>The ease of access to information has geared us towards efficiently looking up information instead of remembering it.
Tech companies want us to be dependent on their information lookup services, while simultaneously not making those services dependable and predictable long-term.
I'm not sure that AI will always be "convenient". We're currently in the rose-colored glasses phase, a lot like object-orientation was back in the '90s. It'll probably never go away, but in a few years everyone will realize that it creates its own friction, just like poorly designed OO codebases have. Inevitably, there will be an entire supporting industry designed to circumvent the inherent problems like a tradeoff.
Is Object Orientation bad? Is AI driven development bad? Not intrinsically, but anytime people are drawn to convenience, there are hidden tradeoffs they're making.
As far as programming goes, I tend to think that the friction created by bad OO practices haven't really led to anything other than "creative" coping mechanisms in those codebases, so perhaps for this analogy, that doesn't really bode well. But anyway...
I'm not coonvinced by the conclusion. The contacts example doesn't show friction leads to growth, it shows absence of friction leads to degrowth. The other way around isn't necessarily true.
Well, LLM's are probably here to stay. I'm not sure that OpenAI has found a viable business model, and as Matt Levine of Bloomberg put it recently, OpenAI is a "money furnace", that takes stupifying amounts of VC money (and, more importantly, cloud compute capacity) and burns it for purposes that do not remotely pay for the cost.
The biggest reason not to rely on ChatGPT specifically, is that it is likely to either disappear or else become much, much more expensive in the future. But, if you can use DeepSeek or some other much, much cheaper alternative just as well, I suppose that will do.
It is even more worrying that what is defined here as "growth", and in other contexts can be interpreted as "quality", when absent or reduced, leads to a vicious cycle of ever-decreasing quality over time.
Contemporary novels, especially those depicting modern times, are mostly terrible. I recently read a review of one such modern novel in the Financial Times—-the review was very promising—-and decided to buy and read it. Meanwhile, I am listening to audiobooks of classic, mostly forgotten novels from the last 100 years in my native language.
What a difference! One could say that there is a selection effect at work, and that would be fair, but the prose, ideas, and creativity are of such superior quality in those classics compared to modern novels that I wonder how and why people read them. Some of the classics are certainly dated, but you can still understand their purpose, their vision.
I see the same phenomenon in music and movies, most of which are pseudo-creative works designed to make money in the short term. Movies and music that is quickly forgotten, shared on social media for a couple of weeks and then gone, forever.
Although it may be natural to say “kids these days,” I have the impression that the easiest fruits to pick in terms of creativity have been picked in the last 100-150 years, during which more people have participated in creative fields, and in the end, there is not much else to say or experiment with. I mean, one of the most popular film genres today is the biopic, which often features people who are still alive or have recently passed away. In these films, screenwriters and directors sometimes feel the need to tweak certain facts and timelines to make the whole endeavor a little more creative.
I recently commented on a video in which one of today's most popular singers did not sing during their concert, but simply danced (badly, half-naked) with playback doing 90% of the work. Some were surprised by my astonishment, saying that this is how concerts by these new artists are today. That's the vicious circle: people don't even expect singers to sing anymore.
Technology, on the other hand, continues, at least for now, to push the boundaries.
in my limited experience using LLMs for side projects it has been a massive creativity cultivator rather than a creativity killer, to such an extent that I don’t understand this take, but perhaps my use case is more nuanced/limited than most?
I see it like this: if you weren’t going to be creative in the first place and you’re just grasping for slop to check a box then there’s no loss, perhaps even a slight gain of creativity, if you are fully engaged in being creative you can now prototype things and preview them and spin off ideas that compound and refine and inspire new ones so much faster so the overall creative output is accelerated both “horizontally and vertically” to borrow from compute scaling imagery
I’ve always said that we need to get out of our comfort zone, to grow. I’ve never thought it necessary to expound; it’s such a “no-brainer.”
Right now, LLMs are selling a vision of “friction-free” productivity, but we haven’t yet gotten to the part, where humans start mastering LLMs as tools. That’s still quite nascent.
Once that happens, a lot of people that have been firing all their employees, and getting fat on the profits, are going be finding themselves on fire.
I think that there's something to be said about brain cycles being freed up for different things. We were relieved of some manual tasks during the industrial revolution. Now what else are our brains free to do?
That's not to say that this notion I raise should not be also considered with others. We are indeed offloading some brain processing to a machine... what have we lost?
"bone in a healthy animal will adapt to the loads under which it is placed.If loading on a particular bone increases, the bone will remodel itself over time to become stronger to resist that sort of loading. [...] The inverse is true as well: if the loading on a bone decreases, the bone will become less dense and weaker due to the lack of the stimulus required for continued remodeling."
