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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'

#71

Post by schneems »

jncfhnb wrote: post #63
layer8 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you’re on the asking side, sure, instant gratification is great. On the answering side, not so much. Chat interfaces are not a good fit for anything you may have to mull over for a while, or do some investigation before answering, and for anything where multiple such threads may occur in parallel, or that you want to reference later.

I don’t agree The thing is that most people seeking help are not able to form their question effectively. They can’t even identify the key elements of their problem. They _need_ help with people trying to parse out their actual problem. Stack Overflow actively tells you to fuck off if you can’t form your question to their standards, and unsurprisingly that’s not very helpful to people that are struggling. You will ne…

> They can’t even identify the key elements of their problem.

I wrote the original comment. I also went to therapy where my provider introduced me to a framework called Non-Violent Communication. It’s a four part process and the last is an explicit request. And a valid request is always “help me figure out how to ask a better question.”

Stack overflow culture sucks, but believe it or not it’s better than what came before.

I’m glad that you’re getting help on discord. To me the ultimate goal of writing questions is to never need to post them. In that: once you can craft the perfect question … then the answer becomes self evident. Usually the more effort I put into a question, the more help I get out of an answer. And I feel that’s a good thing.

I feel that you lose that introspection and self iteration when getting help via chat. When I give someone a debugging suggestion (I teach college, elementary school, and have worked in a support role for over a decade) I never want the person to simply tell me what happened. I.e. I don’t want to remote pair program where they run commands and tell me the results. I’m always aiming to teach them via a hypothesis. I want them to take the new evidence and give me their analysis. So I can possibly correct their misunderstandings and get a glimpse into their thought process. While that process can happen in chat. It’s more suited to people who respond quickly rather than those who are looking for maximum depth. You’re also limited to only the people online at that exact moment.

I think there is value in getting help from chat. Developers also need to learn how to deeply inspect and debug complicated issues. I developed those skills as a byproduct of async forum culture and years of self study. I feel we need to find a way to train devs for some of these accidental skills that old timers picked up accidentally.

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

#72

Post by alganet »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #70
alganet wrote: post #40

Using aimbot in Gunbound didn't make players better. Yes, it changed everything: it destroyed the game ecosystem. Can humanity use "literacy aimbot" responsibly? I don't know. It's just a cautionary tale. I'm not expecting to win an argument. I could come up with counter anectdotes myself: ABS made breaking in slippery conditions easier and safer. People didn't learned to brake better, they still pushed the pedal har…

Appreciate the balanced take. An improvement to a technology can be good, or it can be harmful - and beyond a certain point, further amplification can destroy society and the commons which we all benefit from. Coca leaves are a relatively benign part of daily life in Peru & a few other surrounding countries - they’re on the table in your hotel lobby, ready to be stirred into your tea. But cocaine - same base but made…

You are right in the sense that addiction and overuse are common concerns regarding new technologies.

Similar concerns existed for the TV and video-games, for example.

The idea of a balance works if you put the problem on a spectrum. "Too much, then it's bad" is a general good advice for anything.

In high school, I started learning geometry. I was puzzled by the angles in the exercises always being 30, 60, 90, 120 (notable angles). I tried a lot to come up with something that could work outside notable angles on my own. I figured that it would be on the next class (it never got there), until I gave up and asked my math teacher. She also didn't knew how to do it by hand. Until this day I don't know.

That's probably due to calculators existing. If they didn't, we would be forced to know. Maybe I would have failed that class and had to work harder, maybe not. I will never know.

There is no such thing as an addiction to calculators. I am not against them. I don't think there are too many calculators in the world. Good, honest tech.

However, I wish doing some math outside notable angles were in my high school curriculum. My teacher was kind and helped curious students. I wish she knew how to do it so she could teach me.

I know that now I could learn that on the internet, or ask an LLM to explain it to me. Notable angles are not the point, right? Just another anecdote.

