Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?

I'd say it is a constant fight against laziness. Sure it is convenient to drive everywhere with a car but at some point you might understand that it makes more sense to walk somewhere once in a while or regularly. Sure, escalators are convenient but better take the stairs so you don't need to go to the gym and save some money. If you ask me should all do more physical labour and the same goes for the mental labor. If we give that up as well the future is really bleak, to answer your question.

The analogy here is probably physical exercise. Lack of exertion sounds great until your body falls apart and destroys itself without frequent exercise.

It is paramount to not ignore the state of the world. Poverty, wars, inequality in the distribution of resources, accelerated natural disasters, political instability… Those aren’t going to be solved by a machine thoughtlessly regurgitating words from random text sources.

Even if a world where people don’t use their brains were desirable (that’s a humungous if), the present is definitely not the time to start. If anything, we’re in dire need of the exact opposite: people using their brains to not be conned by all the bullshit being constantly streamed into our eyes and ears.

And in your world, what happens when a natural disaster which wasn’t predicted takes out the AI and no one knows how to fix it? Or when the AI is blatantly and dangerously wrong but no one questions it?

It's much worse in South Korea, I think there were at least 5 different bins with different signs. Most things you bought had a label on them and you could try to match the letters to what was on the bin. Except it wasn't perfectly matched up, and we didn't have some bins with signs that matched up with whatever was written on the package.

I eventually gave up and only ate to avoid having to deal with it.

> the signs specifying whether parking is allowed can be impossible to decipher.

In UK, works as designed... to maximise penalty earnings.

Recycling labels are a thing.

> There are many on HN that claim that only programmers that are already really good can leverage AI.

So all we need is a ban on every other programmer's employment of it.

I'll wait :)

More than just both can be correct.

>top use case for "Artificial Intelligence" is lack of natural intelligence.

Also true if you think about a situation where there is just not enough natural intelligence to accomplish something within its scope.

Maybe there never was enough natural intelligence for something or other, or maybe not enough any more.

It could be a lot more acceptable to settle for artificial in those cases more so than average, especially if there is a dire need,

But first you have to admit the dire lack of natural intelligence :\

It's initially true but I think there is a human tendency to outsource, that's where the dragons lie.

This sounds nice, but what I've run into is that the model fails to write changes if the code has changed under it. A better tool, where it takes a snapshot at the start of each non-interactive segment, and then resolves merge conflicts with my manual changes automatically, would make this much easier.

I used to work on a project that could take 30 mins+ to compile the entire project.

Nearly every time, your problems were detected _early_ in the process. Because build systems exist, they don't take 30 minutes on average. They focus on what's changed and you'll see problems instantly.

It's _WAY_ more efficient for human attentional flow than waiting for AI to reason about some change while I tap my fingers.

That is both a sweeping generalization and plainly wrong. The "much earlier" days of programming had blazing fast compilers, like Turbo Pascal. The "earlier" days had C compiler that were plenty fast. Only languages like C++ had this kind of problem.

Worst offenders like Rust are "today", not "earlier".

As someone with focus problems, I find it more productive to have a conversation with ChatGPT (or Claude) about code. And avoid letting it make major changes. And hand code a lot with Copilot.

yet you kind of feel "too slow" if you don't use one?

Human attention doesn't work this way. This type of task switching makes both tasks fairly inefficient.

"What was I doing again!?" is a big problem

They're not that slow! You want me to believe we've gone from programmers being so fragile that disturbing their 'flow state' will lose them hours of productivity, to programmers being the ultimate multitaskers who can think and code while their LLM takes 10 seconds to respond? /s

That's even worse, because I'm task switching between two intensive tasks

> What do you find insulting about the title?

The title itself. Without reading the article, I can sense the "we are living in a stupid age" arrogant trope characteristic of the "winning" social classes.