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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

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I literally just started playing around with Lathe (https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe) which was shared here on HN a few weeks back. There are some things I have been wanting to learn more about (some for work, some for personal desire), and I used it to generate a tutorial about some of the things.

I have been very pleased with the results so far. I was able to tune the tutorial to exactly what I want to learn, and it did a very good job (at least that i have seen so far). It has made learning fun, since I get to learn exactly what I want, and I can ask the AI questions and have it make changes to the tutorial in real time as i am working through it.

Now, will I keep using this at a rate to fully offset all of the thinking i have stopped doing since i started using AI? I am not sure, I guess time will tell.

Yea, this is a serious problem but honestly it was present before LLMs. Actually knowing, deeply, how to do something was always very difficult and very time consuming. People would substitute it with “edutainment”: youtube videos, Ted Talks, blogs, etc. The thing is nobody was really learning deeply. We were training our brains for recognition, but mastery requires training for generation which was always the harder of the 2 cognitive processes.

"[Learning] new sports" strikes me as an especially odd one. I can see how an AI tool could help to learn the theory or perhaps come up with better training or match-day/racing strategies, but it won't short-cut the work of developing the necessary physical skills, will it?

See my response above on this.

I'm using it to learn coding.

i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before.

now i am learning basic scripting and data modeling etc.

it is phenomenal for learning languages.

i built a chicken coop and some furniture. the skills and confidence i gained are real. am i failing to learn certain skills in the process? of course. but I'm getting further then i would on my own, and that is truly meaningful.

you can keep dismissing it; but I'm genuinely using it to break down barriers, give me confidence, and highlight my ignorance in very productive ways.

i find it bizarre how unwilling some people are to recognize that.

> i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before

You want us to believe you couldn't overcome the puddle-deep challenge of installing an IDE and using Pip or Node in the past, but now you're actually learning how to write functions?

Cool for you if true I guess but I'm pretty seriously skeptical

I can sort of buy this, honestly. When was the last time you picked up a new language with unfamiliar tooling? Especially something older that won't hold your hand.

A lot of the most miserable parts of getting started coding have nothing to do with programming and everything to do with like, trying to apt-install the right compiler version or figure out which build headers you need or some other equally trivial bullshit that gets in the way of writing code.

> I can sort of buy this, honestly. When was the last time you picked up a new language with unfamiliar tooling?

I started learning Monogame with C# literally yesterday after being a chiefly JavaScript dev for over a decade. I'm having a lot of fun learning it from scratch with no AI

I'll concede that before yesterday it had been a while though

> Especially something older that won't hold your hand

Python and JavaScript are two of the most "will hold your hand" languages these days aren't they?

> A lot of the most miserable parts of getting started coding have nothing to do with programming and everything to do with like, trying to apt-install the right compiler version or figure out which build headers you need or some other equally trivial bullshit that gets in the way of writing code.

I agree but absolutely not for these two languages in particular

You can open the developer tools in any major browser and start typing in JavaScript right there if you want

Python you can install it and write it right in any editor

The upfront burden for both languages is absolutely trivial imo

Python environment management is notoriously reticulate. I can totally imagine that they got stuck on some path bullshit so that the installed packages were on a different Python than the one they launched in the IDE. I've been using and configuring computers since they had DIP switches and if I were teaching someone to code manually I would absolutely let them use Claude to get their environment set up.

It's kinda easy to measure if you've learned something. You can test yourself if you can do what you've learned without AI.

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...

i'm using LLMs to do personal aspnet web project. i'm not skill in javascript. i let AI handle it and learn.

Sure. It doesn't mean that you're learning javascript though. This is where the OP, hodder, is wrong.

I agree with the sentiment of the parent comment. But I also sometimes question what you have posed exactly. Am I really learning or getting the curiosity itch scratched. The line is very thin sometimes. But I think I am more in the camp of learning. I can ask so dumb question that I never had the courage to ask nor were they entertained where I was educated. It has been a boon to finally ask.

For example I am following Dirac's book "The Principles of quantum mechanics" to study QM. Pre-AI wouldn't have been able to do so, I am just that dumb. Even with AI its tough. but the thing is I can keep asking questions until I get that concept drilled in. Now I am doing it at a pace that's unfathomable to me.

But now that I am getting to grips with QM, I can get to things that I am really interested to learn like spin resonance and so on. This is something I am so grateful for.

Now it can be questioned that is it making me wise, intelligent or just "giving me answers" that I should strive to discover myself. I dont know the answer to that. But studying what I want, how I want and not getting judged is something i deeply enjoy. Srry the comment might have taken some tangents.

> For example I am following Dirac's book "The Principles of quantum mechanics" to study QM. Pre-AI wouldn't have been able to do so, I am just that dumb

Why exactly wouldn’t you be able to learn pre-AI?

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