This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Been vibe coding hard for a new project this past week. It's been working really well but I feel like I watched a bunch of TV. Like it's passive enough like I'm flipping through channel, paying a little attention and then going to the next.
Where as coding it myself would engage my brain and it might feel like reading.
It's bizarre because I've never had this experience before.
Are history teachers wasting their time?
Thank you for providing a better Source and editing the post!
Isn't that the same guy that plays Michael Bolton in Office Space?
For those wondering: Scruffy, Roberto, and WERNSTROM
relying on AI makes people stupid?
Who knew?
The obvious AI-generated image and the generic name of the journal made me think that there was something off about this website/article and sure enough the writer of this article is on X claiming that covid 19 vaccines are not fit for humans and that there's a clear link between vaccines and autism.
Neat.
Thanks for the warning. Here's the link to the original study, so we don't have to drive traffic to that guys website.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
I haven't got time to read it and now I wonder if it was represented accurately in the article.
Thanks for pointing this out. Looking closer I see that that "journal" was definitely not something I want to be sending traffic to, for a whole bunch of reasons - besides anti-vax they're also anti-trans, and they're gold bugs... and they're asking tough questions like "do viruses exist" π€‘
I edited the post to link to MIT instead, and added a note in the post body explaining why.
I just asked ChatGPT if this is true. It told me no and to increase my usage of AI. So HA!
Anyone who doubts this should ask their parents how many phone numbers they used to remember.
In a few years there'll be people who've forgotten how to have a conversation.
I don't see how that's any indicator of cognitive decline.
Also people had notebooks for ages. The reason they remembered phone numbers wasn't necessity, but that you had to manually dial them every time.
And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.
βa story told by Socrates, according to his student Plato
The other day I saw someone ask ChatGPT how long it would take to perform 1.5 million instances of a given task, if each instance took one minute. Mfs cannot even divide 1.5 million minutes by 60 to get get 25,000 hours, then by 24 to get 1,041 days. Pretty soon these people will be incapable of writing a full sentence without ChatGPT's input
Edit to add: divide by 365.25 to get 2.85 years. Anyone who can tell me how many months that is without asking an LLM gets a free cookie emoji
Rough estimate using 30 days as average month would be ~35 months (1050 = 35Γ30). The average month is a tad longer than 30 days, but I don't know exactly how much. Without a calculator, I'd guess the total result is closer to 34.5. Just using my own brain, this is as far as I get.
Now, adding a calculator to my toolset, the average month is 365.2425 d / 12 m = 30.4377 d/m. The total result comes out to about 34.2, so I overestimated a little.
Also, the total time is 1041.66... which would be more correctly rounded to 1042, but has negligible impact on the redult.
Edit: I saw someone else went even harder on this, but for early morning performance, I'm satisfied with my work
πͺ
Pirat gave me an egg emoji, so I baked some more cupcake emojis. Have one for getting it so close without even using a calculator π§
I hope your weekend is as awesome as you are
I want a free cookie emoji!
I didn't ask an LLM, no, I asked Wikipedia:
The mean month-length in the Gregorian calendar is 30.436875 days.
Edit: but since I already knew a year is 365.2425 I could, of course, have divided that by the 12 months of a year to get that number.
So,
1041 Γ· 30.436875 β 34 months and...
0.2019343313 Γ 30.436875 β 6 days and...
0.146249999987 Γ 24 β 3 hours and...
0.509999999688 Γ 60 β 30 minutes and...
0.59999998128 Γ 60 β 35 seconds and...
0.9999988768 Γ 1000 β 999 milliseconds and
0.9999988768 Γ 1000000 β 999999 nanoseconds
34 months + 6d 3h 30m 35s 999ms 999999 ns (or we could call it 36s...)
Edit: 34 months is better known as 2 years and 10 months.
πͺ
You got as far as nanoseconds so here's a cupcake for extra credit too π§
Thank you, you really didn't have to. That cupcake is truly the icing and it's almost too much! I'll give you this giant egg of unknown origin: π₯ in return, as long as you promise to use it for baking and making some more of those cupcakes for whoever else needs or deserves one within the next few days, hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds and 999999 bananoseconds π
I swear the companies hard code solutions for weird edge cases so their investors are fooled into believing that their LLMs are getting smarter.
I already have seen a massive decline personally and observationally (watching other people) in conversation skills.
Most people now to talk to each other like they are exchanging internet comments. They don't ask questions, they don't really engage... they just exchange declaratory sentences. Heck most of the dates I went on the past few years... zero real conversation and just vague exchanges of opinion and commentary. A couple of them went full on streamer, like just ranting at me and randomly stopping to ask me nonsense questions.
Most of our new employees the past year or two really struggle with any verbal communication and if you approach them physically to converse about something they emailed about they look massively uncomfortable and don't really know how to think on their feet.
Before the pandemic I used to actually converse with people and learn from them. Now everyone I meet feels like interacting with a highlight reel. What I don't understand is why people are choosing this and then complaining about it.
Does this also explain what happens with middle and upper management? As people have moved up the ranks during the course of their careers, I swear they get dumber.
That was my first reaction. Using LLMs is a lot like being a manager. You have to describe goals/tasks and delegate them, while usually not doing any of the tasks yourself.
that's the peter principle.
people only get promoted so far as their inadequacies/incompetence shows. and then their job becomes covering for it.
hence why so many middle managers primary job is managing the appearance of their own competence first and foremost and they lose touch with the actual work being done... which is a key part of how you actually manage it.
Yeah, that's part of it. But there is something more fundamental, it's not just rising up the ranks but also time spent in management. It feels like someone can get promoted to middle management and be good at the job initially, but then as the job is more about telling others what to do and filtering data up the corporate structure there's a certain amount of brain rot that sets in.
I had just attributed it to age, but this could also be a factor. I'm not sure it's enough to warrant studies, but it's interesting to me that just the act of managing work done by others could contribute to mental decline.
My dad around 1993 designed a cipher better than RC4 (I know it's not a high mark now, but it kinda was then) at the time, which passed audit by a relevant service.
My dad around 2003 still was intelligent enough, he'd explain me and my sister some interesting mathematical problems and notice similarities to them and interesting things in real life.
My dad around 2005 was promoted to a management position and was already becoming kinda dumber.
My dad around 2010 was a fucking idiot, you'd think he's mentally impaired.
My dad around 2015 apparently went to a fortuneteller to "heal me from autism".
So yeah. I think it's a bit similar to what happens to elderly people when they retire. Everything should be trained, and also real tasks give you feeling of life, giving orders and going to endless could-be-an-email meetings makes you both dumb and depressed.
So if someone else writes your essays for you, you donβt learn anything?
