> we do need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI.

Here's my advice: if there's someone around you who can teach you, learn from them. But if there isn't anyone around you who can teach you, find someone around you who can learn from you and mentor them. You'll actually grow more from the latter than from the former, if you can believe that.

I think there's a broad blindness in industry to the benefits of mentorship for the mentors. Mentoring has sharpened my thinking and pushed me to articulate why things are true in a way I never would have gone to the effort of otherwise.

If there are no juniors around to teach, seniors will forever be less senior than they might have been had they been getting reps at mentorship along the way.

A long-standing truth in martial arts circles has been that you can't advance beyond a certain belt before you teach classes.

It's purely because of the fact that if you can't teach something, you really don't understand it.

And the act of having to simplify and break down a skill to explain it to others improves your knowledge of it.

I haven't heard this benefit for mentors clearly articulated before (probably just missed it), but definitely felt it - I guess it's a deeper version of how writing/other communication forces clarity/organization of thoughts because mentorship conversations are so focused on extracting the why as well as the what.

See one, do one, teach one.

Yes—and the key is, you do not leave the category of "how to learn a thing" between steps 2 and 3.

I can confidently say that, yes, reading helps a lot. My mental model has shifted a bit that words are cheap (printing -> writing -> typing -> generating) and that we should accept there is something like high quality text.

I haven't really been a reader, but I can definitely notice when a book/text is "hard". I'm currently reading the old testament, and I understand very little (even the oxford one that has a lot of annotations is hard for me). I like this, because its a measurement of what I don't know (if that makes sense).

For the first time in quite a while, I've started reading a challenging, non-computer book ("The New Testament in its World").

I'm trying to decide if my attention span has atrophied, or if I'm just more aware now of my ADD.

Either way, I'm hopeful that my attention span for this kind of reading will grow with practice.

I too have noticed my attention span having atrophied. It was pre-AI, at least for me. Post-internet, though.

I think browser tabs and screen (the terminal multiplexer) did it for me.

If you you haven't read a book in a while, I noticed it's like a thing you need to practice.

I tried reading Proust's In Search Of Lost Time some time ago, in which the first 10-20 pages are about a guy lying in his bed at night and observing his own thoughts (roughly). And I quickly realised how I was reading the words and even sentences, but couldn't grasp the meaning of them - I couldn't produce a "mental model" or image of what it was about. It was a very humbling experience.

I used to be an avid reader as a child, even as a teenager. That was a long time ago. I'm looking forward to that time when I will have the mental capacity to read long prose again.

I'm pretty sure all this AI is built on top of Silicon valley's technobabble of "permanent underclass" which seems to have zero introspection as to why we're just going to accept the feudal overlords of technology.

But besides that, it's interesting so many people are willing to tailor their entire workflow and product to indeterminate machines and business culture.

I recommend everyone stop using these infernal cloud devices and start with a nice local model that doesn't instantly give you everything, but is quite capabable of removing a select amount of drudgery that is rather relaxing. And as soon as you get too lazy to do enough specifying or real coding, it fucks up your dev environment and you slap yuorself a hundred times wondering why you ever trusted someone else to properly build your artifaces.

There's definitely some philosophy being edged into our spaces that need to be combatted.

I'm pretty sure the -as-a-service stage is only temporary.

The local models are only going to get better, and the improvement curve has to top out eventually. Maybe the cloud models will still give you a few extra percentage points of performance, especially if they're based on data sets that aren't available to the public, but it won't make much difference on most tasks and the local models will have a lot of advantages too.

As-a-service for infra maybe, but as-a-service for payment is here to stay.

It's definitely not temporary from POV the billionaires trying to carve out a worker-free lifestyle.

I agree on the over-reliance part, but I don’t think it’s AI itself .It’s how people choose to use it.

Most people are outsourcing thinking instead of using it to go deeper. The tools aren’t the problem, the default behavior is.

True, but the tools make the default behavior so tempting.

I have a friend who uses Google Maps to find places, then memorizes the route there and closes the app to navigate because he wants to build a better mental map of our city. Meanwhile, I just check the app every five seconds like a dummy, and my hippocampus stays small.

This is a good parallel. In the 90s when I learned to drive I was quite good at navigating. Now google maps is on a screen in my car telling me where to go whenever I drive beyond my most common routes.

Really all the research telling us about AI skills atrophy.. We should have guessed from previous experience.

Old people my entire life have made fun of younger people for “not being able to read maps” or something.

But I’ve never seen anyone follow a GPS so religiously into so many obvious dead ends than elderly Uber drivers.

Your friend use google maps, while google maps uses you.

Do you want a Stairmaster with that elevator? Life is for living, ostensibly. This Inevitabilism drone choir[1] may be correct that it will take my current job and after that maybe there will nothing fruitful in that department left. But I can’t imagine a life situation where I’m both surviving and using thinking-with-my-brain as some retirement home pastime/ “brainrot”-preventer.

> Stay active and engaged, and you’ll begin to stand out among your peers.

Here’s how the rat race looks in the age of AI and how you can stay ahead.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487774

hoped for something useful in your link, found drivel.

Given your shattered hope and the fact that you came to it from the same author must have meant that something in this latest comment appealed to you. Sorry to disappoint! Can I interest you in some of my other musings instead? To salvage that hope of yours.

Oh absolutely, I'll have a poke around.

For the record I'm not an ai doomer, but I am pragmatic, and the lack of hope is merely a foundation.

its drivel all the way down, act accordingly

But you tried. And in this Age of AI of ours that’s what matters.

> need ways to stay mentally sharp in the age of AI. Writing and publishing is a good one.

I have never typed and expressed myself so much before I started talking to clankers. Telling them what to do, teaching them skills, giving them architecture decisions and yanking their chain when they weer off course. I type in plain English maybe more than 60 hours a week now.

There are many things the AI can't do.

Another one is: Don't use GPS in your own city. Try to learn where you live. Read the map in advance if you are going somewhere new and memorise the turns.

A shocking number of my coworkers plot every single trip (even to work!) and claim this helps with traffic or undercover cameras or some other cope. But the traffic will be there regardless, and they shouldnt need Google Maps to remind them not to speed. They'd rather be glued to the screen than pay attention to their surroundings or learn any landmarks.

> But the traffic will be there regardless

Isn't the point to use the GPS to avoid the traffic? In my experience, it's pretty effective a lot of times for that.

You are the traffic.

In my experience, if you are trying to dodge congestion at a peak time, so is everybody else. Excepting in the first 15-20 mins after a major incident, the alternate routes end up congested and settle to an equilbrium time because everyone is trying to do the same thing.

I love playing lost and found: get yourself lost and then find your way back home without GPS.

Couldn't tell if the first part was a sarcasm or not.

The second part gave it away though.

Or, you know, writing some code every day.