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Comment by ragequittah | Hacker News Reader

I push back on this idea hard. There's some things I consider not worth my time since an LLM will always be available to do it for me. But a whole lot of things you can learn far better with a LLM than almost anywhere else.

Been learning Linux, how to build a homelab, and quite a few other related topics since about chatgpt 3.5. If the LLM went away tomorrow I'd still know how to do most things in Linux, set up my opnsense router, reinstall xcp-ng, do everything in docker, and a boatload of other things that would've been so much more tedious to learn before an LLM. Simplicity of access to knowledge doesn't mean you don't learn it. A google search didn't make us learn slower than when we had to scour for books at the library, it increased the pace dramatically. Same goes for LLMs.

You can use LLMs and learn nothing. People who like to learn won't ever use it that way.

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> Simplicity of access to knowledge doesn't mean you don't learn it

Except that it does, learning is mediated by _effort_.

Was it hard? Then what did you gain by using AI?

Was it easy? Then you didn't learn

It's not as simple as that.

If you're building a home lab, you might just give up because you are tired of searching for Cisco router syntax.

LLM can be the little bit of lube you need to understand things at a higher level, because the tedious things are not as bad as they used to be.

You then end up actually getting a few things in your lab to work correctly, get a confidence boost, and follow up with some searches about how routing actually works and why the syntax is the way it is.

Apparently using sqlite aint learning.

I think that's very simplistic (I also think learning is generally mediated by failure not effort. Effort is just the path through the repeated failure).

If I do a project with an LLM, I want to understand exactly how and why it did something that I didn't know how to do. So I ask it. And it's generally very forthcoming.

Generally I don't have "project = simple|hard" as a thing in my life, I generally know a whole bunch about something I want to do, and maybe not the college-level education of the nitty-gritty details.

Do you know what a really good way to learn is ? Once the LLM has taught you what LICM is and why you want it in a compiler, ask it to give you a quiz on the topic. This is a surprisingly excellent way to learn things.

"Was it easy? Then you didn't learn"

Do you work in education? Learning does not need to be hard at all, this is just a certain education style.

Learning by playing around with the topic with fun would be another one.

Having emotions while learning is a strong enforcer.

And more concretely, finding out why my linux GPU driver is not working is much more fun now, that I don't have to deal with man pages, can ask any stupid question anytime and get a answer likely to be correct immediately - and not have to dig up old outdated forum posts or ask a question somewhere and wait 2 weeks to get a unhelpful answer.

I have a formal training in education. I may agree that learning may not necessarily be hard, but any learning requires effort.

"but any learning requires effort."

With this I agree.

If the main effort is trawling through forums or poorly written documentation the main thing you've learned is how to trawl through these things. I'm of the opinion these should've never been useful skills to begin with.

> If the LLM went away tomorrow I'd still know how to do most things in Linux, set up my opnsense router, reinstall xcp-ng, do everything in docker, and a boatload of other things that would've been so much more tedious to learn before an LLM.

This makes sense, but i'm assuming you have some sort of technical background to begin with? I imagine people that have been around pre-LLMs would be better equipped for not only prompting the LLMs for accurate information, but also internalizing that information. I wonder if the post-LLM generation would be the same.

: Though I imagine that there's going to be a cutoff date for people born before a certain point pre-LLMs too. Old people rn seem to be much more blindly accepting of whatever the LLMs spit out than younger adults.

This I agree with. But it goes for people's attention spans due to social media, hopelessness because of the insane top-heavy economy and climate change, and a whole load of other stuff piled on top of it all. I feel really bad for the kids these days. There are of course ways to prevent kids from using AI but I bet it'd work as well as preventing kids using social media (they'll just find a way around the rules).

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