I chose Gunbound aimbot as an example of something that is not good, not even a little bit. Not because aimbot is addictive (it's the contrary, cheating takes away the reward sensation), but because it unbalanced the game ecosystem. No one could beat the cheaters, who rapidly reached a plateau themselves. If everyone used aimbot, there was no reason to play it, to learn the quirks of each character, to practice, to train your skills.

It's just an anecdote. I tend to stay away from those, but sometimes they're useful.

Regarding focus now, the "skill of the future" and its relation to AI:

We always needed focus. It is as skill of the past too, not tied to a niche tech, not the only human skill, not a point in a spectrum.

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

#73

Post by JambalayaJimbo »

obscurette wrote: post #28

I'm old enough to remember myriad of experts 10+ years ago who were active selling a view, that smartphones with constantly connected social media will change everything, we just have to learn to use it wisely.

It did change everything

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

#74

Post by aryehof »

jncfhnb wrote: post #26
schneems wrote: post #12

The flip side of focus (to me) is responsiveness. A post to SO might deliver me the exact answer I need, but it will take focus to write the correct question and patience to wait for a response and then time spent iterating in the comments. In contrast an LLM will happily tell me the wrong thing, instantaneously. It’s responsive. Good engineers must also be responsive to their teammates, managers, customers, and the…

This is why I honestly like discord over forums

I’ve never understood how Discord and Slack work. Is the expectation that one is constantly monitoring it? Is the expectation that when one occasionally visits that all unread content is carefully read? Is using search somehow the key?

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

#75

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

kennyadam wrote: post #39
obscurette wrote: post #28

I'm old enough to remember myriad of experts 10+ years ago who were active selling a view, that smartphones with constantly connected social media will change everything, we just have to learn to use it wisely.

They weren't wrong. Unfortunately, we didn't use it wisely and obliterated objective reality and allowed people to create spaces where they never have to engage with anything challenging.

This isn't smartphones, it's the Internet. The only reason that smartphones made a difference is that way more people use online services on mobile than would've done the same on the Internet.

The convenience and ubiquity lead to a step change.

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

#76

Post by oddly »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #67
daveguy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well it seems like an easy way to filter them into the ignore pile…

Yes and no. Although I’m a proponent of the “put the pain where it belongs” way of doing things, sometimes a more nuanced way of doing things is needed. This usually involves more communication instead of less. You can always give them feedback that (may) make them reconsider their approach of just stating things and not asking questions. Small effort for you, but you might change someone’s way of asking things, both for the good of you and them. If that doesn’t work, you can always go back to ignoring.

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

#77

Post by sebastiennight »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #24
bufferoverflow wrote: post #17

This article makes no sense. It criticizes current LLMs and then without stopping for a second pretends future LLMs will have these problems. Even though hallucination levels have been going down with every generation. Even though every test and benchmark we can come up with, LLMs do better with every generation.

> Future bicycles will fly. Just two more rounds of venture capital investment, trust the plan.

To be fair, we went from the invention of the bicycle to a (wheeled) flying apparatus within a shockingly short amount of time.

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

#78

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

sebastiennight wrote: post #77
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Future bicycles will fly. Just two more rounds of venture capital investment, trust the plan.

To be fair, we went from the invention of the bicycle to a (wheeled) flying apparatus within a shockingly short amount of time.

Yeah, but not by dumping a billion bucks into bicycle venture capital funds.

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

#79

Post by namaria »

"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

Herbert Simon (1971)

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

#80

Post by jncfhnb »

aryehof wrote: post #74
jncfhnb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I honestly like discord over forums

I’ve never understood how Discord and Slack work. Is the expectation that one is constantly monitoring it? Is the expectation that when one occasionally visits that all unread content is carefully read? Is using search somehow the key?

In a business context yeah it’s an attention stealing notification thing

But I mean more development communities that organize around pieces of tech. The idea is people voluntarily just hang out in the chat and respond to people in real time. There’s no obligation. You probably won’t get an answer if you don’t get one in the first couple hours. But in an active community you’ll likely get acknowledged quickly enough, at least with someone saying that your problem is non-trivial and that you’ll need to look at X to figure it out.

Such communities are often not designed for solving difficult problems so much as helping people get through the basics.

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