Libra
@Libra@lemmy.ml
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 23 hours ago:
That, I’m afraid, is the nature of technology: it makes everything easier, even the stuff you really wish it didn’t.
- Comment on There's a noticable influx of trans kids in my job. Are there any topics I should avoid or considerations I should take into account when training them? 1 day ago:
Respect them for who they are, and listen to them if they tell you you’re fucking it up, just like you would with anyone else. It’s almost as if trans people are just people. ;)
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
I’ve heard it said before that the limitation on empire size is about 2 weeks. That is to say, if it takes longer than 2 weeks to get a message from the capital to the frontier it causes instability. So, it’s more about time than absolute physical size.
- Comment on Discord unveils Discord Orbs, a new in-app currency that users can earn by completing Quests, which reward participants who interact with ads 2 days ago:
Enshittificaiton is a uniquely capitalist thing, so…
- Comment on Discord unveils Discord Orbs, a new in-app currency that users can earn by completing Quests, which reward participants who interact with ads 2 days ago:
Yeah, my primary concern is I’m part of a community of ~350 people who games together, and while there’s probably some folks in there who could swing a server, right now discord isn’t costing us anything and does everything we want (chat, voice, streaming, etc). If we were to consider moving we would probably need a reasonably beefy server and some software with all of those features, and right now that just doesn’t seem feasible.
- Comment on Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet 2 days ago:
I quite liked Walkaway, but I’ve got kind of an anarchist bent myself, so.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 2 days ago:
Replace ‘stop remembering things’ with ‘remember fewer things’ at your own leisure if it makes you happy, I’m exaggerating slightly to make a point.
My argument is not that we will stop practising critical thinking altogether, but that we will not need to practise it as often.
And mine is that as far as I know we have no evidence (or at least nothing more than anecdotal evidence at best) for that because society has only gotten more complex, not less, and requires more thought, memory, etc to navigate it. Now instead of remembering which cow was sick last week and which field I’m going to plant tomorrow I have to remember shit like how to navigate a city that’s larger than the range in which most people traveled their entire lives, I have to figure out what this weird error my PC just threw means, I have to calculate the risk-vs-reward of trying to buy a house now or renting for a year to save up for a better down payment and improve my credit, etc. These are just examples, pick your own if you don’t like them.
Less practise always makes you worse at something. I do not need evidence for that as it is obvious.
Now who’s being reductive? I’m not asking for evidence that less practice makes you worse at something, I’m asking for evidence that labor-saving devices result in people doing less labor (mental or otherwise), because I think that’s a lot less obvious.
I have seen how today’s students are using it instead of using their brains
This is a bad example because learning is a different matter. People using it instead of learning will not learn the subject matter as well as those who don’t, obviously. But it’s a lot less obvious in other fields/adult life. Will I be less good at code because I use an LLM to generate some now and then? Probably not, both because I’ve been coding off and on for 30 years, but also because my time instead is spent on tackling the thornier problems that AI can’t do or has difficulty with, managing large projects because AI has a limited memory window, etc.
We teach critical thinking in schools for a reason, because it’s something that does not always come naturally, and these students are getting AI to do the work for them instead of learning how to think.
That’s debatable, though I guess it depends on where you’re from and what the schools are like there. They certainly didn’t teach critical thinking when I was in (US public) school, I had to figure that shit out largely on my own. But that’s beside the point. Shortcutting learning is bad, I agree. Shortcutting work is a lot more nebulous and uncertain in the absence of that evidence I keep asking for.
- Comment on Why do people care so much that their friend or family member’s partner is attractive and not just loving? 2 days ago:
Because some people are just shallow.
- Comment on Microsoft wants Windows Update to handle all apps 2 days ago:
And I want Windows and all its bullshit to heck off!
Fortunately I’m winning that one so far.
