| ▲ | lmf4lol a day ago |
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| ▲ | phil-martin a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| Of course it matters. If you used Claude just to accelerate production, let's say it makes you twice as productive. That means if you budget 30 minutes to do something, if Claude stops working, it means it'll take you 60. Or you just use the 30 and its half as good, not as polished, any number of things. Particularly if you know claude is really good at repetitive tasks, such as making sure all the font are the same size so you leave that until the end so you can focus on content. The example are contrived, but still very real. |
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| ▲ | solid_fuel 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > such as making sure all the font are the same size so you leave that until the end so you can focus on content. `ctrl-a`, select desired font in style dropdown, done. Do you perhaps have a better example? The criticism people are throwing out here is that while users often claim that they're only using claude to speed up the exact thing they would have done anyway, they are in fact ceding control and critical thinking to claude and just accepting what it does as if it were what they would have done. | |
| ▲ | xattt a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Clearly, this mess would have been avoided by using two Claudes to cut prep time to 15 minutes. | | |
| ▲ | wongarsu a day ago | parent | next [-] | | People with more budget than me give the task of polishing up the powerpoint to an assistant. They don't hire 20 assistants to have the work done 20 times as fast, but that does not negate that having one assistant do it does free up some of their time Responsible use of Claude behaves much the same, just within my budget | |
| ▲ | dmd a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Huang needed to have a baby in 3 months, so, | |
| ▲ | Raed667 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | why stop there? i hear Boris Cherny has thousands of instances running in parallel, he can do it in milliseconds | | |
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| ▲ | globular-toast a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, if you were cutting deadlines this fine, with or without AI, then it was only a matter of time before your luck ran out. > Particularly if you know claude is really good at repetitive tasks, such as making sure all the font are the same size so you leave that until the end so you can focus on content. Surely you can come up with a better example than something that's solved by even the most basic tools we've had for decades at this point? |
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| ▲ | PeterStuer a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My thinking took a lifetime, my slides an hour or two. It's not the content, its the format. |
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| ▲ | api a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes it matters regardless of how much thinking you offloaded. Having the tools you’re using vanish would stop anyone. Imagine if your favorite editor or other tools vaporized and you had 30 minutes left. If the OP had hours they’d probably be fine. My different smug answer is: I bought a laptop with 64G of RAM before the RAM bubble and would try throwing qwen3 or gemma at it. |
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| ▲ | thatsabadlook a day ago | parent | next [-] | | If my favorite editor disappeared I would literally be fine. | | |
| ▲ | Gareth321 a day ago | parent [-] | | Because there are many other editors. Perhaps this is a lesson to have backup LLMs ready to plug in. | | |
| ▲ | em3rgent0rdr a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Or always use tools that you have complete access to, i.e. that run entirely on equipment you own. | | |
| ▲ | Gareth321 a day ago | parent [-] | | I think that ship has sailed. The entire world runs on SaaS tools which cannot / do not run locally. For mission critical ops, it can make sense to pay the enormous premium for local tools, but when one runs the risk/impact calculation, it rarely makes sense. Especially when there are four 9s attached to most of these online services. | | |
| ▲ | awsglkhj a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > The entire world runs on SaaS tools which cannot / do not run locally. Some of us have made different choices and therefore have different exposure to these kinds of failures. Yes, sometimes those choices mean higher costs or fewer features, but a lower probability of getting kneecapped by others' problems is a pretty good feature. Life is tradeoffs. | |
| ▲ | toss1 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | That ship is still very much available for boarding, but if your not already on it, it will take a bit of effort to get onboard. Many of us refused to go along with the subscription model, and so are not affected. I've used primarily LibreOffice for ~two decades, and even more emphatically when Excel became primarily Subscription. Stuck with Gimp even after buying Photoshop for the Pantone support, but killed PS when it went online model. Was very interested in Fusion 360, but stuck with RhinoCAD when Fusion was online-only. I refuse to use online accounting/payroll "solutions". I use Claude $20/mth a good amount, and am hesitant to use Chinese technology, but the last day makes it look a lot more sensible to setup local AIs, even at the cost of higher initial cost, lower capability, more system management effort, and potential compromise. It's just one small shop, but many others could make similar decisions, instead of going with what's "just easier today". |
