Discussion
UNMITIGATED RISK
cptroot: I really appreciate how this finds a common thread through all of my current engineering anxieties.
snovv_crash: I agree, but I think the same logic could have been applied to the structure of the article. It could have all been 2 paragraphs.
sudonanohome: > He wasn’t following a plan. He was just that kind of person.Because the article is AI slop, plain and simple.
justonceokay: I would write that prose. It’s very powerful to use small sentences with small words to drive a point home. Am I AI slop?
aunderscored: This one definitely does not feel like AI to me. I could be wrong. But it has too much warmth.
blast: Gptzero and Pangram both say this article was AI-generated. Seems we've forgotten how to do other things as well.
breggles: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/sp-287.pdf sent back an error.Error code: 404 Not Found
vdqtp3: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19...
WillAdams: Ages ago, I worked at a flexographic print manufacturer, once, when a new hire had made a large plot on Kraft paper (which was moderately expensive/difficult to source and a nuisance to switch to/from), it turned out a circle was on a non-printing layer (why Adobe Illustrator allows that is a separate discussion --- Freehand's printing everything which is visible and not printing anything invisible or on the background is correct) and came to me asking help in re-loading the Kraft paper and in explaining to the folks who were concerned about money and so forth.Instead, I troubled the lead stripper for a compass and ruling pen and got a bottle of fountain pen ink (fortunately, the circle was black, and that was a colour I had in my ink rotation) and showed the trainee how to use a compass w/ a ruling pen to create a circle with a desired stroke thickness in ink --- their low-budget graphic design program had totally skipped over any sort of physical media, going straight to computer usage....
bluGill: Great that you knew that - but that doesn't mean it was worth it for the kid to learn.There is more interesting/useful things in life to learn than you will live. Just becoming a brain surgeon, heart surgeon, anesthesiologist, and other somewhat related medical specialties will take you to retirement age without ever leaving school. That is despite the overlap, we haven't even start to make you any form of engineer, musician, or any other the other interest fields there are out there.We as a society have to look at things like manually drawing as hobbies you can learn if you want that should be put in a book just in case someone wants - but otherwise not taught. There is nothing wrong with what you knew how to do, but there are more important things to teach kids and we need them to move on to the real world not learning everything.
ekelsen: Ahhhh the AI writing! The goggles, they do nothing!Maybe the author should be more worried about AI allowing us to be lazy and forgetting how to write.
stephc_int13: Generational knowledge loss is often either discarded as irrelevant, illusory or misunderstood.It is not a new phenomenon and can easily traced back to antiquity.Because _reality has a surprising amount of details_ the entire humanity knowledge at any given time is living in our memories, and even if we had the time and will to try and formalize it, language is not complete enough and we lack the ability to fully introspect what we know.You can ask a professional Tennis or Chess player to formalize his expert knowledge and it may contains some useful insights, but far from enough to replicate his skills.So learning is re-discovering many things, a Sysphean task, and the majority is lost, we managed to keep just enough thanks to the invention of writing and books to reach a kind of slow escape velocity.Because technology is constantly evolving, what is lost is not systematically relevant, like writing poetry in ancient Greek.But there is the risk of losing too much, too quickly. As a veteran of the videogame industry I can attest that many mistakes that are made today were solved before, but the good designs and principles were largely lost.Newcomers are not inherently less smart than their parents, quite often they just don't learn because the incentives changed.I am not entirely convinced the emergence of "vibe coding" and other assistants will be a net gain.
