Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task [edited post to change title and URL]

Fuck, this is why I'm feeling dumber myself after getting promoted to more senior positions and had only had to work in architectural level and on stuff that the more junior staffs can't work on.

With LLMs basically my job is still the same.

After being out of being a direct practitioner, I will say all my direct reports are “faster” in programs we use at work than I am, but I’m still waaaaaaaaaay more efficient than all of them (their inefficiencies drive me crazy actually), but I’ve also taken up a lot of development to keep my mind sharp. If I only had my team to manage and not my own personal projects, I could really see regressing a lot.

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.

That’s a math article

GenAI is short for generative AI in this context

I haven't read the paper but they might mean "Generative AI"

I think we can get federal funding, let me run it by Director Big Balls

That's probably true, but it sure can be hard to motivate yourself to do things yourself when that AI dice roll is right there to give you an immediate dopamine hit. I'm starting to see things like vibecoding being as addictive as gambling.
Personally I don't use AI because I see all the subtle ways it's wrong when programming, and the more I pay attention to things like AI search results, it seems like there's almost always something misrepresented or subtly incorrect in the output, and for any topics I'm not already fluent in, I likely won't notice these things until it's already causing issues

bingo.

it's like a health supplement company telling you eating healthy is stupid when they have this powder/pill you should take.

tech evangelism is very cultish and one of it's values is worshipping 'youth' and 'novelty' to an absurd degree, as if youth is automatically superior to experience and age.

Sir this is Lemmy & I'm afraid I have to downvote you for defending AI which is always bad. /s

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.

—a story told by Socrates, according to his student Plato

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 ÷ 30.436875 ≈ 34 months and...

0.2019343313 × 30.436875 ≈ 6 days and...

0.146249999987 × 24 ≈ 3 hours and...

0.509999999688 × 60 ≈ 30 minutes and...

0.59999998128 × 60 ≈ 35 seconds and...

0.9999988768 × 1000 ≈ 999 milliseconds and

0.9999988768 × 1000000 ≈ 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.

I swear the companies hard code solutions for weird edge cases so their investors are fooled into believing that their LLMs are getting smarter.

Rough estimate using 30 days as average month would be ~35 months (1050 = 35×30). 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

You forgot doing the years, which is a bit trickier if we take into account the leap years.

According to the Gregorian calendar, every fourth year is a leap year unless it's divisible by 100 – except those divisible by 400 which are leap years anyway. Hence, the average length of one year (over 400 years) must be:

365 + 1⁄4 − 1⁄100 + 1⁄400 = 365.2425 days

So,

1041 / 365.2425 ≈ 2.85 years

Or 2 years and...

0.850161194275 × 365.2425 ≈ 310 days and...

0.514999999987 × 24 ≈ 12 hours and...

0.359999999688 × 60 ≈ 21 minutes and...

0.59999998128 × 60 ≈ 36 seconds

1041 days is just about 2y 310d 12h 21m 36s

Wtf, how did we go from 1041 whole days to fractions of a day? Damn leap years!

Had we not been accounting for them, we would have had 2 years and...

0.852054794521 × 365 = 311.000000000165 days

Or simply 2y 311d if we just ignore that tiny rounding error or use fewer decimals.

This is the furthest thing from my experience lol I can type 2 letters in my phone, see the right name and press call. I haven’t memorised a phone number since before the year 2000* (*hyperbole)

How does it suggest that?

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.

Or one could entirely skip the part where they read the study beyond the headline.

I don't think this is a fair comparison because arithmetic is a very small and almost inconsequential skill to develop within the framework of mathematics. Any human that doesn't have severe learning disabilities will be able to develop a sufficient baseline of arithmetic skills.

The really useful aspects of math are things like how to think quantitatively. How to formulate a problem mathematically. How to manipulate mathematical expressions in order to reach a solution. For the most part these are not things that calculators do for you. In some cases reaching for a calculator may actually be a distraction from making real progress on the problem. In other cases calculators can be a useful tool for learning and building your intuition - graphing calculators are especially useful for this.

