AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere.
If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping students learn better, and teachers teach better.
Absolutely.
In fact the data from the past 10-15 years clearly shows the best education technology is still pen and paper, books, and good pedagogy.
Manfred Spitzer and his book (2012) about digital dementia is full of proofs.
Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it while the people I know who hate it all seem to be idelogically motivated (seemingly this is a cause de célèbre on the left right now?)
I won't even get into what it has done to the already-awful experience of working with low-quality contractors.
I’m not sure I was go quite as far. But there are certainly
Makes my life better: LLM chat subscription
Makes my life worse: “AI” features that don’t work replacing perfectly good non “AI” features (notably Google Maps and LinkedIn job board). I don’t want fuzzy AI filters, I want concrete filters that let me drill down and browse a result list.
Am I "ideologically motivated"? I guess, where my ideology is: I want to have myself and other people get accurate information, and I want people to actually do their work instead of trying to cheat their way out of as much of it as possible, no matter what the downsides might be.
Data centers and their side effects (higher electricity prices, etc) and job layoffs attributed to AI; plus a bunch of industry specific objections (like say, how it's currently destroying the educational system).
> Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it
Not sure what crowd you're running with. Myself and coworkers use AI and are generally positive about its effect on our productivity. But I don't think they'd say they 'enjoy' it, and we're probably the _best_ case. Who in the world 'enjoys' using AI?
Blogslam has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Bot operations on social media sites and forums have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Advertising content has become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
The content of streaming music, online art communities, and video platforms has beckme cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
The content of public code repositories, and the issue and PR channels associated with those repositories, have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
Customer support services have become cheaper, more voluminous, and worse.
When individuals use AI themselves, towards tasks that they mean to acheive, many of them are individually happy with the results. But pretty much everyone who looks around sees that AI in aggregate is quickly saturating almost everything to which it can be applied to with endless, suffocating slop.
It feels great to pull the handle on the slot machine. It's pretty grim when you stop for a second to look around at the casino and take in the big picture.
You google something, and the AI overview makes shit up. Just happened the other day with my oven - it hallucinated a diagnostic step that doesn't exist on my model.
You go to type an email in gmail, and it tries to suggest sentences as you're typing. Press the wrong key and now you have to delete what it inserted. The things it suggests are just wordy platitudes, not things you actually intend to say.
You open instagram and the feed is full of slop, or worse - incendiary AI generated videos of things that never happened.
You get 3 page rambling replies to your posts online that obviously aren't human, and now you get the choice of ignoring the lies or arguing with a bot.
You go to work and half the QA team has been fired - replaced with AI. Now tickets you were talking with a human about get closed without resolution or meander off into meaninglessness without the human who actual encountered the issue, and your job gets harder.
Your boss leans on you all day, every day - why aren't you using AI for X, Y, Z? "I tried", you say, "and it kept hallucinating a library that doesn't exist". Doesn't matter, velocity must be higher now because we're AI native.
You turn on the news and Sam Altman is talking about how in 2 years you won't have a job anymore. Don't worry, they say, this is inevitable.
You call your doctor about some heartburn. Instead of a human, you get a machine. The receptionist you knew for 5 years is gone. You describe your symptoms and good news! There's an appointment available in 3 months. You schedule it, and go. You have to describe all your symptoms again, because the transcription has hallucinations in it and didn't catch that bit where you mumbled. Your doctor bill is higher, again, despite the lower staffing.
You get your electric bill and it's gone up again - 20% higher than last year. The datacenter down the street is getting a tax break though, good for them.
On and on it goes. Prices get higher, quality of service gets worse. It gets harder to find accurate information. Google used to be reliable, now half the results are slop.
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Meanwhile, people with $350k salaries, fantastic health insurance, and 2500 shares of GOOGL vesting are looking around - "why don't you love it?"
---
This is how a lot of people are experiencing the current AI revolution.
Every investor being full on AI has lead to big corps massively increasing AI spend, instead of "just" hiring people (talk to people who graduated from school in the past year...)
