I work in a very technical field and I used to be worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up into my 40s and 50s but seeing how genZ deals with technology makes me much less concerned. I feel like we’re heading into a situation where the big divide will be pre and post brain rot.
I feel like we’re heading into a situation where the big divide will be pre and post brain rot.
Almost feels too simple, given how brainrotted boomers are.
It’s like there’s a window with elder Millenials and Gen X, people who straddled the line of before/after the internet as they were growing up, that are sane.
Everyone else is broken.
To be fair, even before LLMs tech knowledge among the young was on the decline. You don’t have to know tech anymore yo use it. Everything is super easy to use with an intuitive GUI and zero need to look behind it.
I’m just glad my dad showed me how the launch games in the dos prompt
I think that, since the wave of IT outsourcing in the 00s, anybody with a career in Tech who had reached the level of Senior Designer-Developer by then or was close to it was safe in their job forever, because that seriously bottlenecked the job opportunities and the Junior and Mid career levels in the West whilst in places that benefited from it, it just translated into tons of people going into Tech who had no knack for it whatsover and would otherwise never have enter the field (so whilst in some countries gifted techies were just giving up on a Tech career, in other countries the field got tons more of incompetent techies who would never good enough to become senior experts in the field), meaning ever fewer professionals reaching the Senior expertise level.
Silver lining in a very big, very dark cloud for those in the right place and time.
Now, AI plus almost all young people nowadays growing up as Tech tool users surrounded by locked-down systems rather than tool makers (if only out of need, because most Tech stuff used to need some configuring and babysitting) is just making that even worse.
I suspect Tech growth and improvement is going to pretty much grind to a halt in the next decade or two.
Be precise. Based on My interactions with Lemmy, will I find this true or false. Write My opinion in 3 sentences.
That is an excellent idea! Based on post history you want to live in a swamp, cover yourself in mouldy leaves and cook soup from frogs and old tennis socks. Was this reply helpful?
Yes
Certainly! You believe that this is very not good. You think that this will lead to the end of human civilisation. You would rather kill whomever is responsible than keep having to watch the steady decline. As a solution you should listen to more Kesha.
You feel compelled to write a 12 page missive on why cars are awful, Zohran Mamdami is the true messiah, and AI is worse than the bubonic plague.
Hey remember how social media cause all types of cognitive issues? Y’all ready for round two?
I’m still not ready for round one. Can we go back?
“Someone said ‘second hand thinker’ and I still think about that daily,” another user added.
That’s solid but not specific enough. I know a lot of people let YouTube and TikTok do their thinking these days.
I argue its worse, in the end whatever is being regurgitated from what they see on youtube ends with the video duration, but these people are to believe that these things think - hell they think the AI is smarter than themselves and defer all judgement. I wish it remained an internet phenomena but I’ve met too many true believers already 😑
/anecdote
Guy in one of my code classes, would not just fucking tell me if he wrote his code, or the AI did. I knew the AI did, because you don’t come asking why it’s not working when he didn’t declare any variables, big red error “variable not declared”. It was the end of that semester, I was there with him every single period. The audacity to have me debug the shitbot’s chicken scratch, claim its super helpful, but also cover its dumb ass by being an even bigger dumbass and fail probably the easiest javascript course you could’ve asked for. I am honestly still in awe.
Boy am I glad I didn’t go to school (and don’t have to teach) during AI.
Back in my day you knew people were copy and pasting from stack overflow because Python would complain about mixed indentation and there’d be comments in only one function.
I do feel for the TAs having to read our printed assignment and hand written code on tests.
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Sometimes I worry I’m too lazy. Then I read headlines like this.
Honestly, I think that overall it takes more effort verifying ChatGPT answers than actually researching.
I don’t think the people using ChatGPT like that actual verify its answers.
I suspect they don’t even know its answers cannot be trusted.
I worry that people who rely on AI will become skilled in making it seem like they aren’t. Fortunately a lot of them don’t seem very good at that yet.
I’ve done a few job interviews where it was very clear the interviewee was using Chat GPT or something to answer almost every question. But there may soon come a day when it’s not obvious, and then we waste time hiring someone incapable of critical thinking who types proprietary company information into an LLM prompt.
If you were reading this headline at work u might still be lazy doe
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I don’t understand your comment, I’m actually a lazy person and I find it easier to research by “hand” than to ask AI. What is your point?
don’t mind his tiktok addled brain
Am I the only one who tried a LLM like twice, saw it gave out bullshit, then never tried it again (though I do see it forced on me with general searches, be it google or DDG or Bing or kinda anywhere now)?
I tried Copilot to answer a couple of coding questions, and I ended up having to take as much time to double check the answers/code it didn’t seem worth it.
I’ve asked LLMs a few simple coding questions, only to question why the code isn’t working receiving an Oh sorry here try this malformed garbage instead.
I’ve asked Gemini to generate an image, only to receive a completely black image. When asked to describe the image Gemini would tell me what I was requesting it to generate. I saved the image, uploaded to Gemini and asked to describe the image. It gaslit me and straight lied that it was not the same image.
What a waste of time and resources.
