Derek Hunt

Oct 20

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/an-opinionated-guide-to-using-ai Notable ideas from this article: - the AI doesn’t know “why” it did something, so asking it to explain its logic will not get you anywhere. - Sycophancy: act as a critic. Otherwise, you might be talking to a very sophisticated yes-man...Read more

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/an-opinionated-guide-to-using-ai Notable ideas from this article: - the AI doesn’t know “why” it did something, so asking it to explain its logic will not get you anywhere. - Sycophancy: act as a critic. Otherwise, you might be talking to a very sophisticated yes-man. _____________________ "In many ways, hallucinations are far less of a concern than they used to be... However, no matter how good the AI is, it will still make errors and mistakes and still give you confident answers where it is wrong. And remember, the AI doesn’t know “why” it did something, so asking it to explain its logic will not get you anywhere. Sycophancy - where the AI agrees with what you say. The reasons for this are complicated but when you need real feedback, explicitly tell the AI to act as a critic. Otherwise, you might be talking to a very sophisticated yes-man. Don’t worry too much about prompting “well”: Older AI models required you to generate a prompt using techniques like chain-of-thought. But as AI models get better, the importance of this fades and the models get better at figuring out what you want. In a recent series of experiments, we have discovered that these techniques don’t really help anymore (and no, threatening them or being nice to them does not seem to help on average). "

Oct 15

"it’s a call for balance: to use digital tools to augment our thinking rather than to offload the mental processes that we need to learn and develop expertise. Learners can't think critically with knowledge they don’t have." https://scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/edu-snippets-e29

Oct 1

Interesting observations from the Economic Futures Symposium: "The productivity story looks simple. The cultural story is not." - Roles are shifting: engineers now see themselves as managers of AI agents - Mentorship is eroding: junior staff turn first to Claude for answers - Skills are in flux: p...Read more

Interesting observations from the Economic Futures Symposium: "The productivity story looks simple. The cultural story is not." - Roles are shifting: engineers now see themselves as managers of AI agents - Mentorship is eroding: junior staff turn first to Claude for answers - Skills are in flux: people are becoming more “full-stack” by working beyond their core expertise - Social dynamics are changing: engineers report that they “work more with Claude than with colleagues,” - Careers are fragmenting: some double down on AI fluency, others bet on human-only skills

Sep 23

AI Slop Fatigue and Analog Intelligence - https://marketoonist.com/2025/09/ai-slop-fatigue-and-analog-intelligence.html

Sep 16

“We must prepare students for a world where the question is not, ‘Can you use AI?’ But rather, ‘Can I trust your thinking without using AI?’” https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-professors-experiment-as-ai-becomes-part-of-student-life/