[marcus_holmes]

> I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.

I'm not sure it matters anyway.

I was talking to a VC the other day and they get an LLM to summarise all the pitches they see and spit out bullet points.

I have a cousin who's a highly-paid lawyer and they get an LLM to parse long documents and spit out bullet points.

I know many people who don't read their emails any more but get a summary from an LLM.

If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me". And it would probably do a better job of it than I would, certainly with less typos.

The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies.

We may not like that. But every generation hates the change that the next generation brings.

[JumpCrisscross]

> it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies

The article specifically references this. The problem isn’t they can’t read and write. It’s that their brains are measurably less powerful. If what we’re getting is everyone over 30 today having a permanent economic and living-standards advantage over everyone younger, so be it. What we’ll actually get is the kids of the wealthy able to read and think while the average American can’t think beyond a YouTube short.

[marcus_holmes]

Define "power".

If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are.

But we deal with more information in a day than they would in a year. It's hard to say because we can't experiment, but I would expect they would be completely confused by the sheer amount of shit that we deal with routinely.

The next generation are just further along on this curve.

And as TFA says, they're perfectly intelligent and cogent when talking, it's just their literacy that is changing.

It's an adaptation to changing circumstances, not a reduction in thinking ability.

[JumpCrisscross]

> If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are

They just wrote and spoke differently. You’ll notice a lot of 18th-century writing is also shorter; most of the Federalist Papers fit on one page, and serialised novels were about to become a thing.

[marcus_holmes]

I'm more thinking of Dickens - long run-on sentences, with points stretched over sub clauses. It's difficult, and that was the pulp of the day.

[GeoAtreides]

>long run-on sentences

long yes, run-on no.

[ngriffiths]

So be it? Everyone under 30 being permanently worse off due to a decline in education is an extremely depressing outcome, that seems like the whole argument for fixing it

[raddan]

> The world is changing, and it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies.

Perhaps this is the case, but it is a great loss to civilization if true. The fact is that there are many ideas that take time and length to explain. Read any good scientific paper. These things are not fluff. As the author of a number of scientific papers (at least a couple of which I would humbly claim are good), it is difficult—sometimes even brutal—to fit in all the essential information while also making the paper accessible to _people in my own field_. Moreover, the experience of writing a paper has lead me to conclude over the years that _writing is thinking_. So what you’re advocating for is the outsourcing of thinking.

Sorry, no. Fuck that. I didn’t work hard all those years just so I could have a good salary and standard of living. Those are ancillary benefits. I did it because I love learning, because it excites me when I do something difficult, and most importantly, because I deeply identify as a person who is interested in the world.

The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible. It’s just not my style, man!

[marcus_holmes]

> The thought I keep having as I read these recurring conversations on HN is “what the fuck happened to proud nerds?” A big group here seems obsessed with doing as little as possible for as much money as possible

Devs have always considered ourselves lazy. The point of programming is to do as little actual work as possible ;) Any self-respecting sysop has a couple hundred scripts so that they don't have to actually type anything :)

I dunno. I totally see the point that losing the ability to read and write long-form text is a loss to civilisation. But I also see civilisation as a constantly changing thing, and trying to freeze or stop that change is futile and counter-productive. If the price of moving to the next stage (whatever that is) is losing long-form text, then OK, let's do that, painful as it is.

I still read books. I think I'm in a minority because most of the people I talk to about books seem to listen to them rather than read them. I find this somewhat ironic - humans had a rich, vibrant, oral storytelling ability and culture that was completely destroyed by the printing press. We used to be able to remember huge numbers of stories, and there were professional storytellers. And then we learned to read and write, and that destroyed our ability to remember that much. We have books to remember them for us.

Likewise it used to be common for families to play music and sing together of an evening, before TV or Radio or recorded music. It's still not uncommon that people play a musical instrument, but it's not as common as it was, and it's a rare family that plays or sings together. Instead we have access to all the music we ever need. I don't know if that's better, but the music certainly is; I can't play anything for shit.

[xethos]

> Devs have always considered ourselves lazy. The point of programming is to do as little actual work as possible ;) Any self-respecting sysop has a couple hundred scripts so that they don't have to actually type anything :)

Sure, that's why this [0] XKCD was made - getting pulled off on a geeky sidequest, automating something that has (almost) no business being automated, and spending far longer configuring, debugging, and refining your "time saving" scripts than actually doing the damn task are what I expect a dev to get lost in.

Which, sure, is a form of laziness, but it has a different vibe than getting an LLM to do everything for you IMO.

As an aside, a common refrain is that the best computer people are innately curious; they wanted to see how the computer responded if they broke or changed something. LLMs make putting up with the (relatively) long slog to find out less likely to happen; in a way, I'd argue they destroy curiousity itself: a horrifying proposition for anyone that looks to the future of computing, or even humanity in general.

[0] https://m.xkcd.com/1319/

[marcus_holmes]

> LLMs make putting up with the (relatively) long slog to find out less likely to happen

My experience has been the opposite. I get claude to go down those rabbit holes a lot, precisely because the effort of doing that is smaller, and claude usually has some insights that help. Often mistaken insights, but still.

[tasuki]

> If I had to write an essay tomorrow, I'd get an LLM to do it based on bullet points that I prompt it with, and a style guide on "how to write an essay like me".

And the person reading the essay would ask their LLM for bullet points.

One wonders what the LLMs are for then, can't we just send each other bullet points directly? Must the bullet points be encoded as prose and then decoded again?

[marcus_holmes]

Or indeed, what essays are for, if the bullet points are communicating the same information