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strangescript a day ago

Yeah, anytime I am about to do some long multiplication, I start reaching for my calculator and stop, "no, you will go to the multiplication gym, and do this by hand, need to stay sharp"

svieira a day ago | parent | next [-]

I am not sure if you are serious, but I literally DO this, not just for multiplication, but for lots of automatable things.

aaronbaugher a day ago | parent | next [-]

Same here. I stopped writing in cursive in high school and completely lost the ability, and it was difficult to learn again as an adult when I wanted to. I don't want to lose basic skills like multiplication, and exercising them occasionally prevents that.

beej71 a day ago | parent [-]

I started journaling in cursive after taking a 40-year break from it. I've gotten better, and am now faster at writing cursive than non.

Even losing programming skills to AI... I'll bet we can get them back.

Definitely easier to not lose them in the first place, though.

mvieira38 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Love your surname dude (also your religion). AMDG

pyfon a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes I do for estimation. If I can calculate requests per minute in my head I saved time.

Also in your analogy the calculator is the compiler :). AI would be someone telling you the numbers to use and you just trust em.

nunez 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Exactly how we've arrived at tip calculators for adults being extremely popular.

ori_b a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't reach for calculators so often. When numbers are small or mental approximations will do, it's simply faster to do it in my head. And I'm not even good at mental math.

mvieira38 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I actually do this and so do many of my peers...

bobbyraduloff a day ago | parent | prev [-]

This is an absolutely false equivalency. There’s no decision making, design consideration, architecture, real problem solving, etc. when doing long multiplication.

canes123456 a day ago | parent | next [-]

You still need to do the decision making, design, architecture when using AI. AI is still more like a enthusiastic junior engineer. It will mindless start trying to solve a problem, copy in bad code, often makes mistakes, etc. You're still responsible for the hard problems and finding the issues. You are more of an senior/lead engineer who is doing as much thinking but not that much of the actual typing.

The question in my mind is if you need to become less productive to keep your thinking skills sharp. Do we need to separate the work from the "gym". We have times when we are using AI heavily to be as productive as possible. Then we have other times where we don't use it all to keep us sharp.

Is this necessary or are we being old fashion? I lean more towards this being necessary but if I grew up with AI, I might look at not using it as trying to write a web app in assembly. Yes, I learned it in college but there no reason to keep using it.

strangescript a day ago | parent | prev [-]

There is more complicated math systems that computers have solved, just like Chess, and Go. Systems that seemed impossible for a machine to beat and eventually they do.

Coding will be exactly the same soon.

skydhash a day ago | parent [-]

Code is formal language, there’s nothing to be solved because it’s already as precise as 2*2. The issue is not with programming language, the issue is the domain where the problem is and the human that does translate the solution.

Let’s take text rendering. We already have words on papers and various ways to get them there. But doing the same with computer is a difficult job because of all the parameters for drawing characters and laying them to form words and lines. Once you find those parameters, you have to account for future changes so you write you code in a way that minimize that impact. And because someone else will probably do maintenance, you try to come up with good abstractions so that your solution become understandable.

If AI will solve coding, it may as well write machine code directly or be embedded as firmware, because every programming language was made for humans.