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jobigoud commented on What's happening to reading?   newyorker.com/culture/ope... · Posted by u/Kaibeezy
interestica · 2 months ago
I saw an example recently of a sort of “AI Codec” : A person has to send a message to a respected figure of authority. They organize their thoughts and requests into a clear and concise bulleted list with explanations. But, that seemed heavily informal and unprofessional. So they used AI to convert the bullets to paragraphs and sent it out.

The authority received the large body of text but, due to time commitments and attention, they didn’t have time to read it all. They used AI to convert the text to a concise bulleted list.

jobigoud · 2 months ago
This is great. Maybe this hints at a different approach, instead of asking the LLM to expand the bullets into paragraphs we could ask it to generate a text that, when asked to be summarized by an LLM will produce the original bullets.
jobigoud commented on What's happening to reading?   newyorker.com/culture/ope... · Posted by u/Kaibeezy
smeej · 2 months ago
I'm not sure what's happening, but I am sure it isn't new.

I had to learn the hard way 15 years ago that the average American adult cannot parse a full-page email in standard English. It seemed crazy to me at the time and seems crazy to me now, given that the average adult has completed elementary school, but most people are barely functionally literate at all.

I don't expect you to believe me. It's a weird claim. But walk into any average grocery store and hand someone a page out of a book and ask them to read it out loud to you. Many people are so aware they can't that they will refuse to try. Of the ones that do, you will struggle to find one who can read the text with anything like the fluidity or inflection they would use to speak the same words. If you give them time to prepare, they'll probably be able to get through it in a few minutes, but nobody's putting that kind of effort into a text-only email, even if it's important for work.

Reading is so difficult as to be a chore for the average person. They don't just see written words and know what they say. They really have to work to get meaning out of written text.

With the proliferation of other means of taking in information, many of which require no effort of any kind beyond hitting play and staying within earshot, why would people choose to read? They didn't want to do it before. And now they don't need to do it either.

jobigoud · 2 months ago
But you are mixing input and output.

It's obvious if you think about learning a foreign language. Parsing written text silently is a completely different task than producing speech with the right intonations, even if you recognize the words.

Reading aloud fluidly requires a certain speed and anticipation. You have to be reading the next word in your head while you are still pronouncing the previous one. This isn't necessarily correlated with reading comprehension which is purely input.

jobigoud commented on How I lost my backpack with passports and laptop   psychotechnology.substack... · Posted by u/eatitraw
skrebbel · 2 months ago
Not GP, but my solution is to just not use 2FA if I can at all avoid it. After all, 2FA is 99% security theater anyway (if you have a randomly generated unguessable password in a decent password manager).
jobigoud · 2 months ago
Even if you have unguessable passwords, the services typically have a way to reset that password. So if the attacker gain access to your email they could do a lot of damage.
jobigoud commented on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app   nytimes.com/2025/06/16/te... · Posted by u/greenburger
okdood64 · 3 months ago
> S-tier status here in Germany

What does this mean exactly?

jobigoud · 3 months ago
It's the top tier in tier lists.

See the image here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_list

Popular format on Youtube, reddit, etc.

jobigoud commented on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app   nytimes.com/2025/06/16/te... · Posted by u/greenburger
egypturnash · 3 months ago
"the iphone 4's antenna isn't a bad design, you're just holding it wrong" - steve jobs
jobigoud · 3 months ago
To be fair Whatsapp works the same, if you are not careful when changing phone you will lose your history. That's because they don't actually store your messages on their servers, they are just synchronized between devices.
jobigoud commented on WhatsApp introduces ads in its app   nytimes.com/2025/06/16/te... · Posted by u/greenburger
yapyap · 3 months ago
Spotify I get because the Spotify free experience is HORRID.

Youtube is also moving into that direction.

jobigoud · 3 months ago
I think a good amount of people pay for Youtube just to be able to listen to audio with the screen off, which is a completely artificial restriction they added to the free version.

Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable.

jobigoud commented on Every 5x5 Nonogram   pixelogic.app/every-5x5-n... · Posted by u/eieio
vintermann · 3 months ago
Yes, 5x5 is small enough that all backtracking can be codified into easily human-accessible rules.

* 5, 0, 1 1 1, 2 2, 3 1 and 3 1 are immediately solved

* 4 lets you set 3 squares immediately

* 3, 2 1 and 1 2 let you set 1 square immediately

jobigoud · 3 months ago
In summary the only ones that don't let you put a square immediately are "0", "1", "2" and "1, 1". And as soon as you put a square you can put some crosses (right click). In the end it becomes fairly mechanic.
jobigoud commented on AI Responses May Include Mistakes   os2museum.com/wp/ai-respo... · Posted by u/userbinator
justmarc · 3 months ago
We can't expect the vast majority of regular users to have any of that skill.

What is this going to lead to? fascinating times.

jobigoud · 3 months ago
It's very easy though, Right click > Block element > Create. Overlays show which blocks you are removing. Sliders can be used to increase/refine.

How can we make it even easier and visual? Customizing pages by removing elements should be part of the default browser experience to be honest. Like in the initial web where you would tweak the color of links, visited links, etc.

jobigoud commented on Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine   solarshades.club/p/dispat... · Posted by u/notarobot123
bosuanzi · 3 months ago
Different times have different teaching tasks, which is the sign of human progress.

Just like after the invention of computers, those methods of how to do manual calculations faster can be eliminated from teaching tasks. Education shifted towards teaching students how to use computational tools effectively. This allowed students to solve more complex problems and work on higher-level concepts that manual calculations couldn't easily address.

In the era of AI, what teachers need to think about is not to punitively prohibit students from using AI, but to adjust the teaching content to better help students master related subjects faster and better through AI.

jobigoud · 3 months ago
On one hand I tend to agree because these students will also be able to use AI when they actually hit the workplace, but on the other hand it has never happened that the tools we use are better than us at so many tasks.

How long before a centaur team of human + AI is less effective than the AI alone?

jobigoud commented on Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine   solarshades.club/p/dispat... · Posted by u/notarobot123
jaza · 3 months ago
The "value of a human" - same in this age as it has always been - is our ability to be truly original and to think outside the box. (That's also what makes us actually quite smart, and what makes current cutting-edge "AI" actually quite dumb).

AI is incapable of producing anything that's not basically a statistical average of its inputs. You'll never get an AI Da Vinci, Einstein, Kant, Pythagoras, Tolstoy, Kubrick, Mozart, Gaudi, Buddha, nor (most ironically?) Turing. Just to name a few historical humans whose respective contributions to the world are greater than the sum of the world's respective contributions to them.

jobigoud · 3 months ago
Have you tried image generation? It can easily apply high level concepts from one area to another area and produce something that hasn't been done before.

Unless you loosen the meaning of statistical average so much that it ends up including human creativity. At the end of the day it's basically the same process of applying an idea from one field to another.

Most humans are not Da Vinci, Einstein, Kant, etc. Does that make them not valuable as humans?

u/jobigoud

KarmaCake day4161October 16, 2012View Original