> My experience is that people who weren't very good at writing software are the ones now "most excited" to "create" with a LLM.
I consider myself to have been a 'pretty good' programmer in my heyday. Think 'assembly for speed improvements' good.
Then came the time of 'a new framework for everything, relearn a new paradigm every other week. No need to understand the x % 2 == 0 if we can just npm an .iseven()' era ... which completely destroyed my motivation to even start a new project.
LLMs cut the boilerplate away for me. I've been back building software again. And that's good.
I would not call telecommunications privatization in Germany a success story.
Yes, we can use more devices now. Prices have stayed more or less the same (or have risen, corrected by inflation. Service quality has collapsed, though.
In all fairness, being both an avid Deutsche Bahn victim (with the Gold victim status), and knowing the German court system ... that was perfectly plausible, if a bit optimistic. I'd do many, many things if I got a 50% chance of arriving on time.
No joke: 15 years ago, when I was riding DB trains regularly, I got whole packs of refund forms. Took a while to find someone who would not refuse this request. I built a rudimentary transparent template in latex that had my name, address, etc. Pushed a whole pack into a printer to fill out most of the forms, leaving only the date and train to be manually inserted. My trains were always delayed, so this saved a lot of time.
If you actually took a train in the last 3 years you would know that the process is know online via the App/Website, and everything is already filled out for you
If you are in America, that 'empty land' was not 'empty land'. It was Native land. Displacement of Native Americans was genocidal and destroyed communities and cultures.
Also, the article touches Moses, right, but it is about communities as a concept, with a heavy emphasis on online communities, where 'new things to buy' do not come at the expense of 'tearing down the old' - and where, when you tear down the old, behaviour patterns change. Take, for instance, the reddit re-design, which changed the page's culture. Or usage patterns of RSS post Google-Reader-shutdown.
You will be pleased to know that I’m not from America, nor have I ever lived there.
My point stands: there are a million excuses not to build more. And when we make that choice not to build, the costs are invisible but they definitely exist. But hypothetical benefits are not as easy to point to as the costs of building.
I've seen people live with their parents till 40 while waiting for a tiny room that will cost 2 or 3 times what their parents pay for their large villa with large garden.
Its quite simple to me. We the grown ups (together) are to facilitate housing for the kids. If we can't do that anymore we should ask ourselves why we don't want to do that anymore?
Quite interesting is how the (now proverbial) 40 year old isn't really attacking the problem.
I won't be around but I'm curious how their kids in turn will share the tiny room till 40.
The word summon comes from Anglo-French somundre and Old French somondre (or semondre), meaning "to call, send for, or notify". It derives from the Latin summonere, meaning "to remind privately, warn, or hint to".
To summon is the correct word in this case. The fantasy meaning comes from thee power politics between one that summons (usually: a king) and the one being summoned (usually the serf).
I sincerely doubt that if someone hears 'summon' today, they think about Dungeons and Dragons-style summoning of fantasy beings. They more likely hear 'to be made to appear in front of [a state power / a court / ...]"
As such, current understanding is closely aligned to the etymological meaning.
Even summoning in fantasy tends to imply the entity being summoned has no choice in the matter. If anything, summoning in fantasy is usually stronger, in that there is a tendency for it to imply the entity is powerless to resist.
Pathologising those who disagree with a current viewpoint follows a long and proud tradition. "Possessed by demons" of yesteryear, today it's "AI psychosis".
Is this an unironic usage of this word? If you're trying to make a different point, it doesn't come across.
> You've highlighted a very real equivalency in spite of yourself
The equivalence doesn't help you, because "possessed by demons" has been used to describe people who are sick, playing D&D, reading comics, listening to music, being women, and it is frivolous and embarrassing to take seriously.
Getting your definitions and worldview from 20th-21st century reactions (many justified) against goofy evangelicalism rather than actual theology and history is likewise frivolous and embarrassing.
I love the parts where they point out that human evaluators gave wildly different evaluations as compared to an AI evaluator, and openly admitted they dislike a more introverted way of writing (fewer flourishes, less speculation, fewer random typos, more to the point, more facts) and prefer texts with a little spunk in it (= content doesn't ultimately matter, just don't bore us.)
no, that isn't accurate. One of the key points is that those previously relying on the LLM still showed reduced cognitive engagement after switching back to unaided writing.
The fourth session, where they tested switching back, was about recall and re-engagement with topics from the previous sessions, not fresh unaided writing. They found that the LLM users improved slightly over baseline, but much less than the non-LLM users.
"While these LLM-to-Brain participants demonstrated substantial
improvements over 'initial' performance (Session 1) of Brain-only group, achieving significantly
higher connectivity across frequency bands, they consistently underperformed relative to
Session 2 of Brain-only group, and failed to develop the consolidation networks present in
Session 3 of Brain-only group."
The study also found that LLM-group was largely copy-pasting LLM output wholesale.
Original poster is right: LLM-group didn't write any essays, and later proved not to know much about the essays. Not exactly groundbreaking. Still worth showing empirically, though.
If you wrote two essays, you have more 'cognitive engagement' on the clock as compared to the guy who wrote one essay.
In other news: If you've been lifting in the gym for a week, you have more physical engagement than the guy who just came in and lifted for the first time.
Isn't the point of a lot of science to empirically demonstrate results which we'd otherwise take for granted as intuitive/obvious? Maybe in AI-literature-land everything published is supposed to be novel/surprising, but that doesn't encompass all of research, last I checked.
If the title of your study both makes a neurotoxin reference ("This is your brain on drugs", egg, pan, plus pearl-clutching) AND introduces a concept stolen and abused from IT and economics (cognitive debt? Implies repayment and 'refactoring', that is not what they mean, though) ... I expect a bit more than 'we tested this very obvious common sense thing, and lo and behold, it is just as a five year old would have predicted.'
I struggle to see how you're linking your complaint about the wording of the title to your issue with the obviousness of the result - these seem like two completely independent thought processes.
Also, re cognitive debt being stolen: I'm pretty sure this is actually a modification of sleep debt, which would be a medical/biological term [0]
You are right about the content, but it's still worth publishing the study. Right now, there's an immense amount of money behind selling AI services to schools, which is founded on the exact opposite narrative.
I consider myself to have been a 'pretty good' programmer in my heyday. Think 'assembly for speed improvements' good.
Then came the time of 'a new framework for everything, relearn a new paradigm every other week. No need to understand the x % 2 == 0 if we can just npm an .iseven()' era ... which completely destroyed my motivation to even start a new project.
LLMs cut the boilerplate away for me. I've been back building software again. And that's good.
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