Fuck AI

Welcome, fellow lemming! And what a great post to start out with! You've recognized what LLMs (and the simplification of tech for that matter) does with your brain and that in itself is very valuable and shows that you're already on the right track.

One of the biggest problems I have is that search engines have turned to shit, probably to boost LLM usage. I have some OK experiences with Kagi as a search engine, but it comes with monthly costs. The other problem is, there are hardly any dedicated forums left anymore. You'll mostly find things on Reddit and Reddit is a garbage website. Plus, many users have erased their comments after the mass exodus. So, getting hold of correct information has become increasingly difficult.

I recently nuked my windows partition and installed Cachy OS. At the same time I started building my home server. I'm going to be honest here, without the use of LLMs I would have started to cry in many situations because Linux is not exactly easy to troubleshoot if you're new to it. However, I started seeing patterns and commands that the LLM frequently suggests. I then went ahead and started researching these things and I have become less reliant on the LLMs over time.

My suggestion for you is to reclaim tech as your own. That will help get around the use of LLMs as you progress. You'll also be sticking it to the tech shitlords. And it's fun! Build your own server, host your own services, get rid of subscriptions, fuck Windows etc. To get things up and running, find communities that are active and can help you on your journey. Communicating with real people that have the same objective as you is way more fulfilling than chatting with a bot.

I just blocked the domains I used. I can of course unblock them, but editing my hosts.txt is a conscious choice.

I have never gotten that addicted though, as I like keeping manuals and books for offline access on my system and the big llms require you and their systems to be online.

I can recommend zeal for complete documentations: https://zealdocs.org/

Navi for cheat sheets: https://github.com/denisidoro/navi

One thing that will help you the most is having someone nearby to actually stop you whenever you try to sneak some AI use. Your own discipline is failing you, and that happens to anyone, so someone else to keep you in line and away from it is possibly one of the most effective things. You can look at it as being babysat, or as a rigid teacher ensuring you do your homework, or whatever.

Remember: humans are social creatures and wanting to look good for someone tends to be a very good motivator.

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.

Welcome!

Others have mentioned books, I want to add a more conceptual thing, just enjoying time spent on something, if anything AI is a symptom of Capitalism pushing for productivity, you don't need to know the answer immediately, your brain is like a muscle being trained when it's working on figuring something out and looking for the correct information. Muscle atrophy is a real challenge for people in wheelchair for example, maybe it can be the same for your brain using AI-trophy? heh

You'll feel more confident in yourself and you capabilities when you know you can find information by yourself.

Don't use it for ANYTHING for a good long while. That's the only way

You are not the first to ask this here.

Now, I’d like to relearn computer science, learn how to code, use Linux systems, and so on… but how?

Dive into the deep end! Try linux on your computer. Backup your stuff, read up on boot-loaders (and if you want to dual boot Windows at all), then follow the Arch Linux installation guide on their wiki, which is a great "crash course" in linux. CachyOS Linux would be my recommendation for something quicker to install but still hands-on.

As for programming, personal projects will have to stem from something you're interested in. I'd recommend a game mod if you still like gaming, but it just depends on your personal interests.

Also:

• This is not your fault. ChatGPT and such are designed to be shamelessly addictive just like Facebook, Twitter and such. Those "AI" apps/services are abominations.

• Don't even use the term AI, unless its used disparagingly! IMO its a marketing phrase built to anthropomorphize tech company services, so be more specific. Use "LLM," machine learning, whatever. Basically, use "AI" to mock the tech bro hype.

• You might need some more general digital detox. Get addictive crap off your phone. But simply being on Lemmy is a good sign you're on that path!

• You need LLM detox. But. In the future, if you are pressured back into usage by a specific class, your career, or whatever, consider the local LLM path, run on your own hardware, hackable, and free of the enshittification of the corporate apps. Consider keeping it offline to force you to fill/use the context yourself. In other words, there is another path besides running back into the drug dealer's arms. But let me emphasize that you should just go cold turkey now, especially at this specific point in your life.

luckily most of us here grew up when there was no AI, or smart whatsoever. Remove all subscriptions/links to AI. If you want to learn what is happening in a field, like Linux, get a RSS reader and follow the blogs. They explain everything and you don’t need AI for that. Follow things you are interested in in mastedon, it’s the same but you don’t let any AI do the summarising for you. You follow and your brain picks up what it doesn’t know.

you can also buy books from HumbeBundle. They have cheap books there. 19 books for 25 dollars.

use social media to stay on top of things, dont let AI do that for you. That is, not to be social but just the follow what organisations are doing.