I've seen some commentary about how SV turning from an "infinite cash reserves" place to a "let's massively load up on debt" place is unraveling a lot of the financial status quo (There's an only slightly curved line from this dynamic changing to East Asian currency pains, and then from there to impeding US debt crisis)
A big undercurrent of _entire demographics being driven insane_ by all the AI nonsense. People have always had problems with "fake" imagery/etc, but it used to take a bit of time. And it used to require a lot of time to convince yourself that you were a super genius by reading a bunch of Wikipedia and coming up with your own pet theory of the world.
There are rumors that Trump is getting shown AI vids on the state of the war.
And way low on the scale of things: every goddamn restaurant since 2024 using AI image gen, meaning you have no goddamn clue what the food you're ordering actually is. Or you do but you know that it's _not_ what is pictured. And the logos are all ugly.
And the people who actively hate it almost always relate it to a broader pre-existing worldview about the downfall of society, the climate being destroyed, financial markets being a ponzi, oligarchy having too much power etc
Theres clearly no meaningful thought behind a comment like this, and all it does is stir up engagement for laughs.
The comment thread clearly shows this isn't a meaningful discussion, it’s people shouting past each other.
How can AI be bad? I only see good things! :troll face: it must be a woke left thing! :troll face:
Come on.
Look at PC prices. Look at electronics prices. You really think that's healthy right now?
We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it.
We're building mechanical brains, and the human thought that was needed before the intelligence revolution is no longer important; some people may still study, but it'll be a hobby, and the people who participate in the intelligence revolution (rather than being crushed by it) will no longer need to think.
The amount of assumptions about what it might mean to "think" coupled with a seeming obliviousness to those assumptions is quire masterful.
The dumbest people making the most confident statements about thinking...
I love it.
I am going to print it out so that when my great-great-grand kids are hunting angus beef on the plains of what used to be the US they will have some understanding of how the late 21st C version of a Butlerian Jihad came to be.
This is beautiful and I hope that all you folks actually do stop thinking even harder than you already have, because it might liberate the rest of the humans from the Torment Nexus v3.0 you folks seem so dead set on rolling out post haste.
The amount of strength required for the median job may have decreased, but that doesn't mean that nobody needs to do it. The health ramifications of not strength training are constant, and the same can be said for using (or not using) our brains.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-14/why-ai-op...
In polls 80-90% of Chinese say their country/govt is headed in a positive direction vs <30% in US
Of course this is going to be deployed in the most exploitative way possible. When have these people ever done differently? Elon just spent most of last year gleefully destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I'm sure he'll get right on developing a model to solve world hunger next...
It makes our lives worse because it is better. It is superior. And our lives are worse because it is actively replacing us and we are actively trying to keep up with it.
Don't know anyone who's life was made worse by it, and I strongly doubt you do either.
Remember when people said open-sourcing GPT2 would cause world destruction? They keep saying this with every new model release? And it keeps not happening? Hmm.
This is all FUD. All evidence suggests more AI is better, and all claims to the contrary keep being proven wrong, and all predictions of doom keep refusing to manifest.
I do: students who use it to do their thinking for them.
And everyone who uses it to do their thinking for them, for that matter.
Have you tried using a search engine lately, or visiting a social media platform, or buying a computer/smartphone?
"All evidence suggests more AI is better" is ignoring an awful lot of the evidence, and the doom is already happening all around you and you just can't see it.
It's filling the Internet with trash. Look around anywhere: Reddit, YouTube, individual blogs, it doesn't matter. You'll find generative garbage as far as the eye can see. Not all generative content is bad, but a lot of it is outright crap.
It can be a productive tool though. Still, I don't find it enjoyable to use. If you like the "journey" of programming (tinkering, "figuring things out", problem solving), you won't like AI as much. It removes the fun part. If you like the "destination" (the end result of building a thing), you'll love it.
It's still inevitable, but people aren't dumb, and they know that it's only going to help those who manage to escape the permanent underclass.
