Comment by ksec
5 days ago
This is completely off topic.
What hit me ( hard ) wasn't the blogging set up, it was this:
>And if anything’s unclear, LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude are great for filling in the gaps.
For people like me who grown up before Internet was a thing. If we dont understand anything we either have to go to the library to look it up go to find someone for help. Then it was encarta. When Internet arrived I could do look up faster, or more importantly if I am stuck anywhere I could ask on IRC or forums for help.
I am sensing a large part of learning on forums and online will be gone. Read the manual becomes ask the LLMs?
And I am sensing ( no offence ) the generation growing up with LLMs may be far worst. We already have a generation of people who think Googling the answer is 99% of the work when in fact the answer is not important. It is the process of getting to that answer that is largely missing from today's education.
Sorry about the off topic message. But that sentence really hit me differently.
Processes are always changing and getting easier. The process you grew up with was far easier than what people had to do decades before you, which was easier than the process decades before that, etc.
It's easy to fret about, "How will the next generation survive in the world I grew up in, without the skills I developed?"
But the answer is, they won't. Just like you don't need the same skills a caveman had because you live in a thoroughly transformed world, the kids of today won't need the same skills you had because they'll live in a thoroughly transformed world.
Ofc some good or important things will always be lost from one generation to the next. But that's okay. Still, humanity marches onward.
I grew up the same way and it's for sure wild to think back how if we had a question about something we had to do digging at a library to find the answer hopefully. Now it's just search and done. Or read a wikipedia page about it.
I do see the "I asked chatGPT" response more and more and initially had a similar feeling but I think it's still early days for LLM's. Will they be around in 10 years and ubiquitous like search engines? Who knows. But undoubtably they will get better over time and more accurate. Just like how the early internet had a lot of bad information on it, it got better over time.
This might also be a divide between different types of people. Personally I am very curious and want to really understand how something works so I get tons of information that won't help me solve a problem, but I understand the tool or part better. I would guess you might be in the same basket. But there are also people who just want the answer to solve the problem. They don't care how it works they just want it to work. And that's fine. It takes all kinds. Not everyone needs to have a masters in CS to use a computer or program one. Best we can do is try and nurture curiosity among other people and help them figure out ways to learn more and more.