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| ▲ | thatsabadlook 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you use open router you can choose whatever you want whenever you want. Before I switched to mostly local I discovered like a lot of people how 99% of the time using the us labs is a complete waste of money. |
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| ▲ | globular-toast a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't need to imagine it, this actually happened to me. OK, it was a bit more than 30 min, but I used Arch Linux back in the day, around '07. Coursework was due the next day and had loads to do. Was looking for a distraction so decided to `pacman -Syu` in the middle of the day. It completely borked my system. Didn't have enough time to fix so chucked in an Ubuntu CD and within an hour I was back with all my favourite tools. It's very different when you own your tools rather than renting them. | | |
| ▲ | js8 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | I had the same experience with Debian unstable and tetex, cca. 2003. Don't upgrade your production system, a good life lesson. |
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| ▲ | jasonlotito a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Having the tools you’re using vanish would stop anyone. No. Not really. Depending on the presentation, it wouldn't stop professionals. More importantly, this is why you have backups. It's why you don't wait until the last minute to prepare your presentation, or, if you have to, you are knowledgeable enough to forego the presentation. Simply put, in this case, absolutely not. Edit: And to be clear, before you put too much weight on the "depending on the presentation" part, data heavy slides are not what I'm talking about. | |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | busyant 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| time for a chalk-talk. |
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| ▲ | SkyBelow a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you completely stop being able to work with without Claude, then I say a deep analysis of the root cause is needed and it may have some uncomfortable findings. But for many, they use it as a productivity multiplier. They can still get the job done, just slower. The problem is that the rest of the supply chain likely doesn't care, management deadlines likely don't have 'do without AI' timelines any longer, so if we define the "job" as needing to meet the deadlines and not just complete the task eventually, people will find themselves unable to do their "job" without AI. These both can be simplified as "not being able to do your job without AI", but I propose we have little to gain and a decent bit to lose by doing anything that treats these two situations as the same. |
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| ▲ | juusto a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Why stop at Claude? Forget computers, bring the good ol' slider projection machine thingie and do super old school. Even better, if cave painting was good enough thousands of years ago it is good enough today. |
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| ▲ | microtonal a day ago | parent | next [-] | | No need to be so dramatic. There are a lot of things you can do with just speaking supported by a whiteboard with markers. When I was still teaching, I’d do this sometimes. Just do a lecture with a whiteboard and draw data structures and algorithms. It’s often much more engaging than prepared slides. Yes, I know it doesn’t work for every possible presentation, but for many it does. | | |
| ▲ | ptero a day ago | parent [-] | | Totally. But today, the room will not be well set up for it, markers may be dry, whiteboard covered in old, settled in diagrams, etc. And half the people dialing in. All solvable, but not in 30 minutes. And for larger work presentations the expectation even 30 years ago was not whiteboards; that is very inefficient. It was transparencies. But try printing those in a pinch. And finding a projector. That's not to say that a key tool outage should kill a presentation (and if it was important, do it early); but it is not a do-not-care either. | | |
| ▲ | clickety_clack a day ago | parent | next [-] | | How does any tech company or team operate without whiteboards? | | | |
| ▲ | microtonal a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's much easier to anticipate dry markers (keep a small stock) than outage of Claude or Microsoft. (Yes, I know that the slippery slope is in jest.) | | |
| ▲ | officeplant a day ago | parent | next [-] | | This is reminding me of a time in school were we thought if we stole all the chalk we might get a day off of Calculus class. The professor came in and looked around for two minutes before shrugging and pulling a fresh stick of chalk out of his back pocket and began writing on the board. This is the same professor who we'd never seen use a fresh piece of chalk ever, he always just soldiered through the nubs and remains littering the board's chalk tray. We had no idea he actually kept a pack of sticks in his back pocket at all times. | |
| ▲ | macintux a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Last time I worked in an office I kept my own private stash of markers exactly for that reason. | |
| ▲ | em3rgent0rdr a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Magnetic drawing boards are also a thing that last forever. | | |
| ▲ | rpdillon a day ago | parent [-] | | Do you have a way to resolve the issue where the surface becomes degraded and much harder to erase over time? I think it's partly due to wear and tear and partly because people try to clean off the boards with solvents that degrade the surface that is erasable. Is there a way to renew it in some way? | | |