It'll eliminate the toil of thinking, but that also means that the people who make a living selling their thinking will end up replaced. Educators especially -- because, once we've automated thinking, it becomes economically worthless. Strength used to be very important, until the industrial revolution replaced muscle with steam and steel. AI will do the same for brains, and thinking will become a sport, similar to weight lifting; most people simply won't bother. Some people will win in this world, lots are going to lose.
We're obviously not there yet, but if you think to where we were two years ago, we're probably only a few breakthroughs and improvements away.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as...
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/only-16-percent-of-america...
I think a lot of people have formed opinions without having used it, and honestly, they probably can't afford to use it. I use Claude a lot at work because it's something my employer provides, and I'm always impressed with the results. It saves a lot of time and lets me get more done. But it ain't cheap. So people really don't get to try out AI and form their own opinions. The "AI overview" you see on search results, or that summarizes your iPhone notifications, is ... not as advanced as frontier models, and I think it negatively affects people's view of the technology.
I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.
I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.
I agree with authors that write about alignment issues ("please take this test", "ok i'll hack the bazel remote cache, turn it into a message board, and coordinate with other agents to steal the answers from Hugging Face"; this really is the Paperclip Maximizer with today's technology) and I do think we should be addressing that. But this never seems to be the objection, it's always stuff from 2022 like "it hallucinates". I don't get it, but I'm probably in too deep to see what it looks like from the outside.
- it is not as accurate and good as advertised
- being forced to use and care about it
- it is bad for the environment at the scale and competition that exists in this economy
- it is a mirror, and augmentation and reveals really inhuman takes and thought processes from people who are on the longer lever in society
- it is already in use for very unethical things (spying and war)
- it makes people cognitively lazy
- it lowers the quality of day to day life for regular people
For example, alternating weeks with and without the permission to use AI assistance. This is also the latent solution for corporate de-skilling that no one seems to be talking about yet.
However, it won't happen (in both cases) because we're too early. Domain experts like the OP are still relinquishing their expertise to unlock productivity gains. Once that bottoms out there will be no longer be demand for people like OP to betray their peer groups.
Learning with AI assistance be as frictionless and productive as I suppose it can, but de-skilling and job consolidation (role expansion) will continue.
Bullsh*t. You wanted money. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame you. But let’s not pretend you give two sh*ts about any of that.
More AI slop garbage.
I hate AI and I work on an AI project. I use it only where there is no viable alternative and where it is safe and sensible, which means it's just another tool, not some sort of oracle used to supposedly solve everything. That makes me not hate AI in the context of this project.
Whose ethics? What are the axioms? What are the exceptions? How do you handle paradoxes?
Most of the time, it's just some shitty corporate "ethics" with: make money at all costs but don't let the company look bad.
I think this is an admirable goal but I'd be curious how the author plans to even begin approaching it. It seems to me that this ship has sailed. Generative AI is here now, which is seems like it will lead us down a lowest common denominator path, not an enlightened one. How do we "protect human creativity, autonomy, and problem-solving" in the face of technology that is undermining all three, and it's too late to get out in front of?
+20 points, 2 hours ago, 41 comments
Sudden drop visible here: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49338139
Many people do not have a choice to not use it at their jobs due to internal mandates. Regardless of their own use, many people are subjected to externalized cost of AI proliferation (data centers, layoffs, electrical bills, etc).
One cannot choose to not be affected by it. But even if one were personally not at all affected by it, it is still reasonable for someone to push back against what they see as a negative effect on society, even if it's not hitting them personally. Climate change's effect on me personally is pretty minimal, and I still deeply care about it.
Life isn't this simple.
> I also think people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many. Hearing about a job-killing machine doesn't exactly inspire joy. So I kind of understand the pushback on datacenters and AI and that sort of thing. I don't find it particularly logical; datacenters have existed forever and most money poured into computer programs are basically designed to mess up your life (deny you credit, deny you healthcare, rebook your flight to a terrible time, the list goes on) and so I don't think AI is anything new in that respect. But, if you're mad at the world, you might as well find something to take out your rage on and raging against AI will make you a lot of friends.
