nsainsbury's comments

Just wait until we start to see the full impact of AI on learning. I suspect the results are going to be so catastrophic that there will actually be attempts to hide it.

eg. See [1] which finds: "The report shows a rapid change over just five years. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of incoming students whose math skills were below high school level rose nearly thirtyfold and 70% of those students fell below middle school levels. This roughly translates to about one in twelve members of the freshman class."

and

"high school math grades are only very weakly linked to students’ actual math preparation."

There is simply no way you can dangle an automatic homework and assignment solver in front of kids and not absolutely destroy their motivation, desire, and ability to learn.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/annaesakismith/2025/12/11/uc-sa...

I used to also believe along these lines but lately I'm not so sure.

I'm honestly shocked by the latest results we're seeing with Gemini 3 Deep Think, Opus 4.6, and Codex 5.3 in math, coding, abstract reasoning, etc. Deep Think just scored 84.6% on ARC-AGI-2 (https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/)! And these benchmarks are supported by my own experimentation and testing with these models ~ specifically most recently with Opus 4.6 doing things I would have never thought possible in codebases I'm working in.

These models are demonstrating an incredible capacity for logical abstract reasoning of a level far greater than 99.9% of the world's population.

And then combine that with the latest video output we're seeing from Seedance 2.0, etc showing an incredible level of image/video understanding and generation capability.

I was previously deeply skeptical that the architecture we have would be sufficient to get us to AGI. But my belief in that has been strongly rattled lately. Honestly I think the greatest gap now is simply one of orchestration, data presentation, and work around in-context memory representations - that is, converting work done into real world into formats/representations, etc. amenable for AI to run on (text conversion, etc.) and keeping new trained/taught information in context to support continual learning.

I actually wrote up quite a few thoughts related to this a few days ago but my take is far more pessimistic: https://www.neilwithdata.com/outsourced-thinking

My fundamental argument: The way the average person is using AI today is as "Thinking as a Service" and this is going to have absolutely devastating long term consequences, training an entire generation not to think for themselves.

Touching on the atrophy point, I actually wrote a few thoughts about this yesterday: https://www.neilwithdata.com/outsourced-thinking

I actually disagree with Andrej here re: "Generation (writing code) and discrimination (reading code) are different capabilities in the brain." and I would argue that the only reason he can read code fluently, find issues, etc. is because he has spent year in a non-AI assisted world writing code. As time goes on, he will become substantially worse.

This also bodes incredibly poorly for the next generation, who will mostly in their formative years now avoid writing code and thus fail to even develop a idea of what good code is, how it works/why it works, why you make certain decisions, and not others, etc. and ultimately you will see them become utterly dependent on AI, unable to make progress without it.

IMO outsourcing thinking is going to have incredibly negative consequences for the world at large.

Yep, sold to DAZN. Who in turn do all their development out of Hyderabad, India. Almost entire tech team locally is gone now with handover done to that team.

IMO, things are different this time (as someone who has been in this industry for about 20 years now) and I don't see these jobs coming back.

For one, many of these companies are now used to their tech teams being remote. The tools, culture, infra, etc. over the last ~5 years has all become remote which lessens the shock of going fully offshore.

Two, many tech teams in the western world are already partially offshored and have been for some time now. I know where I worked, a reasonable % of the team was already offshore in low COL countries (India, etc.). What's happening now is just the expansion of that cost saving after initial testing of the waters was successful.

Three, the quality gap between offshore teams and their western counterparts is now much smaller, and AI will be used to lessen the gap even further (along with just throwing more bodies at each problem which you can do when your salaries are 1/3rd of what they are here).

Four, many products/services now have captured markets with strong network effects, which means they can weather a heavy degradation of services with little to no loss of customers. It's called enshittification, and businesses are doing it now because they absolutely know they can, and get away with it.

I was laid off recently along with most of the tech team (Australian company ~ very well known brand). There's a handful of people left, but even they know their time is coming soon.

And this isn't about AI (well, not primarily anyway). It's offshoring, offshoring, offshoring.

IMO, what's taking place now is absolutely transformative and the world economy is in the process of being reshaped. It's not just tech jobs that are being offshored - we're just one of the first/early movers. Many other professional/white-collar jobs (accounting, etc.) are also getting offshored at an accelerating rate. And it's happening all over the western world - it's happening in the US, it's happening in Australia, Canada, the UK, etc.

And unlike previous periods of mass offshoring, I don't think the jobs are ever coming back.

I've always found it interesting that on Hacker News, articles like this pretty much fly by without commentary and are routinely downvoted, while articles speculating about the inevitable doom of mankind due to AI generate hundreds of comments and lively discussion.

We're so in search of novelty, we ignore the bus steadily making its way straight towards us as we stand in the middle of the road, doing absolutely nothing - and with no hint that anything or anyone will come to save us - and instead we keep reading tea leaves and imagining more fascinating and wonderful dangers that have a near zero chance of manifesting before the bus hits us.

To some extent, the bus ending is just too boring it seems for anyone to really become engaged by it - narratively speaking.

We're not going to make it to anywhere close to AGI before we see widespread and systematic societal and environmental collapse on almost all fronts due to climate change.

We're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction right now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction), we're in unparalleled territory with ocean warming: (https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/) and as a society we are utterly incapable of reducing CO2 emissions (https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/).

