<Shrugs in passive aggressive>
That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. Out with the old, in with the new! Sorry but not sorry life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now.
That’s what they said when the calculator was invented. Out with the old, in with the new! Sorry but not sorry life was so hard before but we got AI to do the work for us now.
Each calculation is just one step, it’s up to the user to figure out which steps to take and how to chain them together. they might even learn that the whole thing would be faster if they could do some of those calculations their head.
like if you’re trying to figure out how much wood to buy for a deck, you’d still need to break the big problem down into those individual computations to do in the calculator. Unlike an llm where you could just ask it and it’d jump straight to a final answer
I don't think AI eliminated the application of concepts from learning. I think that has been eliminated enough due to the erosion of our public education systems. If we are not capable of critical thought with the information our own peers present us, why would it be any different when we seek it from AI?
I had this happen to me once while shopping, where I could immediately tell that three items costing less than £1 each should not come to a total of more than £3, but the cashier needed that explained to them.
(And that's aside from anything about asking LLMs to output in a format suitable for mechanical validation, which they can generally do).
On their own they would. We just don't see it very much because of external forces managing it - like teachers not allowing students to use them early in school.
Some of them had customer service jobs where they became utterly confused if the change was 99 cents and the customer gave them an additional penny.
It seems to have become the norm for young cashiers to be unable to understand. And if you try to explain, they'll insist "I can't change it now I've rung it through". Some seem to think the system keeps an exact record of the quantity of each individual coin (or they just don't even know where to begin to think about it).
It's like the difference between a language you are fluent in and a language you are tentative in. If you're fluent, you have to make an effort not to listen to somebody's loud conversation, or not to pay attention to a billboard. They intrude into your consciousness. There's never a situation when I don't do simple arithmetic when exposed to it. I don't have to consciously figure out what 4 times 9 is. Subjectively, the number just pops into my head when I see the question.
edit: If you can't do this with explanations of identities or related rates, etc., it's hard or impossible to follow any quantitative or especially probabilistic argument. Even the simplest ones. I think this results in people for whom arithmetic is difficult faking it by trying to memorize the words used during quantitative arguments without having any real understanding. Just sort of memorizing a lot of slogans and repeating them during any argument that shares similar words. I think discomfort with arithmetic ruins people politically (as citizens), so I really do think calculators are a problem.
I'd say yes to basic arithmetic; but I can't really use my own experience as a software developer who started off in video games to justify why a normal person needs to understand trigonometry and triangle formulas, any more than I can justify why they need to study Shakespeare and Alfred Tennyson over e.g. Terry Pratchett and Leonard Cohen — "I find it intellectually stimulating" is perhaps necessary, but certainly not sufficient, given there's more to learn than we can fit in a lifetime.
Conversely, understanding the deeper meanings behind the stuff people do read, perhaps Pratchett, is valuable — the use of speciesism between Dwarfs and Trolls used as a substitute for racism, etc.
It's not like rhetoric stopped with old classics; therefore it is better to learn how it works in newspapers or viral memes, as if you keep to Tenyson you're just going to pattern match it to 1800s writing style.
Modern writers including Pratchett make lots of references to this canon. Some people also learn that they enjoy Shakespeare in school, and they would never read a play like that otherwise.
That modern writers reference old works is true, but so too did Shakespeare, and we don't reference his cultural ancestors to understand his works.
> Some people also learn that they enjoy Shakespeare in school, and they would never read a play like that otherwise
That fine, but it's not the job of school. If it was, we'd also have mandatory watching of foreign language horror films.
What makes Pratchett more "relevant" than Shakespeare? I would posit to you that the same order of magnitude of people (or more) read and watch Shakespeare plays by choice as read Pratchett books. Let alone modern adaptations like West Side Story. I get that you prefer the one, but not everybody does.
English classes also have you read lots of other more recent and more modern works. It's not exclusively Shakespeare. I remember, for example, Death of a Salesman, 1984, and Slaughterhouse-Five being part of my high school's English curriculum.
Lord of the Rings is apparently in several English curricula now.
Comedies of all kinds (from Aristophanes to Pratchett) usually take a backseat to tragedies, bildungsromane, and other more "serious" genres in English classes because they tend to be much less timeless and much more current in terms of their themes and references.