PRETTY_NAME=“Nobara Linux 42 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition)” - Comment on Discord unveils Discord Orbs, a new in-app currency that users can earn by completing Quests, which reward participants who interact with ads 2 days ago:
Next thing you know the ‘orbs’ will be NFTs and we’ll all be expected to grind away at their ‘quests’ (probably training AI) to earn ‘real money’.
- Comment on Discord unveils Discord Orbs, a new in-app currency that users can earn by completing Quests, which reward participants who interact with ads 2 days ago:
increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.
The word you’re looking for is enshittification.
- Comment on Discord unveils Discord Orbs, a new in-app currency that users can earn by completing Quests, which reward participants who interact with ads 2 days ago:
Damn, I’ve been thinking about checking it out, but if it doesn’t do voice at all (and I would also really like streaming) it’s just not worth it to me. Text chat is nice, but I spend 2-3 hours evenings hanging out in voice with friends and I don’t want to lose that. Messing with two separate apps is just not worth it atm, so I’ma keep steadfastly ignoring Discord’s bullshit until Matrix is where I need it to be to switch. Although then the problem will be getting everyone else to switch, of course.
- Comment on Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet 2 days ago:
I listen attentively to pretty much anything Cory Doctorow says about the internet and technology, he’s been consistently insightful as hell on the subject. His books are also pretty good.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 2 days ago:
For sure, I even said so.
Social media makes it easier to fearmonger and spread hatred, no doubt
I hate to break it to you though; I grew up during the Cold War and propaganda was literally everywhere before the invention of the internet. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Red Scare?
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 3 days ago:
This seems like a capitalism problem, not a technology problem. That endless drive to greater productivity so that others can extract the bulk of the value thereof for their own benefit instead of the benefit of everyone is a big part of what’s eating up the purported leisure-time. But also that’s a choice you can make: I choose to spend my spare mental capacity learning about how the world works and engaging with ideas about how it ought to work. If people choose to spend that extra capacity doom-scrolling social media and keeping up with the virtual Joneses or whatever then that’s on them, but I’m not here to judge, I do that sometimes too. Life takes it out of you, sometimes you just need some low-effort destressing. But the point stands: offloading labor (mental or otherwise) to technology and then turning that time/energy/etc to stuff that’s more important is just how humans work.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 3 days ago:
That’s fair, and not something I disagree with.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 3 days ago:
No, fear and hatred lead to things like MAGA and the rise of Nazis. Social media makes it easier to fearmonger and spread hatred, no doubt, but it is by no means the cause of those things.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 3 days ago:
The people who were used to the oral tradition were right. Memorising things is good for your memory. No, I don’t think people will stop thinking altogether
Except people didn’t stop memorizing things. I went to school in the 1970s - unarguably a long-ass time after we stopped using the oral tradition as the primary method to transmit culture) and I was memorizing shit left and right. I still remember those multiplication tables, ‘in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue’, etc 40-odd years later.
(please don’t be reductive like this lmao)
Sorry, I thought it was pretty clear that I was expressing skepticism at the idea that anyone actually thought this.
But people did get worse at remembering things.
If you have evidence that suggests that people got worse at remembering things between, say, ancient Greece and the Industrial Revolution I’d love to see it.
We know that using tools makes us worse at whatever the tool automates, because without practice you become worse at things.
Likewise if you have evidence that people stopped thinking with the invention of books, the calculator, computers, the internet, etc, don’t be shy about it.
because without practice you become worse at things.
You assume that offloading some mental processes to AI means we will stop practicing them. I argue that we’ll just use the capabilities we have for other things. I use ChatGPT to help me worldbuild, structure my writing projects, come up with thematically-consistent names, etc, for example, but it’s not writing for me and I still come up with names and such all the time.
- Comment on German court sends Volkswagen execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal 3 days ago:
I was making an argument about should, not does, and executing people is rather different than shooting someone in defense of yourself/others.
