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The younger generations do seem to be embracing AI more, but mainly because it can do their homework for them without requiring them to learn anything. For now

The younger generations do seem to be embracing AI more, but mainly because it can do their homework for them without requiring them to learn anything. For now at least, until curriculums have time to adjust to this new reality.

diggan 2y ago
I initially picked up programming because I wanted to create things (well, initially break things, but moved on from that), and the programming was one way of doing that. I only learned how to structure my programs, because they became hard to change. I only learned testing and refactoring, because I noticed I was faster when the code was better and more tested, even if the upfront cost was slightly higher. If I was 14-15 around this time, when I first picked up programming, but had an LLM on my side, I'm not sure what the outcome would be, to be honest. I'd use them, that's for sure, but once I got a working application out of them, would I be curious enough to understand as much as I understand now, if it wasn't required? Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?
- n4r9 2y ago
  > would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks? Would even that have some downsides in the long-term, since the process of banging one's head could be crucial to rewiring your brain to understand new concepts.
  - diggan 2y ago
    Yeah, I'm guessing that most of my valuable knowledge comes from sessions like this, where something is hard, and eventually you solve it. If I was in the same situation today, I'd probably keep throwing stuff at the LLM until it got it right, and not really learn anything. But then on the other hand, the point was never to learn, but to create. I'm still not sure if I'd be better or worse at actually creating things if I had LLMs in the beginning or not.
  - Arisaka1 2y ago
    I think the argument made is, if there's no added value by understanding something deeper when it will inevitably do better than now, the only reason to dig deeper is for one's curiosity. All that digging now translates to expertise that is critical and potentially lucrative. But if it's only going to get better then for how long will this be true?
- eMPee584 2y ago
  > all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks? thanks for this lil' dose of copium, so at least it qualifies as character buildup what a relief
- lurk2 2y ago
  > Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks? This was my experience. I’m not a programmer but I enjoy playing around with Python. I work with it a lot more and make far more complicated programs now because I don’t have to spend half an hour trying to find a solution to my problem on StackOverflow. The issue I found is that I don’t bother trying to build anything on my own anymore, so even though I’ve learned a lot about designing programs, my knowledge of Python has probably actually declined.
- noisy_boy 2y ago
  Its like computing gave us the most powerful paintbrush of all time and we said, "nah, you do the painting".
- randomopining 2y ago
  AI is just another abstraction. It's not like a senior Java dev can implement LocalDate.now() or CompletableFuture.await()
nisa 2y ago
It's creating devastating effects in higher education here. I'm a bit older but did a masters after working a few years and I've now decided to quit because most - if not all - students just upload the sheets to an llm and copy the output. Group projects used to be really intense and interesting here - now my partners in the group-projects ask me to explain their code to them. It's not an ivy-league university here but it used to be that I had a lot of fun working hard with other students to work on the projects and we learned a lot doing this - this is completely gone. It's 100% transactional - how can I go through this as fast as possible - as a result people fail the exams at unseen rates like 50-80% in classes that can be passed by learning a few days and doing the exercises yourself. I'm suffering from quite a bit of ADHD symptoms - for the past 20 years - I already got an diagnosis and I can survive even if it's a shitty thing to have - but it feels like now everyone around me shares the same fate and people seem to forgot how to work or study or worse - never learned it. I've used to be an outlier, sharing my fate with 2 or 3 other people in the class back when doing the bachelors - we failed in spectacular ways in some areas while outshining everyone else in other areas but it was a honest struggle. I'm okay with that - I'm not made to be a researcher or writing a PhD in computer science or math. But I can work in my area of expertise - however what is happening with all these graduates? Is this the fault of AI? Not really but society isn't really prepared for what is happening now. People correcting the exercises tell me it's impossible to proof LLM usage and 90% of the results are just ChatGPT - funnily enough this was a machine learning 101 class. Another thing I've noticed that often when looking at LLMs prompts from other students and their application of the results that they kind of don't help them to really learn and improve yourself - you are stuck on your level of knowledge and so are your prompts and the quality of questions you ask and the way you handle the answers which results in very weird effects. So you are talking with your group member to load some binary serialized arrays for a computer vision projects and use numpy to do some calculations. Next meeting you have some code that does something but it's using another dataset and completely different code, runs 100x slower and solves a slightly different problem. All you get is a shrug. I'm better off watching Youtube or working than staying in university. It's not the fault of the teachers but I've came back because of human interaction and because I don't want to learn alone. This is almost gone here. All of this - even if it sucks - would be somehow okay but the thing I'm scared of the most lately is the blatant dishonesty and lying I've been seeing in other students about their usage of AI - it's creating a kind of person that only pretends to be able to understand what it's doing but fails reliable to actually understand what LLMs tell them. I'm not made to deal with this and I'm getting angry. Tell me you've used an llm and you are not sure about the results, we can talk about it, work through it and improve upon it. Then it's actually a great thing to have LLMs - but I'm not seeing it. This will be interesting - not in the good way.
baxtr 2y ago
I am old. But when I was young I could not comprehend why they wouldn't not let us use calculators for stupid calculation task that humans have a hard time to compute.
bko 2y ago
I don't know if it's "embracing" it, it's just a fact of life. I remember in an interview with Marc Andreessen he spoke about introducing his 8 year old to chat gpt. He described the moment as monumental, likening it to "bringing fire down from the mountains." However, his son was unimpressed by the technology, responding, "It's a computer. Of course you ask it questions and it gives you answers. What else is it for?"
- deltarholamda 2y ago
  I compare it to something like PEDs or even painkillers. These too are a fact of life, but going down that road makes a lot of decisions for you. AI in certain hands will be fine. In other hands it will be a disaster for the person that uses it, because they will not perform the reps they need to really be able to think. Believing a computer is a magic box that gives answers is not great, it's adjacent to "believe and do what the computer tells you".

