**AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance. **A paper from researchers at Oxford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and UCLA that needs to be seen by everyone in the education community.

Full Abstract in alt text.

#ai #GenAI #chatbots #edtech #education #academia #academicchatter

https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721

we're destroying the open web

we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria

and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe

i only know three people who've had a psychotic break in the last year, so maybe i am simply biased against progress

alas i am resigned to be "anti science" for daring to believe in the parade of studies that talk about skill fatigue

i am simply not capable of understanding how "a machine that makes you bad at thinking" is also "the machine that gives people agency" but i guess i don't have the right growth mindset

My stance on #LLM :

1. There _might_ be some useful use cases with this technology that could be worth exploring.

2. However, it is glaringly obvious that, as of now, their main purpose is to power the mother of all investments bubbles.

3. Which leads us to the present trillion dollar business case for "we must build energy- and water-wasting data centers everywhere so that we can scrape every single website a thousand times a month for new training data!"

4. Thus, there is currently pretty much no ethical way of using LLMs.

5. Any ethical exploration of LLM use cases will thus have to wait until the bubble has burst, the investors have moved on to the next scam, and we can sort through the rubble to check what is left.

At no point in the past 30 years of my career in the technology industry has any boss ever said "gee Ross, the latest technological advances have made you 5x more productive, would you like to cut back to working 8 hours a week for the same pay?" and I have very much noticed the absence of that discussion.

If you program, you should read this piece.

"Ada's successes — the aircraft that have not crashed, the railway signalling systems that have not failed, the missile guidance software that has not misguided — are invisible precisely because they are successes. The languages that failed visibly, in buffer overflows and null pointer exceptions and data races and security vulnerabilities, generated the discourse. [Ada did not]"

https://www.iqiipi.com/the-quiet-colossus.html

“Stuck Character Service”

https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/stuck-character-service/

> "It's early days" – people toss out that cliche all the time to defend the failures of "AI" to work well, to be embraced, to make money, and so on. But it's not early days. Not remotely. We've been trapped in Sam Altman's ChatGPT hustle for almost five years now.

@futurebird

"He's one waffle shy of a teleport, if you know what I mean."

"Her teleporter doesn't go all the way to the Waffle House."

"The teleporter's on, but the Waffle House is closed."

Advice for community managers:

Use the Olivia Hill rule.

It's surprisingly easy to enforce:

Fascists get really upset and will talk to you about why the rule is bad.

You then ban them.

That's it, that's all the work it takes!

Montana's supreme court rules widely in defense of trans rights, nuking several anti-trans bills: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/montana-supreme-court-rules-its-constitution

Every consensus position paper I read from software research about AI right now:

- AI should provide assistance
- but also make sure people don't use assistance
- should be a command center
- but not make people "managers"
- should synthesize data based on patterns
- but never reify patterns and ignore outliers
- "critical thinking"*

*which is what exactly

If I had to identify a list of skills in high impact engineers, it would include:

- ecological awe
- intellectual humility
- respect for the complexity of unfamiliar problems
- cross functional communication
- resilience engineering
- marketing and sales

(“Technical skills” aren’t in my top ten)

Hello #portfolioday,

I'm Bison a woodcarver from France ✌️

I take commissions, and would love to work on team projects.

🐙 https://bisonrimant.fr
✉️ bisonrimant@gmail.com

"I used AI. It worked. I hated it." by @mttaggart https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/

This is a really good blogpost. And I"m sure it'll make some people unhappy to read whether they're pro or anti genAI. What's good about @mttaggart's blogpost is he talks honestly about how using Claude Code did actually solve the problem he set out to do. It needed various guardrails, but they were possible to set up, and the project worked. But the post is also completely clear and honest about how miserable it was:

- It removed the joy from the process
- If you aim to do the right thing and carefully evaluate the output, your job ends up eventually becoming "tapping the Y key"
- Ramifications on people learning things
- Plenty of other ethical analysis
- And the nagging wonder whether to use it next time, despite it being miserable.

I think this is important, because it *is* true that these tools are getting to the point where they can accomplish a lot of tasks, but the caveat space is very large (cotd)

I freaking love my #SyncThing setup, it makes workflow across multiple devices on a local network — Linux and Windows desktops, an Android phone, occasionally even a Steam Deck — so easy and seamless! There's an initial learning/setup curve and at one point Windows threw a curve ball by arbitrarily switching folders around, but once you get used to the basic concepts things make sense, troubleshooting isn't too much trouble, and it's a breeze to flexibly configure folders for different uses like one-way backups (e.g. sending phone pics and footage to desktop) and two-way synchronization (e.g. keeping folders synced between desktops or between a desktop and phone).

Them: if you set aside all the ethical concerns…

Me: this is what evil is. This is how evil talks.

I’m not trans. As far as I know, my kids aren’t at the moment. Nobody in my family is. None of my good friends are. I don’t prescribe medication for gender affirming care. I don’t specifically treat folks for gender dysphoria. So why do I give a fuck?

You don’t punch down. There’s no transgender machine producing trans judiciary and trans politicians and trans PACs to come for my cisgender. There are trans folks being discriminated against, outed, beaten, jailed, and killed. I hate bullies.

Ok, today’s xkcd is glorious!

[edit] I should probably mention you need to visit the site for the full effect, it’s more than just a comic today!

https://xkcd.com/3227/

For no reason at all, please give me your favourite cow-related figures of speech! (Stuff like "No use crying over spilled milk" or "until the cows come home", puns extremely welcome)