In addition to making people stupid, I wonder what affect will LLMs like Claude will have on programmers? How will new programmers learn if companies start using Claude?
It’s speed. Grunt work & time gets in the way of seeing out ideas and making them realities. You can test ideas significantly faster and get to answers much quicker so you’re moving mountains instead of pebbles.
If I’m working on something that is properly documented, it’s a waste of time to ask a human or search for something when a machine can find it in seconds so I can continue my work instead of spinning in circles for a hour.
Why am I as a single dad having to spend an entire night working on a meal plan for the week when I can have AI take my parameters, point it to my sources and drop me the plan every Sunday at 5pm without paying a service to do it?
Why should I look through articles and articles of local events when I can have my local AI ingest everything and bubble up what’s important?
I can’t trust news that pops up on Reddit by bots or government controlled media outlets. But I also don’t sit around on my ass all day to spend hours on news. Why not have my local models point at places like AP and Reuters and pull down all the articles in the day and summarize it for me for a 15 min read?
The internet has been enshitified, if I want to learn about something and research whatever, I have to dig through layers of sponsored content, click bait, and straight up lies. Why not build a RAG pointed at places I can trust and ingest data dumps from highly respected scientific and medical studies so I can get -real- answers?
I’m a high output army of 1 with responsibilities taller than me. My greatest enemy is time and I’m regularly trying to shove 35 hours into a 24 hour day.
AI has been a gift.
But you need to do it local and design your own stuff.
By design.
Tech in general is making all of us more stupider, or at the very least, suckers and rubes.
Absolutely shocking.
Again an article that draws the wrong conclusions.
No, it does not make people stupider. It makes people lazier. Just. Like. All. Tech.
How many of us do research in libraries rather than on the internet these days? Back when internet became popular there were similar criticisms to what we have today on AI.
Essays are AI generated, show poor critical thinking, and you can tell? Great, grade it like what it is. A piss poor work. Just like someone who would copy a wikipedia article 15 years ago would be graded like shit, perhaps even considered cheating and given a 0 (or F or whatever is the worst grade in your system)
If you can’t tell, then the tool was properly used. If you can’t tell the difference between an AI generated essay and a human-made essay, then perhaps essays are no longer good tests of someone’s abilities.
Rather than pushing back against a tech that is probably never going away, even when the bubble pops, how about we start thinking productively and adapt how we learn, evaluate, and work instead?
How many of us do research in libraries rather than on the internet these days? Back when internet became popular there were similar criticisms to what we have today on AI.
Not even close to the same. Any (actual) research done online is still using real sources that have just been catalogued online.
The entire point of having students write essays is to demonstrate an understanding of the subject matter. Being able to come up with a good enough prompt to spit out a few paragraphs good enough to fool your teacher defeats the purpose entirely.
My point stands: the technology is not going to disappear. What are we going to do about not being able to use essays to evaluate how well a student understands a subject? Push back on AI? Futile ban attempts?
You’re saying using AI for essays defeats the purpose of essays, I’m saying essays are no longer a good way to evaluate understanding of a topic.
Can you not see how this is actively making people more stupid?
Do you have thoughts on how we would do that ?
Well I’m already changing the way I work to use my brain on what AI can’t do well, and letting AI do what it can do well. I haven’t spent time thinking about how to change the world, and I don’t exactly have that time, but I’ll support left leaning parties that focus on integrating with the change rather than forbidding it.
The most essential thing in my opinion is a UBI. For decades we’ve been automating jobs away. Unemployment is no longer a problem because of economic troubles, it’s a problem because we’re using automation to increase production rather than improve people’s lives. The most essential thing, in my opinion, is shifting the way we think about work from “you must work to survive” to “you are surviving by default, you can work to improve your life”.
Then the second thing is education. But, I am very opinionated and might be wrong. I find the whole system, in every country that I know of, so antiquated. It is the one thing in our lives that has barely changed in centuries. Exam-driven education does not work. Brilliant, mostly neurodivergent minds (which are much more common than we used to think) are excluded from success because of it. AI won’t replace passion, students use AI because they dislike what they do. We as a species are not lazy, we’re just great at doing things that we love. Stop hammering students with exams, start letting them choose earlier on what they study, and they’ll stop using AI to offload everything.
by exams do you mean just grades in general? since you also mention essays earlier?
Hi Lisa.
Hi Super Nintendo Chalmers.
I’m lernding
Has anyone found an effective way to pair-up and “learn” the syntax faster/better compared to not using AI?
I’ve written a lot of code in the past, but recently started doing more with golang… and have been using AI for an assist, but at the end of the day (and enough reiterations) - it creates readable and maintainable code. But (unfortunately), I don’t think I could rewrite it.
I was contemplating seeing how I could change my workflow, so I’d write the code, but AI would offer fast guidance.
invest more time before you ask for help. Same as when you’re working with a person.
Also, add instructions to your agent to use a Socratic question teaching mode.
You need to force yourself to think, else you won’t learn.
@grok this true?
You can’t fix stupid. AI is super charging my life in so many ways.
I wonder… are Google and Bing search indexes being intentionally left to moulder specifically to drive people to Gemini and ChatGPT?
s/could\ be/are/
They’re lobotomising tools. Vibe coding is just shoving one end of an ice pick up your nose, setting the other on a keyboard, and replacing its handle with a mains powered personal massager.
They can also make you smarter if you use them right. Key is to use local models and not giving the techbros any money.
