I think you're interpreting the commenter's/article's point in a way that they didn't intend. At all.

Assume the LLM has the answer a student wants. Instead of just blurting it out to the student, the LLM can:

* Ask the student questions that encourages the student to think about the overall topic.

* Ask the student what they think the right answer is, and then drill down on the student's incorrect assumptions so that they arrive at the right answer.

* Ask the student to come up with two opposing positions and explain why each would _and_ wouldn't work.

Etc.

None of this has to get anywhere near politics or whatever else conjured your dystopia. If the student asked about politics in the first place, this type of pushback doesn't have to be any different than current LLM behavior.

In fact, I'd love this type of LLM -- I want to actually learn. Maybe I can order one to actually try..

In fact, I agree with the article! For instance, many indeed offload thinking to LLMs, potentially "leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains". It also makes sense that students who use LLMs are not "learning to parse truth from fiction ... not learning to understand what makes a good argument ... not learning about different perspectives in the world".

Somehow "pushing back against preconceived notions" is synonymous to "correcting societal norms by means of government-approved LLMs" for me. This brings politics, dystopian worlds and so on. I don't want LLMs to "push back against preconceived notions" and otherwise tell me what to think. This is indeed just one sentence in the article, though.

I have so many text files (technically wikis and GDocs text docs, but I'm not doing more than lines of text). I was talking to a coworker today about our graveyard of pen and paper notebooks, todo apps, reminder thingies, post-its..

I need two things: ubiquity, so that I can add ideas, todos, etc. wherever I am; and exaggerated simplicity so that I don't end up turning the note solution into its own project that's abandoned or exchanged in a year.

Force yourself to use the same paper journal you carry around. Keep writing whatever comes in your mind, literally everything. Re-read the last day at day's end. Mitigation tecnique to empty your brain, leaving trails.

My eternal issue with paper is that it's not always physically on me. A phone, however, is.

GDocs/a wiki have actually worked well, though I don't do the re-reading. Just crapping it out into a known place works pretty well.

There are some really good suggestions in this thread: sleep, exercise, medication. Therapy also helps some.

Externalizing my brain helped massively before I was diagnosed. Pages and pages of notes -- both to write an idea down to move away from it and as a way to make sure I do a task. It's way easier for me to accomplish something if I can obsessively plan it out in advance, and it's way easier to stop rolling an idea around in my head if I jot it down (potentially to be never entertained again.)

It's a later step after diagnosis, but my doctor told me I'd be surprised at how effective medication can be. They were 100% right. It's not a cure all and it's not without potential side effects, but it makes me sad that it took me so long to approach my primary doctor about the issues.

But as a side note, the medical info I've read makes a pretty firm statement that there is no late developing ADHD. One if the diagnostic criteria is that the symptoms occurred during childhood. Coping and your environment may affect the disorder's effect on your life, but it's with you for your life. _However_, adult diagnosis is very real. Your environment changes so much as you age, and it may or may not make ADHD worse. I'd talk to your primary doctor with an open mind, both for what may be going on and for how to deal with it.

I've downvoted you for being incredibly aggressive in your responses. I'm not sure why you're ad homineming the parent commenter, but it's not helping the discussion.

I don’t even really get what they are saying. I am also saying that they are hostile, and with all of their money they can afford to not be hostile. So I feel like we agree?

> We stuck with them when they brought their support back to the US. Each tech person wanted to make a career out of each ticket. We couldn't get broken hardware fixed without screaming and begging.

The people I talk to doing laptop repairs and trying to get parts from Dell say that Dell is treating them like potential scammers. They've diagnosed the broken part, everything is under warranty, Dell was previously fine with trusting these people.. But now Dell is forcing them to prove, every time, that the part needs to be replaced.

It's the weirdest combination of time wasting and incentivizing this team to be _lower_ skilled that I've ever seen. Because, I'm guessing, Dell was dealing with too much warranty waste and decided to crack down on everyone.

> Because, I'm guessing, Dell was dealing with too much warranty waste and decided to crack down on everyone.

If that’s the case, then it’s further mismanagement from Dell.

All of the parts get refurbished and go back into circulation. Not in a secretive way. Dell points out that replacement parts for warranty claims might be a refurbished item.

> I have been using Linux exclusively for twenty years now.

Ditto. I can't stand other OSs; they are constantly in my way for just the basic tasks.

> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.

Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents. They're capable enough to maintain their own Windows computers, and switching them to Linux would mean that I'd have to take over all of those tasks -- because they've got other, more important things to do than to learn a new OS.

I'd agree with you if you could buy rando PC with Linux installed and working with no stupid hardware issues. People who can live in Google Docs/Office 365 web and don't have industry specific use cases will almost always be fine. But once you break out of that subset of people, tossing them a Linux machine can be kind of mean.