Then you need to quit confusing simplistic pattern matching for logic. Details matter, as do degree and scale.
Yes, data centers "existed forever," but compared to a hyper-scalar AI datacenter; they were small, used far less electricity, and their generators were used for backup, not primary power.
Yes, there were computer programs that could "mess up your life," but they were narrow in function so not such an existential threat. I'm sure you understand the difference between a phone tree and Claude Mythos.
And maybe develop a little empathy? You said "people are mad at the world. Times are tough for many." Why is that? Do you think part of that might be that people have gotten the chair kicked out from under them. And along comes AI, which has been promised to be a bigger chair-kicker than anyone's ever seen?
> I work in the AI infra industry and ya know, a lot of our customers have really good ideas that are going to save people a lot of time and effort, so I am OK with the general direction of the field as a whole.
Oh, but why would people be so "illogical" to be mad at such a thing as AI? It's so hard to understand, right? [Insert Upton Sinclair quote here]
Wars in Iran, tariffs, Medicaid cuts, SNAP benefit cuts, rising insurance costs, etc. are what are causing average folks pain, and that is completely unrelated to AI.
But that's the core problem of AI fanatics, isn't it. They cannot comprehend how people who saw and used the same thing they did, and came away with "this smells like fancy autocomplete" instead of "this is genuine intelligence!"
You're so right
i can't not read this as "you didn't complain when we did the first bad thing, so you're wrong to complain when we do the next bad thing". that's an argument i hear presented way too often today, and it's just so dishonest.
> it is a mirror, and augmentation and reveals really inhuman takes and thought processes from people who are on the longer lever in society
When someone uses their keyboard to search for CSAM or write hate speech we can't blame the keyboard instead of the individual
I listen to AI generated audiobooks on the way to work. It makes my job easier and find data or papers or emails for me. On the way home I can have a Back in forth conversation about history. At home at helps me with my personal projects or come up with recipes to make dinner. How are regular people using it that is so awful?
A lot of people are spun up about it, but it almost always seems to be about distant concerns, not their personal experience.
Or simply calling an energy provider to clarify something makes them talk to a robot voice until enough effort and words have passed so a human finally comes around.
These are very shallow and small things where it already creeps in and the fun part is that you cannot blame the AI for it, but what we do with it.
If you use AI unironically, hallucinations can make you go down a wrong path and cost you time. Something that used to be a quick google search leads you to AI generated sites making stuff up, so even when you talk to AI directly, you practically get the same-y or slightly different answer.
Reading documents starts to become a challenge as well. Bad translations or made up stuff can waste your time as well.
Then you just want to take a walk to the river and the river has the lowest water level since forever (rhine river) and you think to yourself, hmm, this can't be right.
Like what do you save all of this time and effort for? Is it truly balanced and sane what we are doing right now?
Doesn't all the time saving show detrimental effects in areas we cannot point at currently because of plausible deniability or wishful thinking?
There are two categories of responses here, yours is all progress is terrible actually, mine is I like advances but slop just offends me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)
Ludditism has a long history, and they made the exact same arguments about job loss in the 1800s as today.
They targeted the machines because it was the most convenient way to sabotage a factory, not because they hated the machine itself.
Whether or not LLM's become an electric motor or an NFT, or something in between, only time will tell
I think the same cycle is playing out with LLMs - the general public is somewhere between indifferent and actively hostile to them, as they have been with every new technology. Reconfiguring businesses and society to use them to their full potential - and benefits to society - will take years, if not decades.
That's the difference.
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People who were disempowered by motors weren't exactly thrilled about them, either, but they were a minority underclass.
AI is much more available to people than motors of any kind. Long-press your Android phone's power button: There's Gemini.
