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It's like I said in another article, I've spent my life in C# and JavaScript. I'm a low-level programmer now, did even have to learn C.

Actually, they have for a large majority of the population. And fun fact: that debate is still going on, and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) enacted a rule prohibiting calculator use in AMC.

https://ivyleaguecenter.org/2024/03/12/over-reliance-on-calc...

Math fosters critical thinking, and we've been in a critical thinking deficit for decades and decades. I don't think we can afford to sink even deeper...

No.

With a calculator you still need to understand the fundamentals of mathematics. You also need to understand how to operate a calculator and know its functions.

With an LLM, you don't even need to know anything other than asking the robot to perform. You don't understand the output, nor can an unskilled person explain it.

A more apt analogy is the diminishing understanding of assembly language and machine instruction sets. I love programming and something got lost in both transitions, first to high level languages and now to coding agents. I am quite sure some contexts will require programming by hand for a long while as there are still people who are writing amd64/avx512/sass by hand. I hope in time we will find new ways to enjoy solving problems with this new programming modality. By now, I am pretty sure it is here to stay and evolve from its current crude form.

That's a very good point. People don't pull out their calculator in the grocery store to do analysis of unit costs or whatever, it's too much of a hassle for that small kind of analysis. But calculators have robbed us of the need to be good at doing that math in our heads. So the math doesn't get done.

I have heard stories of cashiers being incapable of giving correct change. So yes it has happened.

Nah, the difference is your average calculator doesn't take over executive function.

This is more like paying someone else to read your math homework and then submit the answers on your behalf.

Arithmetic skills. And they probably have?

Math skills had never anything to do with arithmetic. Maybe Ramanujan discovered a couple of theorems by dealing with numbers themselves. That is it.

Online discourse though is collapsing under dumb AI talking points.

1) have they not? 2) not a level comparison

"Mental math skills" literally did collapse tho??? "Math skills" to write proofs (which a calculator cannot do) is a fundamentally different skill set than that "math skills" of mechanically doing arithmetic (which a calculator does do).

Seems like critical reading skills have already collapsed.

They probably have though.

This is the same kind of analogy people make when they "poo-pooh" any sort of technological advance, especially with AI.

"Oh, that old simple device didn't displace anything, so this one which is now quickly taking over every job will be just like that simple one". So I guess people today know how to sew and knit and bake bread?

"Oh, humans were always needed, so it'll be the same this time." Is that true of horses and oxen after cars and tractors were invented?

Your calculator isn’t designed to keep you addicted to it and doesn’t have baked in orders like “be humorous and irreverent when appropriate.”

Also, yes I am dependent on a calculator.

This is exactly the right analogy. Granted LLMs are a more sophisticated calculator and engineering is still adapting to this wonky/evolving technology. But to pretend it's a coming catastrophe is to ignore every past parallel development - where this has not happened.

Yeah I'm not convinced people are just going to give up solving problems

There's something weird about nurse pay where it doesn't seem to raise even during large shortages of qualified nurses. I think it's artificially lowered by hospital admin, with temporary traveling nurses acting as "scabs" to avoid the normal wage increasing

The Labor Theory of Value was defeated decades ago, get with the times

I'm solving harder and harder problems for real users/customers than I was a year ago and our sales are increasing as a result.

I think nurses in the Bay Area make like 200k a year

The effort/pay ratio never made sense though.

Do you think LLMs and compilers have a lot of overlap?

In contrast with Pascal, I could see in my mind the PDP-11 instructions behind my C code. By the time I started running code on x86, there were debuggers that could step through source code, and I didn't really want to think like an i386.

> I don't know how you teach that without coding

That's the neat part: you don't!

Even Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin, who's as AI pilled as they come and doesn't read code any longer, says that junior developers shouldn't even look at AI tooling for the first three years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxxxGkFIUJ0&t=1356s

We don't teach kids math with access to calculators, and so on. Making students code by hand at first is a very moderate proposition

> LLMs are just another abstraction layer above programming languages, machine language, etc.

Programming languages are (largely) deterministic. LLMs are not. The boundary between an abstract concept and something executable sits comfortably in the mind of the programmer in non-LLM contexts. This boundary shifts when using an LLM and becomes shared between the programmer and the matrix multiplication machine.

The "layer of abstraction" analogy is therefore technically true but essentially false. "Just another" papers over how seismic of a paradigm shift all of this is.

Not to mention the idea in the article has kinda been beaten to death

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it