Yes, but also no. If I prompt a graphics artist, "draw me a picture, any style, of a calendar with this day circled in red", you do not have to tell them what a calendar looks like, what the days of the week are, or how many there are, or that days in a month increment sequentially.
Also, you probably don't need to tell an artist "don't violate other people's copyrights" while you're at it, though that's perhaps somewhat more debatable than "does the artist know that the day after Thursday is Friday".
This applies equally to all disciplines: AI generated code regularly contains wtfisms that a human would not need to be guided from, or at the very least (more similar to the copyright problems) that experience and knowledge would drive them away from — and permit me to entrust, particularly more experienced — humans with a vague outline of the idea, and trust that the details will get filled in sensibly. "Filling in details sensibly" is where AI hallucinates the hardest.
Exactly. Whether hn is a social platform is a hot topic for some, but in terms of addictiveness it's on the same level as reddit. And there's no algorithm and sub categories.
But every day there's basically the same type of threads, with the same predictable discussions and you know just by the title and the amount of comments on a thread that you'll get you dose of dopamine whether you're pro or anti any topic that is regularly discussed.
There was a time that whenever I got in front of a computer and opened a web browser, my hands would start typing "slashdot.org" into the address bar and my eyes would watch for autocompletion so I could enter the address as soon as possible.
It was so automatic that when I was working on a new, not-at-all-internet-connected long-distance wireless IP network with the (quite apt) customer looking over my shoulder, well before the days of cheap or free phone hotspots and always-on pocket supercomputers, he laughed when he saw my hands start to type out slashdot and said: "Yeah, good luck with that."
After Slashdot, it was Reddit.
Now, it's mostly HN.
I've mostly avoided traps like MySpace, FB, and whatever LinkedIn has become. But it's all social media, and all of it always has been.
But HN is a little bit softer, I think. Whether it's design elements like the deliberately-quiet cooldown periods on serial comment replies, or the very apt and cordial moderation by dang and company, or some combination of that and everything else else: My compulsion to smash news.ycombinator.com into the address bar is not quite as intense as it was for Slashdot during its prime, or Reddit.
For me, HN is mostly just a place to learn about some new things that are going on in the world (with a focus on tech) and find healthy responses that help me to do better in my little version of that world. Sometimes, I get to teach some things, and I also occasionally vent about some things.
But sometimes, I get still find myself mired in responses from people who I feel are deliberately anti-helpful. This promotes involuntary responses in my brain chemistry that make me want to fight back as soon as I possibly can. I wish I could do better, and I wish that they would also do better.
But! So far, that's usually been pretty easy to shut down or redirect here on HN when it occurs, before it all gets Godwin'd all to hell and back.
(And before Slashdot, I used tin and an an ISP-provided news server. And before that, networked BBS systems; the whole of the 1990s were also rife with social media in my world. :) I even tried [and failed] once to implement an nntpcache box for a local ISP, to help them save on bandwidth and local storage.
Before all of that, it was the 1980s and I was a little kid.)
I think people under 25 probably don't even know how absolutely uncool it was to tell people you stayed at home in front of a computer on weekends or after school.
Absolute pariah behavior on the scale of coolness. But now ? Totally normal.
It's all about balance. Learning about various stuff from well written articles and Wikipedia for one hour is good. Doing the same thing for the whole weekend isn't.
Even reading books all the time to the detriment of other activities isn't good.
What's good is doing a bit of everything. Reading a book an hour before sleep, doing a hour of exercise two to three times a week. Reading a few blog articles, wikipedia, long and well researched magazine articles. Making time for in person social interactions. Playing games, video games, board games, card games from time to time. Engaging in a few online discussions every week. Etc
It's all about balance or at least that's the way I see it.
Doing a bit of everything is what’s good? Why? Because that sounds like aimless distraction. If you had a goal in mind, doing a bit of everything isn’t even an option
I have another question I've always wanted to ask. How do you spell words if you can't picture them in your mind?
Have you memorized that "pyramid" is spelled p-y-r-a-m-i-d and that for every word? How does it work for Chinese characters?
To answer my own question from a non aphantasia perspective the best I can describe it is that I conjure the picture of the word in my mind then I read each letter aloud.
For spelling, I memorize pseudo-Latin letter pronunciation.
For Chinese characters, I memorize the "primitive" characters as a series of strokes (there are only about 10 basic stroke types in Chinese). For complex characters, I'm using mnemonics. E.g. “支”（"branch" or "support") for me is "branch is supporting _ten_ (十）times its weight _again_ (又)".
I just know it. And I also think it speeds up certain thinking not having to go through the cycle of visualizing and assessing the visualization. But definitely impairs other things like thinking about geometric relationships.
Show me any brand in a supermarket and I couldn't tell you who owns them.
When put in these terms it shows it's perfectly normal not to know who's behind chatgpt.
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