For the record, I'll use it as a better web search or intro to a set of ideas or topic. But i no longer use it to generate code or solutions.

1. https://nikomatsakis.github.io/rust-project-perspectives-on-...

I'd go further and say the thinking is humanity's fur and claws and teeth. It's our strong muscles. It's the only thing that has kept us alive in a natural world that would have us extinct long, long ago.

But now we're building machine with the very purpose of thinking, or at least of producing the results of thinking. And we use it. Boy, do we use it. We use it to think of birthday presents (it's the thought that counts) and greeting card messages. We use it for education coursework (against the rules, but still). We use it, as programmers, to come up with solutions and to find bugs.

If AI (of any stripe, LLM or some later invention) represents an existential threat, it is not because it will rise up and destroy us. Its threat lies solely in the fact that it is in our nature to take the path of least resistance. AI is the ultimate such path, and it does weaken our minds.

My challenge to anyone who thinks it's harmless: use it for a while. Figure out what it's good at and lean on it. Then, after some months, or years, drop it and try working on your own like in the before times. I would bet that one will discover that significant amounts of fluency will be lost.

That said, I've given it a go. I used zed, which I think is a pretty great tool. I bought a pro subscription and used the built in agent with Claude Sonnet 4.x and Opus. I'm a Rails developer in my day job, and, like MitchellH and many others, found out fairly quickly that tasks for the LLM need to be quite specific and discrete. The agent is great a renames and minor refactors, but my preferred use of the agent was to get it to write RSpec tests once I'd written something like a controller or service object.

And generally, the LLM agent does a pretty great job of this.

But here's the rub: I found that I was losing the ability to write rspec.

I went to do it manually and found myself trying to remember API calls and approaches required to write some specs. The feeling of skill leaving me was quite sobering and marked my abandonment of LLMs and Zed, and my return to neovim, agent-free.

The thing is, this is a common experience generally. If you don't use it, you lose it. It applies to all things: fitness, language (natural or otherwise), skills of all kinds. Why should it not apply to thinking itself.

Now you may write me and my experience off as that of a lesser mind, and that you won't have such a problem. You've been doing it so long that it's "hard-wired in" by now. Perhaps.

It's in our nature to take the path of least resistance, to seek ease and convenience at every turn. We've certainly given away our privacy and anonymity so that we can pay for things with our phones and send email for "free".

LLMs are the ultimate convenience. A peer or slave mind that we can use to do our thinking and our work for us. Some believe that the LLM represents a local maxima, that the approach can't get much better. I dunno, but as AI improves, we will hand over more and more thinking and work to it. To do otherwise would be to go against our very nature and every other choice we've made so far.

But it's not for me. I'm no MitchellH, and I'm probably better off performing the mundane activities of my work, as well as the creative ones, so as to preserve my hard-won knowledge and skills.

YMMV

I'll leave off with the quote that resonates the most with me as I contemplate AI:-

"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about." -- Agent Smith "The Matrix"

I don't rest meat to keep it juicy. I rest it to finish the cook. It's not quite ready when it comes off the heat.

Now I'll read the rest. :-)

The same is true for crypto. It's fungible, private, and limited in supply. It's also independent of governments although they are doing their level best to correct that.

But I don't know that it's true. My questions regarding the US system and health insurance: Is it a truly free market or does the state regulate in ways that make it difficult for competition?

In Australia we have heavily subsidized healthcare, but it's not great. If you've got something life threatening then you'll be OK. If it's not life threatening, but just really difficult to live with then you'll wait. Sometimes years. No choice of specialist or hospital either. So many of us get private health insurance of one level or another, in order to have more choice and better, more prompt care.

So, how free is the US system?

Also, here's an X post from a guy called Devon Eriksen on the topic of socialized healthcare and free markets.

[https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1865932424376377833]

PS: Devon wrote a great debut Sci Fi novel called "Theft Of Fire" (Orbital Space #1). It's a great read, with endorsements from John Carmack, "Uncle" Bob Martin and ESR, among others.

His surgeon used an approach that minimised damage to the muscles in the area. If I recall correctly, this meant he gain access to the hip joint via the posterior side of dad's upper leg, and went between muscle and tendon, rather than needing to cut muscle to get to the joint.

I don't know if I'm remembering correctly, but dad healed up pretty quickly.

I, for one, made no such comment.

I've been attempting to express the moral argument for God. Religion doesn't feature, as such.

The moral argument isn't telling you that. You people (HN readers) seem intent on misunderstanding my initial statements.

It's not that atheists are not moral. Not even less moral than religious people.

The point I am trying, and failing, to express is that morality must come from a higher, non-human source. If it does not, then it is just a product of fallible human minds and is entirely meaningless. That's it.

It's not that you need God to be moral. It's that you need an objective "higher power" as the source of that morality.

So I totally agree with what you wrote there, but you can't make a sound argument for a moral position without God or some objective higher power.

> "Belief in a higher power isn't required to give someone food."

So it's a moral duty to give a hungry person food. OK. I agree. Now we could have an exchange where you try to make a strong rational case for that, during which I will ask "why?" an annoying number of times until we get to the part where it's clear there is no basis for the moral duty absent a higher, non-human, source.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp9Nl6OUEJ0

"People feel good when they help ...". No argument. But is morality just about the feels? No, it isn't.

Why "kind and empathetic"? Who said that's how we should be?

If we are nothing more than an arbitrary arrangement of matter, formed according to arbitrary laws of physics, and only for a relative moment, then what is "kind" and "empathetic"?

In a godless universe, you are no more significant than a rock. The only sound position you can then take is that there is no such thing as morality.