I think people made similar comments re: the advent of mobile and the internet. New technology always introduces new pitfalls. I agree that using AI as a substitute for deep thinking is an insidious problem (especially for young kids who are still learning how to think), but for those of us who use it as a thought partner - it can accelerate the tedious parts of gathering and sourcing inputs to focus on synthesizing.
One anecdote of this: in consulting, half of my brain power used to be spent on taking copious notes and organizing action items. Now tools like Granola have trivialized that process so i can focus on understanding
And as an extension, people who can exist in both words - leveraging AI or any other new shiny tool that will come up, and at the same time - constantly pushing themselves mentally in an old-school way regularly, will be unstoppable.
Tools are only as powerful as their operators; and to be a powerful operator, you must face friction, the often the better.
> Overcoming friction leads to growth. Comfort leads to stagnation.... I’ve come to believe that with the rise of convenience and comfort, it becomes harder for us to reach our potential.... A certain level of convenience can lead to efficiency gains. Automation is important for a reason. Too much convenience though, that's a killer. When friction was inherent in the system, applying ourselves led to growth as we overcame that friction.
There's some kind of logical flaw in all of this where "growth" is circularly defined as the overcoming of friction.
In a world where one could snap their fingers and magically have everything, would "growth" be impossible?
Conversely, just throw out all your technology and live in the woods and re-implement and re-discover agrarian tools and techniques: amazing growth!
The point is that in my opinion "growth" defined in this way is not a helpful goal.
Building/creating/producing something that is more cheap/efficient/better than an existing tech should be the goal, regardless of whether or not there is friction involved in creating it.
Friction in current technology may or may not be a signal that therein lies opportunity. It's not a given.
Can I make a distinction between "friction" and "effort"?
If you're riding a bike up a hill, you can't go up without effort. But not all of your effort is actually moving you up the hill -- some of it is being lost in friction: inefficiencies in your muscles, friction in your gears and wheel and chain, wind resistance.
Similarly, you can't learn anything without effort; but it's often the case that effort you put in ends up wasted: if you're learning a language, time spent looking for content rather than studying content is friction; effort spent forcing yourself to read something that's too hard is effort you could have spent more profitably elsewhere.
Put that way, we should minimize friction, so that we can maximize the amount our effort goes towards actually growing.
No try biking up that hill without friction you can expend infinite effort but without friction you'll not get anywhere. The tire will spin and spin but with no friction you'd have no forward force applied. That is if you muscles could work without friction that might work but the spining of the chain and all the other details don't work without friction.
But I think at a more personal level truly learning and having that learning last happened because friction not because it was effortless. I honestly don't remember much about things that were effortless. Things that don't take effort can't show you what your doing wrong because it was effortless, there was no resistence to feel where you might be going wrong. I agree there is a optimal point of friction but minimization might not be that optimal point.
In weightlifting, it's similar to progressive overload giving enough stimulus for the muscles to grow. If you just keep lifting the same weight over and over again, your muscles get used to it and no longer grow. However, if you slowly keep increasing the stimulus by either increasing weights, or increasing the reps/sets, or slowing the tempo, then it gives your muscles a reason to adapt and grow to be able to handle the new load.
We should all be programming in assembly. Or better, 0s and 1s. We are missing out on great friction and growth by programming in higher level languages.
With AI, you can still have plenty of friction. For me, I aim higher and my friction is moved elsewhere. AI is good at very many things, but there are plenty of things it is not good at.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 52.6 ms ] threadTech companies want us to be dependent on their information lookup services, while simultaneously not making those services dependable and predictable long-term.
Is Object Orientation bad? Is AI driven development bad? Not intrinsically, but anytime people are drawn to convenience, there are hidden tradeoffs they're making.
As far as programming goes, I tend to think that the friction created by bad OO practices haven't really led to anything other than "creative" coping mechanisms in those codebases, so perhaps for this analogy, that doesn't really bode well. But anyway...
Well, LLM's are probably here to stay. I'm not sure that OpenAI has found a viable business model, and as Matt Levine of Bloomberg put it recently, OpenAI is a "money furnace", that takes stupifying amounts of VC money (and, more importantly, cloud compute capacity) and burns it for purposes that do not remotely pay for the cost.
The biggest reason not to rely on ChatGPT specifically, is that it is likely to either disappear or else become much, much more expensive in the future. But, if you can use DeepSeek or some other much, much cheaper alternative just as well, I suppose that will do.
Contemporary novels, especially those depicting modern times, are mostly terrible. I recently read a review of one such modern novel in the Financial Times—-the review was very promising—-and decided to buy and read it. Meanwhile, I am listening to audiobooks of classic, mostly forgotten novels from the last 100 years in my native language. What a difference! One could say that there is a selection effect at work, and that would be fair, but the prose, ideas, and creativity are of such superior quality in those classics compared to modern novels that I wonder how and why people read them. Some of the classics are certainly dated, but you can still understand their purpose, their vision.
