oerdier

It has gone well enough for these rich people because their hired assistants were human. With humans there is some degree of responsibility, liability and a slow tempo (= time to correct) involved. LLMs are a significantly different beast.

A critical difference between a calculator and an LLM is that a calculator doesn't make decisions. A calculator performs the operations you type in, nothing more. An LLM does make decisions. The human operator of the LLM needs to be able to evaluate the decisions made by the LLM. That requires education and experience beforehand.

An LLM is a force multiplier only, not a replacement. It's a personal assistant to an expert. To use an LLM in a acceptable way, you still first have to learn how to do what it does yourself. I think your suggestion for people to be taught how to use LLMs is justified, but they should do so only after first being taught a no-LLM curriculum. I think this should be entirely after what the notion of an education was in pre-LLM times. Don't incorporate LLMs into our current education, instead teach use of LLMs after our current education.

Dutch culture is primarily atheist, yet it's considered virtuous and goes-without-saying to uphold agreements . A common saying any child would have heard is "afspraak is afspraak": an agreement is an agreement, period. Atheist doesn't mean amoral or unreliable.

Individual businesses may be different, of course.

One doesn't exclude the other. I still program myself; I actually have more time to do so because the LLM I pay some billionaire for is taking care of the mundane stuff. Before I had to do the mundane stuff myself. What I pay the billionaire is a laughable fraction compared to the time and energy I now have extra to spend on meaningful innovation.

I wasn't suggesting individuals shouldn't be able to pay with credit. I have a credit card myself, which I use when I can't pay with debit. I was suggesting that for a population as a whole, having paying with credit being so commonplace leads to crippling debt issues, which as far as I can believe "the reports", is an issue in the US.

Your comment on the risk of paying with debit cards surprised me. I've never considered it a risk at all. It made me realize that perhaps here (in the Netherlands) we have consumer protection systems in place, in addition to the payment systems, that prevent any issues.

I think it's healthy for a population to not have as part of day-to-day life to pay with credit, effectively paying with money you might not actually have, going into debt. How many US citizens are crippled by credit card debt, and the interest on it?

After getting shoulder bursitis two years ago--although the direct cause was sports, not desk habits--I dove into the world of split ergo keyboards. I did get one (a Kyria v3) and learned to type on it at an acceptable speed--although still significantly slower than my speed on a regular keyboard.

Wanting to optimize my layout, I did research into my typing behavior and logged my keystrokes (and storing these logs as securely as I would a password). Analysis did give me notable insights (e.g. by far my most used keys are arrow keys, for selecting text), but my main conclusion was that even during a regular full day of programming preferring my keyboard over my mouse (tiling window manager, hotkeys, browser extension to virtually click on elements using keys), I don't actually type that much, and if I do, it is in bursts, never more than 20 seconds or so.

Although I find typing on a split fun and comfortable, I went back to a regular keyboard because the hit in productivity is not worth it for me. The experiment did teach me how to improve my ergonomics. I optimized my desk height and bought a very flat and less wide keyboard, with the completely unused numpad section chopped off ("TKL") so if I do grab my mouse there is less travel.

This kind of translation problem is the focal point of Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 5 episode 2, "Darmok" (1991).

I watched it for the first time after somebody referenced it, as I did just now, as an example of this kind of problem. Despite my knowing the point of the plot beforehand, I found the episode was still interesting.

I wish I could mention this episode here for language enthusiasts to enjoy without revealing the main plot point (that idioms in languages are hard to translate). Shaka, when the walls fell. But I think the very act of mentioning it in a thread on this topic does so unavoidably. Temba, at rest.

Check out E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s work, e.g.'Why Knowledge Matters'.

I hope they'll apply the critical thinking rule of thumb to check for themselves what modern research has to say on this!

Edit: And how can you critically assess if that research is any good? To do it well you need... domain knowledge.

There are such legal, cultural and economic differences between countries that no homework might work in one country but not at all in another.

Not being able to solve basic math problems in your mind (without a calculator) is still a problem. "Because you won't always have a calculator with you" just was the wrong argument.

You'll acquire advanced knowledge and skills much, much faster (and sometimes only) if you have the base knowledge and skills readily available in your mind. If you're learning about linear algebra but you have to type in every simple multiplication of numbers into a calculator...

Critical thinking is not a generic/standalone skill that you can practise targetedly. As in, critical thinking doesn't translate across knowledge domains. To think critically you need extensive knowledge of the domain in question; that's one reason why memorizing facts will always remain necessary, despite search engines and LLMs.

At best what you can learn specifically regarding critical thinking are some rules of thumb such as "compare at least three sources" and "ask yourself who benefits".

Great initiative, but the landing page on Firefox Android is quite annoying because the animated text wraps and keeps changing the vertical position of the text I'm trying to read.