@rysiek

How is this not just another perennial grump about Kidz These Days?

Semper eadem

@rysiek This isn't totally new. Mumblemumble decades ago, a friend of mine in SF, who headed up the local office of international tech firm told me he'd rather hire humanities/artists than those who only trained to coder because you can teach a creative to code, but not the other way around necessarily. That's why this new focus on AI for coding - maybe the grunt work - but then how do people learn - has me rolling my eyes. It takes intelligence and creativity to build things. Not AI vibes.

@rysiek I don't think it's AI.

If you ask these kids what they want to be when they grow up, they don't say doctor or teacher or fireman. They say "I want to be rich". Money was always a means to an end, but now it's an end in itself. These kids have grown up in a world where the people who should be in jail are raping their classmates, because they are rich, because they are powerful. The people they admire and respect are barely scraping by. The mask slipped during covid and now they know the only escape from the capital monster is to be the capital monster.

These kids aren't AI pilled. They're CEO pilled. That's why they're dumb.

@rysiek Please folks, don't put this on us the job seekers. The company DO crave the "AI literate" and critical thinking is likely to get you passed over for a job. The only way to get the job is to be dishonest and tell the employer everything they want to hear, right ? Come with the right keywords, the right schools, they right certifications or whatever. Lie, and don't go try anything that might pass over the head of the recruiter or the AI that is the first thing to check your resumé. And then they get surprised when they find what they went lookng for. If there's a graduate that's not what they article describe, he wouldn't have gotten hired to begin with.

@rysiek 4+ years of job hunting shows that bosses, in fact, reject the concept of critical thinking as a general skill.

And oh boy do I have things to say about the depth of ideas coming out of long-established C suites 😬

@rysiek It is so incredibly depressing to think that there are however many thousands or myriads of colleges and universities in the United States, and let's throw in high schools as well because the hi-power high schools posture themselves as basically the onramp into higher #education, have gone all-in on this "AI literacy" nonsense. Can we please take the concept of literacy away from the techlords now? Please?

@rysiek when the plagiarism machines started doing well on some standardized tests we could have taken it as a sign that this way of teaching and grading is broken, instead it was used to fuel the bubble. Oh, well, at least they are creating some amazing value for shareholders.

@rysiek I am even more shocked. Who could have known, possibly.

@rysiek

The reason the techbros were pushing social media addiction and ai slop is because they want to infantilize the fucking masses. They do this because then they can feel superior.

Only what they're doing is destroying society as a whole, and soon the techbros will be facing a massive mob of violent people and none of their technology will work.

@rysiek but they want us to use AI and agents to code to keep our jobs?

@rysiek

haha they know Jack Shit

@rysiek As if "humanities" students were immune against using AI instead of thinking by themselves...

@rysiek FFS... is about all you can say to that!

@rysiek I homeschooled my youngest pretty much the whole way through*. They laugh at people who use AI. They are also extremely critical, analytical thinkers who are allergic to bs.

I want to pat myself on the back and say it's because I did something right, but I suspect that it's more because they didn't have something *wrong* done to them.

*Yes, we taught them evolution, the Big Bang, and math.

@rysiek This is not bad news.

... In fact, I'm going to be talking at my alma mater government-and-international-studies high school in October and I may work this anecdote in, because I already intend to say something to the effect of "they gave me an undergrad BS degree from one of the more prestigious tech unis with one class of intro philosophy, one class of intro econ, and a safety factors class I dropped before midterms under my belt, and maybe that's a problem."

@rysiek
#slopheads

@rysiek
My wife was at work one day, her colleague came to her with an issue: printer not printing. She asked him what had he done so far, and he says: "scatgpt just had me go down a list and nothing worked. "

She goes down to the printer and asks the user a question: "when did you start having issues? "

Turned out, user unplugged everything to move around, then plugged the cable in the ethernet port and not USB. Wife confirmed this, fixed it, and printer ejaculated jobs.

