Lynda Barry on How the Smartphone Is Endangering Three Ingredients of Creativity: Loneliness, Uncertainty & Boredom | Open Culture

The delete but­ton makes it so that any­thing you’re unsure of you can get rid of, so noth­ing new has a chance. Writ­ing by hand is a rev­e­la­tion for peo­ple. Maybe that’s why they asked me to NASA – I still know how to use my hands… there is a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing that goes along with them.

Source: Lynda Barry on How the Smartphone Is Endangering Three Ingredients of Creativity: Loneliness, Uncertainty & Boredom | Open Culture

Give Django your time and money, not your tokens · Better Simple

In this way, an LLM is a facade of yourself. It helps you project understanding, contemplation, and growth, but it removes the transparency and vulnerability of being a human. For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human. This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.

Source: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens · Better Simple

An Entirely Other Day: Lose Myself

People will argue that speaking English to LLMs is just another level of abstraction away from the physics of how the machine actually works. And while that’s technically true — the worst kind of true — it also misses the point. Industrialization fundamentally changes things, by quantum degrees. A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream directly into your mouth while standing in front of the fridge at 2:00am. The level of care, of personalization, of intimacy — both given and taken — changes its nature. Digging a trench is a very different thing than telling someone to dig a trench. Assembling a clock is a very different thing than asking Siri for the time.

Source: An Entirely Other Day: Lose Myself

Hoard things you know how to do – Agentic Engineering Patterns – Simon Willison’s Weblog

Knowing that something is theoretically possible is not the same as having seen it done for yourself. A key asset to develop as a software professional is a deep collection of answers to questions like this, ideally illustrated by running code. I hoard solutions like this in a number of different ways. My blog and TIL blog are crammed with notes on things I’ve figured out how to do. I have over a thousand GitHub repos collecting code I’ve written for different projects, many of them small proof-of-concepts that demonstrate a key idea.

Source: Hoard things you know how to do – Agentic Engineering Patterns – Simon Willison’s Weblog

The hidden cost of letting AI make your life easier

He directs attention to a marginal yet indispensable figure: the Google DeepMind employee seated beside the board, manually placing stones for a machine with no arms. This person did not understand AlphaGo’s strategies. He did not need to be a skilled Go player, and perhaps did not even fully grasp the rules of the game. He was never regarded as the new world champion, and no one credits him with even a fraction of the achievement. So who, in fact, won? The engineers behind AlphaGo, absent from the games themselves? The system alone? Or, unsettlingly, no one at all?

Source: The hidden cost of letting AI make your life easier

What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?

If an AI can go to school for you what’s the point of going to school? For Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn’t one. “I think about horses,” he said. “They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I’d argue horses became a lot more free,” he said. “They can do whatever they want now. It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

Source: What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?