71–80 of 529 posts
Thinking everything ML produces is just shorting the brain.
I see AI wars as creating coherent stories. Company X starts using ML and they believe what was produced is valid and can grow their stock. Reality is that Company Y poised the ML and the product or solution will fail, not right away but over time.
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I found a great fix for this was to lock my screen maps to North-Up. That teaches me the shape of the city and greatly enhances location/route/direction awareness. It’s cheap, easy, and quite effective to passively learn the maps over the course of time. My similar ‘hack’ for LLMs has been to try to “race” the AI. I’ll type out a detailed prompt, then go dive into solving the same problem myself while it chews throug…
I try using north-up for that reason, but it loses the smart-zooming feature you get with the POV camera, like zooming in when you need to perform an action, and zooming back out when you're on the highway. I was shocked into using it when I realized that when using the POV GPS cam, I couldn't even tell you which quadrant of the city I just navigated to. I wish the north-up UX were more polished.
this doesn't seem like a clear problem. perhaps people can accomplish more difficult tasks with LLM assistance, and in those more difficult tasks still see full brain engagement?
using less brain power for a better result doesn't seem like a clear problem. it might reveal shortcomings in our education system, since these were SAT style questions. I'm sure calculator users experience the same effects vs mental mathematics
Good. Humans don’t need to waste their mental energy on tasks that other systems can do well. I want a life of leisure. I don’t want to do hard things anymore. Cognitive atrophy of people using these systems is very good as it makes it easier to beat them in the market, and it’s easier to convince them that whatever slop work you submitted after 0.1 seconds of effort “isn’t bad, it’s certainly great at delving into t…
> Cognitive atrophy of people using these systems is very good as it makes it easier to beat them in the market I hope you’re being facetious, as otherwise that’s a selfish view which will come back to bite you. If you live in a society, what other do and how they behave affects you too. A John Green quote on public education feels appropriate: > Let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools even though I person…
Curious what the long-term effects from the current LLM-based "AI" systems embedded in virtually everything and pushed aggressively will be in let's say 10 years, any strong opinions or predictions on this topic?
If we focus only on the impact on linguistics, I predict things will go something like this: As LLM use normalizes for essay writing (email, documentation, social media, etc), a pattern emerges where everyone uses an LLM as an editor. People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent. Interestingly, people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased ra…
While sometimes I do dump a bunch of scratch work and ask for it to be transformed into organized though, more often I find that I use LLM output the opposite way.
Give a prompt. Save the text. Reroll. Save the text. Change the prompt, reroll. Then going through the heap of vomit to find the diamonds. Sort of a modern version of "write drunk, edit sober" with the LLM being the alcohol in the drunk half of me. It can work as a brainstorming step to turn fragments of though into a bunch of drafts of thought, then to be edited down into elegant thought. Asking the LLM to synthesize its drafts usually discards the best nuggets for lesser variants.
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It's just a different way of writing code. Today you at least need to understand best practices to help steer towards a good architecture. In the near future there will be no developers needed at all for the majority of apps.
That just means the majority of apps don’t actually serve much of a purpose
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If we focus only on the impact on linguistics, I predict things will go something like this: As LLM use normalizes for essay writing (email, documentation, social media, etc), a pattern emerges where everyone uses an LLM as an editor. People only create rough drafts and then have their "editor" make it coherent. Interestingly, people might start using said editor prompts to express themselves, causing an increased ra…
>Human languages start to evolve in a direction that could be considered more coherent than before Guttural vocalizations accompanied by frantic gesturing towards a mobile device, or just silence and showing of LLM output to others?
That said, if most people turn into hermits and start living in pods around this period, then I think you would be in the right direction.
It seems this study has been discussed on HN before, though was recently revised very late December 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44286277 - June 2025 (426 comments)
1: https://www.catharsisinsight.com 2: https://ashleyjuavinett.com
Druids used to decry that literacy caused people to lose their ability to memorize sacred teachings. And they’re right! But literacy still happened and we’re all either dumber or smarter for it.
It's more complex than that. The three pillars of learning are theory (finding out about the thing), practice (doing the thing) and metacognition (being right, or more importantly, wrong. And correcting yourself.). Each of those steps reinforce neural pathways. They're all essential in some form or another. Literacy, books, saving your knowledge somewhere else removes the burden of remembering everything in your head…