[iszomer]

LLM's are a great onramp to filling in knowledge that may have been lost to age or updated to their modern classification. For example, I didn't know Hokkien and Haka are distinct linguistic branches within the Sino-Tibetan language and warrants more (personal) research into the subject. And all this time, without the internet, we often just colloquially called it Taiwanese.

[aguaviva]

How is this considered "lost" knowledge there are (large) Wikipedia pages about those languages (which is of course what the LLM is cribbing from)?

"Human-curated encycolpedias are a great onramp to filling in knowledge gaps", that I can go with.

[iszomer]

How often do you go back to your encyclopedia hard copies only to find whatever knowledge you may have absorbed have already been deprecated? Or that information from Wikipedia may have changed at moments without notice, have never read or, dare I say, included a political bias to them?

Maybe I should have worded it better as a "beginner" or "intermediate" knowledge onramp and/or filler. For example, I have asked it on occasion to translate into traditional Mandarin in parallel for every English response. It helps tremendously in trying to rebuild that bridge that may have been burned long ago.

[nicce]

It is lost in a sense that you had no idea about such possibility and you did not know to search it in the first hand, while I believe that in this case LLM brought it up as a side note.

[aguaviva]

Such fortuitous stumblings happen all the time without LLMs (and in regular libraries, for those brave enough to use them). It's just the natural byproduct of doing any kind of research.

[skydhash]

Most of my knowledge comes from physical encyclopedia and download the wikipedia text dump (internet was not readily available). You search for one thing and just explore by clicking.