"Just Ask Claude" Is a Rare and Valuable Skill
justismills.substack.com
justismills.substack.com
This is why I hate when people paste a response from Claude/ChatGPT to me when I ask them a question.
Why punish someone for trying to help you?
I think the only people I know that complain of this are the ones that don’t use the tools. And the only people I’m inclined to reply are also the people that don’t use the tools.
For people that do, the question is usually formatted differently - either it’s obvious Claude wouldn’t help, or they explain why it wasn’t helpful.
Could we stop doing this? There is nothing in the world that every single person likes and LLMs are definitely not something that everyone who uses it turns off their brains to valid criticisms.
It is perfectly congruent that you might use AI tools but not want AI answers pasted back at you, just like it’s perfectly congruent that you may enjoy playing music in the privacy of your home but don’t appreciate strangers (or even friends and acquaintances) blasting music in public.
In theory - sure. But in practice - do you use paid gpt/claude and receive slop from people when asking them questions? I will seriously revisit my statement if you are such a person. So far I haven’t found such a case.
And if so, what is an example question you had to someone that they replied to with a slop grenade? Why aren’t people that complain about this sharing their questions?
Clearly, for some people, "type into a search bar" is some sort of cognitive obstacle, and "go bother another person" isn't.
Now that I'm thinking about it: maybe the likes of OpenAI have the right idea when they invest into conversational models? Does it meaningfully reduce the workload of flesh proxies?
OTOH, I do begrudge them all the scams they have accepted ads for in the past.
You can pay them, but they'll return the favor by ruining you and your family's lives at your most vulnerable moment:
I don't have the time and energy for that.
If you are one person with one or two devices that you use YouTube on, and you're willing to make certain sacrifices, then yes I agree.
If you have a family of a few people, all with multiple devices that they might want to use YouTube on, that also use YouTube Music, then I don't personally think it's easier. I'd rather part with $30/mo and have back the time I'd spend dealing with the nonsense resulting from trying to do the ad block or alternative app route
And less mental effort as well, since the subscription forces to stay in guard for enshittification (are there now ads in my tier? Did the price go up?).
Also, some sponsored segments are good. For example, imagine I had skipped the legendary Thursday Boots ad read on Cumtown.
Firefox with uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock is the correct move.
If on mobile, Duckduckgo app has Duck Player.
The principled position behind "you should install something" is that in the scenario you outline, you cannot just install something, and this is a kind of power over you that you are relinquishing to both YouTube and the TV manufacturer. You will not get it back.
If it's fair enough for Youtube to send me a video full of ads, then it's fair enough for me to run a program that removes the ads. The only way Youtube's business model actually works is either a) people watch the ads voluntarily, or b) they are able to force your computer to not do what you tell it to and instead to show you ads. Because all computers are general purpose computers, option b allows the server to impose arbitrary restrictions on you, not just reasonable ones. You might think watching ads is ok, but future restrictions (like fiat banning you from otherwise public content) might not be. That's the argument.
Of course, if everyone used an ad blocker then Youtube's business model would not work. But businesses are not entitled to a revenue stream.
Entirely depends on the TV IMO... I have no issues installing third-party YT clients on mine.
If people would rather pay money for the convenience, that's fine, I'm not going to stop them... that's what all software is anyway, even FOSS. Every abstraction layer in computing is just another level of saving time.
Nobody gets upset because your C or Python program wasn't written in Assembly, and then claims you're "just coding for convenience." Or when you use someone else's library.
Or, you didn't build your own house brick by brick... and make the bricks yourself, etc.
NewPipe/PipePipe are free
You are welcome
Youtube music is also serviceable enough if you're not picky about mobile UX. Comes included with a basic yt premium subscription.
I'll always tell people, no other subscription - software or otherwise - comes close to providing the real-world value that yt premium does for that little money.
I have trouble saying "I" when an LLM has done the leg work.
"I found a report with this info..." turns into "There's a report with this info". heh.
Anyway, I guess that's so different now when kids have internet devices in their hands and now even moreso with an AI assistant that has the worlds knowledge
This gradual accruing of more and more falsehood will hurt us in the coming years, big time.
EDIT: I just asked Claude a very basic question on an area I'm an expert in and it gave me a partially true and misleading answer. I drilled in on the false part and it wiggled and gave more confusing, incorrect, poor justifications for why it gave me the clearly wrong information. If someone was not an expert, there is absolutely no way they could fact-check this. Instead, the falsehood would be written, published somewhere, and would serve as a base for more falsehood in the future.
Go check out the collective social knowledge of some political groups, and it's clear that we don't need to wait for "coming years" to be hurt by misinformation and disinformation. AI had very little to do with this.
Also, a good Claude-asker should be capable of a decent level of fact-checking, and shouldn't in fact be a pure meat proxy.
Corrupt actors have always existed, of course, but AI automates, normalizes, and scales this to a fundamentally different level.
I'm pointing out that we already deal with issues like this. You're speculating that we won't be able to deal with this latest incarnation. That remains to be seen.
Feels a bit like a fools errand.
[1] https://www.loom.com/share/aa6e55acb18c445e9186637ac763c08d
If you're not careful, it is also super easy to extrapolate your own skills - and your peers skills - to the rest of the population.
Try being technical support to some non-tech people over the phone, it'll really open your eyes to the general computer knowledge of people.
This is more or less why writing was invented thousands of years ago, the amount of knowledge exceeds human memory
If your writing is compressible, you are doing it wrong.
EDIT: I see your point. Same mechanism, different substrate.
You don't have to start doing their research for them, or copying and pasting or transcribing Claude's answer.
There are a few people I can tell are better at prompting than I am. Them, I'll tolerate this from, though most of them do more than function as an AI proxy anyhow and usually will say "I don't know, I'll check X" first.
"I had an idea for a new app. Here's a set of screen mockups and a requirements doc I did with Claude. Can you go ahead and finish that off now that I've done the design?"