Y’know, I did eventually get a smartphone. But even today, I use my phone almost exclusively for maps and private messaging/calls. I have zero social media apps on it, and view zero shortform video content on it. And I think that’s basically the right attitude.
Drawing the analogy to LLMs: there are some narrow use-cases for which LLMs are great. Even two years ago, they were already great as a search engine alternative, including generating simple StackOverflow-style code snippets. In the last few months, they’ve also become viable for generating nontrivial numerical code and (sometimes, with a fair bit of scaffolding and Lean) nontrivial proofs. These use-cases are to LLMs what maps and direct messaging are to smartphones.
… but then there’s also a whole slew of other LLM use-cases which are more analogous to social media or shortform video on smartphones. And those use-cases I still avoid like the plague. Much like both social media and shortform video, they seem addictive and actively mind-killing. As a rough heuristic, if it feels like the LLM is thinking with you or for you, then that’s usually a use-case to avoid scrupulously.
(You might wonder if using LLMs for proofs feels like they’re thinking with/for me, but mostly it feels to me like they’re throwing prodigious amounts of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, with pretty little thinking-of-the-sort-I-do at all. The power of Lean verification is that it makes that sort of brute-force-y search a viable method for finding proofs.)
makes sense—my razor for “this is like the evil social media notification slop version of LLMs” vs “i’m uplifting in a way that is good for me” is whether or not I can defend an artifact by myself on a whiteboard. I almost never meet this bar. So when I use it to teach me some new tool, then assemble that tool into a solution to a problem, I would ideally slow down enough to let my own alone-at-a-whiteboard command over the material catch up. Perhaps we agree that finding time to do this is the analogue of not letting social media notifications fry your brain.
(I think my work is less conceptually complicated or interesting than your work)
Y’know, I did eventually get a smartphone. But even today, I use my phone almost exclusively for maps and private messaging/calls. I have zero social media apps on it, and view zero shortform video content on it. And I think that’s basically the right attitude.
Drawing the analogy to LLMs: there are some narrow use-cases for which LLMs are great. Even two years ago, they were already great as a search engine alternative, including generating simple StackOverflow-style code snippets. In the last few months, they’ve also become viable for generating nontrivial numerical code and (sometimes, with a fair bit of scaffolding and Lean) nontrivial proofs. These use-cases are to LLMs what maps and direct messaging are to smartphones.
… but then there’s also a whole slew of other LLM use-cases which are more analogous to social media or shortform video on smartphones. And those use-cases I still avoid like the plague. Much like both social media and shortform video, they seem addictive and actively mind-killing. As a rough heuristic, if it feels like the LLM is thinking with you or for you, then that’s usually a use-case to avoid scrupulously.
(You might wonder if using LLMs for proofs feels like they’re thinking with/for me, but mostly it feels to me like they’re throwing prodigious amounts of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, with pretty little thinking-of-the-sort-I-do at all. The power of Lean verification is that it makes that sort of brute-force-y search a viable method for finding proofs.)
makes sense—my razor for “this is like the evil social media notification slop version of LLMs” vs “i’m uplifting in a way that is good for me” is whether or not I can defend an artifact by myself on a whiteboard. I almost never meet this bar. So when I use it to teach me some new tool, then assemble that tool into a solution to a problem, I would ideally slow down enough to let my own alone-at-a-whiteboard command over the material catch up. Perhaps we agree that finding time to do this is the analogue of not letting social media notifications fry your brain.
(I think my work is less conceptually complicated or interesting than your work)