Hello,
This is my first post on Lemmy! Glad to join the Fediverse.
I’d like to ask for advice from people who might have tips on how to do research and learn things without using AI.
I’m starting to get sick of it, it’s very addictive, and I must have spent over €50 developing crap on Cursor.
When I discovered AI in 2023, I was the first person at my high school to discover ChatGPT. In fact, I’d even been playing around with the OpenAI Playground before that.
But over time, I became addicted, it turned into a real drug. I didn’t even use search engines anymore, just ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and so on…
Since I discovered this in high school, can you imagine what it’s like to discover this while you’re in the middle of a specialized digital studies program? Yeah, you don’t learn anything new, you gradually fall behind. I’ve lost some of my Python skills, like how to create classes and stuff like that, even though back in 2021 I built a client for downloading pirated games that I was pretty proud of. I’m really disappointed in myself about that.
Now, I’d like to relearn computer science, learn how to code, use Linux systems, and so on... but how? Not only have I regressed a bit, but what AI has really brought out in me is a reluctance to do things and a tendency to leave everything up to the AI.
Today I’m in college, and everyone uses it in graded group projects; no one follows the university’s guidelines, which require you to disclose when you’ve used AI. There is a climate of mistrust nowadays.
I’d love to hear your tips, how do you manage without AI, and how can I relearn to live without it? I’ve made up my mind: I don’t want to use it at all anymore, except as a translator (I use DeepL, which I don’t think is the same thing as a generative AI).
Books! Get a library card, get a book and read it front to back. Some of them are really good. And we have plenty books around!
That's how I do it, anyway. Takes a while to adapt, but you'll manage to get into the habit by chapter 3. Also there's really good books on computer science and programming. What I love about programming books is how you learn in a structured way. They're laid out so you learn concepts the right order. They're written by experts... All of that spares you time and effort. There's always some initial hurdle / slow start, but overall you'll even learn more and faster than people going through random internet information.
In doubt (if you can't decide which book to get), ask your professor. It used to be called "suggested literature" and you'd get a list of books with any higher education course. You can also spend an hour at the library, grab 10 books from the shelves and just go through the pages. Pick the one you think is fun to read / you like the style.
How do you make sure you remember the things in the books? Normally in Uni i would need several repetitions and compacting rounds to keep stuff in my head. With reading its easy to read but not process or read but never remember.
There's tons of theories on reading skills, but really the only things proven to be important are identifying key information and active recall.
As you read, try and identify the key sentence in each paragraph and mark it (I like to use sticky labels). I also label key paragraphs. After each chapter or so, close the book and try and recall what you've just read. (If you've properly identified key sentences this will help you remember.) You can write down what you remembered as a summary and check the key sentences to see if there's anything important you've missed.
A very common mistake is re-reading. This feels like work because it's tedious, but won't actually help you remember much more if you just reread poorly a second time. The quality of the reading is much more important. Over time you should improve your monitoring whilst reading and you might not need to mark and summarize. Monitoring is checking in with yourself on whether you're reading properly whilst you're reading. So during the reading you'll take mental note of key information and recall what you've just read in your head.
Yeah, it's exercise. Repetition and applying the learned information myself. I'll usually get books with some form of homework assignments at the end of each chapter. That's fairly common at least with programming books. I'll read the entire chapter. Sometimes two if I'm far away from my computer. After that I'll do some of the assignments. Or in case they're boring, cook up something myself.
Other than that, there's two options. Either I'm interested in some topic and enjoy learning more. In that case I don't even have to put in a lot of effort. I'd still have to do something with the information, otherwise it's gone after a few weeks, but it's not that hard. Plus I already got plenty ideas what to do with learned information once it's of interest to me. And if it's not... Well... learning Oracle SQL syntax or calculus were impossibly hard. I'll just need a lot of repetitions, compacting rounds, exercise, some test to see if I even got what I was supposed to understand... It's annoying and requires more willpower than I have available... But I'm not aware of any easy way to pull it off. I think it gets slightly better if you learn a lot/constantly. And everyone probably need to figure out which strategy works best for their own brain. Seems to be slightly different for different people.