If you're scared of AGI, instead step away from your monitor, put down the techno-goggles and sci-fi books, and go educate yourself a bit about the profound ways we are changing the natural world for the worse _right now_

I can recommend a couple of books if you'd like to learn more:

Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (https://www.amazon.com/Our-Final-Warning-Degrees-Emergency-e...)

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (https://www.amazon.com/Uninhabitable-Earth-Life-After-Warmin...)

Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide (https://www.amazon.com/Hothouse-Earth-Inhabitants-Bill-McGui...)

For anyone looking for the related talk from LeCun discussing the proposed architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRzvpV9DZ8Y

Science does eventually self-correct, but unfortunately it takes far too long to do so.

One area I've studied pretty extensively is the history of cancer treatment. In the long story of the history of cancer treatment, it is absolutely scandalous how often the scientific consensus was wrong and persisted for years in spite of the evidence. For example, the radical mastectomy for the treatment of breast cancer continued to be used for many years, leaving many women disfigured, in spite of wide evidence that it did not produce better outcomes vs more restrained breast tissue removal.

In the history of science, many of these kinds of bad ideas have persisted simply due to deference/seniority - the incentives are all stacked towards paying your dues and not challenging the status quo and absolutely not towards being right/following the actual scientific method. There is a reason the saying "Science advances one funeral at a time" exists - as Max Planck noted: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Yes, absolutely this.

I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years.

There are an extremely small number of fields in which the overall quality is still quite high (mathematics, etc.) but overwhelmingly the social sciences, medical science, etc. are wastelands of p-hacked, low-N, biased, poorly designed studies that can't be replicated (not to mention the outright frauds and absolutely rampant plagiarism).

Every intelligent person should be deeply, deeply skeptical of papers published in particular fields over the last ~20 years.

That's true. And I agree that the vaccines have saved lives - mostly, of the old and the very sick/unhealthy.

However, what is less clear today is whether there has been a net positive or negative effect of the vaccine for young healthy people. You can only come to that conclusion if you actually had high quality data and studies on vaccine side-effects, effectiveness in population groups stratified by age, health, etc.

I suspect that the vaccines, mandates, lockdowns, etc. have been a net negative for the overall health of young (<50), and healthy people, and the body of scientific evidence will support this position in the future. It's just cloudy today because it's wrapped up in politics...but the science will eventually win out.

Actually, I would argue we don't have good data from the use of the vaccines. Part of the reason is because all the mechanisms used for reporting things like side-effects, effectiveness, etc. have a litany of confounding variables which haven't been controlled for which could be far better corrected for/isolated with good studies.

For example, when it comes to vaccine side-effects, I don't think there exists a true account for how common the side-effects really are. The most common way to report side-effects (VAERS, and similar national databases) are dismissed due to the self-reporting nature, local GPs frequently dismiss side-effects and tell people to just go home and take a Panadol with zero reporting going on (I had this happen to me - started experiencing severe chest pain 2 days post-Pfizer. Subsequently saw a cardiologist after months of pain and his comment to me was "I'm seeing young people like you daily and your cases are going widely underreported"), etc.

Likewise, when it comes to vaccine effectiveness, there are a million and one confounding variables from % of the population that already had natural immunity, covid variants, health, age, seasonality, societal lockdowns, isolation, etc.

Also, it's important I think for us to raise the bar to the highest possible standard when you're talking about a medical intervention that was forced under significant duress (loss of job, social stigma, public/medical shaming) on a substantial percentage of the world's population. We should not be content as a society to come within inches of worldwide medical authoritarianism without asking some seriously hard fucking questions and imposing the absolute strictest and highest possible scientific standards to justify why.

I started developing chest pain two days after my Pfizer shot and actually still experience some chest pain at times now, many months later. For me the pain started after exercising as well.

The cardiologist I went to see about the issue said he's seeing people like me daily.

Appears to be very very common (as high as 2/3 'with' covid vs 'for' covid). See: https://twitter.com/MonicaGandhi9/status/1478401273317654528

I don't think anyone is ignoring long COVID and hospital issues. Hospital capacity is discussed front and center daily and is the primary justification given for lockdowns.

Also, please see this recent meta-analysis which found that when you actually add a control group, most "long COVID" symptoms disappear in children. A higher study quality was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms.

Original tweet: https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876

Link to study: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...

Actually, a recent meta-analysis found that when you actually add a control group, most of the "long COVID" symptoms disappear. Higher quality studies were was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms. "Long COVID" appears to be almost entirely an artifact of bad science (and bad science reporting)

See https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876 and https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...

From what I've seen there seems to be a growing body of evidence that "long COVID" is very much overblown. Eg. See this recent meta-analysis which found that when you actually add a control group, most of the symptoms disappear. A higher study quality was associated with lower prevalence of almost all symptoms.

Original tweet: https://twitter.com/ShamezLadhani/status/1472622893154639876

Link to study: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(21)005...

I've been continuing my study of mathematics (https://www.neilwithdata.com/mathematics-self-learner) and recently started Needham's Visual Complex Analysis which I'm really enjoying.

I've also been putting more time into competition table tennis (coaching, etc)! Am no Fan Zhendong but the backhand is coming along nicely.