smugglerFlynn

This article just follows its own stated principle

I’ll add to this for cases where the problem is motivation for reading and spending time “non-productively.”

Many life and work problems have relevant fiction books that cover similar or loosely related situations. Reading these can create a perfect “mental sandbox” for problem solving, where your brain unconsciously plays around with a topic in a safe and fun way, all while you’re following a fictional narrative.

This is an alternative to more “rational” methods, like reading non-fiction, prompting an LLM for possible approaches, or problem-solving explicitly. Brains work in weird ways, and they often need lots of unstructured time, lateral thinking, and play. Reading fiction provides all three.

The study cited in the article was about people watching birds through a window

This "passive consumption" needs disambiguation, though.

What separates "I see colorful moving things" [watching birds] from "I see colorful moving things" [social media reels] is not the perceived passiveness but passiveness in the psychological sense.

Watching birds is active attention: you scan, predict, analyze. You get random, sparse rewards for it. Importantly, birdwatching is mostly nothing happening, which leaves room for your mind to wander - and wandering is the thing that's apparently really good for the brain.[1]

[1] - Moshe Bar, Mindwandering (2022), Michael Corballis, The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking (2015) and different related research papers

I believe our current work environments will be romanticized one day, in a similar way - we just don’t recognize the fun parts of the mundane.

Saying this because looking back at my own office spaces through photos and nostalgia feels very different from how it felt and was perceived back then. Connecting in person is much harder nowadays, true, but back then people were not really valuing this ease of connection - it was just an obvious and often obligatory part of your work life.

Brains are weird.

They don't "want" anything. They preach to enterprises and intentionally create a fear of missing out to get more paying business customers on board of this hype train. This is what is happening.

This is also the reason absolutely no attention is spent on evolving B2C products.

What is being exploited is the overt attention businesses pay to their own cost metrics, to the point where broader strategy is getting thrown under the bus in favor of efficiency. I believe this is an illusion, and for many companies that jump on board, sober learnings are right around the corner.

It is jobs to be done theory on steroids. If someone wants a drill, give them a hole, this kind of logic. Let users literally click “make a hole” button that would instantly make a hole in the wall, and you’ve just disrupted the whole drills market.

Or like in Harry Porter, where you don’t need cooks - food just appears from thin air and floats straight to the tables.

The problem is, jobs to be done theory is not new, and product teams that build Excel and SAP know this stuff. The reason why nobody has yet made an accounting software that is just one magic button is in the amount of user decisions that are necessary to make a “proper hole”.

This is where analogy breaks, because you are not helping to drill a hole anymore, you are helping to design a hole. And to design something you need visibility into what parameters you control, what has just changed with the latest tweak, where rough patches are that require cleanup and design rework.

In programming it just so happened that your code structure and your IDE were also your design UIs. In other areas, like Accounting, your design UI today is Excel and SAP.

Arguably a chat interface can also be a standalone design tool, just not a very user friendly one, like trying to pilot a plane through popup notifications. It works for areas where we fully give control over design to LLMs themselves, but step up into higher level designer shoes and you need proper UI/UX again, chat becomes suffocating.

Current reality and current numbers are totally irrelevant. This whole business model bets on people believing that TAM at the scale of whole human population is right behind the corner, just one more SOTA model, just let us get to AGI and you will see.

Guys are milking investors and try to manipulate gen pop and governance systems to ride this illusion for as long as possible, with fear mongering and weird “we see miracles in the lab” posts like the OP, which you read on a regular basis over the past N years.

Saying this as a paying customer from that 20m segment.

> Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all.

“Cy Draven: I tried everything. Believe me, I hammered the race thing, I hammered the gender thing, the trans thing, the border thing, the homeless thing, the war thing, the election thing, the abortion thing, the climate thing, the thing about induction stoves, Israel, library books, vaccines, pronouns, AK-47s, socialism, BLM, CRT, the CDC, DEI, 5G, everything. All that I did, nobody, just nothing.

People are just numb these days, I don't know why.”

— Knives Out movie

Don't tell me you are reading readmes with your eyes in 2026. Blasphemy!

Exactly. Imagine alternative time line where tech is the same but each creative provides their own trained model that scales their own creative vision and skills, and keeps them in control of their own work.

Imagine OpenAI, Anthropic &co having to compete by hiring [thousands] of their own talent to help training their commercial models.

