[…] this technology is horrific for attention. It’s a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends. Folk running 3 screens simultaneously working on totally unrelated “projects” they have little hope of maintaining, and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.
Worth a read, whatever your opinion on LLMs.
AI subscription
🤡
If I ever want to use an “AI” I just go to duck.ai and regret it every time
LOL. Imagine having an AI subscription in the first place.
Don’t punish people just as they’ve finally come to the right decision!
I hate this framing of ADHD as being “basically doomscrolling”. ADHD is a profoundly distressing developmental disorder that takes a decade or more off the lives of those of us with it. It’s marked by severe executive dysfunction, emotional disregulation, a terrifying fear of rejection, environmental sensitivity which can be overwhelming, impulsive and risk taking behaviour, constant short term memory problems, frequently comorbid dyspraxia, connective tissue problems, mast cell activation syndrome, cardiovascular problems, and a whole host more.
We face higher lifetime risks of early death from cancer and cardiovascular disease, higher rates of dementia, are more vulnerable to sexual and domestic abuse and violence, and greater rates of suicide.
It’s not the internet joke diagnosis of “being addicted to your phone”.
Why the hell would doctors prescribe schedule II controlled drugs (amphetamine, methylphenidate) for a “phone addiction”?
I think one of the fundamental problems is that we treat mental disorders like they’re some sort of specialized set of adjectives. Being unfocused is “ADHD”. Being shy or fixated on a specific topic is “autistic”. Being emotionally charged in a stressful situation is “bipolar”. We do that and it undermines what it’s actually like to have and deal with those conditions every day, and makes people who actually have them seem “crazy” or “creepy” to people who are just ignorant. It really sets the general consensus back hard.
Wow! I have ADHD but I wasn’t aware of all that! The cardiovascular and cancer thing really got me! But yeah I feel you…some times I wish I had this phone addiction and none of the other symptoms.
@HumbleBragger Stimulant medication gets you pretty much all your life expectancy back btw.
Oh no. I need my amphetamines to function (properly) but they will eventually kill me. What an impasse.
@HumbleBragger I mean, that’s the point: they won’t (unless you are unfortunate enough to get the cardiovascular side effects)
And those of us who don’t have it but live with someone who does and doesn’t think they need meds to help… it’s a terrible disorder that doesn’t just effect the person who has it. I really really hate that it’s downplayed so much on the Internet.
@SupraMario it took me until the age of 51 to get diagnosed. I thought I had “some traits”. Turns out I have severe ADHD. There was a deep and profound “oh f**k” moment when I realised what that meant.
My diagnosing clinician was surprised I was still alive.
What sucks is that it ruins relationships for those of us who know the person has it but they don’t think they do or use the Internet to do a “lol I have ADHD, what’s your super power?”. I have a ton of sympathy for you all who know you have it and want help but have docs who think you’re just fine, because everyone these days runs around saying they have it.
If you can’t tell I’m dealing with this situation, and they are basically pushing me away because they think they’re just fine, and I’m the issue. Yet all their relationships always end in the other person being the issue, and everyone being against them. ADHD sucks and it’s so shit how social media has turned it into just some joke. Like it’s a “hah” disorder and not a life altering disorder that needs serious help.
Someday the person may have the ‘aha… fuck’ moment and think back to you. I’m so sorry you’re having to deal with it. I’m ADHD only diagnosed about 5 years ago but my work’s CEO is basically 15 years older, SUPER undiagnosed, and has money/power/sycophants so he will never truly ‘deal’ with any of it, even as he may be actively ruining his company and his behavior is causing the best people to quit. The defense mechanisms go deep. We can’t force introspection unfortunately…
You’re also describing Borderline Personality Disorder. This is why I can’t get a clear ADHD diagnosis.
@KyuubiNoKitsune BPD is one of the most common misdiagnoses of ADHD, especially in women.
I use many of these tools, but I didn’t need them. I can’t afford to maintain any of them
That’s it. He doesn’t need them. But in order to maintain them, he’ll use up even more of his time, and probably spend a lot more on AI to do the maintenance for him. In the end, what is the cost, and what is he getting out of it?
I think for a lot of people, AI is like so many addictive video games. They take our attention and make us feel like we’re getting something out of the interaction. Each prompt is like doing a run in Sling Kong or Jetpack Joyride. Didn’t go well? Try again. And in the end we’ve wasted a lot of time on something that has little to no value, that nobody else is going to use, and the net result is a lot of wasted time with very little to show for it. We have a high score, we have some collectibles, and we’re no better off than we were when we started.
I think one answer to this is more focus on the problem, and less velocity. Velocity is not helpful if you’re not pointed in the right direction, and even if you are pointed in the right direction it’s not useful if you overshoot your destination.
video games … we’ve wasted a lot of time on something that has little to no value
Fun has value. Joy has value. Pleasure has value. Indeed, one could even argue that they’re the only things that do have value.
Right, and I’m not saying that playing video games is bad. I’m saying that addiction is bad, and that AI can be addictive, and can distort your sense of value so you think something is good for you when actually it is bad.
Fun, joy, and pleasure are indeed things we should be chasing in life. A lot of us lose sight of that while working on our careers.
Velocity is not helpful if you’re not pointed in the right direction, and even if you are pointed in the right direction it’s not useful if you overshoot your destination.
I made this metaphor at work but management is not interested.
