mechoman444

Right, and it will be severely overpriced and ultimately useless for anything beyond serving as a daily-use social media machine. Essentially, they want everything to become a glorified iPhone. Which, from a business perspective, makes sense. Apple’s business model revolves almost entirely around iPhone sales, so why wouldn’t they want to turn all of their other products into variations of the same thing?

Man here: there’s a reason. There is a reason.

This comment section is fascinating. Some people are arguing that they don’t need the technological bloat of a touchscreen on their laptops. Others are specifically arguing that Apple doesn’t need to add touchscreens to its laptops, despite the fact that Apple consumers have been asking for this feature for years.

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with having a touchscreen on a laptop. Six years ago, I bought an Acer laptop on sale at Costco, and it came with one. It has proven to be a genuinely useful feature, not some unnecessary gimmick or bloatware. You don’t have to use it, but having the option is certainly nice.

The primary issue, of course, is how late Apple is to the party. Apple has a long history of adopting existing technologies years after its competitors, then marketing them as though they’ve reinvented the wheel. While Apple certainly deserves credit for some of its innovations, particularly during its earlier years, the company’s reputation for innovation often seems to have more to do with its marketing than with being first to market.

Touchscreen laptops have existed for a very long time. Yet now that Apple is reportedly bringing the technology to its MacBooks, some people are acting as though it represents a revolutionary leap forward. It doesn’t. It’s an established feature that Apple is finally choosing to adopt.

The same argument applies to Apple’s rumored foldable iPhone. Foldable smartphones have been on the market for years, and the technology has matured considerably, even if issues such as the crease in the middle of the display remain. Apple entering the market might bring its own refinements, but it won’t be inventing the category.

The problem isn’t that Apple is adding unnecessary features. The problem is that the company has cultivated a brand culture in which ordinary product updates can be presented as groundbreaking innovations. Its exceptionally loyal customer base often seems willing to accept higher prices and fewer options simply because the product carries the Apple logo. And with the amount of competition in the technology market today, I find that level of brand loyalty difficult to justify.

In my opinion, consumers should stop rewarding Apple for charging premium prices while taking its time adopting features that competing manufacturers have offered for years. Lower the prices, deliver something genuinely compelling, and give people a real reason to upgrade beyond the logo and the ecosystem.

Or, better yet, bring back the iPod. I’d buy one of those in a heartbeat.

I want one but then I go to T-Mobile and see that dammed crease in the middle and I know my OCD ass won’t be able to handle it.

And I work in the repair industry so it wouldn’t last very long. And it has no practical use. At all. It’s just a keeping up with the Jones gimmick and it’s made by apple. All their tech sucks they survive on nothing but name.

BioWare died a long time ago. The studio that made the games people fell in love with ceased to exist in any meaningful sense years ago, and everything since has been a slow decline.

They have spent the better part of the last decade failing to deliver games that live up to their legacy, with several releases failing to meet financial expectations. Instead of focusing on compelling writing, memorable characters, and meaningful player choice, they increasingly prioritized ideological messaging and what many people see as forced wokeness at the expense of good storytelling.

At some point, a parent company has to look at the numbers. If a studio consistently fails to deliver commercially successful products, there is little financial justification for continuing to fund it indefinitely.

The unfortunate reality is that BioWare’s reputation carried it long after its ability to deliver on that reputation had faded. The closure isn’t the death of the BioWare people remember. That studio was already gone. This is simply the final chapter of a decline that began years ago.

I also want to make something clear: I have absolutely no issue with politics or progressive themes in video games. Politics has always been part of the medium, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with exploring social issues or incorporating different perspectives into a story. My problem is when those themes take precedence over the actual narrative and the established identity of the intellectual property. When the political messaging becomes more important than the world, characters, and story that made people care about the franchise in the first place, it destroys immersion. And in my opinion, that is precisely where BioWare went wrong.

I would say that’s true about Sony and its ecosystem.

Xbox, on the other hand, isn’t doing so hot. I’d argue that Microsoft could potentially be heading toward a serious decline in the console market. When a consumer base is pushed hard enough, eventually people start pushing back.

That’s why we’re seeing PlayStation and Nintendo Switch consoles being jailbroken. It may be a sign that some consumers are tired of being restricted and exploited by the platforms they use.

Xbox has a particularly serious problem: if Microsoft fails to deliver games and experiences that make its ecosystem worthwhile, people will simply move to PlayStation or Nintendo to play video games. They aren’t necessarily going to care about Xbox as an entertainment ecosystem if the gaming experience itself isn’t compelling.

Microsoft needs to remember that people buy gaming consoles to play games, not to buy into an ecosystem.

I wonder if XBox realizes that their player base isn’t locked into their ecosystem…

And they are certainly far from the only option.

I remember all the opposition to Uber as a taxi service back in the day, and the same thing happened with Uber Eats and other food delivery services.

Now we’re taking their side because fuck AI?

And it’s becoming much harder to defend the anti-AI rhetoric we’ve been hearing in recent weeks. Just look at what it’s doing to Sony’s stranglehold on the gaming market. We’re seeing the PS5 get completely jailbroken and games being decompiled in record time.

So which is it, folks? Is it AI slop? Or is it some kind of hero we didn’t know we needed?

The results of the study are not in question, nor am I arguing against them. I am criticizing the sensationalist title being used in this Lemmy post.

