Lady @Lady@cat.family

@james@strangeobject.space @noracodes “With a deadline and thus no real time to properly skill up like I want to.” this is the thing tho yeah, no company wants to pay (in time or $$) for actually training people (or hiring people who are trained)

not to say any particular person or company should act differently in any particular instance, but it’s cultural, we don’t have the systems in place (they’re being dismantled)

@james@strangeobject.space @noracodes (we're at a point where many people are more comfortable asking chatgpt to do something in vscode every time than they are writing a script to automate it. and this isn't slighting those people; i think Microsoft/GitHub has been deliberately pushing people into a position of dependence on their technologies)

@james@strangeobject.space @noracodes i'm also seeing people who do know how to code using it to generate boilerplate or perform other time-consuming tasks

the thing is, this is just refusing to learn a different skill: how to build your own tools to make your workflow more effective

@noracodes (personally, in most cases, i think if it's not worth waiting five days for it's probably not worth knowing, but)

@noracodes i think immediacy is also part of the problem here; people want a tentative answer in five seconds not a well-researched answer in five days

@noracodes there are two related things here:

(1) is that on-call librarians are generally overkill for this sort of job. LLMs are, by design, only effective at broadly-scoped inquiries into generally-available information. librarians can make reference materials for these sorts of queries which patrons can self-service with; you don't actually need an on-call human being to produce the same exact libguide ad-hoc every time. the problem is that, in the current state of the internet, these reference materials are not discoverable.

(2) is that many people do not want to use LLMs to learn, they want to use LLMs to avoid learning (e·g bash script generation so they don’t have to learn bash). librarians would not help in this case since being an expert at finding information doesn’t mean you can or should be doing other people’s homework for them.

i think (1) is solveable and (2) should not be solved. however, capitalism currently finds profit in (2) and not (1).