Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by FrinkleFrankle 127 days ago
Just because a calculator will only ever be used by a subset of the population to type 80085 and giggle, doesn't mean it can't also be used for complex calculations.

AI is a tool that can accelerate learning, or severely inhibit it. I do think the tooling is going to continue to make it easier and easier to get good output without knowing what you're doing, though.
1 comments
godelski 127 days ago 

  > Just because a calculator will only ever be used by a subset of the population
I'm not sure what your argument is here. I think everyone knows this but also recognizes that the vast majority of people are not using calculators in that way. The vast majority of people are using calculators to replace calculation.

I'll give an example. I tell people I tip by: round the decimal, divide by 10, multiply by 2. Nearly every time I say that people tell me it is too difficult. This includes people with PhD STEM educations...

link
techpression 127 days ago
Hearing these stories (and I hear them more than I would like) is mind boggling to me. As someone who’s quite bad at math, doing what you describe is insanely basic stuff, anyone in a developed country with access to school should be able to do that. It will be hard to convince me those people are using a LLM to learn.
link