was because it contributed directly to survival, eg studying and building a career to provide a product/service others needed. Things had to stick because living depended on it. Now with AI, well it just doesn't matter anymore with the essentials and everything beyond increasingly being automated away.

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

SoftTalker wrote: post #38
Arainach wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be. Comments such as yours add nothing to the conversation. It's an ad hominem attack. In the absence of explaining why you believe it "looks like AI", it's a baseless accusation

It has the typical patterns: em dashes, "it's not A, it's B" constructions. Also relatively new, low karma account, and its other comments are similarly LLM-ish.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by acmerfight »

SoftTalker wrote: post #38
Arainach wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be. Comments such as yours add nothing to the conversation. It's an ad hominem attack. In the absence of explaining why you believe it "looks like AI", it's a baseless accusation

It has the typical patterns: em dashes, "it's not A, it's B" constructions. Also relatively new, low karma account, and its other comments are similarly LLM-ish.

Guilty as charged. As a non-native speaker, I used an LLM to compile my original thoughts into fluent English.

But notice the irony: I used AI exactly as I advocate. It handled the horizontal spread (syntax), while I rigorously enforced the vertical depth (the architectural logic). The 'taste' is entirely mine.

Thank you to Arainach and cableshaft for engaging with the actual substance. Dismissing a core argument because you pattern-matched an 'em-dash' is exactly the shallow thinking this post warns about.

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

#65

Post by bluefirebrand »

peteforde wrote: post #56
bluefirebrand wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, it's been several weeks. How much of what you did have you retained? Could you do all of, some of, a small fraction of, or none of the work again today if you had to?

My reaction to this question is that it might technically be in good faith, but you're pushing it. Let's say that LLMs didn't exist, and I learned these same skills in an oddly specific hands-on workshop, or from an oddly specific textbook, or fuck it, let's say that I hired some greybeard pedal designer to just sit beside me and answer all of my stupid questions without judgement for a few weeks at their hourly rate…

> Would you feel compelled to challenge whether I had retained what I learned

Yes, the exact same way I would dubious when someone says they learned much from following a youtube tutorial or participating in a two week workshop or something

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

#66

Post by acmerfight »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #46

Anecdote: I haven’t done any web development since 2002 and I always farmed that off to someone else. But since I started using coding agents, I have done two feature full internal web apps authenticated by Amazon Cognito. While the UI looks like something from 2002, I am good at putting myself in the shoes of the end user, I iterated often (and quickly) over the UX. I didn’t look at a line of code and have no plans…

Agreed. This is pure architectural thinking: you hold the ground truth, enforce the strict IAM boundaries, and outsource the mud-playing to the LLM. Mindless 'vibe coding' without this structural discipline is just tittytainment. The job is contract validation now, not typing.

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

#67

Post by joquarky »

peteforde wrote: post #57
sagarm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs absolutely let you explore ideas and areas you wouldn't have otherwise...but does your new design actually _work_? I'm curious whether the "knowledge" you gained was real or hallucinatory. I've been using LLMs this way myself, but I worry I'm contaminating my memory with false information.

I think that you're confusing what you're doing with what I'm doing. What I'm doing is learning the circuit constructs that I need and then putting them to work in real circuits. There's usually a few breadboard steps in the middle, which you could call reinforcement learning. To me, the telling thing about your question is the implication that I would spend a week learning how to do something and then not test it ou…

This will always happen as long as people are led by their egos. Also they probably aren't autodidacts and don't understand learning for fun.

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

#68

Post by joquarky »

dminik wrote: post #30
elgertam wrote: 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?

Critical thinking.

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

#69

Post by joquarky »

quater321 wrote: post #4

So what is important is not that 10 or 20 times the work can be done, but that you are stressed out and exhausted while doing your work?

It is difficult to have any bandwidth to protest about the state of everything if you're burned out.

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

#70

Post by peteforde »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #65
peteforde wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reaction to this question is that it might technically be in good faith, but you're pushing it. Let's say that LLMs didn't exist, and I learned these same skills in an oddly specific hands-on workshop, or from an oddly specific textbook, or fuck it, let's say that I hired some greybeard pedal designer to just sit beside me and answer all of my stupid questions without judgement for a few weeks at their hourly rate…

> Would you feel compelled to challenge whether I had retained what I learned Yes, the exact same way I would dubious when someone says they learned much from following a youtube tutorial or participating in a two week workshop or something

That's funny... I taught myself Fusion in about a week following this excellent tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK60ROb2RKI

It's a 90 minute video that will take you a week to watch if you're doing it properly.

Seriously though... you don't learn from watching a video tutorial (which you can slow down and re-watch as many times as you need) and you apparently don't believe you can learn from an LLM which will patiently answer literally infinite questions, no matter how basic or repetitive... would you mind clarifying how you do learn?

Everyone has different learning styles so I tend to take a different strokes for different folks attitude. For example, I don't absorb highly technical stuff from books and the idea of [paying to be in a] classroom where you're forced to endure 95% what you're not interested in to get the 5% you care about (at the speed of the dumbest student in the room) gives me hives.

Yet, it kind of sounds like you might just be arguing for argument's sake. Also, you can learn A LOT in two weeks if you're motivated.

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