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by tobiasSoftware 1222 days ago
I'd say it is about the accessibility of data.

First, there is the issue of paid ads. An example is if I look up "How to learn C++", the top link is a paid ad for CodeAcademy, which claims to be free, but then has three tiers with only the basic one being free. I started looking for information on C++ and ended up in a sales room being given a payment plan. Contrast this to me typing "How to learn C++" into ChatGPT, which informs me about "variables, data types, control structures, functions, and arrays", which are a lot of nice keywords that I could jump further into.

Second, Google does not give you access to the information itself. As such, the style the information is stored in on a website is inconsistent, with each website displaying information in drastically different ways. For an example, I Googled "what is a pointer in c++".

The top link starts with "You learned from the previous chapter, that we can get the memory address of a variable by using the & operator", leads to a single example, and is about a single screen long. This would be useless to someone who has no idea what a pointer is and just heard the name of the concept.

Meanwhile the second top link starts with "In earlier chapters, variables have been explained as locations in the computer's memory which can be accessed by their identifier" and is a much more in-depth tutorial spanning over a dozen screens worth of information. This is better as it gives a lot more information, but is still assuming that I got there from following their tutorial, but instead Google just jumped me into the middle of it.

However, ChatGPT homogenizes this, so the data is already organized in an easily accessible format that does not assume you have much previous knowledge. When I tried ChatGPT with this question, it started with "A pointer is a variable in C++ that stores the memory address of another variable." That is far better than either of the websites that I tried with Google that assumed you were halfway through their personal tutorials.

1 comments

Yeah, I'm going to write a one page textbook on how to learn C++. On that one page it just says "variables, data types, control structures, functions, and arrays". It's gonna be brilliant.