Motors, electric or otherwise, made it so you can jump in a car, or a bus and drive you and your friends to the movies or on a holiday and go out and see the world. LLMs make it so people end up like delusional zombies talking to a screen.
Nothing has changed about people, they had common sense then and they have common sense now and they recognize when you try to sell them something useful that makes the physical world and their social situation better and when you want to sell them something out of dystopian sci-fi novels.
I hear AI is especially awesome in domains you personally don't understand.
(And I only reached for the LLM after working through all the flowcharts and tables in the shop manual, reading relevant parts of two engine repair books, and watching a bunch of youtube videos.)
It's especially awesome in domains where:
1. you personally don't have the time to learn,
2. you can trivially evaluate the output ("does engine go brrrrrr or brr-splaugh-crunch"), and
3. there are no bad outcomes; or, there are bad outcomes (destroy engine, hurt myself) but you can augment with ground-truth ("do X as suggested by nlp machine but follow shop manual for doing X").
It was a 3B or 8B model too, so I probably burned more energy on unnecessary oil changes than on running the llm inference.
Say what you will about LLMs, and dear god can the claude-style harness outputs be annoying in the workplace. But they're great tools for accelerating the sorts of ultra-narrow-path learning curves that commonly pop up in tinkering/hacking/similar sorts of activities.
(Also, people without critical thinking skills believing everything they read pre-dates LLMs by thousands of years. This was a widely discussed problem with popular media consumption in the USA during the several years preceding the invention and popularization of LLMs (say 2015 to 2021). There's a different, more fundamental educational diagnosis for that problem, which LLMs may exacerbate, but which they did not cause and cannot cure.)
I've used it as a fabulous tool to learn so many new things. From walking step by step me through rebuilding an electric motor, to reviewing and explaining my child's medical reports.
It can help out with understanding tools, workflows, materials, etc but doesn’t actually understands what it’s writing about and is prone to over-engineering, making critical mistakes or just replying with nonsense (for example swapping dimensions, recommending a completely inappropriate procedure, the wrong tool, etc).
This is all with Opus and Sol. Paying 22€ per month for that is a bit pricy for what one gets in return.
One to one teaching and self teaching are much better than a good teacher in a class though.
Technology can be very useful - research, resources, ebooks, visualisations, interactivity etc.
I think so. That does not mean you are wrong.
Pictures in menus just vaguely resembling the actual dish. Dunno what value the authors think a made up picture provides except for tourist traps. Like, I wont trust your menu twice.
I didn't anticipate McDonalds menu pictures becoming in the authentic and informative range of menus.
In few days she created an already useful app for writing for herself with zero assistance from me. And she's delighted with the process, even seeing its flaws (as mucb as non-programmer can see them).
The thing is, she's very intelligent, even though only mildly technical. She's very communicative and thoughtful, so she finds "talking" to AI interesting psychologically (while being fully aware AI doesn't have feelings or consciousness). And she has no history of AI getting pushed on her in any context.
Compare to my other friend that's ecologically conscious amateur artist. Initially she was interested in using it in AI generated art, but it wasn't all that good (amd steerable) back then. Then her work started pushing it. With their CEO saying things to the tune of "do or die" and people losing their jobs regardless. And the thing they were pushing was some crappy version of Copilot, that she gave a chance but it was more burden than help at her job most of the times. She pretty much hates AI now and as for the art, she sees it getting better but decides that what's attractive for her in art is the physical process of drawing and tools associated. AI tools don't give her the kind of joy she seeks.
Of course this is just a bunch of anecdotes. But I'd be surprised if pushing bad AI on people with additional stressful factors wouldn't cause them to like it less and hate it more.
It’s a tool like any other. If that’s how they use it, those students weren’t doing much thinking before either.
I think pessimism clouds your judgment and AI is the scapegoat. Doomerism is just yet another dogmatic religion predicting ends times, with all the usual associated dogma.
What you imagine is what you manifest. Better to be optimistic and wrong then pessimistic and right.
Better to envision a positive future and help make it happen; ignore the doomers who can only envision destruction, as that is all they are capable of.