Another thing is attribution. Even a book that was re-published illegally can be easily attributed to its author. What happened is the exact opposite: no attribution, not even a notice, just obfuscation that strips away any traces of the original ideas and original work. Imagine piracy websites and trackers just dropping first few pages that name their authors, and publishing "the book you are looking for". This is exactly what happened.

This reminds me the car industry touchscreen craze: if you can paint anything and control anything via the touchscreen, then the only thing you need is the touchscreen, right?

I cannot shake the feeling that we are chasing the wrong goose.

The end goal of education is to help you understand how things work, with problem-solving being a means of developing and applying that understanding. LLMs shortcut the former and turn the latter into a pointless arms race that we cannot win.

I loved the example of increasing the complexity of learning projects, but I still feel like one question is missing: are people really trying to learn the same thing we were trying to teach them in the first place?

Comparison between LLMs and atomic weapons just mystifies the issue.

I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685036

Is there anything specific you, as an LLM equivalent of a nuclear physicist (if that’s a fair comparison), can highlight in terms of these imminent dangers?

This is seriously cool, Mitya

Thanks for sharing this.

I actually work in education and can share the following first-hand: the things we now build, the ways we now educate, and all the opportunities for reaching out to students are beautiful. I foresee that _many_ people will cut corners now, but I believe that, in the end, we will get a new generation of education that is personal and humane.

I don't mean this as preaching some shiny future that I hope will magically arrive. I already see these things happening. And I also see all the ways people misuse the tools or take shortcuts.

Educators with good intentions, skills, and powerful tools will always beat ignorance and laziness relying on those same tools.

It’s funny how the [very real] thing that normalizes the exploitation of user data, enables “reel casinos,” suffocates creators and replaces them with “influencers,” etc. is compared with the [still very abstract] danger of AI.

Even before big money was on the table, people didn’t blink an eye at starting to work for Google/Facebook, “solving fun tasks.”

This implementation is tune-able. One idea that comes to mind is setting up e.g. salience scores for different company-internal lingo and names of internal components and teams, enriching wiki / chats / tickets / logs this way for quicker and more accurate skimming.

You get downvoted but I remember the times when Google was carrying exact same sentiment, people who used Google were labeled 'lazy' etc

Going from “the human brain might use similar language techniques” to “human output is driven by autocomplete” - and implying that LLMs and the brain are therefore similar - is a very long road.

Prove to me that autocomplete contributes even 2% of what we write here, if you are so trigger-happy to assign the burden of proof to someone else.

There is a difference between historical institutions failing people, and monkey A getting to a wrench quicker than monkey B (exactly what that email points to)

   > My other children were smart enough to choose tennis and horses

I am giving you a black card warning right there, sir

Many large modern corporations are third-hand cars. The original owner had a purpose and an emotional investment in owning the car; for the second-hand owner, it became a practical thing; for the third-hand owner, it is often a liability.

If you are lucky, your third-hand owner still checks the oil and puts quality tires on it. If you are not, your third-hand owner pours customer relationships down the drain and doubles down on indiscriminate cost-cutting, alienating good people from the organization.

There was an emergent and surprising phenomena in collaboratively writing Linux kernel and low level backbone of modern operating systems, or developing mobile apps, or scaling Internet to broader population.

What is different about LLMs? Is it their social aspect and influence? All three examples above were also social to a different extent.

I find this a very engineering/technology focused point of view. Most business related functions run on this “human in the loop” with zero hints from industry this will change anytime soon - quite the opposite.

Even if we take purely engineering, support and operations functions, there is still plenty of “human glue” in the organizations that allow for them to function - the larger the org, the more often you need to interface people between each other, and corner cases become more complex.

Big Tech which is the most vocal about their technological savviness is a great example: pretty much nothing has changed on business and cross-functional side since the 90th and earlier, all key decisions are made via Powerpoint, memos and personal contacts. Jeff’s innovation of preparing and reading a one page of problem statement and proposal at the beginning of a meeting was considered breakthrough in this field. No LLM in sight that can magically fix this [semi-ironically] beautiful mess.

And don’t get me started on B2B Sales and Partnerships.

How do you solve this problem right now?

This feature is well thought out in terms of battery use, because nobody is going to ever use their phone as a "bedtime clock"

Work smarter, not harder

If Apple continues like that, in 10 years it won’t exist

   > you must ask yourself a single tough question: 
   > How much do you value technological wonder over everyday, solid, smart game design?

This quote applies to so much more than just gaming