This is interesting to me because in my job as a senior dev I can tell that there are greater opportunities for me if I can improve my skills. As a result, I think this may speak to your work environment more than the nature of being senior.
Plausible-sounding mechanisms like you're presenting here do not add value to the discourse without data. There are tons of plausible mechanisms we could make up absent empirical evidence to distinguish them.
Most folks subjectively prefer having light after work because that's when it's more fun to do stuff. Unfortunately, the health impacts are (objectively!) worse under permanent daylight saving time.
My sense is the same as the authors that LLMs + an Anki-like -> mediocrity. But I feel like there ought to be such potential there! Even just things as simple as rewording the same question a bunch of equivalent ways to avoid recognizing the sentence structure...
Downside for AI potential as a whole, framed broadly: We don't seem to be good enough yet at identifying what friction is functional and what we should strive to automate/eliminate.
I would also support this if there were a way to do it without privacy implications for actual adults. Unfortunately, there is not, and more unfortunately still, there is not widespread understanding of that fact. I think our industry owes more honesty to the public about the trade-offs.
V used game guides as an example of how LLMs corrode a culture of user-generated material provided out of love / desire for clout / etc. and I think about this a lot. Funny to see this specific example come back
This is not rambling and it is not abstract. The content here is about the second-order effects of "getting AI to write code for you" in less supervised ways. I'll cede the author could have polished this to more concise effect, but at the level it's at, a reader's failure to understand the substance doesn't imply there's mystification going on.
I fully agree! It is in keeping with that sense that it is important that I object to a system where society expects non-parents to do it for free within a mesh of social obligation, and where that burden falls disproportionately on one gender.
My great-great-grandmother was made to drop out of school to take care of her nephew after the child's mother died. This, too, is what a "village" looks like – stunting a girl's future for the needs of someone else's child.
Believing "if X, Y" is not unacceptable in 2026. That was the analysis of the recent FT article too, pointing to the fertility rates in different countries with different success in expanding education to women. The difference is what you did not state, which would be to say "Therefore, we should not allow girls to attend school beyond 16 or women to have professional careers". That would be quite a take in 2026 (or in, frankly, 1926).
In theory very little of it has to be about women specifically, but practice is different. (The expectations that used to exist for ~teenage girls to babysit for free for their relatives are somewhat undersold relative to adult labor, maybe)
I wish society had taxed me (desired path zero children) more in some way that would have routed the resources to my friend who would have wanted to start having kids earlier and have more. Instead, the combination of regional housing crisis with contemporary parenting standards meant she and her husband waited for career progression to have the money for the space to start.
Do you believe the same people were saying those things? (Were they really?) The idea that "different attitudes towards labor have been expressed by different people" doesn't feel too remarkable
Imagining a version of this that scales by how long I've been using the phone since the screen's been off. If I need to check something quickly, I want the internet and processing to be fast, because checking my phone a lot is fine with me – just not zoning out for long periods of time. First 60s or so unpenalized. Then beyond that, if I'm getting close to my daily target, it starts throttling. A little longer than 60s? Maybe only a bit slowed down. 5min? I want it to get cronchy. Not sure network's the right axis though. Maybe actual screen responsiveness?
> This is an addiction and reaching for the phone is just what gives relief to whatever pain one might be experiencing. Just removing that is laying ground for a substitute.
This model would not suggest the results seen in studies like this:
This is really interesting! I don't know that I would have expected the result, but it's laid out well. Easy to absorb the wrong paradox into one's mental model of the world...
I'm pretty sure all these models have terms of service that make the user assert that they have permission to use the content you're feeding into them (clickwrap infringement-is-the-user's-fault). This kind of integration makes a mockery of that.
> If you work in construction, you need to lift and carry a series of heavy objects in order to be effective. But lifting heavy objects puts long-term wear on your back and joints, making you less effective over time. Construction workers don’t say that being a good construction worker means not lifting heavy objects. They say “too bad, that’s the job”.
My parents were both construction workers. There is an understanding that you cannot lift heavy objects forever. You stop lifting objects and move to being a foreman, a supervisor... and if you are uncomfortable learning to get others to do work that you before have done yourself, you burn out your body entirely and the consequences are horrible.
This is factual reality, but it is also a parable that has been important for me to internalize about delegation in my own career. It is not irrelevant to AI use, but I don't think it slots onto it totally as neatly.
she/her