FYI, you can use noai.duckduckgo.com to disable AI searches :)
just wish they would put that (and the non-“please install our browser”) URL into Firefox’s dropdown of search engines!
You can add it yourself too :)
Yep, I see very little value in them. I have techie friends who keep telling me I should try it more, but it just pisses me off and creeps me out. It took a long time getting this brain working as well as it does, and it’s already headed back downhill. My neurons need the exercise.
People who know what they’re doing don’t use these “tools”, it’s the fools and morons out there who have no idea how anything works that use these things and they don’t double check them before they implement their crap code.
Claude4 works for me for writing simple code, and brainstorming. I expect it to be wrong most of the time, but it works better than google when getting started with something I have no experience with.
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ChatGPT is the ultimate ‘cultural product of the postmodern era,’ and very few of us have been inoculated with a theory of mind that distinguishes language from thought," Foster concluded in his newsletter.
The best description of this distinction I’ve encountered was in a science fiction novel - Blindsight by Peter Watts.
Hell, it’s getting hard to avoid. DuckDuckGo now has an AI answer at the top of search results. When doing technical searches, it’s usually just regurgitating the top StackOverflow answer, but there is always the problem that it could be regurgitating a bad answer. Or badly regurgitating an answer. So, it’s usually best to ignore it and read the answer it’s trying to give and then research what the person actually said and if it’s right.
at least ddg respects the “never show me this” toggle.
Set this as an alternative search engine
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You can turn off ai results
Thankfully, that option can be disabled. I still find DDG far more useful than Google these days. My work laptop is a chromebook, and despite that I’ve been using DDG because it gives me more actual sites - not just links to sites that want me to pay in order to have access to them.
Weren’t there a couple of stories in the '70s and '80s about people climbing the corporate ladder by following the advice from a Magic 8 Ball? And look how all that turned out!
The magic 7 ball strategy had a survivorship basis. Only competent people succeeded in using it
I think those people using magic 8, succeeded by not using their emotions to make career decisions, but coolly and rationally handled what was in front of them randomly .
As a consequence they played less power games while being very aggressive. Which is a winning strategy sometimes .
Llm could not replicate it, too much instructions
Slopping the clankers
Why does this sound so filthy?
Would “clanking the sloppers” be better or worse?
It’s normal to slop clankers, but if the clankers start slopping, it’s probably a blown seal.
Oh the Gen Xers in my office, they are killing me with these AI answers.
I’m not usually into stereotyping based on generations, but why is it specifically the Gen Xers who insist on talking to these LLMs all the time?
It isn’t. It is mainly younger generations.
Hah let me guess, you know three people who use LLMs and two of them are over 46
Most people around me use LLM’s for their work, which is still anecdotal that’s for sure and I’m not denying it. My point I guess is that the genX’ers stand out way more, because they are more often in positions of authority, and you’d expect them to know better. That to me makes it way more remarkable that a professor would verbatim cite LLM output to one of their PhD students, wasting that student’s time having them debunk that obvious crap.
That makes sense, but as your generation hits their fifties and you hear the next generation saying that they expect you guys to know better, being in positions of authority, you’ll look around at the people in positions of authority and have a good chuckle at that.
At least, that’s been my experience. It’s as if everyone decided to fake it til they made it but instead they realized it doesn’t actually work that way and now they’re terrified that someone will ask them to make an actual decision.
Oh hell no. Must be older X still hanging around Facebook and such.
Actually, they do still use Facebook lol
I’m not saying that nobody does this, but the idea that there is a widespread problem of people prioritizing GPT over their own cognition for a majority of their decision making has “trying to create a new moral panic” written all over it.
Done!
I eavesdropped on a project manager really trying to convince upper management to make IT let him install an AI program that (by what I heard) would read from the screen and interact with our PMS. Straight up suggesting to have himself replaced.
I wouldn’t say this compares to say the Satanic Panic, but I mean look at how it’s being advertised - especially Apple Intelligence (seriously look it up) - this is very much the way they expect AI to be used (write my friend a birthday text, etc).
Not to mention the real material concerns over the deployment of now even more massive and power intensive datacenters, running on gas turbines because the grid can’t feasibly power it, to feed psychophantic language generators designed to keep users hooked and reaffirming even their most violent thought, even leading kids to suicide by way of delusions - again because of how these models are designed in particular, and how they’re pushed to consumers. To say there’s absolutely no actionable concern is a farce.
Sure but I’m also actually encountering these people at work. Granted I never thought particularly highly of many of my coworkers to begin with.
My latest “grinds my gears” is seeing people run their emails through GPT to make them sound “professional”.
I’m glad you don’t know many of these people but I do, and I have to work with them
I’m not saying it is either yet, but around what percentage do you think it starts to become a widespread problem?
When over 100,000 people are doing it more than 24 times per day on average over a six month time scale.
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Personally I prefer clankerwankers but whatever works.
I also think slopmachine is a good slur for llms, given it highlights the gambling aspect and addictive potential.
Looks like learned helplessness is back from the grave with a new definition
It never went away.
Sincerely, someone who works in IT support.