Giving an incompetent team AI is like giving a child a chainsaw. Maybe he’ll chop wood faster but that’s probably not all that’s going to happen.
I’m confused on one main point from the author. Are these created projects for work or just personal? This answer changes the dynamic of the entire article.
Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don’t want to maintain any of it.
If they were personal projects, then there’s nothing wrong. They were useful for a moment, or were fun to build, and if they’ve exceeded their usefulness, get rid of them. We do this all the time with hobbies, so why would it be a sin with personal code? Nobody spends an hour finishing a crossword puzzle and says “well that was a waste of time”. We spend money on hobbies too, so if your hobby is coding and you want to spend money on an LLM subscription for your hobby, as long as you get value and enjoyment out of it, its fine.
However, if these were supposed to be commercial marketable products, and that business resources were used they yes, clearly there is a lack of planning and resource allocation. Spending time and money building something which has no use can can’t be maintained is a major business error.
A friend of mine wants to get into gold trading. He is trying to vibe code bots that’ll buy/sell following his investment principles precisely. He’s paying for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and now also Mistral. Multiple screens, hundreds of working hours and not a cent earned. Yet, he claims. But the thing is, he doesn’t have money to invest, so the chances of this project ever being lucrative are, well non zero but also not very high. I linked him this article, but he is just going to glance at it and dismiss the thought, that he might have gotten lost in something here. What can I do to save him?
You probably can’t. He will likely have to hit rock-bottom before he realizes he’s made a mistake. You’ve tried intervention, and you can leave the door open for when his plan all falls apart. You can’t really do anything more than that.
What can I do to save him?
Just curious what makes you think there’s something you could do that would save him?
Fair point. But is it even more of a ADHD amplifier then a modern smartphone connected to social media?
I found the post to be useless. As a cherry on top, empty blog. I wonder who are the people who have nothing to say, then they post like one silly piece of word salad, then they don’t post for years again. I’d prefer reading someone who actually posts regularly, and is able toto communicate their mind clearly.
Here … I mean, why did you start so many projects, and why did you abandoned them? I too have an ADHD, like many others these days, I believe. Yet, for me, a GPT allows make progress when I’m stuck and don’t know where to start to continue working on my abandoned project. The massive improvement to me is the ability to communicate. To have my mind written, the problem clearly formulated. I have never paid for any subscription and I would never pay them. It would be less convenient when this shit won’t be given for free to folks like me. By that point, I expect I’d just run some less powerful local model. The value I get is from the ability to communicate and have feedback, sometimes (oftentimes) on topic. Yes, it’s slop. The longer the chat, the sloppier it is. But I usually have up to 10 messages conversations, and I use it only in my browser, for like an hour or two a day, tops. Most times, it’s much less than that. About 4 hours a week, summarised.
I usually hit the free limit with Claude and that’s where I stop. I almost never hit that limit with ChatGPT for some reason. Weirdly, Gemini was absolutely useless to me. I tried it thrice and never opened it again. I have no use for it.
I am not that good to juggle gazillion of projects and languages too. So I don’t. I work on one project, sometimes two or three, but they are highly related, they are almost the same, or solve the same thing from different angels.
I’d love to discuss it, but this particular piece has zero value. To me, there’s not much to discuss.
And, it’s irrelevant to my ADHD. Perhaps because I actually do something with it, and I have no Instagram, Facebook et al. I don’t doom scroll, so the dopamine is here only when I’m able to write some tiny helpful script with one prompt. When things go into some complex work, a GPT always produces incredible useless shit. So, I’ve learned there’s no point in using it that way. So, I use it with very small tasks only.
There screens simultaneously, I can only laugh at these delusional folks who believe they’re being efficient.
I think if AI creates negative effects you shouldn’t use it. I find it quite useful altho I have to be very careful and often cite its sources or explain how it came to a response because I dont trust it much more than a code writing tool and advanced search assistant/summarizee
I know someone’s gonna swoop in a say it cant think/reason/ideate it only matches patterns but I disagree, thats probably part of it but I have gotten many excellent and reliable responses and answers to questions far faster in so using it so I have to brush over those complaints
Never been a fan of the whole I couldnt handle it so neither can you imperative in many of these type pieces
When you say you have it cite its sources, do you actually read the source? Because I’ve noticed models continually cite sources that don’t support what it’s saying.
And it most definitely cannot think/reason/ideate - full stop.
And yet, somehow it does. If not in letter then in spirit
Please read the citations. I’ve found Claude (and a slightly lesser extend GPT) to be right more often than not, but the leading LLMs do get things wrong with enough frequency that it’s worth checking.
Also, to be clear, I’m not fervently anti-LLM, but I do know how it works (as much as anyone who has read the academic literature). “Thinking” is at best a misnomer and at worst a marketing term. It’s just an ouroboros; the LLM more-or-less feeds its output back into itself to “check” it and “think.” It works surprisingly well, but it’s not actual thinking.
cite its sources
Just so you know, an LLM isn’t capable of actually citing its sources properly, that’s not how vector engines work. When you ask it to do so, one (or more thread) spits out what ever the algebra says is the best answer, then another thread tries to best fit that output to some article in its database. If the first thread was fully committing plagiarism, then the link is accurate. If it “reasoned” anything then it may not be.
That’s not true. LLMs that can search the web can answer based on what it finds. The newest models are up to the moment on this. You were right years ago, but your information is very much outdated.
Sorry, i meant
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