I see people enthusiastic about LLM-based text summarization tools, and then I try them and I'm confused how I'm supposed to find them beneficial to either my comphrension or the calmness in my life

Alexandra Magin 🏳️‍🌈

Skimming large amounts of text is something I've learned to be very good at... trading that (small) effort for having to trust the LLM didn't make errors which will cause me to take incorrect actions just feels more exhausting and stressful

Aaron Brick — אהרן בריק

@recursive It doesn't seem like a coincidence that these tools are seeing such uptake at a time when attention spans are supposedly falling, and people seem to often prefer learning from videos to texts. Then, those of us who are already good at working with texts find ourselves on the outside looking in.

Alexandra Magin 🏳️‍🌈

@aarbrk Your comment makes me realize why I find them especially mismatched with my desires -- I'm really swimming upstream, presently in a phase of getting my ADHD treated and diving into areas of computer-related learning/work that demand less fast information and more patient, rigorous mathematical proof

(And I resent the idea that the other mode of thought is better)

Riley S. Faelan

@recursive As an aside, my mental model of why some ADHD people are particularly good at certain single things that a naïve thinking about ADHD says we should be bad is — we're good at these things because we were so bad that we needed to develop coping strategies, and sometimes you get lucky and find a really effective coping strategy.

A common recurring theme appears to be "having good memory". As far as I can tell, it comes from coping with ADHD-associated short-term memory impairment by learning to use long-term memory for many of the things that NT people use short-term memory for. It's only of limited use in managing everyday affairs and chores, but if you get lucky enough, you get out of it an ability to see links between the topic at hand and seemingly random things whose relationship is non-intuitive, even obscure, for neurotypicals. Yay, +1 bonus at the skill of interdisciplinary research!

@aarbrk

Dan

@riley @recursive @aarbrk it's true! My main coping strategy for having an inability to remember large volumes of information has been to seek understanding of the core principles of the thing and thinking them through to the logical conclusions as needed. It's made me very good at understanding how things work and troubleshooting them when they don't

Dan

@riley @recursive @aarbrk it's also made me good at (sometimes) leaving a good trail of breadcrumbs for next time I or anyone else have to solve a particular problem again. Because I know I won't remember all of it but I can usually have an inkling that I've seen something similar before (yay, pattern recognition) and that's enough

Riley S. Faelan

@dan I'm bad at leaving breadcrumb trails, even though I have tried many ways over the years. :blobcatsad:

@recursive @aarbrk