That was a terrible experience. For a start that site has an expired certificate, as do many of the pages it suggested, and of the pages that worked it was mostly people that dipped a toe in a few years ago and never came back or other broken function.
It might be because it wasn’t a technique as such. I don’t visualise not thinking, I just stop thinking about things, but I also don’t have a constant inner voice talking to/with me as I understand many people do.
I don't know, maybe the 10 prior weeks of sleeping in hypoxic tents might have had some effect too. If they walked off the street, huffed some Xenon then blasted up Everest that'd be amazing, but it sounds like people are overfocusing on the Xenon bit.
You might, just as ages ago when people were complaining about juniors c+ping stack overflow answers you might have said you used them to learn from.
LLMs are a turbo charged version of the same problem, only now rather than copying a code fragment from stack overflow you can have an LLM spit out a working solution. There is no need to understand what you're doing to be productive, and if you don't understand it you have no model or reasoning to apply in the future to other problems, maybe AI will save you there too for a while, but eventually it won't and you'll find you've built your career on sand.
Or maybe I'm wrong and we're all headed for a future of being prompt engineers.
Training people is a cost, an investment, if everyone does it the cost is amortized across the industry. If I can cut that cost by using AI I'm now at a competitive advantage, everyone will look to cut that cost because the downside of paying for training juniors that may leave is worse for that company than the downside of the whole industry not training juniors any more.
But they don't learn from that, they turn the crank of the AI tooling and once they have something that works it goes in and they move on. I've seen this directly, you can't shortcut actual understanding.
The why is because we can, but damn am I finding the tools being built with, or having tacked on, AI depressing. Is this a small glimpse of the future we're building for ourselves? Communication is valuable because thought and effort went into it, lowering the bar on producing content doesn't mean more choice, it means lower quality. Already I see a reaction against this amongst some peers when they find out something they were asked to review was AI generated, why should they put effort in if the other person didn't.
I think you're ignoring the externalities of supporting a business/country that is doing things you don't agree with. If ACo can sell me widget cheaper than BCo because they dump the polluting manufacturing waste in a local river it's perfectly rational to decide not to deal with them. The intent is to make them change their behavior by impacting their business. Should we ignore the effects of our purchases just because we can get something cheaper or better?
I would suggest you don't understand the equivalence because it's not there. They aren't saying that creating something with polish is expecting to make money off it. They're saying when you start a new hobby or interest forget about trying to tailor your output to an audience that doesn't exist and focus on skill. Maybe you really want to produce something polished, but the reasoning for that should be for your own development and edification not because you want it to appeal to others. Prioritise what makes you happy and gives you enjoyment not what you think other people want.