> Anti-ditto. I would never give Linux to my parents.

I don't know about your parents but most people (including my parents) just use a browser and some applications that are identical to their Windows versions or sufficiently similar. There isn't really anything new to learn.

System76!

One huge barrier is printing. I've been using Linux as my daily OS for a decade and I still have stupid problems with printers. I can't print from my laptop because the printer spits out unicode garbage if I try. My desktop works, but sometimes I have to reboot to get the print queue to clear.

Printing has always been the most brittle experience of all IT at least since when I started printing in the 80s.

To add an anecdote I let a friend print on my HP LaserJet from his Windows laptop today. It detected the printer over Wi-Fi but it could not print anything because it was missing the driver. After a 100 MB download from HP's site the installer wanted an USB connection to the printer. That friend of mine is young so he never saw a USB cable with the small squarish plug that connects to a printer (or scanner, or USB2 disk) but that's another story. The installer run for minutes and failed with an error. I told him not to trust the error and attempt to print anyway. It did print. However after a few pages a pop-up complained about a non original toner (probably true) and it stopped printing. However he managed to find the printer from his Android phone and print from there. Then he was able to print from Windows too.

All of that took about an hour. I installed Debian 13 on my laptop last week and I could detect the printer instantly and print without any problem. No driver to download. I know that I can apt install hplip to get more specific drivers but it was not necessary.

To be fair, I also have stupid problems with printers in all other OSes.

Printers are their own slice of misery that seem to transcend brand, OS, platform, etc.

I did give Linux to my dad and he used it fine for many years until my sister gave him a Windows laptop.

Most people just use an OS to start applications. There is nothing they need to learn other than maybe the start button has a different logo on it.

> If the retort to this is it impacts poorer people more

We've ended up, though, with a growing wealth gap and more tolls.

I think you're misrepresenting what Pike is mad about, why he's as mad as he is, and what Markov bots are.

I've slowly pushed away the classic attention manipulating applications -- basically anything that will find new content to keep you engaged. Tiktok feels like the maximalist example, but other similar apps, social media text feeds, and parts of Youtube (though, I've so aggressively tuned Youtube that it has a very limited content base to show me.)

TV isn't for TV's sake; it's for relaxing a little with someone I care about.

I can read longer form news articles and not need to stay abreast of what's happening daily.

I've found that I'll eventually grow bored and annoyed with things meant to steal attention, at which point I'll excise them from my life. It just might take an unfortunate while to get there.

I've taken somewhat of a parallel path.

I set foot in a shop for the first time at a hackerspace 11 or 12 years ago and eventually feel deep into machining. I spent huge swaths of my days there, and when I wasn't, I was reading about machining. Books, because there were few Youtubers doing it and the forums are thin. It's not a popular hobby and a lot of the professionals and hobbyists aren't computer savvy.

I focused on it to the detriment of other things. Friends commented last year on how absorbed I became and how much I was absorbing. Puttering around on a computer fell away, since it wasn't that relevant to the hobby. It wasn't necessary to use the aging laptop in my free time; I could read PDFs on my phone or old, used books.

But you're not looking at your phone often, because your hands are dirty. Or busy. Or there's a significant safety concern from lapsed attention. Or when doing related types of metal working, weld spatter might land on a face up phone and take chunks out of the glass. Or maybe a steel chip scratches the screen.

Eventually I drifted away from machining for another hobby, but I've come back to it now that I have space in my garage -- this time with more balance. I'm not out until after midnight on work nights. Instead, I'm up before dawn, working with my hands for an hour or two before work. After work, I spend time on learning things somewhat relevant to my career. On the weekends, I'll spend a few hours each day.

The machining isn't ever useful. I made a nylon washer on my lathe once for a dog harness -- I think that's the only item I've made that's not for the hobby itself. But it's tangible. The projects are incredibly slow, and no undo button means a small mistake can result in hours work thrown in the recycling. I spent maybe eight hours over the past four days making a tiny brass rod (as well as other, failed versions) to repair an older clockwork mechanism. A used replacement would've been relatively cheap on Ebay, but that's never the point.

If (and I mean only if it would be interesting to you, no other reason and no implied 'ought') you wanted, I'm pretty sure that there are people out there who would like to return things like telescope mountings, old focusers, mechanical devices of all kinds to a working state. Over here in the UK, people volunteer at steam engine workshops and even in jewellery workshops to restore things. And they get a supply of interesting items to make...

I don't know if that's a thing here in the states, but I'll keep it in mind! It probably wouldn't be hard to advertise via the local (different) hackerspace.

But I'll probably have to get through my backlog of current tasks and projects before I wanted to take on other peoples'. And I may have literally set up a wiki to track those projects...

What is the other hobby?

It was climbing, but that one I've fully walked away from.