Keep telling yourself that
That’s on my to-do list. I’m currently reworking my entire build between because I realized I had enough last generation parts to build a media server. Once I have windows set up to only run on VM and get my stuff moved and backed up I’m going to install an LLM
I recommend Qwen3.6, either the 27B dense or the 35B MoE model. Both outstanding for local models.
What hardware are you using?
I am using qwen3.5 9b. And it is barely working.
I wish that I didn’t have to use them, but for basic Linux troubleshooting, it’s easier to ask the chatbot and have it explain itself and cross-reference than to use a search engine or forum. The internet has become so shitty for self-teaching. You either end up on YouTube watching videos that aren’t relevant, your search engine pumps you to garbage on top of ads, or you find a forum from 5 years ago with someone asking the same question, but it was closed because it’s the same question that was asked 20 other times, and all the solutions don’t actually work.
I know that I am robbing myself of this collection of secondary skills, and that part of it is a lack of patience, but the pool of knowledge that is the internet has been poisoned. The only way I even get to useful guides anymore is if Claude links me to them. It’s becoming impossible to use the internet otherwise. Even spell checkers have gotten shittier.
Even in Word, it will try to autocorrect or just tell you something is wrong without auto-correcting, as if I want to search for the word that it obviously marked in red. Even if it offers a correction, it will be one word, and it will be the wrong word. My phone too, constantly changing my words or somehow hitting the wrong letter when it didn’t before.
I just don’t even know anymore. The mental energy to “do it myself” is exhausting. Then, of course, whatever I do or learn to do will be undone with the next update that gets pushed out and changes all my settings. My fucking phone settings have completely changed between when I got it and today. Every app has tied its permissions for functionality to its permission to send notifications, and those notifications are just ads. If I want to order DoorDash and know when it arrives, I have to agree to have DoorDash bug the shit out of me to order food when I don’t want to.
I’m just tired, and if using an AI helps me figure out how to replace my bootloader when I accidentally deleted it, then so be it. I can’t fight every battle.
it was closed because it’s the same question that was asked 20 other times, and all the solutions don’t actually work.
This has absolutely been my experience as well, yeah. I rarely go straight to LLMs first but sometimes I’m not comfortable with simply posting my problem on Reddit and waiting (or posting on Lemmy and waiting forever lol), since it isn’t always that simple or convenient to first anonymize data before getting public help, nor do people even always reply, leaving me back to square one with time wasted. I am by far the techiest person in my company (and I barely know anything relative to full-time programmers), so there sure isn’t anyone at work who I could ask for help, haha.
I don’t go to LLMs often, and they sure messed up a lot even just 2 years ago, but they’ve come an impressively long way from the unintelligible-text and six-fingers era (despite still occasionally messing up nowadays) and have legitimately optimized my formulae dramatically in both function and legibility, such as by showing me
LET()that I didn’t even know existed. While I’ve been meaning to take an online course on spreadsheets and just haven’t gotten around to it yet, I try to learn from how the model did XYZ right away but it’s nice to have a personal, on-demand tutor, as long as you’re always aware of the fact that what it says could be garbage, despite it speaking so confidently. I think for actual, entire vibe-coded products, it’s much harder to learn what the heck it’s doing versus just simple one-liners. Anyway, on-device and FOSS LLMs make for better compromises, I think, though their quality is noticeably poorer.The reason I try to avoid “AI” use is not The Dumbening™ but because of the ecological impact, yet I contend that spending hours and hours trying to traditionally solve a problem in frustration is also harmful in its own ways… It’s a decent tool of last resort and the Stupids are merely the ones treating it as a line of first defense against everything.
I have no doubt “AI” companies are sitting on studies proving their shit causes irreversible brain damage, much like tobacco cartels used to sit on studies proving their shit caused cancer.
By the time the bubble pops and their shit gets properly regulated it’ll have crippled a whole generation (on top of all the other damage like destroying the Internet, causing unfathomable damage to science culture, and society in general, and infecting any information produced after this shit became commonly used).
I have very little hope for our civilization being able to survive this self inflicted disaster (and given how we’ve squandered natural resources and caused a runaway greenhouse effect that’ll make our world mostly uninhabitable for humans without massive industrial effort that will be impossible after our fall, no new civilization will be rising after this dark age). But hey, at least some sociopath CEOs will have made a lot of money out of it. Who cares if they murdered the future for their short term profit.
Not quite an LLM, but I asked Siri the answer to 24*6, without thinking. When I saw the answer I realized if I actually took a moment using some critical thinking I would have easily gotten it. In short, I believe it.
So really, it’s a choice to become stupider that’s the problem not that a tool exists that could potentially make us stupider.
Perhaps we should look at the root cause as to why we choose to take these shortcuts instead of putting all blame on the idea of AI?
Except we’re not choosing this, it has already been chosen for us by a handful of billionaires who stand to make more money
The answer here is always “capitalism,” of course!
If the answer were as easy as one word or a simple concept, it’d certainly make a solutio easier to find. Sadly the world is not so simple.
So…you are concerned that you used a calculator instead of doing math in your head?
Did you know how to do that math before hand?
I think the biggest risk to using AI is that people don’t first learn how to do something before using tools to do the thing. In other words, our 7th grade teachers were right. You should understand the principles before accessing the short cuts.
You should understand the principles before accessing the short cuts.
I don’t really agree with this take. The reason we teach kids mental calculus is to indeed understand basic principles, but only because their further education is based on those principles.
But it doesn’t generalise to everything. I don’t need to understand assembly or the basic principles that make a computer work to be a good software engineer using high level programming languages.
And this might be an unpopular take, but you don’t even need to understand well low level development to be a good software engineer using high level languages.
