Cars turned us—one of the best species in long distance running into couch potatoes.

Now llms are attacking our brains and making us stupid and insane. A species of slopheads if you will.

  • Flagstaff@programming.dev
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    13 days ago

    Those moments, the ones where you have seemingly exhausted all possibilities, are the ones where your mind starts working.

    That seems plausible, but in reality I’m not actually sure that’s true. Even before “AI” (which I fully know is a false buzzword and really should just be “LLMs”), I just stuck to the only known way of doing things if I was unsuccessful. Basically, the LLM is merely an additional opportunity to find resolution; I would’ve actually given up at the level of annoyance where I was before trying it anyway.

    who can only forward what AI told them get AI to solve the problem better than more effectively than others

    It actually takes finessing to understand how the model may likely be perceiving your problem, hence the entire sub-industry of experienced prompt engineers. You have to be patient in identifying why it messes up and how to guide it towards accuracy, and there are certain ways to address this.

    Why would I give you a raise when I could just replace you with someone equally capable of reading off “AI solutions”?

    It’s about generation of optimal solutions in the first place versus ones that don’t work. People who aren’t at least familiarizing themselves will be left behind. I speak this as someone who is wary of LLMs, is fully aware of their copyright disputes, and tries to use them less than once/week.

    Where are these “better employers” who will “probably” save you going to come from

    They will emerge from the experience of not relying so heavily on LLMs for very complex matters as opposed to simpler ones.

    Is that assessment based on anything in particular?

    Just my suspicions about where this is all going…

    Why go to bat like this over something you can only call “mostly okay” for particularly small tasks?

    Fair point that I could have elaborated on: I know people using interconnected agents to shrink 5 hours of work into half an hour, like it or not. Let me share what he said:

    Man
    You should see the future i work in
    We have every AI tool at work
    All connected to our databases
    Slack, Gmail, calendar, code, Claude, codex, notion, langsmith
    My agents all communicate with each other and pull from each resource
    Work is light speed and sooo easy
    I’m like “chatgpt, based on today’s meeting which notion transcribed, create for me a linear task, and assign the priority based on the product handbook in notion, and send a slack DM to the channel, and send a recurring calendar invite for the meeting to discuss the project”
    It does like 5 hours of work for me in 30 seconds

    How can you fight this? Ethical or not, we will fall behind if we shun it like luddites. At the same time, though, I think the bubble may burst for extremely complex operations revealing faults, which would pull employers back to using it in lower-level capacities; either that or else the killer may be permanent ecological devastation. Either way, we have certainly opened Pandora’s box and it’s going to come to some breaking point. If on the off-chance that none of these calamities comes to pass, though, then we will really fall behind all the more acclimated.

    • Carnelian@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      If AI requires so much patience and persistence to use properly, how do you expect to achieve anything with it? You, who by your own admission, quits when you are initially unsuccessful?

      Is “less than once a week” of time investment your official recommendation of how much is needed to “not get left behind” in developing our “prompt engineering” skills that will be in such high demand?

      To be honest I don’t understand why I’m supposed to be anxious about your random office worker buddy using AI set up some reminders and calendar invites. Does it not strike you as odd that literally nobody can come up with specific, concrete examples of how the technology has improved their efficiency as a matter of fact? Like it’s all just a vibe they have followed by the bare claim that they are working 20 times faster, but that reality never seems to materialize in a way that can be measured by anyone else.

      He also describes it as “soooo easy”, so again, where is this investment of skill that I should be worried about not doing? Like are there any “prompt engineering” skills that take more than a few minutes to learn?

      • Flagstaff@programming.dev
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        2 days ago

        If AI requires so much patience and persistence to use properly, how do you expect to achieve anything with it?

        I have. It’s helped me solve issues on machines that would have simply remained unsolvable otherwise.

        You, who by your own admission, quits when you are initially unsuccessful?

        It tends to accomplish the job with a higher rate of success than my own efforts. It’s easier to interact with and stay motivated than to keep crawling through search results that often don’t match the exact issue you’re trying to fix.

        Is “less than once a week” of time investment your official recommendation

        Not at all. I’m just personally stating what my current usage has been like.

        To be honest I don’t understand why I’m supposed to be anxious about your random office worker buddy using AI set up some reminders and calendar invites.

        I never said anything about people needing to be “anxious.” It is apparently costing companies too much to maintain, so I myself look forward to the bubble bursting. What I’m saying is that

        Does it not strike you as odd that literally nobody can come up with specific, concrete examples of how the technology has improved their efficiency as a matter of fact?

        Again, you don’t need a smartphone to survive in today’s times. The difficulty level of survival in today’s world for people who willingly forgo ownership of a smartphone is probably about the same difficulty as it was when smartphones weren’t available to anyone at all. That’s fine; however, we with smartphones can simply do more faster. He already said that AI let him accomplish hours of work in 5 minutes; how much more concrete would you like? Would you like the exact count of hours? I don’t get it. I was able to solve a driver issue using an LLM when I could literally find no one across the whole Internet who had found a solution to this problem. Do you not believe me?

        Like are there any “prompt engineering” skills that take more than a few minutes to learn?

        Again, I’m not super-pro-LLM as some people I know are, but I could point you to some friends who are. However, I doubt they’d care to waste time arguing with such a hardened skeptic, especially when I’ve said myself that I’m wary of its severe limitations and problems and try to not rely on it unless I see no other practical choice, when you’re already trying to go to your absolute darnedest to rebuke me for my meager use.

        • Carnelian@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          A dude going “yeah bro I’m like a thousand times faster bro I get a day’s worth of work done in ten seconds bro” is the opposite of concrete lol.

          And then for details he mumbles about “calendars bro and uh, meetings! It’s all connected bro!”

          There have been case studies about this. Your buddy, like many thousands of other people, is simply delusional regarding the perceived efficiency gains. People whose productivity literally decreases, measurably, often report that they have more than doubled their productivity.

          However, I doubt they’d care to waste time arguing with such a hardened skeptic

          Why not send them over? I mean they get their whole year’s worth of work done by the second week of January, right? Even with ten or fifteen jobs they should have tons of free time yes? Or is their financial reality, for some unknown reason, not in line with their enormous head turning productivity?

          • Flagstaff@programming.dev
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            1 day ago

            they get their whole year’s worth of work done by the second week of January, right?

            Rather, it’s more like this is their new normal (he says he’s basically starving for free time and that that’s how much he’s overworked); efficiency is punished with more work, as I’m sure you well know… Anyway, I do look forward to the crash…