| ▲ | microtonal a day ago | parent [-] | | The ones I have usually seen do have some coated steel (presumably because they are cheaper). At home we have a glass whiteboard (tempered glass I think?), which is extremely strong and the surface very smooth. |
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| ▲ | Merrill a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Or whiteboards and blackboards. | |
| ▲ | excannuk a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | thatsabadlook a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are people seriously so helpless they can't stand up and talk about what they've been getting paid to do anymore? If so y'all need ai detoxes, you arent even people anymore. | | |
| ▲ | antonvs 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Standing up and talking is not the problem, it's getting the information into other people's heads effectively. The adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" does have a basis, especially when the subject is very technical. | | |
| ▲ | thatsabadlook 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yea but, you just think about it. Or you ask a colleague to rubber duck. AI usually has really weird takes. |
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| ▲ | SamInTheShell a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Only Claude understands their codebases... so they probably are not thinking anymore. |
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| ▲ | streetfighter64 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Asinine argument. Are you outsourcing your thinking to the compiler because it gives you warnings, instead of getting an error two hours into your punch card programs's runtime? People have done this work by hand for years and years, and now when they've been using LLMs to do it 5x faster for a couple of years, suddenly they'd be unable to work the traditional way? Please > My car broke down and now I'm late for work > Well you shouldn't have outsourced your mobility to a machine |
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| ▲ | latexr a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > People have done this work by hand for years and years, and now when they've been using LLMs to do it 5x faster for a couple of years, suddenly they'd be unable to work the traditional way? Yes. Not completely unable all at once, but they certainly get worse at it fast. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1... Losing skills due to over-reliance on technology is not a new phenomenon and not exclusive to LLM use, but they of course exacerbate it by so pervasively touching so many areas. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gps-weakens-m... | | |
| ▲ | streetfighter64 a day ago | parent [-] | | You take a clockmaker who's used to working with hand-operated lathes, mills etc. and let him work for a few years using CNC versions. For sure he'll probably be worse at using the traditional machines when he comes back to them, but that doesn't mean he's any dumber or worse at making clocks. He's just out of practice, same as if he'd have spent a few years staffing a convenience store or anything else. That seems to be precisely what your study shows as well, though I only read the summary. Say the AI lowered the endoscopists' workload by (for illustration) 20%, so they got 20% less practice per unit of time, which made them have a performance that was 20% worse in the trial. I would expect the same to happen if they got assigned to do paperwork for 20% of their time as well. I'm not trying to be argumentative, perhaps we're in agreement here, I'm just clarifying my point. There's a famous talk about the importance of knowing when to use which level of automation, and maintaining currency at all levels you expect to need to use: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs | | |
| ▲ | rootnod3 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | That only works because the clockmaker had the manual experience to begin with and only needs to remember to get back into the groove. If however he had always only worked with CNC machines the story would be very different. | | |
| ▲ | streetfighter64 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not convinced that's true. If you have experience driving an automatic car with lane assist, you'll have an easier time driving a 1980s manual car than somebody with no driving experience at all. Likewise, the machinist still knows the principles of construction even if he's only used CNC machines. The endoscopist still knows the principles of colonoscopy even if he's only done it with AI assistance. Just anecdotally, back when I took courses in assembler and logic circuits, there seemed to be no great difference in success between people like myself that had previous experience with that, and people who'd at most done some high-level scripting. If you have enough curiosity I doubt using AI will be a roadblock to true understanding, just like high-level programming languages weren't. | | |
| ▲ | latexr 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > If you have enough curiosity That’s a gigantic “if”. Anything can become a positive in the right hands, but we have to consider the societal impact of broadly available tools. |
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| ▲ | latexr a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Analogies with physical tools don’t work well for LLMs because the former enable you to do things you couldn’t before, regardless how much you train and learn. A microscope and a needle allow us to see and work with precision beyond our human physical limitations. Furthermore they don’t make decisions, you are in control the whole time. The talk looks interesting, thank you. I’ve added it to my list to watch later. |
