This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Thatβs a math article
Fixed. Thanks!
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.
Public health flat earthers
So if someone else writes your essays for you, you donβt learn anything?
I just asked ChatGPT if this is true. It told me no and to increase my usage of AI. So HA!
relying on AI makes people stupid?
Who knew?
cognitive decline.
Another reason for refusing those so-called tools... it could turn one into another tool.
More like it would cause you to need the tool in order to be the tool that you are already mandated to be.
Itβs a clickbait title. Using AI doesnβt actually cause cognitive decline. Theyβre saying using AI isnβt as engaging for your brain as the manual work, and then broadly linking that to the widely understood concept that you need to engage your brain to stay sharp. Not exactly groundbreaking.
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
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§
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.
Thank you for providing a better Source and editing the post!
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?
what should we do then? just abandon LLM use entirely or use it in moderation? i find it useful to ask trivial questions and sort of as a replacement for wikipedia. also what should we do to the people who are developing this 'rat poison' and feeding it to young people's brains?
edit: i also personally wouldn't use AI at all if I didn't have to compete with all these prompt engineers and their brainless speedy deployments
Thing is, that "trivial question asking" is part of what causes this phenomenon
The abstract seems to suggest that in the long run you'll out perform those prompt engineers.
what should we do then?
i also personally wouldnβt use AI at all if I didnβt have to compete with all these prompt engineers and their brainless speedy deployments
Gotta argue that your more methodical and rigorous deployment strategy is more cost efficient than guys cranking out big ridden releases.
If your boss refuses to see it, you either go with the flow or look for a new job (or unionize).
I'm not really worried about competing with the vibe coders. At least on my team, those guys tend to ship more bugs, which causes the fire alarm to go off later.
I'd rather build a reputation of being a little slower, but more stable and higher quality. I want people to think, "Ah, nice. Paequ2 just merged his code. We're saved." instead of, "Shit. Paequ2 just merged. Please nothing break..."
Also, those guys don't really seem to be closing tickets faster than me. Typing words is just one small part of being a programmer.
you should stop using it and use wikipedia.
being able to pull relevant information out of a larger of it, is a incredibly valuable life skill. you should not be replacing that skill with an AI chatbot
16 hours after posting it I am editing this post (as well as the two other cross-posts I made of it) to link to MITβs page about the study instead.
Better late than never. Good catch.
