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Comment by fluoridation | Hacker News Reader

A programming language is a skill with an accessible source of irrefutable feedback. If the program doesn't work, then you did something wrong. What happens if you try to learn something less concrete or less testable, like quantum mechanics, as the GP suggested?

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I agree with you. I'm also using AI to help me learn electronics so I can finally make some real stuff I can hold in my hands. Lots of hard engineering involved so I'm a lot less confident in my ability to spot the AI's own mistakes.

However, saying you can't learn "anything" is just too strong. I'm definitely managing to distill the AI's weights into my own brain.

It's true in a very real sense, though. Without calibration, how can you tell whether you're learning something real or something fictitious? Imagine trying to learn a language from a single teacher, without ever talking to or corresponding with a native speaker. How could you tell whether you're actually learning the language, or the teacher's unique dialect? Yes, you indeed "learned" something, it's just something that might not bear much resemblance to the real thing.

This made me realize all those benchmarks which unlike loosely acts as a person being awarded with a certificate after his doctorate is rather worthless, for you never know when it bullshit-ted.

Yep. This is the key. You need some kind of knowledge of what the end result should look like to really learn something from LLMs. Otherwise it's a deep dark forest with no way out.

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