Comment by bluefirebrand

4 days ago

> would you mind clarifying how you do learn?

Practice

> Everyone has different learning styles so I tend to take a different strokes for different folks attitude

Okay but at the end of the day the only way to actually learn (and demonstrate that you've learned anything) is by actually doing it

And I don't really consider "I got the AI to do it" as actually doing it, which is why I'm questioning what you've actually retained.

To be clear if you feel like you've actually learned this stuff then good for you. I'm genuinely happy if that's the outcome you feel you have obtained

I'm just personally very skeptical of anyone learning fuck all from using AI to build stuff because like I said... I learn from practice. Using AI is not practice any more than copying from open source repos is.

And frankly I'm bitter because I absolutely cannot learn fuck all from using AI. It is the sort of shortcut that prevents my brain from committing anything to memory.

I guess I don't understand what about any aspect of what I explained gave you the impression that I might not have put what I learned into practice.

This is going to sound like I'm fucking with you, but I'm deadly serious: if someone taught you how to do something and you later learned that that person was actually an LLM masquerading as a human, would you forget what you had learned?

It's actually not impossible that you've hypnotized yourself, or could be experiencing a trauma response.

  • Of course it's traumatic. It is undermining the value of my knowledge and skills in a time when the economy is extremely rocky and I'm afraid for my future

    • I sincerely do have a ton of compassion for you in how this is affecting your life, and I can empathize with existential anxiety to a degree that most folks won't understand. It sucks to be stressed out when it seems like everything should be possible.

      Here's what I can say from the other side: you can only control what you can control, but you will be surprised to realize that you can control a lot if you put in the hours and just doggedly refuse to let problems stop your progress.

      I don't think that the answer is a one-man fight against the zeitgeist, though. I promise you that blaming LLMs will quickly go from reasonable position to crutch to weakness. Like bankruptcy, it tends to happen very slowly and then very quickly.

      If you treat good LLMs as a tireless mentor that needs to be reigned in and verified, you too can learn stackable skills quickly.

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