Mastodon Feed
Boosted by jwz:
Robotistry@fediscience.org wrote:
@graydon @johnzajac @jwz @mikej @mjg59 @glyph Long covid took away my ability to interpret symbols for months.
I went from a paperback-a-day habit plus intense cognitive work to picture books because I couldn't hold a word and its meaning in my head simultaneously.
I lost English, math, music, programming, graphs - everything that involved interpreting symbolic information. Spell checking was like crawling over gravel.
These were all things that I *knew* I used to be able to do, but my brain couldn't access the actual skill anymore.
Doing something by writing a prompt would have been just as difficult as doing the job. And evaluating whether the prompt accomplished the task or not? Impossible.
(I'm better now, but bad symptom flares still trigger cognitive impairment and my ceiling is nowhere near where it used to be. On a bad day I communicate the same way an LLM does - by having chunks of pre-stored communication that fall out in response to the right trigger. I'm crashy today and had to deploy the chunk that means "I'm not comprehending what's going on and can't answer questions right now".)