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| ▲ | rglullis a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | My compiler does not require billions of dollars of opearational infrastructure to work, except for the electrical grid. And even in the case of outage, I can keep my computer running on a battery or a backup generator. | | |
| ▲ | origini a day ago | parent | next [-] | | One claude instance also doesn't need billions of dollars of operational infrastructure to work. Its great that you can keep your computer running, 1/3 of my information is ithe cloud (which is not a problem at all, even today) and 100% of my infrastructure is in the cloud. Its not a problem at all, that a service has an outage. My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke. Took 2 days to fix so what | | |
| ▲ | rglullis a day ago | parent [-] | | > One claude instance also doesn't need billions of dollars of operational infrastructure to work. Of course it does. It's the marginal cost that is low. > 100% of my infrastructure is in the cloud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion > My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke. And if you had a local backup, you'd be able to resume your work immediately. | | |
| ▲ | streetfighter64 a day ago | parent [-] | | > My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke. > And if you had a local backup, you'd be able to resume your work immediately. Immediately after buying a new laptop. Or perhaps you mean you keep a spare laptop around? In any case, it's also an object that requires a huge environmentally destructive supply chain to create. Quite like a LLM... | | |
| ▲ | rglullis a day ago | parent [-] | | > Immediately after buying a new laptop No. I could go by with an older one, or in a pinch I could repurpose my current media server. Or I could put my data in an SSD with a bootable partition and borrow my wife's laptop... > huge environmentally destructive supply chain to create. Sunk cost fallacy? If the major electronics factories explode today, the existing computers won't stop working. If any of the Anthropic's datacenters go under, the compute capacity would have to be rebuilt. |
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| ▲ | streetfighter64 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you're worried about the environment, you're better of stopping "outsourcing" your food gathering to factory farms or your walking to cars. That's not what I'm talking about though, the question is whether the compiler does the thinking for you or not. Or do you mean that the question of whether you're outsourcing your thinking to a LLM or not depends on whether you're running it locally? Would you claim you're outsourcing your thinking every time you run a script on a remote server? | | |
| ▲ | rglullis a day ago | parent [-] | | My argument is specific to Claude, and it has nothing to do with "the environment". | | |
| ▲ | streetfighter64 a day ago | parent [-] | | It seems you didn't finish reading my comment before replying. Here's the relevant part in case you missed it: > Or do you mean that the question of whether you're outsourcing your thinking to a LLM or not depends on whether you're running it locally? Would you claim you're outsourcing your thinking every time you run a script on a remote server? In any case, your "argument" is more of an observation that > Claude requires billions of dollars of operational infrastructure to work Okay, so does a bunch of other things as well. So what? Me and other commenters have tried quite hard to divine what you feel is relevant about this fact, without success. Perhaps it's time for you to try to articulate what significance you see in it. | | |
| ▲ | rglullis 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | My point is that your "outsourcing to a compiler" analogy does not make sense. And that running a hosted, proprietary LLM is not the same as "running a script in a remote server". The whole "AI is a tool" argument only works if the "tool" is a commodity that is universally available and still exists even if the tool manufacturer disappears. Open-weights, locally hosted LLMs fit this criteria. Anything that depends on a cloud provider does not. | | |
| ▲ | streetfighter64 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The whole "AI is a tool" argument only works if the "tool" is a commodity that is universally available and still exists even if the tool manufacturer disappears. You have quite strange criteria for what constitutes a "tool", but sure, at least I see where you're coming from then. |
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| ▲ | numpad0 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Linus Torvalds might be able to describe some obscure part of Linux Kernel memory management that LLMs might not be able to come up with, but he won't be able to type it out faster than he can have it generated off his explanation are your audiences going to be exactly as pleased with just the prompt in the center of the sole slide just as they would with the complete generated slides? probably not will they find AI-generated slides sloppy and worthless anyway? I might, but that is not exactly my business. also I know gcc or clang won't accept a prompt as source file(s) yet |
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| ▲ | UqWBcuFx6NV4r a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
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| ▲ | donkey_brains a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I don’t think that’s quite the same | |
| ▲ | fwlr a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Oh no, my syntax highlighter that charges me per token is offline! and my chair’s seat is missing because the cloud-based seating provider has an outage! |
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