If I'm in the room, yes. For me, AI is one, is the best handicap accessibility tool I've ever had. At a minimum, speech recognition is a higher quality, and second, it lets me write code again. I'm working on the third benefit, which is it helps me organize, helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.
If you look around, you'll find the AI has made some significant improvements to medicine and engineering. These improvements get drowned out by the AI Cheerleaders, but they're there.
I like this argument/reasoning more than any I've encountered so far. Thank you! Enabling the disabled is definitely a positive and this is a strong argument for the "pro AI" column.
I think another argument for AI is that it can help pull out patterns and information that are normally hidden from human cognition because we can't encompass that information and keep it in mind.
I think one place we should apply this is to the financial system. Use it to detect fraud, tax manipulation games and Other b**** pulled by the 1%ers.
With luck, it might even help us find methods of reducing their influence and power.
> helps my ADHD mind organize large chunks of random information.
I keep seeing this and I'm pretty envious! You must have a different form of ADHD than I do. For me, trying to use AI to build anything is terrible for my attention, it turns everything into a miserable slog because it's so hands off.
AI helps me get into flow state because I can have a rambling conversation with a chatbot and work through ideas and what abouts. eventually it helps me forget to a place where flow is easier to maintain.
There are multiple points of iteration. for me, it's user interface and core algorithms. Because the cost of creating an iteration was so high before, I would think about the problem for a long time and then implement the one that seems best maybe kind of?? I was always wondering that maybe I could have found a better solution. Now with AI, I can iterate through two or three solutions that I'm trying to decide between and see which one works best in a much shorter time frame.
> we are not good at making new places that people want to be
I think it's more appropriate to say that we don't have enough diversity of places to meet the population's wide-ranging desires and needs. There are city mice that love the density, crowds, and noise of urban environments, and there are country mice who take refuge in quieter country spaces. It's a disaster when housing misallocation forces one to live in another's space.
Case in point. A friend lived in a suburban rural community because it had dark skies and he loved astronomy. It was great until some neighbors moved into an adjacent house, and they immediately put up floodlights all around the house and left them on all the time. They resisted turning them off when he asked.
These people should have been living in a city condo tower where they would feel "safe." The question then becomes, why didn't they buy in the city? They clearly had the money given the size of the property and the city it was located in. I suspect the answer was an insufficient number of urban condos.
I love having gardens, fruit trees, and birds at the feeder. That is an existence I chose. I want people to be able to choose a different living option if they want it.
I don't have an answer for how to solve the housing problem. I hope that whatever plans people use, they keep urban-scale density inside the city limits and not export it to the countryside. And while they're at it, turn down the fucking lights. Your light bubble damages crepuscular and nocturnal life cycles in animals and plants within a 20-plus-mile radius.
I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question. But they are not self-aware or confident enough to understand that they should preface the AI response with:
"Interesting question, I asked Claude that question, and here's what I got for a response. Here's what I thought was interesting about Claude's response and what I think applies. What do you think?
I would rather hear the answer “I don’t know. I had to look it up.” (And I don’t care what you have used as sources, as citing counts with norms/laws or in academics.)
If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.
Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
And we won’t be able to distinguish what is yours and what is claude’s so I’ll be subconsciously suspicious that the whole answer is ai-generated (/skill me-persona-answer-descriptive)
That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.
The emphasis should be on “rewriting”, even kids know copy-paste and it doesn’t count :)
Back in the day, you couldn’t ask stack overflow about your specific business or project. You were forced to build at least some level of understanding of what you were doing on the job or risk your lack of knowledge being obvious (and obviously holding you back).
What we’re seeing now is industrial grade ignorance that can only be observed in in-person or video meetings.
Actually that's fine. StackOverflow, Reddit, HN are or at least were populated by people. Looking to them for answers is doing a survey of best practices for a topic and will at least tell you what is popularly true.
Asking AI sometimes gives you the same answer as AI is trained on these same forums, but not always.
Your prompt structure and/or inference bugs (which is a lot more common in smaller providers or local hosting) can change the answer AI gives.
