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Comment by margorczynski | Hacker News Reader

This is the same naivete that I saw in coding some time ago before most people finally accepted there is no going back and the times of writing code by hand are gone.

And the guy is not a mathematician primarily - he's a Youtube creator and entrepreneur. I liked a lot of his videos but now I usually just ask the LLM for detailed explanation and I can probe it as much as I want if something is not clear enough.

Education will also take a huge hit, you can't really beat an almost free supergenius that has all the time in the world to explain something to you in as much detail as you wish.

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> the times of writing code by hand are gone.

It is not, and for the same reason it's not over for mathematics. For anyone doing anything truly novel, and yes there are still software engineers out there doing that, it's still inept.

It's de jour to leverage formal verification as LLMs are quite good at looping it, but that's still a tool we had to invent to solve problems. It'll be truly over when we're being outpaced in the realm of invention but I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that has meaningfully occurred at all. Coding by hand is not gone, there's just less of a reason to do so now.

I’m a cheerleader for the Khanmigo AI tutor effort. But, apparently so far they are discovering that the hard part is getting the kids motivated to actually ask the AI any questions.

3Blue1Brown does an amazing job of making math interesting to learn in itself. As opposed to the hundreds of millions of kids told “You just have to learn it or you’ll be dumb. Keep up or you’ll fall behind forever. Go!”

The vid calls out explicitly that math education is a primarily a motivation problem and I agree. One way or another, we need a lot more focus on that.

Lack of motivation can be a problem and I love 3b1b videos. However, if you want to truly learn, you still have to sit 30-60 hours on a subject to be able to solve problems. No motivation will replace that.

When you have limited time to learn as a student, you either have the smarts to learn in the limited time or you cheat.

Motivation doesn't replace working for 60 hours. It causes working for 60 hours.

I can beat this “supergenius” - I hire a professor that knows exactly how to teach and what to teach. This professor isn’t rolling the dice every time I ask them a question. Boom.

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