I agree that financial crimes should have harsh penalties, just not death. The problem is that we don’t generally apply penalties to this type of crime at all; fining a company $500mil after they made $40bil or whatever by circumventing laws/regulations is not a penalty, it’s the cost of doing business.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 4 days ago:
People said it about fucking writing; ‘If you don’t remember all this stuff yourself to pass it on you will be bad at remembering!’ No you won’t, you will just have more space to remember other more important shit.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 4 days ago:
Our dishwasher broke a few years ago.
This is a bad example because going from using a dishwasher to washing dishes is not a big leap in effort required. I doubt many of the people who get to do intellectual work in offices instead of doing back-breaking labor all day on a farm because of technology would agree that going back to that would improve their quality of life. Some of them would certainly find that to be a ‘richer experience’ too, if not for the lack of healthcare and air conditioning.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 4 days ago:
Did you get the impression from my comment that I was agreeing with the article? Because I’m very not, hence the ‘It’ll definitely be true this time’ which carries an implied ‘It wasn’t true any of those other times’, but the ‘definitely’ part is sarcasm. I have argued elsewhere in the post that all of this ‘xyz is making us dumb!’ shit is bunk.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 4 days ago:
Yeah, the people who were used to the oral tradition said the same thing about writing stuff down, ‘If you don’t remember all of this stuff yourself you’ll be bad at remembering!’, etc. But this is what humans do, what humans are: we evolved to make tools, we use the tools to simplify the things in our life so we can spend more time working on (and thinking about - or do you sincerely think people will just stop thinking altogether?) the shit we care about. Offloading mental labor likewise lets us focus our mental capacities on deeper, more important, more profound stuff. This is how human society, which requires specialization and division of labor at every level to function, works.
I’m old enough to remember when people started saying the same thing about the internet. Well I’ve been on the internet from pretty much the first moment it was even slightly publicly available (around 1992) and have been what is now called ‘terminally online’ ever since. If the internet is making us dumb I am the best possible candidate you could have to test that theory, but you know what I do when I’m not remembering phone numbers and handwriting everything and looking shit up in paper encyclopedias at the library? I’m reading and thinking about science, philosophy, religion, etc. That capacity didn’t go away, it just got turned to another purpose.
- Comment on AI is rotting your brain and making you stupid 4 days ago:
Oh lawd, another ‘new technology xyz is making us dumb!’ Yeah we’ve only been saying that since the invention of writing, I’m sure it’s definitely true this time.
- Comment on German court sends Volkswagen execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal 4 days ago:
I mean my own counterargument to it as that no state should have the power to execute people, and if it should it shouldn’t use it on criminals, and if it should it shouldn’t use it on financial crimes. Yeah $12bil is a lot, and I am absolutely in favor of hard time as a punishment for financial crimes, but I don’t think seriously think anyone should die over it.
- Comment on German court sends Volkswagen execs to prison over Dieselgate scandal 4 days ago:
No, this is the way. But the above article is a good start.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 4 days ago:
Guy’s over here talking about a story involving tech and magic and you’re talking about how sci-fi works? I think you’re confused about how genres work.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 5 days ago:
We’re talking about technology in the context of a story here, so whether or not it’s high tech to the reader is besides the point. Which, as I was trying to elucidate, is that what matters is how the characters treat technology relative to magic, not the audience.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 5 days ago:
Like hunks of metal, but that’s not how I treat smartphones or fusion reactors or whatever. Technology is change, and there is no evidence in Star Wars that technology ever changes. They treat supercomputers with world-altering computational power compared to what we have like old console TVs from the 70s that you have to slap occasionally to make work again. Doesn’t seem like high-tech to me.
- Comment on Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work? 5 days ago:
They don’t treat it like high tech, they treat it like their granddad’s old beater of a car that somehow never dies or fails to get you where you’re going, but somehow never does a particularly good job either. They treat technology like we treat trees: a brute fact of life with some occasional redeeming qualities.