Comment by justinhj
8 hours ago
This is why I never use a calculator. Since my school days I have the skill to do long division. Why hit the sin button when I have the skill to write out a Taylor series expansion? For many other purposes I have the skill to use Newton Raphson methods to calculate values that mostly work.
Those who use a calculator simply don't have these skills.
There is a notable difference between say, calculating long division through a calculator compared to prompting an AI to calculate the derivative of a simple continuous function. one requires _understanding_ of the function, while the other just skips the understanding and returns the required derivative. One is just a means to skip labor intensive and repetitive actions, while the other is meant to skip the entire point of _why_ you are even calculating in the first place. What is the point of dividing two numbers if you don't even understand the reason behind it ?
I'm not quite sure I understand the logic of this and how people don't see that these claims of "well now everyone is going to be dumber because they don't learn" has been a refrain literally every time a major technological / Industrial Revolution happens. Computers? The internet? Calculators?
The skills we needed before are just no longer as relevant. It doesn't mean the world will get dumber, it will adapt to the new tooling and paradigm that we're in. There are always people who don't like the big paradigm change, who are convinced it's the end of the "right" way to do things, but they always age terribly.
I find I learn an incredible amount from using AI + coding agents. It's a _different_ experience, and I would argue a much more efficient one to understand your craft.
100%. I have been learning so much faster as the models get better at both understanding the world and how to explain it me at whatever level I am ready for.
Using AI as just a generator is really missing out on a lot.
> This is why I never use a calculator.
I always use the calculator.
But, because the numbers that get returned aren't always the right numbers, I try to approximate the answer in my head or with paper and pencil to kind of make sure it's in the ball park.
Also, sometimes it returns digits that don't actually exist, and it's pretty insistent that the digit is correct. If I catch it early I just re-run the equation but there is a special button where I can tell it that it used a digit that does not actually exist.
Sometimes, for complex ones, it tells me it's trying to calculate and provides some details about how it's going about it and keeps going and going and going, for those ones I just reboot the calculator.
Solution for a hallucinating calculator: get a second unreliable calculator to verify the work of the first one. This message brought to you by a trillion dollars in investment desperately trying to replace the labor force with pseudo-intelligent calculators.
Also, the calculator may refuse to process certain operation deemed to be offensive or against the interest of the corporate-state.
Not to forget, the calculator consumes so much processing power that most people are unable to run it at home, so you need a subscription service to access general-purpose calculation.
You probably also don't use a calculator because it uses a scary language called arabic numerals. Why write 123,456 when you could write out in english: One Hundred Twenty-Three Thousand Four Hundred Fifty-Six? English is your programming language and also your math language, right?
I hope this comment is sarcastic.
LLMs are able to ingest numbers. And not just Arabic numerals; Did you know that there are other kinds of number systems?
Believe it or not, they also ingest multimedia. You don't need the English language to talk to a language model. Anything can be a language; you can communicate using only images.
And for that matter, modern LLMs are great at abstract math (and like anything else the results still need proofreading).
Bad analogy. The things I delegate to a calculator, I'm absolutely sure I understand well (and could debug if need be). These are also very legible skills that are easy to remind myself by re-reading the recipe -- so I'm not too worried about skills "atrophying".
Meanwhile those who use a calculator merely hit that sin button and get on with the actual problem at hand, and life in general.
Strongly suspect this is sarcasm, but if it isn't, I applaud your... gusto? Or whatever it is you have going on here.
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