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Comment by jesse_dot_id | Hacker News Reader

I've been equating them to graphing calculators since the first LLM launched. It's an amazing tool if you know how to use it. If you don't know how to use it, it's still a tool, but you won't be doing anything amazing with it.

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Nice analogy.

I loved graphing calculators until I learned tools like Mathematica and Matlab. Still waiting for the Mathematica version of LLMs.

Agents / loop engineering / whatever is hot with the AI Twitter kids still isn’t it.

LLMs are golden retrievers that have memorized all of wikipedia

maybe outing myself as a dinosaur, but "back in my day" the calculator came with a book that detailed exactly how to use it. Both the high level basic language and the low level system language. Not knowing how to use it is simply a failure to Read The Fucking Manual.

You can read the manual all you want, but if you don't know basic algebra, trig, calculus, etc, you are not going to have any idea how to apply or use much of anything that the manual describes with regards to actually doing math with a graphing calculator. There is a base level of knowledge required.

It was a general purpose computer, just a small one. Anything you could do on a "real" computer could be done on a calculator, albeit with tighter constraints. It might help to have some higher math objective to accomplish, because that would better utilize the preloaded system software. But in terms of the hardware? Probably not super relevant.

I made a lot of use of the TI-89 era CAS in college. But IMO the TI-83 era manuals taught me more about both math and computers than the subsequent generations could have.

Difference is, it can teach you.

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