Saturday, September 26th, 2026, 6:57 am
You Lose the Ability to Think and Forget Skills
Filed under: Don’t do that
think I was about 3 when I was in a particular place and time and can still vaguely remember that place and time. I also think that psychologists deem this to be normal, based on the belief people cannot have any vivid memories of them being 1 or 2 (belief; we cannot “read” brains). I don’t know why, but it’s something to do with memory retention in the brain as it ages. I also think that recollection requires rehearsal, so in order for me to remember some moment from age 3 I’d need to recall that at age 5, then 7, 10 and so on. It reinforces that memory.
The same is true for adults in their professional lives. Without exercising some skill regularly, that skill will be lost.
This is one strong argument against using slop, either in a business (collective skills/retention thereof) or as an individual.
Also see this new blog post: If you don’t have the factories, you lose the expertise
Ignore how he uses for slop for images (hypocrisy when it comes to LLMs for code, too). To quote: “If you have the factories, sooner or later, you get the designers. If you don’t have the factories, you lose the expertise. Or you never get it. There aren’t that many people left in the Silicon Valley capable of working on silicon. You can design a chip from California. Making one is done where the fab is. You can get a PhD in robotics in Quebec City, but you won’t be designing robots unless you fly over to where they are made. Zoom calls won’t cut it at scale.”
