Tootfinder

"This isn’t to say that AI is uniformly bad—it’s clearly not—but that we must not fall into the trap of mistaking the outputs of writing (…) from the value of the cognitive process of writing (…).
It would be a catastrophically unwise decision for humanity to abandon a key step in training young brains simply because they can now clack a few keys and produce something that sounds intelligent even as they never become intelligent."

The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition
One professor's reflections on the end of an era, as AI tools such as ChatGPT have murdered the student essay (RIP). Here's why that threatens the future of human cognition—and how to save ourselves.

New study on the effects of LLM use (in this case on essay writing):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Quote:
"LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four month…

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalo…

"Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task"
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872
"[…] While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four mont…

Wissenschaftler:innen haben herausgefunden: Wer ChatGPT oder andere Bullshit-Generatoren nutzt, verblödet innerhalb kurzer Zeit.
#LLM

„While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, #LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.“ #AI

Interesting article on Cornell research:
"AI suggestions make writing more generic, Western"
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/04/ai-suggestions-make-writing-more-generic-western

@… unsolicited wild thought: what if the per item front-matter would be within an HTML comment?
1. This would allow any Markdown processor to continue to work.
2. Implementation wise, achieving this won't be extremely extensive.
(Context: I implemented over time many Markdown extensions. Most of the time the main struggle was to find the balance between ease of using (as in writing) the new elements and ensuring that tools unware of the new elements won't choke on them.)

Prompt-Hacking: Apple-Intelligence-Schreibwerkzeuge zum Chatbot machen
Apple hat es gezielt unterlassen, Apple Intelligence mit eigenem Chatbot auszurüsten – nur ChatGPT ist aktivierbar. Mittels Writing Tools geht es aber dennoch.

I keep posting about how the AI hype bubble makes it almost impossible to have a reasonable conversation about LLMs, and it’s only when the bubble bursts that we can start thinking realistically about what if anything LLMs are actually good for in writing code.
That seems to be what Fred is getting at here: the massive gap between the hype and the reality means that the affordances of these tools fit neither the task at hand nor the tool’s own capabilities.
6/

rant on software dev practices
What is it with P5js and virtually all its ecosystem (like Q5js) that, still today, didn't manage to _properly_ package their libraries to be distributed and used via package managers?
Same with their insistence to push global resources and state everywhere... and of course virtually not documenting any of the truly delicate details, just the trivial stuff that could be auto-discovered by relying on auto-complete tools.
I kind of understand wanting to keep the vanilla experience alive, making it "easy" for novices... but that shouldn't be at odds with more "professionalized" production pipelines, at least *not that much*.
For example, with Q5js:
- The NPM packages could be mentioned in their documentation (they are not, even though they are official)
- The NPM packages could define proper exports (same for the JS modules themselves), not forcing us to rely on relative paths to files in node_modules... 🤦
- Globals could be at least namespaced... of course, it would be much, much better if they didn't exist at all.
I'm writing this in 2025, not 1993... and I'm... "triggered".
At this point I'll have to check if I have any other neuro-condition beyond ADHD that makes me "obsessed" with technical flaws, because it seems to be a "me problem" when either virtually nobody sees that as a huge collection of fatal design flaws... or they see it and don't care at all.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10877 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csSE_…

Developer Perspectives on Licensing and Copyright Issues Arising from Generative AI for Software Development
Despite the utility that Generative AI (GenAI) tools provide for tasks such as writing code, the use of these tools raises important legal questions and potential risks, particularly those associated with copyright law. As lawmakers and regulators engage with those questions, the views of users can provide relevant perspectives. In this paper, we provide: (1) a survey of 574 developers on the licensing and copyright aspects of GenAI for coding, as well as follow-up interviews; (2) a snapshot of…

The Hidden Cost of AI Coding #Ai,

The Hidden Cost of AI Coding
AI coding tools boost productivity but may sacrifice the flow state and deep satisfaction developers experience when writing code by hand. What are we losing?

Since migrating away from big tech platforms (including Google Drive) I have been using Libreoffice for my writing and presentations.
I often get asked why I do not use OnlyOffice since it looks so much better (especially the web client). Two answers:
- The presentation tools of OnlyOffice are too barebones
But more importantly:
OnlyOffice is a company that seems to be controlled by a Russian guy who invests a lot of time to hide the fact that OnlyOffice is Russian (see…

Comparing Collabora with OnlyOffice
Collabora Online provides excellent interoperabilty, efficient backend for scalability, best privacy, and a rich interface for cooperation and editing docx, xlsx, pptx and odf