> That modern writers reference old works is true, but so too did Shakespeare, and we don't reference his cultural ancestors to understand his works.
Schools do generally have you read ancient writers, often including Greek comedies and tragedies, and some have you read medieval British literature and those references do, in fact, come up. It's possible that you did not fully enjoy Shakespeare if you did not get that context.
> That fine, but it's not the job of school. If it was, we'd also have mandatory watching of foreign language horror films.
Believe it or not, if you take advanced French classes, you're going to watch a lot of French films and listen to a lot of French music for school! Since most students in English-speaking schools spend a lot more time studying English than French, they read a lot more English literature than French.
The language, the content, and the characters.
We don't live in a world where someone could fail to hear from their ship for a few weeks, thinking themselves unable to pay a weird debt, and have their loan shark's daughter dress up as lawyers and waltz into the trial to save the day. And we definitely don't encounter people who speak in Shakespearean English (even Victorian English is pushing it).
We do live in one where people try to commit insurance fraud as soon as they hear about it, a world where Magrats' have excessive candles (even if the magic isn't real), and a world of Vimes' Boots.
> Let alone modern adaptations like West Side Story
Or the Lion King. The adaptations are fine, the success make the connections to the world in which they are created.
> English classes also have you read lots of other more recent and more modern works. It's not exclusively Shakespeare.
I didn't say otherwise; I'm saying focus on those other things. I think the most modern thing we had was Ethan Frome.
> Believe it or not, if you take advanced French classes, you're going to watch a lot of French films and listen to a lot of French music for school! Since most students in English-speaking schools spend a lot more time studying English than French, they read a lot more English literature than French.
Again, that's fine for those learning French (and etc. for each other second language) to a higher level — given my experience with teaching myself a second language, and my self-tests over the years, there's a huge quality gap between what's a good grade in school and what's enough to get by with in practice — but that's not most people, and as there's exactly 18 years in the first 18 years of your life, my point is: what should be mandatory in schools? You've got limited time, what is the "you must" rather than "here's something you may like"?
We live in a 3d world, every human has to reason about geometry many times in their lives and trigonometry is the most useful and easiest of geometry math. Same reason we learn about volumes etc, everyone learns cos, sin, tan, its just 3 things it doesn't take a lot to learn that.
Outside hobbies and having worked as a game developer, I can't recall a single time I've needed them.
I suspect most learn them for a test them forget them forever.
Now, statistics, percentages, and compound interest, those are things people would do better to know, as those are the tools of advertising and money and are unavoidable in modern life.
They do teach those in middle school before they teach trigonometry, so that is already covered.
> And yet, outside my hobbies of "being a massive nerd", I've not needed the maths of trigonometry for at least a decade.
Lots of people craft things or work with schematics in some way, not just highly educated people, to them having the basics around angles is often very useful. People like mechanics, carpenters etc, that sort of math is useful to solve so many basic everyday problems in more handy jobs.
Not well enough, or people wouldn't get fooled so often.
> People like mechanics, carpenters etc, that sort of math is useful to solve so many basic everyday problems in more handy jobs.
And for 90% of the world, they're not.
Put those things into those schools.
The more you have memorized the more nimble your thinking is. If you have a large vocabulary you can effortlessly express yourself with precision while others are thumbing through a thesaurus (or these days asking an AI to “rewrite”).
If you know the history of something you can have more interesting perspective and conversations about it.
There is almost no situation where the person with a lot of memorized knowledge is at a disadvantage to the person who needs to look everything up or rely on tools to do the work.
Yes, it takes time, but learning is exponential, and overtime, the pace will increase greatly.
I'm software engineering student. I had a phase year ago where I was using ChatGPT a lot, a lot more than I ever should have.
And it messed up with my brain a lot. I felt I became utterly lazy; to the point where quick fixes that should have taken me like, 10-15 seconds (?) I had to do with AI, which often took a very long time.
And the point of studying is to learn. You won't learn anything if you have someone else write your software for you.
Steroids. It’s not a perfect metaphor, But I think it’s useful. Two people are trying to gain muscle mass. They both have an ideal starting point. First person has a healthy diet, lots of exercise, and sleep. The second person has all of the same things the first person however they also taking growth hormones.