And ofcourse, if there's low/no data, AI will still give an answer even though it's not in the safe zone.
Hard disagree. If I only cared about immediate results, I'd just ask Claude myself, sure. But I care about developing people's judgement, longer term. And if they're just parroting back what Claude says, I'm not doing that.
Another approach is to refuse to hire employees with poor judgment in the first place, or rapidly terminate them if they display bad judgment after hiring.
If you assume that good judgement is an inherent attribute that can't be developed, that might be a sensible option.
I've found that it's a thing that develops over time with experience, though. And I want people I'm training to develop that skill rather than farm it out to an LLM that never gets it right.
I care about developing people's judgment, longer term. You care about developing people's judgment, longer term. Does capitalism, or the managerial-business class that only sees 6 months out?
> If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something.
What a waste of time. Do you treat your coworkers like students trying to do homework that you assigned?
> Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
I should be upfront about the use of AI when providing an answer. You in turn would learn that you can find the solution using AI yourself next time. You learn something and so do I. What is wrong with this interaction?
> That is the reason why doctors wear white and have stethoscope. In many cases people don’t argue with their opinion as they know that doctor had to spend 6 years to earn it. But if they admit LLM as a source they are becoming replaceable.
And don’t get me started with doctors. I hate when someone just tells me to trust them just because they are a professional. If they are worth their salt then they can defend their position without using their costume or degree to intimidate me.
I don’t see an issue with quoting an AI and citing it. Are you defending the parent post’s position of rewriting the AI answer to hide the fact that you used AI to find the solution?
I’m not condoning simply taking the first answer that AI spits back at you and regurgitating that as a response. But if the answer is correct then there’s no need to rewrite it. I just feel that rewriting the answer is trying to hide the fact that you had to use AI to help you find the solution, which to me, is dishonest.
The fact that people vet the AI answer before responding is the value added not the process of rewriting the response to protect frail egos.
You should abso-fucking-lutely use sources and cite them when trying to answer questions.
What is this macho bullshit of pretending like you have memorized all information you might ever need and looking something up is a sign of inadequacy?
And yes Claude or whatever is just another source, to be verified just like any other.
No one is saying to pretend you memorized everything. They’re saying they’d rather have an “I don’t know” than a half-assed ai response (or stack overflow cut and paste).
Or, if you get nerd-sniped by the question and spend some time figuring it out, that’s fine too.
But if you want to be helpful but don’t want to take the time to figure it out yourself, don’t just forward the question to AI or send me a link to the first result in Google because I could have done that myself(and may have done it already). Just say you don’t know, which is a paradoxically more useful response.
Besides just not wanting to look insecure, there are good reasons to include sources, even in cases where you actually have the info memorized.
It shows someone where they can find that information for themselves in the future. That way they don't have to bug you later if they forget and it can give them a useful resource they can explore. If nothing else it demonstrates that at least one other person had the same understanding of something that I did which could be reassuring.
> If you really rewrite LLM’s response in your own words, I will know that you have learnt something. Because if you tell me directly that you have asked Claude, next time I will probably ask Claude directly as I don’t need you.
On the other hand, it's nice when someone tells you an answer is AI generated so that you can apply an appropriate level of skepticism to that answer. Maybe you can even reply to let the person know when inevitably the something they just "learned" was entirely bullshit.
Part of the problem with people sending text/screenshots right out of AI chatbots is that it suggests that not only were they so lazy that they went to a pathological liar chatbot instead of thinking about what you asked, but they likely didn't bother to review/fact check any of it
The problem is that most of the people in my circle who are returning AI answers to emails and chat messages do not understand enough about the topic to know whether a question is interesting or not, which parts of the response are interesting, and which parts apply.
They seem to think they've more or less solved the problem by posting an LLM's response to the issue or concern I've raised.
This used to horrify me, until I started noticing the type of person that mindlessly spits crap out for me to deal with are the exact type of people I had already identified as being at most neutral or dead weight anyway. Sounds harsh but if your first reaction to solving a problem is to turn off your brain entirely and dump the thinking onto something/someone else for you, you're likely already layoff fodder, even pre AI. Maybe we'll all get there eventually, but for now, there's a clear distinction I see between types of people that use these tools, and one is very exhausting to deal with.