I see the same phenomenon in music and movies, most of which are pseudo-creative works designed to make money in the short term. Movies and music that is quickly forgotten, shared on social media for a couple of weeks and then gone, forever. Although it may be natural to say “kids these days,” I have the impression that the easiest fruits to pick in terms of creativity have been picked in the last 100-150 years, during which more people have participated in creative fields, and in the end, there is not much else to say or experiment with. I mean, one of the most popular film genres today is the biopic, which often features people who are still alive or have recently passed away. In these films, screenwriters and directors sometimes feel the need to tweak certain facts and timelines to make the whole endeavor a little more creative.
I recently commented on a video in which one of today's most popular singers did not sing during their concert, but simply danced (badly, half-naked) with playback doing 90% of the work. Some were surprised by my astonishment, saying that this is how concerts by these new artists are today. That's the vicious circle: people don't even expect singers to sing anymore.
Technology, on the other hand, continues, at least for now, to push the boundaries.
I see it like this: if you weren’t going to be creative in the first place and you’re just grasping for slop to check a box then there’s no loss, perhaps even a slight gain of creativity, if you are fully engaged in being creative you can now prototype things and preview them and spin off ideas that compound and refine and inspire new ones so much faster so the overall creative output is accelerated both “horizontally and vertically” to borrow from compute scaling imagery
Steve Jobs on Crafting Idea to Product
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SQYGSFrJY
Tumbling rocks make them shiny metaphor
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OGQusNS1kcU
Right now, LLMs are selling a vision of “friction-free” productivity, but we haven’t yet gotten to the part, where humans start mastering LLMs as tools. That’s still quite nascent.
Once that happens, a lot of people that have been firing all their employees, and getting fat on the profits, are going be finding themselves on fire.
That's not to say that this notion I raise should not be also considered with others. We are indeed offloading some brain processing to a machine... what have we lost?
What will we gain?
I feel very annoyed by pointless friction (inefficient systems) but motivated by friction that improves myself (going to the gym)
If you solve for what’s best for you this trumps seeking friction
"bone in a healthy animal will adapt to the loads under which it is placed.If loading on a particular bone increases, the bone will remodel itself over time to become stronger to resist that sort of loading. [...] The inverse is true as well: if the loading on a bone decreases, the bone will become less dense and weaker due to the lack of the stimulus required for continued remodeling."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff%27s_law
One anecdote of this: in consulting, half of my brain power used to be spent on taking copious notes and organizing action items. Now tools like Granola have trivialized that process so i can focus on understanding
Such a bold and non obvious statement that the author backs up with memorizing phone numbers as a youth?
Let me fix that:
> It is likely also going to be the biggest GENERATOR of creativity in my generation.
Reason: I am creative and I use it for creative things. And I no longer have to spend my memory holding phone numbers in my head.
Tools are only as powerful as their operators; and to be a powerful operator, you must face friction, the often the better.
There's some kind of logical flaw in all of this where "growth" is circularly defined as the overcoming of friction.
In a world where one could snap their fingers and magically have everything, would "growth" be impossible?
Conversely, just throw out all your technology and live in the woods and re-implement and re-discover agrarian tools and techniques: amazing growth!
The point is that in my opinion "growth" defined in this way is not a helpful goal.
Building/creating/producing something that is more cheap/efficient/better than an existing tech should be the goal, regardless of whether or not there is friction involved in creating it.
Friction in current technology may or may not be a signal that therein lies opportunity. It's not a given.
If you're riding a bike up a hill, you can't go up without effort. But not all of your effort is actually moving you up the hill -- some of it is being lost in friction: inefficiencies in your muscles, friction in your gears and wheel and chain, wind resistance.
Similarly, you can't learn anything without effort; but it's often the case that effort you put in ends up wasted: if you're learning a language, time spent looking for content rather than studying content is friction; effort spent forcing yourself to read something that's too hard is effort you could have spent more profitably elsewhere.
Put that way, we should minimize friction, so that we can maximize the amount our effort goes towards actually growing.
But I think at a more personal level truly learning and having that learning last happened because friction not because it was effortless. I honestly don't remember much about things that were effortless. Things that don't take effort can't show you what your doing wrong because it was effortless, there was no resistence to feel where you might be going wrong. I agree there is a optimal point of friction but minimization might not be that optimal point.
This resonates! Doing things the long, hard, stupid way is the extreme version/application of this opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41512207
Also, since convenience/comfort are so widely available now, you practically need to choose discomfort in order to grow: https://herbertlui.net/personal-growth-happens-after-volunta...
With AI, you can still have plenty of friction. For me, I aim higher and my friction is moved elsewhere. AI is good at very many things, but there are plenty of things it is not good at.