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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

#71

Post by bluefirebrand »

peteforde wrote: post #70
bluefirebrand wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

> would you mind clarifying how you do learn?

Practice

> Everyone has different learning styles so I tend to take a different strokes for different folks attitude

Okay but at the end of the day the only way to actually learn (and demonstrate that you've learned anything) is by actually doing it

And I don't really consider "I got the AI to do it" as actually doing it, which is why I'm questioning what you've actually retained.

To be clear if you feel like you've actually learned this stuff then good for you. I'm genuinely happy if that's the outcome you feel you have obtained

I'm just personally very skeptical of anyone learning fuck all from using AI to build stuff because like I said... I learn from practice. Using AI is not practice any more than copying from open source repos is.

And frankly I'm bitter because I absolutely cannot learn fuck all from using AI. It is the sort of shortcut that prevents my brain from committing anything to memory.

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

#72

Post by BOOSTERHIDROGEN »

joquarky wrote: post #68
dminik wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not sure what something is saying, how can you be sure that the AI had picked the correct interpretation?

Critical thinking.

In good faith, how do you tell yourself have good critical thinking?

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

#74

Post by erelong »

You still have to check output as it could be wrong

With things like Tiktok I've learned that we need to break up bigger works into smaller digestible pieces

Another issue is there is too much content for people to read or consume already (a problem independent of AI)

Yeah, it's about "effective use of AI as a tool"

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

#76

Post by peteforde »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #71
peteforde wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

> would you mind clarifying how you do learn? Practice > Everyone has different learning styles so I tend to take a different strokes for different folks attitude Okay but at the end of the day the only way to actually learn (and demonstrate that you've learned anything) is by actually doing it And I don't really consider "I got the AI to do it" as actually doing it, which is why I'm questioning what you've actually…

I guess I don't understand what about any aspect of what I explained gave you the impression that I might not have put what I learned into practice.

This is going to sound like I'm fucking with you, but I'm deadly serious: if someone taught you how to do something and you later learned that that person was actually an LLM masquerading as a human, would you forget what you had learned?

It's actually not impossible that you've hypnotized yourself, or could be experiencing a trauma response.

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

#77

Post by Orellius »

I can't see the issue of being lazy, and laziness becoming more productive than liability in these times we have AIs, most lazy people find better shortcuts and better ways to make things that other cannot find due to overly being filled with the need to be more productive than lazy and your brain capacity will get overloaded. Sometimes AI also can be an assistive tool for disabled people, and make even them Productive people, so calling it "lazy", over exaggerated.

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

#78

Post by mattmanser »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #55
mattmanser wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t look at a line of code... I know it’s secure - I validated the endpoints can’t be accessed unauthenticated and the IAM role Oh god, this made me laugh so hard. Best 'we gonna get hacked' comment of the day.

Please tell me how is going to be “hacked”? A) The IAM role of the Lambda runtime it’s running in is least privileged and only has access read and write access to the required S3 bucket and other required AWS services and even those are tightly scoped. B) For authentication I used Amazon Cognito and ran a curl shell script against each endpoint for authentication vs non authenticated end points C) The database user h…

So you've made a read only wrapper around a database? That one person needs to access? There's no tentantization? You can't access more than one person's data? So there's zero chance one user can access someone else's data?

If you answered NO to any question, refer to my previous post.

If you answered YES, you could have just hooked your DB up to power BI or tableaux or whatever. Not exactly something to start boasting about that you're doing web dev.

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

#79

Post by atrocious »

Pretend learning is absolutely the key point, for me. There is danger in shifting our reasoning from knowing "stuff", to knowing a symbolic summary of "stuff" (helpfully generated by an LLM at varying levels of accuracy).

Previously, we saw a shift with search engines where we no longer needed to learn data because we could use a search engine as a mental signpost to the data, freeing up capacity for other thought.

LLMs are shifting knowledge creation to this mental pointer model. We don't need to know real "stuff" because we know how to look it up later (never?).

Each of these summaries is a secondary source, delivered through an agent biased by whatever is in its current context window. Like a game of telephone the summaries are inherently lossy, and each one may be 95% correct and we crucially don't understand which 5% may be incorrect.

When our basis for decision making is a collection of 100s or 1000s of LLM generated "Schrodinger's facts", we risk cumulative cascading errors. We will be wrong in unpredictable, chaotic ways.

We are voluntarily capping ourselves as this childish level of thought, because it feels like we are exercising our critical judgement the same as ever. However, the integrity of the inputs has been compromised. Bad inputs always lead to bad outputs.

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

#80

Post by atrocious »

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…

An LLM can't invent meaning in a text where there is none. It's equivalent to CSI's classic "zoom, enhance" on resolution limited photographs. You need to consider you're learning a load of rubbish from LLMs.
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