Technology

How many phone numbers do you know off of the top of your head?

In the 90s, my mother could rattle off 20 or more.

But they're all in her phone now. Are luddites going to start abandoning phones because they're losing the ability to remember phone numbers? No, of course not.

Either way, these fancy prediction engines have better critical thinking skills than most of the flesh and bone people I meet every day to begin with. The world might actually be smarter on average if they didn't open their mouths.

I've only used it to write cover letters for me. I tried to also use it to write some code but it would just cycle through the same 5 wrong solutions it could think of, telling me "I've fixed the problem now"

I use it to write code for me sometimes, saving me remembering the different syntax and syntactic sugar when I hop between languages. And I use to answer questions about things I wonder - it always provides references. So far it's been quite useful. And for all that people bitch and piss and cry giant crocodile tears while gnashing their teeth - I quite enjoy Apple AI. It's summaries have been amazing and even scarily accurate. No, it doesn't mean Siri's good now, but the rest of it's pretty amazing.

The same could be said about people who search for answers anywhere on the internet, or even the world, and don’t have some level of skepticism about their sources of information.

It’s more like, not having critical thinking skills perpetuates a lack of critical thinking skills.

Pretty shit “study”. If workers use AI for a task, obviously the results will be less diverse. That doesn’t mean their critical thinking skills deteriorated. It means they used a tool that produces a certain outcome. This doesn’t test their critical thinking at all.

“Another noteworthy finding of the study: users who had access to generative AI tools tended to produce “a less diverse set of outcomes for the same task” compared to those without. That passes the sniff test. If you’re using an AI tool to complete a task, you’re going to be limited to what that tool can generate based on its training data. These tools aren’t infinite idea machines, they can only work with what they have, so it checks out that their outputs would be more homogenous. Researchers wrote that this lack of diverse outcomes could be interpreted as a “deterioration of critical thinking” for workers.”

Misleading headline: No such thing as "AI". No such thing as people "relying" on it. No objective definition of "critical thinking skills". Just a bunch of meaningless buzzwords.

Unless you suffer from ADHD with object permanence issues, then in that case you can go fuck yourself.

so no real chinese LLMs....who would have thought.....not the chinese apparently...but yet they think their "culture" of opression and stome-like-thinking will get them anywhere. the honey badger Xi calls himself an antiintellectual. this is how i perceive moat students from china i get to know. i pitty the chinese kids for the regime they live in.