I feel missed out. What are some spicy communities where these arguments are going on?

Fun fact: large energy expenditure even from renewables is subject to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It heats up the planet.

So I prefer to do everything the old fashion way with principles of frugal computing, offline docs, local editing, and try to keep as much in my brain as possible.

I don’t expect others to do the same. It’s about how much convenience you want to sacrifice to live a wholesome life.

edit: It makes sense from the perspective of keeping your brain young too. The more you use it even for “tedious” tasks like navigating instead of relying on gps, learning languages, doing mental arithmetic instead of using a calculator, memorizing phone numbers, and writing manually etc, the better it’ll function especially after middle age.

Firstly thank you for such a thoughtful and long reply. You are right about LLMs reducing cognitive overload and helping you concentrate on the core problem. I avoid them for environmental reasons too.

I too am not a fan of boilerplate and tedious languages like latex.

My approach for dealing with it is using better abstractions like typst. When I was seriously writing LateX years ago I had emacs macros and shortcuts to power through the tedious parts.

I also choose modern programming languages like gleam instead of java or js. They are easier to reason about and write fast manually. IME you can overtake the productivity gains that LLMs offer after 3-6 of working on a project.

LLMs can remove education from your brain? Or functionally make you stupid?

Definitely.

There are studies showing that LLMs make you measurably stupid and insane in just a few years of usage.

And it makes sense too. The brain is always changing. It prunes and rewires connections related to unused skills and memories. That’s why if you haven’t done math, played chess or haven’t spoken in a language you were once fluent in, for a while you get rusty.

Of course you can recover if you start practicing again. But sometimes the damage is too great and you can never go back to how you used to be.

Put simply, it’s propaganda by the LLM salesman and liars like scam altman.

Avoid LLMs. Preserve your brain and skills. Don’t become a slophead.

The only think you’ll fall behind on is humanity’s race to the bottom into total idiocracy.

You can delude yourself all you want that the AI is enabling you to do “x”. But all it’s doing is ensuring that you can never do x and that you keep getting worse at everything related.

And science is proving it. In just a few years of usage, llms are making people stupid and insane.

The brain is like a muscle. Each time you get in a car to travel 5 miles in 6 mins instead of running there in 30 minutes you get weaker. After 10 years your body will be in a horrible shape and much closer to death.

Yes I’m against calculators too for most things. Because of avoiding them I can do small calculations faster in my mind than most people can type into a calculator.

And guess what I’m not left behind. Because of my philosophy I am stronger and sharper than most people half my age.

I agree.

I wasn’t so surprised by tea / coffee because most people add sugar and diary to it. Like you said, alcohol is associated with diseases like cancer but it does reduce stress and helps you bond with others.

Degrading your sanity and mental health for yourselves is not okay. But if it’s to serve a rich guy then it’s fine…

What’s going on in the chart at the end? Fast food looks greener than legumes.

Because you can slap on a ‘30g protein’ label on junk food and charge double for it

You can cure many allergies with exposure therapy. I’m surprised nobody mentioned it.

None of what you said contradicts what I said, so I guess nice strawman?

I wrote it to prove that for most people LLMs impair learning.

cost effective

Yes counting the billionaire subsidies. But it’s very costly on the planet.

Ok? Don’t develop parasocial relationships with AI? Don’t use it to skip learning?

Sorry most people do. Few people use heroin to get better from sickness doesn’t mean the majority of people who get their hands on it will abuse it.

4 is anecdotal

Everything you said is anecdotal—that too a very unpopular opinion at that. Lol.

An accountant is going to become less sharp at math

yay we both agree. What has worked in schools is banning a calculator until a student gets proficient in basic arithmetic and math.

That’s what has worked. You can obviously use a calculator to check your answers etc without cheating and get better at math.

But that rarely happens in the real world.

Are you going to criticize every dev for not knowing how to code in assembly?

If you haven’t done even a little bit of assembly then you don’t know the fundamentals of CS—how a processor works etc. Yes I would criticize such devs.

AI can help enable people to learn things they previously could not

They fool you into thinking that you learned a lot. Why don’t you learn something with ai and then take a university exam or apply it in the world with chatgpt off?

I’m sure you’ll fail horribly.

Hmm. If you are confident that learning from ai will work out for you better than learning from humans or human created materials, go ahead.

But as I said it doesn’t work in the real world.

1. AI has been shown to make people stupid and mad.

2. All professors know this. Students are using llms to cheat in exams and skip learning.

3. Gen Z has the lowest attention span and reading comprehension skills mostly due to ai summaries. Few can even sit down and read a book anymore.

4. Using ai for coding and “agents” have eroded the skills of developers. Many have said so and I have seen it among my colleagues too.

I have a feeling we won’t make any progress here. I’ll stick to learning from humans and the learning materials they have left us.

But how would that be different from learning via a book

AI averages all the text on the internet. So you cannot rise above this bar if you learn from an llm. It’s only possible by reading text books written by human experts.

I can give my field as an example. It’s been objectively measured that AI generates terrible code compared to humans on average. So if you learn coding from an llm it’ll be disastrous compared to learning from text books or courses.

Benefits of llms for learning are not demonstrated in the lab. Studies have only shown the opposite—that ai makes you stupid and delusional.

You can ask it questions you might be embarrassed to ask actual people

lol. Reminds me of the Subnautica 2 drama. A CEO has a rich guy breakdown and asks Chatgpt how to avoid paying the developers of that game after it becomes a huge success. Chatgpt gives him a failed plan which gets him sued.

And all his embarrassing deleted conversations with chatgpt were retrieved by police.

True. The people around you IRL become an echo chamber and fool you into thinking that it is missing nowadays.

So many send me ai slop in chats, go on endless speeches about how they wrote an email, created a poster in 1 minute with chatgpt etc.

I started working on a side project recently with a dev on the condition that he would code without llms. We were aiming for very generous deadlines. But the quality and style of the code were horrible and inconsistent. It was as if each change was written by an amnesiac or a different intern who didn’t read the rest of the code.

I confronted him about it and he admitted to using llms from the start. Turns out he was spending 20-30 min a day generating ai slop and creating PRs. His response was “who cares the code is readable and it works.”

For sure. I have learned the basics of mountaineering, cooking and fermenting foods. I make sourdough bread, sprouts, and natto at home. And it’s so meditative. 😄

If you want someone to talk, I’m here btw. :/

Thanks so much for your kind words. There was some upside to this lol.

I have left my boring IT job that forced me to use AI and ship ridiculously fast. I vastly improved my fitness now and started working in outdoor adventures. It’s quite fun too.

They’re losing tons of moneys. The AI-bubble probably bursts soon.

Ikr. I’m eagerly waiting for it.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )

It’s over 9000!

What if the left over parts are not enough and you had to dedicate lots of land and grow crops just to feed farm animals?