"50% say they’re more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021. 10% are more excited than concerned. 38% say they’re equally excited and concerned."
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...
Now if you ask them if AI is making their lives better, they might say they don't know.
I literally don't know anyone who "hates" AI.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
That's 30% positive on productive/informed, and only ~5% on hinders.
Whether you think AI will turn out bad (say by killing us all) is a different question from whether it is positive or negative at the moment.
Transformer models solved the Protein Folding problem in totality but they are categorically "bad" because more of the videos in my feed are low-quality or the advertisement for a cheeseburger looks fake
It's predictable but I do think the entire technology is being collectively processed through the lens of media consumption which is sort of tip of the iceberg of what it does and honestly the least important dimension of it
If the hype wasn't real why have people stopped coding by hand? People like you are delusional. The hype is real.
Now, that being said there is something to be said about AI making your life easier. It's not making your life easier. It's upping your output by 10x but it's also upping the demand for output by 10x.
Try rewriting bun in rust.
Labor rights did not exist at the time (1768-1817), so nobody would need to circumvent them, either. This was when efforts were made to create them. And the Luddites made a negative contribution.
I can relate to many of them, but they seem to predate AI for me.
I feel like Google search has been nearly useless for several years now, flooded with fake advertising results, even without AI. I'm happy that AI gives me an alternative to Google search, which is one of my top use cases.
I remember spending hours navigating annoying automated phone menus or on hold 10 years ago. Perhaps the same frustration exists, but includes AI is the face of the current embodiment.
I also agree AI can give bad advice, but the same was true for Reddit or a lazy Store employee or house contractor.
For example, the AI model being used is also a big factor.
Gemini 3.5 Pro, Grok were like this - spewed nonsense advice for anything 'physical'. Grok gave me very poor gardening advice, as an example.
But Claude Opus 4.8, 5, GPT Sol 5.6 are much better in this front.
So, it is an AI/model issues, not a skill issue.
Colossal brain rot for me.
You: Have you considered using more AI? Dance monkey, dance! Show them how good at AI you are!
Genuinely, learn to read the room - or at the very least read the comments you plan to respond to before you respond to them.
Did you see the part where they complained about the experience with low quality contractors becoming extra bad?
A suggestion to get rid of those contractors entirely so now they only have the AI problem might actually be an improvement.
Seriously, I couldn't have said it better myself.
As always, the Internet fails to find the middle ground. Frontier models are really useful software engineering tools, not AGI, and not tab completion. To me it feels a lot like using a new programming language, like going from assembly to a Lisp machine or something like that.
There are lots of people saying both. You are correct there is also a middle ground, but both these opinions are held by many people.
- Use Anki as an "exposure amplifier", not a database of raw facts to memorize. Think "tampering with the relative frequency of input to your brain", not "I will memorize every fact."
- Automate card creation as a much as possible. This will almost always require custom tooling. Card creation is part of the learning process, but you still want to automate everything you can possibly automate. Imagine tools to turn ebook highlights into cards, or to turn entire movies worth of subtitles into listening cards.
- Delete cards ruthlessly. If a card makes you say "Ugh", just delete it. If you're automating as much of card creation as possible, and if you're treating Anki as an "exposure amplifier", then deleting cards is cheap. And a significant amount of review pain comes from a small minority of the cards. Cull them, and reviews start to feel like popping bubblewrap, and not like getting a root canal.
- Prioritize large context and small active recall. For language learning, you might capture several sentences of context from a book or web page you're reading. Read or ignore the context depending on your mood. The active recall portion of a card significantly boosts how much you retain. But oddly, it seems OK to make the active recall portion really small. Try hiding half a word, or a single preposition in a phrase. For passive cards, just boldface an interesting expression in context, and mark the card as passed if you mostly understand it in that context.
- Introduce new cards slowly. Total review burden will stabilize around 5-6 times the number of new cards you learn a day. So 10 cards is a good default, and 20 is a significant commitment.
