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> The AI is useless crowd truly makes me scratch my head.

I think it's because, past autocomplete, for AI to be useful professionally you need to already have a lot of background and experience in what you are using it for, in addition to engineering and project management to keep the scope on track. While demos with agents are impressive in practice autonomy is not there they need strong guidance, so it only works as very smart assistant. What you are describing is very representative of this.

If you don't have that level of seniority then you'll struggle to get value from AI because it'll be hard to guide and keep on track, also spotting and navigating errors and wrong thinking paths. You cannot use it as an assistant, only takes what it says at face value, and given it'll randomly be wrong it makes it useless.

I think most people commenting on HN have the expertise, no?

I use it like a book of openings in Chess. Advanced players also learn openings.

This is why I used it for something I already knew about I just needed clarification on. I could tell when it was wrong and it just wasn't often enough to worry about. I was wrong far more often than it was. And Google searches would be wrong way more often than me.

Feeling glad that one is insulated from the knowledgeable users that have trained the "AI" that stole their IP is just strange.

"AI" is also larger than plagiarizing Stackoverflow. Google AI answers on any topic, which most people use, are pretty poor.

Coming back to sysadmin/programming. There are many migration guides from pfsense to Opnsense, for example (note there are no mean people in that thread):

https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=32793.0

The estimates are days, which is not that different from a weekend.

OpenAI now basically has your firewall configuration and who knows what else, so I would not recommend using "AI" for such sensitive matters.

Openai doesn't care about my iot rules. They aren't going to hack my small home network. It's like saying the people who wrote the guide to set up an iot and guest network know your firewall rules if you follow the guide. Sure. I'd wager they probably know most of the rules for my admin lan too because they're self evident. And turns out most people configure unbound and dnsmasq in the same way too.

Moreover the fact that the AI knows my setup now makes it effortless to troubleshoot.

> If I just had google this would've been a 2 week project easily.

But you'd know something new by the end of it.

So many are so fast to skip the human experience element of life that they're turning themselves into mere prompt generators, happy to regurgitate others' knowledge without feeling or understanding.

For this, you might not care to gain meaningful experience, and as a conscious choice, that's fine. But there are an increasing number of developer and developer adjacent people who reach for the LLM first. Who don't understand "their" contributions to projects.

The haters are those of us who have to deal with this slop, and the sloppy people submitting it without thought, care or understanding.

I don't know, the kind of developers doing this are the same that would copy paste from stack overflow in the past. Because if you are interested in knowledge and human experience, LLMs or not you are curious about what you read and take ownership of what you produce. In the past these developers would have created the same slop but at a much slower pace, LLMs are just enabling them to do it faster.

It's the speed that stops you learning anything. Piecing together a dozen scripts from a dozen sources and making them work requires some work. You have to debug it. Some of this knowledge sticks.

It's not just a tech thing. Kid's learning suffering at their ability to just crank out essays they've never even read.

LLMs and AI are getting better. We doomers aren't decrying the technical advances they're making, we're appalled at the human cost of giving people a knowledge-free route through life.

Not just knowledge free, but thought free. Instead of thinking deeply about something and coming to a conclusion yourself, just offload it to an AI to do it for you. Something challenges you in life? No worries, AI is here. Not just to answer your questions, but think for you. What kind of world is that? What kind of society will that lead to?

I set up opnsense and xcp-ng. The idea thay I now don't understand those front ends is absurd. I'd already learned the underlying networking and Linux stuff years ago I just needed to know where the right nibs are.

And you can easily learn deeply with AI just ask it deeper questions. I do this all the time. I did this several times in this network setup when I did encounter something I didn't understand. If you aren't curious you won't learn, if you are you'll learn faster than any other method out there.

Similar things were said about the calculator.

And rightly so. If you use a calculator instead of learning the fundamentals of how to do maths, you don't learn. This is reflected on them not being touched until 11+ in the UK, and even then there are exams where they are forbidden.

I'm not against the calculator and I'm not against LLMs. I'm against people choosing ignorance.

You're going to be fighting an uphill battle for as long as humanity exists.

Conservation of Energy rears its head in fascinating ways.

Again, I'm not fighting the use of tools, rather their use as a substitute for knowledge.

Practically every educational institution is with me here, so uphill it may be, but it's an important battle for the future of mankind, and recognised as such. We've long joked about a quick slide into Idiocracy (2006), but substituting learning for what a LLM can answer for you is how you rapidly deskill and get there.

In this case, "ragequittah" up top doesn't know how their router/firewall is actually configured. That might work out okay for them but they (and people like them) don't even know what they don't know.

I know exactly how my firewall and router are configured though. I didn't do it blindly and would often hone what the AI gave me. I can see the argument if someone did do it blindly, but I'd wager very few are.

I didn't have to very much because pfsense that I've been using forever and opnsense are basically the same, but if I wasn't sure on why I was setting something the way I was setting it i would ask for clarification with sources. This just amounts to an extremely powerful google search tailored exactly to my situation.

I think everyone pictures ai users as drooling idiots who copy / paste without thinking. While I'm sure that exists you can use AI to learn and it works quite well. To me it feels like how a librarian might feel when people started using the internet to learn because if you don't use the dewey decimal system you aren't really learning anything.

I think what I'll miss from the SO approach to research is encountering that wall of text someone bothered to post giving a deep explanation of the problem space and potential solutions. Sometimes I just needed the fast answer to some configuration problem, but it was always worth the extra 20-30 minutes to read through and really understand those high effort contributions.

Nobody is writing a wall of text about opnsense rules or unbound checkboxes. I already knew the fundamentals I just wanted to get it done. I'm not a novice I've been using firewalls forever. Xcp-ng for half a decade. I just needed clarification on the differences.