Lots of folks look at the two results and will see lots of different things. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose. If you think the end results of the work should yield sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles… you might opt to use hormones. However, if you think sculpted bodies with larger than normal muscles looks unrealistic or just not your style/goal… you would probably opt for a more natural approach.
Both have their merits and could be described as “fit” despite their differences. folks may value one over the other. people might fantasize about looking like thor, but if everyone actually looked like thor, things would be weird. My two cents: Thor is fiction, and while we need fiction. Im not going to pretend that anyone should look like thor in order to be in shape or to be described as fit. If we allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that it can be normal to look like thor, then we are doing something wrong. Fiction should not become reality.
Calculators arent giving you “kind of correct” answers.
Do you have a link or more info? Without further context, the 41% doesn't tell us the whole story; all we have is a numerator lacking a denominator. Did bugs per line of code go up, or down? Did # LOC produced after using AI go up/down? For all we know, the increase in productivity caused average bugs per line to go down, rather than up, which is contrary to the argument you're making.
Efficiency does not go up. In fact, the users claims that they are more productive do not stand up to scrutiny.
Code quality decreases.
This is why I don’t just believe what people say. It makes no sense to me that something I am observing is sneaking in little bugs on nearly every suggestion somehow saves time.
It logically cannot be true that reading output code to make sure it is doing what you want is significantly faster than just writing what’s in your head.
Then it is supposedly good for boilerplate, but like, code templates have existed forever. There’s been tools with prescriptive, deterministic output that handle boilerplate for you for ages. So again here, it makes literally zero sense that a non-deterministic output is actually handling boilerplate better than just setting your env up properly.
I’m willing to believe that those posting on HN about their experiences with AI coding tools are doing so in good faith and also are probably able to evaluate their own experiences faithfully. They aren’t gaslighting themselves, as most folks using them for work are assumed to be doing useful work with them over baseline of not using the AI coding tools, or they wouldn’t use them.
Good enough works. By that same token, those who are not having better than baseline experiences with AI coding tools are probably “holding it wrong”/using the tools in a manner that they are ill-suited for etc. Those devs are probably not able to assess their own performance as well as those who are more proficient at coding generally, even without using AI coding tools.
Basically, good programmers are better able to use programming tools, even AI coding tools that are somewhat buggy in their implementations and/or output. Using the wrong tool for the job or using the right tool improperly is not an indictment of the tool, but of the user.
A poor craftsperson blames their tools. A quality craftsperson accepts their tools for what they are and aren’t, and adapts their tools and adapts to their tools accordingly.
The tools in this case is consistently giving wrong results and measurably not living up to claimed efficiency. This is literally your business paying Microsoft to reduce efficiency and output a worse product than had you not done that.
Maybe AI will be there some day, but as of right now, using deterministic tooling is still unquestionably the king of productivity helping.
Aggression against what? Yourself?
I think you show a tragic misunderstanding of technology and what it is doing in the world. It's not the work that it's doing for you. It's the living. Is it really your life you want a machine to take?
Nobody wants to "work". Henry David Thoreau said ,"There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living." All good, no? But that's not what "AI", in the hands of exploiters (or even yourself, as a self-exploiter) is going to do to you. Technology is more "productive" but creates more, not less labour.
Better to heed Max Frisch who said, "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Would you employ a machine to enjoy a music concert for you? To have sex for you or play games for you so you're not troubled by the effort?
Two of the three games I play on a daily basis largely play themselves, so... yes, actually. I still have plenty of fun watching them.
It's actually surprisingly fun, like you I was in the "why would I let a game play for me?" camp before. As they say, don't knock it until you try it.
Meanwhile, the third game I mentioned which is Fate/Grand Order explicitly does not have any autoplay functionality, and it too is very fun.
Not so much a game, but I get you.
Is "AI" a curiosity machine then? Our error is to think it can do "work".
What we're describing about games is fun, but for some kids in poor countries "work" is now generating bizarre images to post for ad engagement - and of course the most popular images are the most messed-up ones they can get past the censor. Like pulling the lever on a demonic slot machine.
And it's beneficial to ban calculators for learning, which is the point of the article?
the AI generation is not going to know how to do anything other than type into chatgpt
at which point human progress ends and we start going backwards