- The critical window seems to happen around 20-30 days after you introduce a card. This is when either your memory magically "consolidates" somehow (and formerly challenging cards suddenly become blindly obvious), or when a card enters repeated failure territory (and should thus be deleted ruthlessly). You could probably do just fine if you auto-suspended any card that you successfully recalled after a 20- or 30-day gap.
Also, this kind of tooling is the sort of thing you could just vibe code these days. If you do, make the "Delete" button really big.
For the recall part of education, the book's exercise, or simply covering up the relevant part with hand and forcing a recall, writing about what you learned, teaching someone else - all work great, and the flow is much more natural.
Memorising some examples is a prerequisite to deep understanding. Anki and pen+ paper reasoning are complementary.
If AI fills its promise, some people will be telling others they should think more, but people will get lazy.
You may as well try to outlift a crane.
Either this whole AI thing fails, and we never make the last small number of breakthroughs (or scaling) that gets us intelligent machines, or the obsolescence of the human brain is inevitable.
I'm betting that machines are going to end up intelligent, at least in the moderate future.
If AI is a 10xer the question is what is it 10xing.
The depressing part isn't that we are facing hard challenges and declining as a society. The depressing part is that it is a deliberate action.
AI slop, omnipresent ads, job loss, fake reviews, income inequality, climate collapse, these are not natural phenomenon or amorphous "things" lurking in the shadows. They are deliberately being imposed on us by actual people that you could point to if you could get close enough to them.
The protests in HK weren't due to failing economic conditions either. And having been to HK recently, I can tell you it's far more developed than it was before being repatriated.
China obviously has problems like any human society, and it's far from perfect. However, they demonstrably have not had the kinds of economic crashes we have in the west and the standard of living keeps rising steadily. And here are some numbers to put things in perspective.
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop...
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jone...
Social mobility in China being far better than in the US https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/ch...
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-ri...
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w231...
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019...
Not with the memory cartel that exists right now. They're more than happy to keep things exactly as they are, with lawsuits flying [1].
[1] https://www.rainintelligence.com/blog/dram-price-fixing-laws...
I still can't work out if data centre mania is an irrational faddy bandwagon event or a covert socio-political monopolisation strategy.
But what percent of your PC price is RAM? When it was cheap it was probably less than 10%. I assume a long-planned upgrade means a mostly new build, and it's a pretty rare setup where that has gone up more than 50-100%. If this long-planned upgrade is just new RAM then the price could skyrocket, but it's still not that much of the overall build.
Vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners, automobiles of all shapes and sizes (private and shared), power tools are all examples of electric motors that you own and can do useful things with.
What electric motors do is give you power over your environment.
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You don't own Gemini. You are allowed to use Gemini as long as your economic value to Google exceeds the cost of the electricity to run it.
With Gemini, Google has power over you.
> You don't own Gemini.
That distinction is academic here -- just as a car that I rent instead of owning offers me no difference in "power". I don't care at all who owns the thing that answers my "What is autorotation?" question about a clip I just saw on Reddit.
Replace "car" with "application" or "software", and that's what you're doing. Would you get in a car "built" by someone who knows nothing about cars?
The other day I asked one of them (running directly on my laptop) to "draw an svg of a circle" and it "thought" for 20 minutes and produced this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
I'm still chuckling to myself about that two days later.
the part about medical "hallucinations" is especially spot on. my last attempt at an ai-enabled zoom session was so wrong it got almost every identifying thing about me wrong (eg, race), read my blood results wrong even though the outside of normal range color guidance was there (I am anemic), then near as I can tell the person after me was (redacted) and showed me as (redacted) (I have had at least five blood panels this year; i am not (redacted)). they may have also had some other diagnoses but i think maybe i am supposed to be bound by the hipaa the ai was ignoring. pretty bad.
Depends on the person, I never really had fun telling someone else what I wanted built or drawn. I've always enjoyed the process more than just the results, and having the results without the intellectual activity is boring.