diggan 2y ago

I initially picked up programming because I wanted to create things (well, initially break things, but moved on from that), and the programming was one way of doing that. I only learned how to structure my programs, because they became hard to change. I only learned testing and refactoring, because I noticed I was faster when the code was better and more tested, even if the upfront cost was slightly higher. If I was 14-15 around this time, when I first picked up programming, but had an LLM on my side, I'm not sure what the outcome would be, to be honest. I'd use them, that's for sure, but once I got a working application out of them, would I be curious enough to understand as much as I understand now, if it wasn't required? Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks?

n4r9 2y ago
> would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks? Would even that have some downsides in the long-term, since the process of banging one's head could be crucial to rewiring your brain to understand new concepts.
- diggan 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm guessing that most of my valuable knowledge comes from sessions like this, where something is hard, and eventually you solve it. If I was in the same situation today, I'd probably keep throwing stuff at the LLM until it got it right, and not really learn anything. But then on the other hand, the point was never to learn, but to create. I'm still not sure if I'd be better or worse at actually creating things if I had LLMs in the beginning or not.
- Arisaka1 2y ago
  I think the argument made is, if there's no added value by understanding something deeper when it will inevitably do better than now, the only reason to dig deeper is for one's curiosity. All that digging now translates to expertise that is critical and potentially lucrative. But if it's only going to get better then for how long will this be true?
eMPee584 2y ago
> all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks? thanks for this lil' dose of copium, so at least it qualifies as character buildup what a relief
lurk2 2y ago
> Or would I have been able to learn even more and faster, since I wouldn't have been all alone banging my head against some trivial problem for weeks? This was my experience. I’m not a programmer but I enjoy playing around with Python. I work with it a lot more and make far more complicated programs now because I don’t have to spend half an hour trying to find a solution to my problem on StackOverflow. The issue I found is that I don’t bother trying to build anything on my own anymore, so even though I’ve learned a lot about designing programs, my knowledge of Python has probably actually declined.
noisy_boy 2y ago
Its like computing gave us the most powerful paintbrush of all time and we said, "nah, you do the painting".
randomopining 2y ago
AI is just another abstraction. It's not like a senior Java dev can implement LocalDate.now() or CompletableFuture.await()

nisa 2y ago

It's creating devastating effects in higher education here. I'm a bit older but did a masters after working a few years and I've now decided to quit because most - if not all - students just upload the sheets to an llm and copy the output. Group projects used to be really intense and interesting here - now my partners in the group-projects ask me to explain their code to them. It's not an ivy-league university here but it used to be that I had a lot of fun working hard with other students to work on the projects and we learned a lot doing this - this is completely gone. It's 100% transactional - how can I go through this as fast as possible - as a result people fail the exams at unseen rates like 50-80% in classes that can be passed by learning a few days and doing the exercises yourself. I'm suffering from quite a bit of ADHD symptoms - for the past 20 years - I already got an diagnosis and I can survive even if it's a shitty thing to have - but it feels like now everyone around me shares the same fate and people seem to forgot how to work or study or worse - never learned it. I've used to be an outlier, sharing my fate with 2 or 3 other people in the class back when doing the bachelors - we failed in spectacular ways in some areas while outshining everyone else in other areas but it was a honest struggle. I'm okay with that - I'm not made to be a researcher or writing a PhD in computer science or math. But I can work in my area of expertise - however what is happening with all these graduates? Is this the fault of AI? Not really but society isn't really prepared for what is happening now. People correcting the exercises tell me it's impossible to proof LLM usage and 90% of the results are just ChatGPT - funnily enough this was a machine learning 101 class. Another thing I've noticed that often when looking at LLMs prompts from other students and their application of the results that they kind of don't help them to really learn and improve yourself - you are stuck on your level of knowledge and so are your prompts and the quality of questions you ask and the way you handle the answers which results in very weird effects. So you are talking with your group member to load some binary serialized arrays for a computer vision projects and use numpy to do some calculations. Next meeting you have some code that does something but it's using another dataset and completely different code, runs 100x slower and solves a slightly different problem. All you get is a shrug. I'm better off watching Youtube or working than staying in university. It's not the fault of the teachers but I've came back because of human interaction and because I don't want to learn alone. This is almost gone here. All of this - even if it sucks - would be somehow okay but the thing I'm scared of the most lately is the blatant dishonesty and lying I've been seeing in other students about their usage of AI - it's creating a kind of person that only pretends to be able to understand what it's doing but fails reliable to actually understand what LLMs tell them. I'm not made to deal with this and I'm getting angry. Tell me you've used an llm and you are not sure about the results, we can talk about it, work through it and improve upon it. Then it's actually a great thing to have LLMs - but I'm not seeing it. This will be interesting - not in the good way.

baxtr 2y ago

I am old. But when I was young I could not comprehend why they wouldn't not let us use calculators for stupid calculation task that humans have a hard time to compute.

bko 2y ago

I don't know if it's "embracing" it, it's just a fact of life. I remember in an interview with Marc Andreessen he spoke about introducing his 8 year old to chat gpt. He described the moment as monumental, likening it to "bringing fire down from the mountains." However, his son was unimpressed by the technology, responding, "It's a computer. Of course you ask it questions and it gives you answers. What else is it for?"

deltarholamda 2y ago
I compare it to something like PEDs or even painkillers. These too are a fact of life, but going down that road makes a lot of decisions for you. AI in certain hands will be fine. In other hands it will be a disaster for the person that uses it, because they will not perform the reps they need to really be able to think. Believing a computer is a magic box that gives answers is not great, it's adjacent to "believe and do what the computer tells you".