A lot of jobs don't need a human for anything from 80-99% of their work tasks and can be replaced by an LLM or other form of AI/ML. As an employer, you hire the human for the 1-20% where you actually need the experience - to quote the punchline of an old but gold joke [1]:
> The revised bill arrived: $1.00 for turning the screw; $9,999.00 for knowing which screw to turn.
In many a company, the "old neckbeards" and "dead weight" are the first ones to be cut or eventually be driven off by ever more outright bullshit - and often enough, it is only realized way too late that important "institutional knowledge" is gone [2].
I personally feel using AI to reply personal chats is extremely bogus. Worse is those that do not even bother to remove the AI watermark. Like, pasting directly from the AI without removing the AI's personal thoughts.
It's usually an email chain that they're CC'ed on, or for which they're the point of contact: Sales, project management, or (worst) a VP getting pinged by a customer who wants to jump to the front of the line: "Our new X keeps showing a message that says the brobillator needs to be froodicated, and worse it now runs at 1/4 speed, but we don't want to froodicate it already because that's expensive and our maintenance guys are busy. Can you change the interval from monthly to annually? This is a critical issue that might impact our budget to purchase 3 more X units in Q3."
The right way to solve this is for the PM to forward it to the ME who designed the brobillator and calculated the 1-month maintenance interval, CCing the controls engineer who helped ensure that machine wouldn't eat itself with the fault and low-speed mode.
The wrong way to solve this is for the PM to forward it to ChatGTP[sic], which might mindlessly suggests maintenance-free sealed bearings (that are totally inadequate for the temperatures and contaminants). If he asks the mechanical engineer to redesign it like ChatGTP suggested, that situation may be salvageable. If he told the customer that they'd have an engineer out in 3 days with new sealed bearings it's bad.
It would be true if they bothered hiding it. But as the featured author said, people seem increasingly not shy of simply forwarding you a screenshot of the AI answer.
...But even that sucks. I want to talk to YOU, about THIS. Not talk about your book report of Claude's output. Why would I want to do that? Why am I supposed to care about what you thought was interesting about Claude's output or how it was applicable? You turned me talking to you about something into a book report about the chatbot.
Nowadays, the top Google result is probably LLM-generated blog-spam of lower-quality than whatever chatbot your company is paying for.
Back when most Google results were authentic web-pages, something like "here's a web page that I think solves your problem" was a fairly useful reply from a coworker.
> I attribute people returning AI answers to a desire to feel valued and to feel that they contribute something to the person asking the question.
At least with the example in the article (with the ChatGPT screenshots), I don't think it's all that different from the olden days when people would include links to an unnvetted webpage after a quick web search, or a link to something like let me Google that for you. It isn't about feeling like they contributed. It's more a passive aggressive way of saying do your own research.
I love the presentation. My initial impression is that it's easier to read, in no small part due to the font choice, color palette, and tabloid-style layout. I would love to have an RSS reader that presents my RSS feed in the same way.
I have seen this type of behavior happen many times in different companies.
For example, at more than one company I've worked for, if you wrote shitty code but got it into "testing" faster than anybody else, you are considered a superior programmer. And then, if you fixed the hundreds of bugs found in your code seen as an extraordinary programmer going above and beyond the call of duty.
> That's also where I learned to be careful with air compressors around open wounds.
That sounds like you may have learned the same way I learned that 1: when a USGS topo map indicates an unimproved road, it may be out of date, 2: don't take your father's four-wheel-drive truck down a late-winter, corn-snow-covered dirt road when the temperature is starting to drop in the late afternoon 3: Don't go down a dirt road on a hill covered in corn snow without walking the path first to make sure you can get out or get back up. 4: When looking for a winter campsite for your Boy Scout troop, tell your parents where you're going.
If you look around, you'll find the AI has made some significant improvements to medicine and engineering. These improvements get drowned out by the AI Cheerleaders, but they're there.
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