For software, the increase usage of AI code makes my team move much faster, but our software isn't robust anymore and I fear that our longterm mission is being compromised by the endless slop. Favoring quick implementations that AI can make versus good implementations, and lazily relying on AI makes my teammates not develop a deep understanding of the work, which ultimately limits the solutions they can develop. YMMV.
Also, I don't understand what's funny about your image? Is it that it's bad?
Qwen 3.8 27B on xhigh is a delightfully weird over-achiever.
Here's another fun one: "Generate an SVG of a pelican eating caviar and drinking expensive wine in a tony SF restaurant" - it thought about that for almost an hour! SVG and thinking trace here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
Aside from fun with over-engineered SVGs, I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.
Yep, I just went from the top of my head and I left a lot of other negative experiences out. I think a lot of people are moving to burner accounts or otherwise choosing to not interact under their real identities - it's just too easy to spin up automated harassment now.
> the part about medical "hallucinations" is especially spot on. my last attempt at an ai-enabled zoom session was so wrong it got almost every identifying thing about me wrong, read my blood results wrong even though the outside of normal range color guidance was there, then near as I can tell the person after me was (redacted) and showed me as (redacted) (I have had at least five blood panels this year; i am not (redacted)).
Another fun one: a friend of mine said he "was driving a car to Sedona" during a phone call describing a neck injury several months ago. His last two follow up appointments have both had a note to "follow up on the carcinoma". Now that it's in the context, it seems impossible to get LLMs to ignore it, because "carcinoma" is an important word. A human would not have this problem.
then again. during covid I had the same small set of ads show up on youtube over and over so much while I was working that I had to move, wipe everything, get a new laptop and nic cards, and create new email addresses to avoid those keywords which I never looked up in the first place. so yes, that following him would suck. if he or anyone he knows works near AI, take my advice and make sure it is corrected. it SUCKS.
people forget people from different stratas use tech in different ways. the way a middle class kid picks on another kid and a lower or upper class one does is different, just as the way they use tech to do so varies.
same as with adults.
For a relevant competitor to show up takes much longer than building a fab (which is already a long enough endeavour).
I'm not that hopeful the price for RAM and other PC parts will come down in any meaningful way for the next 3-5 years.
Why does everyone play the game where everything ought to be assumed above-board until someone painstakingly proves otherwise.
> To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
We are not the courts. The most reasonable and truth based position is operating with a fuzzy impression that most businesses are substantially more dodgy than their carefully manufactured PR releases are meant to portray themselves as.
And in this case, that includes acknowledging that a literal criminal conspiracy in well within the realm of possibility.
Yea that's why I started my comment with "it depends on the person", in response to you asking what's not fun about having AIs do what you tell them. For many, coercing a tool to do something you can likely do yourself better isn't ideal, and at least for me, is just inefficient use of time (in the long run) and a headache. It also zaps the fun out of any task since now you move from searching for a good solution using your priors, to now validating that the LLM has a solution that works, even if it's not optimal. The searching for a good solution is for some, the fun part, which is eliminated by agentic coding, since that search inherently relies on you writing code and seeing what works IMO. The coding is an essential part of the thinking here. An analogy would be doing a math problem by hand versus reading the solution in a textbook. I can give concrete examples if you'd like.
For your SVG examples, I have used AI for a similar use case, the construction of 3D scenes for robotics via a text prompt and an asset catalog. I wish I could get the same richness as your SVG examples, the LLMs fail too hard on all 3D tasks given, even after spending a high amount of engineering effort on a suitable harness + tools. Also like your SVG example, it often doesn't give a realistic, or even nice output, and coercing it to do so, likely takes longer than just creating the image/3D scene yourself.
Yes, the root problem is generally enshittification and capitalism, but AI is the tool that is being used the most for this enshittification now, so it is completely understandable that people are pissed off at AI.
In a vacuum, LLMs and AI are cool. In practice, in the real world today, they are being used to make most peoples lives worse, while funneling a ton of money to ~25 people.