The study does not say that using ChatGPT for 10 minutes erodes your ability to perform hard tasks. You yourself acknowledged this in the information you provided from the study.

So I guess the question is, what exactly are you arguing against?

Once again, to reiterate, my complaint is about the misleading clickbait title.

The vast majority of people who see this post aren’t going to read the study. They’re going to look at the title, nod their heads, and move on. I’m simply trying to provide some context.

You used an AI service to determine if my comment was written by AI, and the service itself admits it can’t reliably determine that. Do you see the irony here? You literally used AI to guess whether I used AI and then treated that guess as fact. That’s some next-level nonsense.

I will say this however in my own defense not that I have to, I use Google keyboard which has a built-in AI editor it helps me to write long responses quickly.

I will use any and all tools that I deem necessary to complete any and all tasks regardless of your idiotic criticism.

Of course I’ll be happy to explain, the title of the article states:

Using Al for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things - Berkeley News

The findings of the study do not indicate that using an LLM (AI) for ten minutes removes your ability to do hard things. The study showed that it was harder to perform tasks without AI assistance after having access to it. In fact, people who used AI for ten minutes before performing difficult tasks actually performed better than those who did not.

The ten minutes was simply used as a control so that everyone had the same amount of time with AI. It had nothing to do with the erosion of their ability to perform difficult tasks. The conclusion the researchers drew, which is up for interpretation, was that prolonged AI usage may potentially impair people’s ability to perform harder tasks without assistance.

The title heavily implies that just ten minutes of AI usage makes difficult tasks harder to perform, which is not what the study showed or concluded. Therefore, the title has been intentionally sensationalized as clickbait. It objectively misrepresents the findings by encouraging a different interpretation and conclusion than what the study actually demonstrated.

The study itself is interesting, but apparently, the researchers’ findings weren’t sensational enough on their own. The people posting these articles still felt the need to mislead their audiences into drawing a different conclusion from the one the research actually supports.

Eh. Go sit and spin.

This is… Unfortunately completely true. ☹️

TLDR: LLMs are better information aggregators than Google, which has become a mess of ads and SEO spam. Using AI to complete homework isn’t inherently cheating; homework is practice, not an exam. If schools want to measure independent knowledge, they should use supervised assessments instead of take-home assignments. And if an assignment offers little educational value, perhaps the assignment is the problem, not the tool students use to complete it.

I think the more important takeaway from this study is that people produce better results when querying LLMs than when using traditional search engines. To me, that points to a problem with conventional search more than it demonstrates a detriment to using LLMs.

Have you tried Googling anything in recent years? It’s a bloody mess. Google increasingly prioritizes what it wants you to see, and more importantly, what advertisers have paid it to show you. Finding genuinely useful information has become an exercise in digging through sponsored results, SEO spam, and pages that exist primarily to generate ad revenue.

LLMs, for all their faults, are arguably better information aggregators at this point. That isn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement of AI, considering that they aren’t particularly good at searching either. It just illustrates how bad conventional search has become.

I wouldn’t interpret using an LLM to complete a task as inherently equivalent to students cheating. I’d argue that LLMs are simply another tool for finding, processing, and synthesizing information. If students can produce better results using those tools, perhaps we should be asking why we’re so determined to prevent them from doing so rather than examining the tools themselves.

And frankly, you can’t really cheat on homework. It’s homework, not a supervised examination. Students should be able to complete assignments using whatever resources are available to them. If the objective is to determine what students can accomplish independently, then schools should assess that through supervised examinations rather than take-home assignments.

More importantly, there’s a broader question about whether we’re assigning too much homework in the first place. Research has repeatedly found that its educational benefits depend on factors such as age, workload, and assignment quality. If an assignment provides little educational value beyond producing a completed worksheet, then perhaps the problem isn’t that students are using AI to complete it. Perhaps the assignment itself isn’t worth doing.

Shenanigans.

That’s not 37 pieces of flare!

This article is a perfect example of how legitimate research gets turned into sensationalist nonsense, and the post on Lemmy is making it worse.

The study involved 1,222 participants across three experiments. Researchers had people use AI to help with math and reading comprehension, then tested them when that assistance was removed. They found that participants were more likely to struggle with accuracy and persistence when they had to work independently.

That’s an interesting finding. It’s worth discussing.

But this whole fixation on “just 10 minutes” is ridiculous. Ten minutes of AI use under specific experimental conditions does not mean that ten minutes of ChatGPT permanently damages your brain or destroys your ability to think for yourself. The study did not demonstrate that.

There’s a pretty significant difference between showing that people can become reliant on assistance and struggle when that assistance is suddenly taken away, and claiming that AI use fundamentally erodes your cognitive abilities. One is an experimental finding. The other is an exaggeration of what that finding actually means.

And this is where I have a problem with the article and the way it’s being presented on Lemmy. The actual research is interesting enough without having to dress it up in sensationalist headlines. If the point is that people need to struggle with difficult problems to develop their skills, then make that argument. It’s a perfectly reasonable one.

But “using AI for 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things” is a hell of a lot more dramatic than what the research actually establishes.

There’s a difference between reporting scientific findings and manufacturing a narrative around them. We should be capable of discussing the potential downsides of AI without resorting to clickbait and misrepresenting what the research actually says.

It shouldn’t be up to discord or any other internet entity to verify the age of its users.

Parents. Parents should be monitoring their child’s Internet usage.