@rysiek

the other thing about being "AI native" is rather simple:

what do they need you for?

it seems some people have turned themselves into a small markov chain chat script, and think they have a future repeating what they asked the AI. and they think no one will notice, or that no one will simply say

"if that's all you do, what do we need you for?"

there is no way to "integrate AI into your workflow"

without turning yourself into a plastic moron

and being eminently replaceable

by AI

@rysiek Be wary of any news story that prompts a "see I told you so" reaction. Confirmation bias aside, this story does not address all the non-STEM students using AI too.

@rysiek Surprised humanities doesn't have the same problem. Must be lagging a little bit?

Now that there's interest in that field, albeit not intrinsically, maybe it'll get the attention it needs to catch up :p

@rysiek

Im experiencing it in the workplace, people with an attitude that think they can google and copilot in 10 minutes the engineering gut feeling and craftsmanship you build in a career…

@rysiek @purplepadma This is why schools who rush to integrate AI into every aspect of their curriculum are just so ridiculously short-sighted. It’s almost like they’re also full of alarmingly shallow ideas. Go figure.

@rysiek A story from the trenches:

My son (CS major) had to take a Communications class as part of his Gen Ed requirements. In the first class they were asked to pair up with someone, introduce themselves and find out something about the other person. The student my son paired with introduced himself and said he’s a Business Major. My son said “Oh, so you have ChatGPT on your phone”. The student looked chagrined and turned his laptop around. It was running ChatGPT and he had prompted it with “How to introduce yourself”.

Dear god, I worry for the future.

@rysiek

@rysiek I'd be curious about the details of how this works: I can see people who went for the typically-less-lucrative degree out of genuine interest being more likely to have done their own work; but if it's just genuine interest that makes you do your own work there are STEM enthusiasts available as well.

Is it a sorting problem, with those genuine enthusiasts harder to distinguish from botherds who scored better? Is it an actual disciplinary rot problem and those departments fell faster?

@rysiek I expect corvids to soon surpass some college graduates in critical thinking skills.

@rysiek meanwhile, here I am, almost failing my thesis course because I loathed doing research but I managed to pass because my teacher forgot to grade a section of my whole file, lol.

I would rather write a creative story than do research ever again. Fuck that shit.

@rysiek Thank you for posting this. My daughter is in a humanities program in college and she frequently feels anxious that she’s making the wrong decision. She actually reads the material and writes without using assistance of AI tools, something she enjoys outside of classes. I’m going to show her the article you boosted and your amusing comment. Below is evidence of her diligence in studying for exams during the semester 😆 #AI #studying

@rysiek żodyn siem nie spodziewoł, żodyn!!!

@rysiek "AI natives" are these new hires from the future or do hiring execs just not understand the word native.

@rysiek Wait, you mean it's like the digital natives (naives) they keep telling me about?!

(just because the young people grew up attached to their bloody cell phone doesn't mean they can do IT... this is not new, many guys tried studying computer science because they liked games and thought they knew about computers when I was at university - and that is the generation now expecting computer skills from new hires just because they have been online all their lives).

@rysiek I think my late career will have something similar to the "cobol effect" back in pre-2000.
(for those who are not aware: year 2000 caused a major headache in legacy IT systems with date length, esp. old and effectivly non-replaceable systems running on Cobol. If you knew the language back then, you earned a shitload of money.)

@rysiek I am not sure if this also relates to the USA now being a rogue state with controlled media, a government so shallow as never seen on earth with horrifyimg morals?

@rysiek

> decline in social skills

way ahead of ya

@rysiek

Us over here in the future saw it coming months ago:

"Published May 9, 2026"

@rysiek This college graduation speaker put it all quite well!

https://mastodon.green/@gimulnautti/117107338529494012

@rysiek AI Naive

@rysiek I actually hate this sense that kids are supposed to come almost fully formed into their workplace, ready to do amazing things on graduate wages. You want them to do groundbreaking, deep thinking? Model it. Teach it. Cultivate it. Pay it.