One thing to look at is Alzheimer's. The current leading theory is that a build up of amyloid protein is the root cause of this disease. It would be wonderful if someone connected the dots to find the reason for the build up and they're able to develop a treatment to prevent the onset of the disease.
I been writing programs for over 50 years and I shuddered at the thought of doing it on a phone. My first thought, he must be a masochist. Then I thought he might not had anything better to work on. I'm a touch typist who doesn't need to look at the keyboard why typing. Given my cataracts and tiny screen and tiny keyboard, it is torture to type on my phone.
Someone made a comment that millennials are the first and last generation who grew up with desktop PCs, discussion forums on the raw internet.
Kids these days are mostly using smartphones, tablets and apps.
We are used to think that younger people know more about computers, but in the case of desktop computers this might not be the case.
I’m a touch typist as well but use a combination of swype/dictation on mobile and pretty much all my writing there looks like this. I will bang out a message, then have to painstakingly edit all the mistakes. It’s an annoying downgrade in communication experience.
Strange, any phone today would be better than most hardware we had 30 yrs ago. In the 90's I had monitors with resolutions of 320x240, limited info on the screen. Things were slow. If you gave me the option of using a phone from today or a computer from then, back then and today, I'll definitely pick the phone. We don't code at the speed of thought, we poke at the computer one key at a time, one register at a time.
Not about the speed, it's about the comfort for me. And 30 years ago would be the mid 90s so most people had 14 inch monitors that supported 640x480 or even SVGA at 800 x 600 with ease.
To me, it doesn't matter how many pixels your phone is displaying when you're limited to a whopping 6 inch diagonal.
And I can't even imagine torturously attempting to touch type on the phones keyboard (which is displacing even more of your limited phone screen), versus a dedicated mechanical keyboard which was also common at the time.
I wrote code with a cheap logitech keyboard and a phone. The keyboard keeps phone upright. The screen is enough for text. But touchscreen for typing? nope thanks give me a 30 yr old computer
I was called by an NPO and had to drive 500 miles to fix their Y2K problem. Their custom software was written in Savvy from the mid 1980s. The problem that faced them was the get time and date function returned punctuation instead of numbers after 1999. I had to sit down and learn the language and then study the problem. I discovered the punctuation followed the ASCII sequence and was able to write a function to call the date function, analyze the the result and then return the correct timestamp. I offered to write a new modern replacement but they declined. They didn’t want to change. They are still using this software on Linux machines using Dosbox. I switched them to Linux to use CUPS to be able to capture the output to the printer and make email statements. All apps written in this language requires a partition not exceeding 40 MB in size or it will freeze on startup. 25 years after Y2K and they're still using it.
I'm afraid this is going to be like the calculator event. Before electronic calculators happened, kids at least learned to mentally do basic math. Now we have whole generations incapable of making change without a calculator. I met a graduate who claimed 32 ÷ 2 was too difficult because 32 is too big to work with mentally. I believe code development AI is going to lead to a whole generation of mediocre coders.
I don't know what happened to that student (I'm guessing not in a field commonly using math ??), but my experience as a student with access to calculators during exams (sometimes even to programmable calculators) is that they were just slowing you down for simple calculations, resulting in a worse grade if abused, especially since you have to lay out all the intermediate steps anyway. (And you just figure out with experience what the cutoff for 'simple' is, and it raises as you keep getting better at it, just as the bar to what is considered a minimum 'intermediate step' raises with the class level.)
But then also the importance of using a calculator as one of the tools to double-check your work (because they make much less mistakes) should not be underestimated... whereas the situation seems to be opposite with LLMs !
Same. In secondary school, calculators was mostly about the trig functions and operating on big numbers. In primary school, you wouldn't have access to a calculators in exams so you learn how to do without. And in university, I mostly had to deal with symbols.
Ah the calculator, the strawman of every maths teacher.
And yet, are we worse at math than the previous generations? I'm not so sure. Pretty quickly math becomes toying with letters and not numbers, and unless the calculator has an algebraic engine, it won't help you.
We can focus in more important aspects of math, like actually understanding the concepts. However, to me this will be worse than the calculator: LLM pretend to understand the problem, and can offer solutions. On the other hand, you don't get a calculator with a CAS until late university (if you ever get one). Calculators don't pretend to be more than what they are.
But IMHO we'll still get the benefits of calculators: let the humans focus on the difficult tasks. I don't want to write the full API scaffolding for the tenth time. I don't want to write the boilerplate for that test framework for the 15th time. LLMs are good at those tasks, let them do it!
I remember reading in Nature of a young bull elephant charging a safari vehicle, frightening everyone. Just before he reached them, he dropped to his front knees and dug his tusks into the ground. Then he made rumbling noises similar to laughter and walked off.
> Testosterone levels in an elephant in musth can be on average 60 times greater than in the same elephant at other times (in specific individuals these testosterone levels can even reach as much as 140 times the normal).[10]
Looking forward to it once it is refined. It still creates some strange artifacts. Within the HN message, the demo image of the baby raccoon in priest robes, one can count five paws.
