AI is essentially a puppet and will always be one. If you rely on it to educate yourself about anything non-objective (that cannot be measured), it will reflect the biases it’s tuned to, presenting a version of reality shaped by the perspectives and interests of its ultimate puppet masters—the board and major (non-futile) shareholders.
The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
81–90 of 341 posts
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#82Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The post was largely about young people who are growing up with these tools and are still at the stage of developing their habits and tendencies. Personally I am glad I learnt programming before LLMs even if it meant the tedious searches on stackoverflow because I didn't feel like I was coming up against a wave of new technology when it came to future job searches. Having done so I can understand and appreciate the i…
Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to figure things out myself. I still use StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things were available when I was learning I would probably not have learnt as much.
I started programming before stack overflow, was never any good (still am not to this day), but I was always scared of asking questions on stack overflow. I felt like there was a certain amount of homework expected when you ask a question and usually by the time I did enough work to post a question, it was moot because I would have solved my problem usually by stringing together two or more stack overflow questions to understand my problem better.
The change with LLM is I can now just ask my hare brained questions first and figure out why it was a stupid question later
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#84For an example of where this already happened, look at the number of people who literally don't have a minor inkling of how to plan a route or navigate without a GPS and mapping software. Sure, having a real-time data source is nice for avoiding construction/traffic, and I'd use a real-time map, but going beyond that to be spoon fed your next action over and over leads to dependency.
GPS allowed me to go where I would have been hesitant to venture before.
Can you draw this analogy or a bit? What hesitation has an LLM helped you overcome?
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#85Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for good senior engineers.
80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them.
We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do.
But these people are struggling to work with basic data structures without an LLM.
So then I put coding aside, because maybe their skills are directing other folks. But no, they’ve also become dependent on LLMs to ideate.
That 80% is no joke. It’s what I’m hitting actively.
And before anyone says: well then let them use LLMs, no. Firstly, we’re making new technologies and APIs that LLMs really struggle with even with purpose trained models. But furthermore, If I’m doing that, then why am I paying for a senior ? How are they any different than someone more junior or cheaper if they have become so atrophied ?
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#86Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#87My current opinion is that AI is just a thing that is going to further amplify our existing tendencies (on a person-to-person basis). I've personally found it to be extremely beneficial in research, learning, and the category of "things that take time because of the stuff you have to mechanically go through and not because of the brainpower involved". I have been able to spend so much more time on things that I feel…
It fulfills steve jobs promise that a computer is a bicycle for your mind. It is crazy to me that all these poeple think they are going to lose their ability to think. If you didn't lose your ability to think to scrolling social media then you aren't going to lose it to AI. However, I think a lot of people lost their ability to think by scrolling social media and that is problematic. What people need to realize is th…
It’s less like a bicycle for the mind, and more like a bus. Sure you’re gonna get there quickly, but you’ll to end up at the same place as a bunch of other people, and you won’t remember the route you took to get there.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
The post was largely about young people who are growing up with these tools and are still at the stage of developing their habits and tendencies. Personally I am glad I learnt programming before LLMs even if it meant the tedious searches on stackoverflow because I didn't feel like I was coming up against a wave of new technology when it came to future job searches. Having done so I can understand and appreciate the i…
Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to figure things out myself. I still use StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things were available when I was learning I would probably not have learnt as much.
> Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow!
I have not, but at the beginner level you don't really need it, there are tons of tutorials and language documentation that is easier to understand. Also beginners feel absolutely discouraged to ask anything, because even if the question is not a real duplicate, you use all terms wrong and thus get downvoted to hell and then your question is marked as a duplicate to something, that doesn't even answer your question.
Later it's quite nice to ask for clarifications of e.g. the meaning of something specific in a protocol or the behaviour of a particular program. But quite quickly you don't actually get any satisfying answers, so you revert to just read the source code of the actual program and are surprised how easy that actually was. (I mean it's still hard every time you start with a new unknown program, but it's easier than expected.)
Also when you implement a protocol, asking questions on StackOverflow doesn't scale. Not because the time you need to wait for answers; even if that were zero, it still takes to long time and is deeply unsatisfying to develop a holistic enough understanding to write the code. So you start reading the RFCs and quickly appreciate how logically and understandable they are. You first curse how unstructured anything is and then you recognize that the order follows what you need to write and you can just trust the text and write the algorithm down. Then you see that the order in which the protocol is described actually works quite well for async and wonder what the legacy code did, because not deviating from the standard is actually easier.
At some point you don't understand the standard, there will be no answer on StackOverflow, the LLM just agrees with you for every conflicting interpretation you suggest, so you hate everything and start reading other implementations. So no, you still need to figure out a lot for yourself.
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally I am glad I learnt programming before StackOverflow! Precisely because it meant I had to learn to figure things out myself. I still use StackOverflow and LLMs, but if those things were available when I was learning I would probably not have learnt as much.
I started programming before stack overflow, was never any good (still am not to this day), but I was always scared of asking questions on stack overflow. I felt like there was a certain amount of homework expected when you ask a question and usually by the time I did enough work to post a question, it was moot because I would have solved my problem usually by stringing together two or more stack overflow questions t…
I can't check, but I don't think I've ever asked questions on StackOverflow, or even Reddit. Maybe I'm lucky, but my searches have always given me enough leads to find my own solutions or where to find them. There's a lot of documentations and tips floating around the internet. And for a lot of technologies, the code is available as well (or a debugger).
Re: The deadline isn't when AI outsmarts us – it's when we stop using our own minds
#90Atrophy has really been an issue in my recent hiring cycles for good senior engineers. 80% of senior candidates I interview now aren’t able to do junior level tasks without GenAI helping them. We’ve had to start doing more coding tests to weed their skill set out as a result, and I try and make my coding tests as indicative of our real work as possible and the work they current do. But these people are struggling to…
It's a matter of opinion what you should know and what you can easily google or ask an LLM.