https://russellathletic.com.au/

No, it’s a joke about this brand.

Ahh yeah true, good point.

“Offensive” conduct must be more than merely hurtful, annoying or vexing. It must be “calculated or likely to arouse significant anger, significant resentment, outrage, disgust, or hatred in the mind of a reasonable person in all the circumstances.” Moreover, it must “be likely to have a serious effect upon the emotional well-being of an addressee.”

I dunno if that’s entirely true but maybe I’m misunderstanding this - it seems kinda open to interpretation.

I think also, people forget that open source projects need maintainers who are properly invested.

It’s difficult to imagine a meaningful future for a codebase that you spun up with AI and don’t actually understand yourself.

There’s an expectation of stewardship beyond “yeah I spent 2k on tokens”

Exactly. Lots of good stuff written in Rust!

Scroll the comments, we’ve had this exact argument.

People literally do struggle with basic maths also

Yeah that should be fine, some recipes use malt syrup instead.

Any kind of sugar syrup that can feed the yeast would be viable.

Why would you take that argument and apply it elsewhere? Not every argument applies to every single thing.

Again, rather than just “maybe we should hold onto the skills we have”, the AI brain solution is “let’s just build our own infrastructure for doing the thinking for us”.

There’s a fairly hard limit in the kind of paywall that can be put in front of lighters, axes and pencils.

Not all technology is bad, not all exchanges are detrimental.

People keep doing this - arguing that if you’re against AI you must not want to use any technology.

This seems like a particularly expensive and resource hungry solution when we could just train more teachers and tutors.

Sure you do. We don’t have to have every permutation of every technology.

I think there’s an issue with lumping them all together here. There is a functional difference between a machine that does your homework and is designed to endlessly praise you, and a model specifically designed to identify viruses or medications.

While anecdotes are iffy sometimes, I think they’re alright in this context.

If people feel the need to reach for calculators rather than doing simple maths in their heads, that at least nods in the direction that the technology has impacted our skill development, or at the very least, made us inclined to use the tool over our own facilities.

But also, there’s emerging evidence of the issues with frequent AI use, so it seems pointless to split hairs.

Edit: just to clarify, I was agreeing with you in my first comment

I was saying the person you responded to was essentially saying “nuh uh!”

It has potential, though I wonder if that’s genuinely better than studying the old fashioned way.

It can definitely feel more dynamic, I’m not convinced the outcomes are provably better.

Absolutely, I’m not necessarily making the argument that calculators are bad, just the point that technology can help us, and also create dependency, or at least a kind of laziness.

He’s not really citing anything, just making a claim that happens to align with his existing argument.

People certainly don’t seem better at arithmetic, and readily rely on calculators. Which isn’t necessarily bad, but it speaks to my argument that technology can, and does, cause skills to atrophy.

Can’t help but notice that in addition to being weirdly smug, all you did was show that someone else has come to similar conclusions.

Writing things down is a great way to offload the cognitive load of remembering things.

Fortunately, it’s hard to paywall writing. The same isn’t true for AI.

We teach arithmetic, but are people better or worse at it than before calculators were widely available?

I’m not sure what you mean by “if you recognise the skill as necessary or useful” - but taking a leap, I don’t see how that matters.

If I allow a machine to code for me, and don’t regularly use my own skills, when that machine becomes financially inaccessible, or just breaks down, it doesn’t matter how important I think the skill is - I’ve given it away.

We would still have to deal with the skill atrophy of AI use.

Even if AI is entirely green, publicly owned and widely accessible, it will negatively affect us.

This is almost entirely AI generated by the looks of it.

The code, the readme, the website.