However, since one was using LLM he was skipping the critical thought portion and just trying to use an LLM to fake engagement

This presupposes sincere engagement prior to LLMs. You’re assuming this guy wasn’t just regurgitating talking points cobbled up the old fashioned was, as though repeating lines you heard from Jordan Peterson or JD Vance on a Joe Rogan podcast.

Alternatively, that this person remains totally sincerely in their beliefs and simply leverage the LLM to recall obscure, vaguely remembered historical details. Or to clean up their poor grammar or clumsy prose.

LLMs have no impact on critical thinking in either case. At least, no more than spell check or a Wikipedia fact lookup or a brain saturated by other people’s professed views.

While flooding the field with bullshit low quality content isn’t new, this is a whole new level of disengagement.

The argument that someone is “using LLMs” becomes a superficial excuse to disengage.

And hey, maybe that’s good. Maybe less people treating the Internet as a real place with sincere people will convince folks to engage more in MeatSpace.

But “technology is making us dumber” is a line I see floated endlessly. It reads more as misanthropy and elitism than any real critique of the new technology

Saw someone proudly proclaim the use LLMs to write all their comments in online discussions

How is that any different than the million bot farms that already exist?

Like, shit posting isn’t a critical value added skill.

I can explain this one: repetition.

Several of them did not believe me even after went through a couple examples.

:-/

Again, nothing in this story explains why calculators are to blame. If anything, it illustrates how calculators are useful.

I mean, that’s a curious anecdote. But it doesn’t explain why they would have been better at the math prior to 1970

There are better AI options

You can take that up with management. I don’t get to pick what AI agent my boss decided to pay for.

We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings

I haven’t seen any actual evidence of this.

That is all they are good for.

Wife is a lawyer. She needs to do complex keyword searches on massive volumes of legal documentation. She absolutely loves how quickly and easily Copilot parses and tabulates info based on her queries.

Total game changer for the kind of work she’s doing.

I work in IT. Love to cobble together scripts in languages I’m otherwise unfamiliar using Claude. It’s also excellent at diagnosing system errors and providing effective remediation.

We teach arithmetic, but are people better or worse at it than before calculators were widely available?

Better. Significantly better.

Well, for starters, if you want to translate a written work to another language, it has never been easier.

LLMs are excellent tools for modeling large languages.

We would still have to deal with the skill atrophy of AI use.

I don’t think you need to worry about skill atrophy if you recognize the skills as necessary and useful.

We still teach basic arithmetic in elementary school, even though we have calculators.

Even if AI is entirely green, publicly owned and widely accessible, it will negatively affect us.

Tools to rapidly parse, sort, aggregate, and distribute information aren’t going to affect us any more negatively today than they did 40 years ago or 400 years ago.

Maybe if we keep the AI but loss the Oligarchy…

Fewer every day.

Ironic

You think it’s bad now? Wait until the polls are closed

The War That Solved Climate Change

I beg you please stop misrepresenting the argument.

“Paper ballots are more secure!”

“Obviously, the textbook case that exposes all the problems with manually managing and tallying physical ballots is beside the point”

Okay, sure.

If you refuse to address this point

Electronically input printed ballots are the best method of tabulating an election result we have formulated to date.

There is absolutely no benefit to using pencils on paper. None. Zero. Zip. Bupkiss.

Your fetish for pencils doesn’t change with the election season. It just becomes blindingly apparent when election is fumbled badly enough to necessitate a deep dive into what went wrong.

fucking around with something not just pencil and paper

Pencil-marked central-count optical scan ballots had a 5.7% undercount rate in Florida counties that adopted the technique.

You can find out more here: https://www.usccr.gov/files/historical/2001/01-021.pdf

These were not unique to Florida, by any moans.

There is something inherantly more secure about physical ballots.

There isn’t. They can be easily misread and miscounted, they can be misfiled, hidden, lost, and destroyed. They are a bitch to transport securely. They can vary in format and interpretation. They’re comically easy to spoil.

An average person can fully comprehend how a paper voting system is kept secure.

No they can’t.

Again, jump back to Bush v Gore. Or go all the way back to Nixon v Kennedy or Tammeny Hall New York. Hell, consider the elections in Iraq and Vietnam and Korea after the various US occupations, and the comically one-sided election results. Or elections in the old Soviet Bloc, which Americans routinely dismissed as fraudulent. Or the most recent elections in Latin America that remain openly disputed.

Very easy to point to historical moments where the paper ballot systems were distrusted. That’s pretty much the whole history of their use.

But it’s much less plausible when you have more secure voting systems.

No lay voter has any idea of what constituents “secure” in a material sense.

All you have are people insisting “my system is safe, your system is not”. And this thread is a perfect illustration.

Hand marked paper ballots are notoriously prone to failure. Nothing about them is materially more secure than a printed ballot. And yet…

This is easily solved by never having any portion of the vote counting and transport happen alone.

It isn’t easily solved, as the number of venues and volume of votes leave ample opportunities for shenanigans (or, at least, alleged shenanigans).

The Ohio Recount in 2004 is a classic example.

Eh. This is more an indication that Lulu, specifically, has learned his lessons from his first turn at the Presidency and isn’t going to wait around for the Bolsonaros to organize a coup against him.

Look at Columbia or El Salvador or Ecuador or Chile. They all had a turn at Biden tier liberalism, let the fascism feaster under their watch, and then got flipped to reactionary dictatorships in the next cycle.

Lulu got jailed once. He came out stronger and smarter. He’s too old to get shoved back into prison again.