Learn how to use search operators on the search engine you're using. It will allow you to narrow your search so much from a general query. There's pages on search operators for google and duckduckgo.

As has been pointed out, books used to be the primary sources. Magazines also, but most of them are gone now, or full of slop. Be cautious of newer books: many of them are slop. There are some very good blogs, forums and personal websites still, but finding them is more difficult, given the degradation of search engines and pervasiveness of slop. None the less, you can still find them and keep your own curated list of the ones you find relevant and helpful.

At college, you can focus on learning, rather than just getting the grades by whatever means possible. It will be hard. It always has been. Cheating isn't new, even if the means have changed with the advent of LLMs. But what others do doesn't stop you from actually learning. Talk to your professors. Most of them probably want to help you learn.

Most important is to understand and verify everything for yourself. Do your own research. Compare multiple sources. Learn to think critically and carefully. And practice. Put your ideas to the test. Many just want the grades, but there are others who want to learn. Find them and discuss with them.

LLMs are unreliable and fraught with legal, ethical, environmental and social problems, but they are not useless. Maybe it is best for you to avoid them entirely for a while, until you get yourself sorted and learning for yourself. But then you might consider using them, skeptically: always reading, understanding and verifying or correcting what they produce. There is misinformation everywhere. LLMs produce it more profusely and sometimes more convincingly than people, but you must learn to evaluate and exercise your own understanding and judgement, no matter the source.

Well, AI gan be a helpfull tool for some tasks in investigations in thousends of documents, astronomy, medicine, physics, etc. but certainly not for substituting the own intelligence, research, creativity or to create cat videos. You never can use AI in your research as is, without additional contrast the corresponding sources, it's not a toy for everyone, even if big corps include it recently almost everywhere, not to help you, but to spy on you and to train their own AIs with your inputs and data. You don't really need AI, the internet since decades works well without, even if you already have to research consulting several sources in your traditional web search, to learn to handle Photoshop or better, Gimp, Blender, Krita to create images, even if it cost somewhat more effort as writing a prompt, if you are online for some years it's also not so complicated to learn a second or third lenguage, even if it is only enough to communicate with others (Spanish, German and English (?) in my case) without the need of an translation tool (Deepl is proprietary and limited in the free version, Google, Bing are a no-go and OpenSource translations are crappy by default). It's always easy to avoid AI>a little effort and some common sense. There are things we need and things which are an artificial created need for the user, AI is the last one.

I use DeepL, which I don’t think is the same thing as a generative AI

It is. It's all AI slop.

I never used AI, that shit rots your brain and makes you a fucking crazy ass schizo who believes bat shit insane shit! Don't fucking start using AI! Would you try cocaine because it's cool? No? Same thing when it comes to AI!

It's not just AI - excessive convenience as a whole is addictive and degenerative to your motivation and ability. All you can do to combat it is to try to take the harder road just for the sake of it. Admit that doing things the easy way is more convenient, but choose to be independent instead, in order to stay out of the cage that the easy way leads to, where you lose your will - and even your strength, past a certain point - to escape.

It's difficult to do, especially at first, but it gets easier in time, and can come with better mental health to boot; the world is brighter when you interact with it directly - when machines and algorithms live your life on your behalf, you only ever really live in the world that they describe, not a true reality.

I’d like to relearn computer science, learn how to code, use Linux systems, and so on... but how?

The question I am left asking is "why"? What is your goal/reasoning for relearning computer science? I can't really provide any concrete suggestions without that.

Showing my age a bit, but I've had similar conversations around interpreted languages, IDE hand-holding and the "Arduino-fication" of embedded development. While there is significant value in understanding the inner workings of a thing and getting a solid grasp on the "deep magic" you can't know everything. If your goal is to bake an Apple pie you don't need to understand particle physics to the point of creating an universe.

AI has really brought out in me is a reluctance to do things

I would suggest strongly evaluating that reluctance and where it's coming from, it's unlikely to disappear just because you stopped using a specific tool.

Today I’m in college, and everyone uses it in graded group projects; no one follows the university’s guidelines,

Yep. You've run into the nasty secret of the "adult world". The only way to get ahead is to lie, cheat and steal your way to the top and anyone who believes otherwise, or claims it was different back in their day, is lying to themselves too. I do my best to try and live a good and moral life even when it would be smarter to just be performative instead. It's a balance your gonna need to figure out for yourself unfortunately.