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Comment by garyfirestorm | Hacker News Reader

Counter point. It’s always advantageous to learn and grow as things evolve. This way you have an active role and maybe a say in how it will evolve. And maybe you could contribute towards that evolution (despite poor execution openclaw showed what LLMs could be doing)

> There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate.

Not long ago we were ridiculing genZ for not knowing why save icon looks like a floppy disk.

Do you want to feel like that in next 5-10 years?

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The counterpoint is that you will learn jank.

If you started early webdev, you learned lots of tricks, that dont benefit a modern webdev. E.g soap, long polling, the JsonP workaround... and so on

Many of the Llm frameworks will be seen simular. Mcp is already kinda heading in the obsolete direction imo, as skills took over

I’ve learned a lot of stuff that don’t really benefits me right now, but now and then I encounter a situation that made me happy that I did. It may never happens for some, but at the time, I was probably happy learning it.

But there’s some stuff that I don’t bother explore in depth because my time is finite and I don’t really need it. And anything LLM tooling is probably easier than a random JS framework. Vim’s documentation is probably longer than cursor’s.

I agree with this point. There is absolutely a 'left behind' gap that is under-explored.

My last job was a cable technician - making house calls to fix wifi, satellite tv, phone issues. Mostly elderly residents. The majority of them all were computer and phone illiterate. They were slow adopters to the fast-moving technology and many of them did not know how to operate their devices after we (UI/UX/hardware/software engineer 'we') removed them.

I wonder if this also has contributed to the elderly lonliness problem - sure its probably mostly related to physical companionship, acceptance of aging, etc, but the world that they knew (in general and the technological world they grew up in) is no longer recognizable.

But maybe it doesn’t matter that much to them. I don’t know how to skin a rabbit, but that knowledge could be handy in some situations. But I don’t see myself being in that situation other than accidentally.

My mother has a phone, but only use it to call. She has never needed a computer even though I spent my teenage years glued to one. But I have like 1 percent of a skill in cooking.

Exactly. We look at older people and think “oh, look at those poor souls. They don’t know X and Y technologies and they keep doing things the old way! They must feel so left behind.” Nothing is further from the truth. My whole life I’ve lived in neighborhoods full of people 20+ years older than me and not once did I have a neighbor or friend who I thought was overwhelmed with the pace of modern life and upset about how different the world was becoming from what they are used to. This is a trope. People are resilient and adaptive, and as you get older you learn how to embrace new things that actually help and reject new things that don’t. As I get older, I find myself just not caring about a lot of things that younger people care about and not doing a lot of things they do. I don’t use social media, I still pay for things with cash and checks, I don’t understand or care about the Kardashians or reality tv. My phone is 8 years old. I listen to prog rock and new wave music, and I probably couldn’t name a single popular musical performer today (besides Taylor Swift because I have a daughter). I don’t feel even slightly “left behind” or “obsolete.”

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