The difference with LLMs is that we are being led to believe that LLMs are sufficient to solve your problems for you, from start to finish. In the past students who develop a reflex to reach for a calculator when they don't know how to solve a problem were thwarted by the fact that the calculator won't actually solve it for them. Nowadays students develop that reflex and reach for an LLM instead, and now they can walk away with the belief that the LLM is really solving their problems, which creates both a dependency and a misunderstanding of what LLMs are really suited to do for them.

I'd be a lot less bothered if LLMs were made to provide guidance to students, a la the Socratic method: posing leading questions to the students and helping them to think along the right tracks. That might also help mitigate the fact that LLMs don't reliably know the answers: if the user is presented with a leading question instead of an answer then they're still left with the responsibility of investigating and validating.

But that doesn't leave users with a sense of immediate gratification which makes it less marketable and therefore less opportunity to profit...

Don't lean on an AI if you want to develop general cognition essay writing skills.

Sorry the study only examined the ability to respond to SAT writing prompts, not general cognitive abilities. Further, they showed that the ones who used an AI just went back to "normal" levels of ability when they had to write it on their own.

Sure, and it’s important to know how to perform math functions without a calculator. But once you learn it, and move on to something more advanced or day-to-day work, you use the calculator.

Look at this lazy fucker learning trig from someone else, instead of creating it from scratch!

Not only that but *broad gestures at society and the state of the world post-Internet*

A constant refrain I've found myself using with a Facebook "friend" is "you lack the ability to even understand why you are wrong". Like I'm convinced he actually thinks anecdotal stories carry as much weight as troves of data proving him wrong.

I bet you think you're totally fine... ;)

Realistically speaking, why would anyone think it's odd to defend something they use and/or enjoy? That doesn't really point to anything abnormal.

...you are in a technology community? They're barely defending anything either, just a reasonable take about people saying the same thing about earlier technologies.

Clearly their mind has been taken over by the machine /s

Baffling comment tbh

It is not. As with all things, LLMs have their use. Unfortunately, they are slightly overhyped and the tech is very resource hungry, contributing to environmental and societal problems in at least the USA, probably everywhere to at least some extent.

The hope is, ofcourse, that the same tech will help alleviate those problems in turn. Time will tell who's right.

doing something wrong is worse than doing nothing.

Is this a general statement right? Try to forget about context then and read that again 😅

I actually think the moments when AI goes wrong are the moments that stimulate you and make you realize what you're doing and what you want to achieve better. And when you do subsequent prompts to fix the issue, you essentially do problem solving on figuring out what to ask to make it do the exact thing you want. And it's never going to be always right, simply because most of cases of it being wrong is you not providing enough details about what you actually want. So step-by-step AI usage with clarifications and fixes is always going to be brain-stimulating problem solving process.

unconfined_u:object_r:user_home_t:s0

sudo semanage fcontext -a -t etc_t "/etc/wireguard(/.*)?"
sudo restorecon -Rv /etc/wireguard

It helped me a ton this summer learn gardening basics and pick out local plants which are now feeding local pollinators. That is something i never had the motivation to tackle from scratch even though i knew i should.

Given the track record of some models, I'd question the accuracy of the information it gave you. I would have recommended consulting traditional sources.

Saw you down-voted and wanted to advise that I am glad you went on to learn some things you had been meaning to, that alone makes the experiment worthwhile as discipline is a rare enough beast. To be clear I myself have a Claude subscription that is about to lapse, and find the article unfortunately spot on. I feel fortunate to have moved away from LLMs naturally.

A diy VPN is exactly the disaster scenario of vibe coding.

a custom VPN without security minded planning and knowledge? that sounds like a disaster.

surely you could do other things that have more impact for yourself, still with computers. use wireguard and spend the time with setting up your services and network security.
and, port forwarding.. I don't know where are you running that, but linux iptables can do that too, in the kernel, with better performance.