>> At least for the foreseeable future you still would like people to become interested and develop skills in these fields. These developments, and especially how they are presented, directly discourage that.
This assumption may well turn out to be correct, but it is not self-evident.
Nearly everyone who has ever got interested in mathematics got discouraged at some point and they left the field. Mathematics is very hard. Those very few that remained certainly have talent, but they also have characteristics that are necessary for success in a competitive field, which are perhaps less valuable per se. Such characteristics as may be over-represented in males for instance. This is not a point about gender differences, but about the intrinsic merit of different success factors.
It seems equally possible that the above assumption will turn out to be diametrically incorrect. People that would have been discouraged before LLMs will now retain their curiosity longer. Democratisation is surely a possible outcome.
Arguably, chess has never been as popular and accessible. And that discipline fell to AI three decades ago.
Could it be that relatively few quartz arrowheads were made, but that disproportionately many of them survived to have been subsequently discovered? Survivorship bias.
You can both be right. I live in a high trust society (Japan), but was raised elsewhere. When I first came here, there were times I had to suppress my instinct to take opportunistic advantage. That was intrinsic motivation.
Later, I had adapted to the culture around me. Such instincts rarely arise as it had become extrinsic.
In 2021, Russia was the source of 52% of Germany's gas. Following the expansion of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 imports from Russia quickly dropped. The biggest suppliers of gas to Germany last year were Norway, Netherlands and Belgium. LNG from the United States and other countries has increased to 10% which is not nearly enough to replace the Russian imports. The phaseout was accomplished by drastically reducing overall gas usage.
Good point: RTFM and (wall of slop) are two ways of telling someone that responding to them is not worth your time that are both ruder and more time-consuming than simply saying nothing. Explaining the culture of RTFM, i.e. "if there was any way you could possibly have found the answer otherwise, you should never have asked the question" to non-tech friends usually results in disbelief.
But the slop-wall is even worse, as it wastes the questioner's time in figuring out that they're just getting slop. At least RTFM is efficient.
Are you arguing that USA can no longer build parking lots due to environmental concerns? If so, that would indeed be remarkable since parking lots seem to be the facility that almost every US town has been able to build more than enough of.
The hard part with 3d part creation isn’t the graphical interface or language, it’s actually describing and translating part requirements to a manufacturable design, weighing material, weight, fit, geometric, and cost tradeoffs. Openscad, opencascade, etc have been around for a long time and have specs for describing features in a way that llm should be able to handle, but if all the part constraints were available it’s far faster to make accurately in Solidworks.
This is my experience too. I took a course a long time ago in design for manufacturing, and it became abundantly clear that just because you can conceive of an idea doesn't mean that you can build it. That requires a lot more work and technical know-how that isn't always put into books or other "training data".
Just yesterday I had an LLM write an openscad module for generating a 2d rounded rectangle. It worked great! I then tried to get it to write a module to extrude a 2d shape into a 3d shape and it failed spectacularly several times before I gave up.
Interesting. I’m building a SaaS around this idea. And I managed to do things waaay more complex than that using LLMs. Especially “several times”. My AI can do a parametric trophy cup from one prompt in a couple of attempts, I would be shocked if it didn’t know how to make rectangular cube…
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