[deepsummer]

I understand it. For example, with AI you don't need to remember stuff. Like there is a command in MacOS (two actually) to flush the DNS cache. I used to memorize it because I needed it like twice a week. These days, I can't remember it. I just tell Copilot to flush the cache for me. It knows what to do.

And it's like that for many things. Complicated Git commands that I rarely need. I used to remember them at least 50% of the time, and if not, I looked them up. Now I just describe what I need to Copilot. But also APIs that I don't need daily. All that stuff that I used to know is gone, because I don't need to look it up anymore, I just tell Copilot or Claude what to do.

[handoflixue]

Is that really a bad thing? It's like saying Google Maps makes you lazier, because you don't have to learn navigation. And, heck, why stop there: cars are just insanely lazy! You lose all the exercise benefits of walking.

[danielscrubs]

Yes? It’s all true. It can be good in one axis and bad in another axis.

[mike_hearn]

Why is losing the ability/interest in navigating through a paper map by hand bad, though?

Humanity has adopted and then discarded skills many times in its history. There were once many master archers, nobody outside of one crazy Danish guy has mastered archery for hundreds of years. That isn't bad, nobody cares, nothing of value was lost.

[kingkongjaffa]

What we call knowledge work is a bit different to archery though.

Writing for example is proven to be better done by hand with a pen and paper, people who take typed notes don’t retain as much.

AI has accelerated the most simple and obvious answers to easy questions.

For more difficult things deep thinking and writing, partly with pen and paper notes and diagrams are still the most effective tools.

[handoflixue]

You can still use pencil and paper for the difficult things. In fact, you'll have more time for doing so, because you don't have to use pencil and paper for the simple things.

[arvid-lind]

> For example, with AI you don't need to remember stuff.

Socrates said the same thing about writing.

https://sites.uni.edu/fabos/seminar/readings/plato.htm

[Imustaskforhelp]

Hm, perhaps a way to export all your chats from any AI provider you use + sending it back to an LLM to just sum up all the commands that you use in a text file that you can reference?

Like I am starting to use etherpad a lot recently and although I have proton docs and similar, I just love etherpad for creating quick pads for information

Or to be honest, I search it on the internet and ddg's AI feature does give me a short answer (mostly to the point) but I think that there are definitely ways to get our own knowledge base if any outage happens basically.

[johnsmith1840]

lol I also had all sorts of commands memorized for k8s and pandas I don't remember at all. But let's all be honest, was it valuable to constantly lookup how to make a command do what you want?

I wasted so much time on dumbass pandas documentation search when I should have been building. AI is literally the internet all you are doing is querying the internet 2.0.

I often kept vast ugly text documents filled with random commands because I always forgot them.