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by moron4hire 13 days ago
It comes from an inclination to be argumentative for argument's sake. Some people approach everything with an eye that nobody else is as smart as them so everything everyone else makes must be flawed and it's their job to tell them how wrong they are.
1 comments
Brendinooo 13 days ago
>that nobody else is as smart as them

>it's their job to tell them how wrong they are

lol.

To be clear, my reply came from a desire to stick up for people who now have access to knowledge that they didn't have access to before - I think they should be able to access it without being guilt-tripped for doing so.

If that sentiment is being unfairly bolted on to this thing specifically, perhaps that's a fair critique: people on the Internet have a way of replying to arguments that people aren't actually making, and I'm certainly not immune from that. But the structure of the piece is clearly making emotional arguments so I don't think I'm wrong in that regard.

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moron4hire 13 days ago
The problem is that your core premise is flawed. Nobody who has access to an LLM today has lacked for access to knowledge in 15 years. The LLM providers even tell us themselves that they provide worse access to knowledge because they train on what is available on the public internet up to a certain cutoff date.
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Brendinooo 13 days ago
The point isn't necessarily access (though I'm not willing to concede that), the point is ease of access.

In another comment[0], I gave a personal example. In a sense you are correct, because I could have taken a year or two to go to the library and find books on reading Cyrillic and speaking Serbian, or maybe found something Duolingo-like (I have to hedge here because neither Duolingo nor Rosetta Stone offer Serbian, which perhaps challenges your point), or even hired a private tutor.

All of these options sit on some kind of spectrum of ease and cost. If you have enough money, you can get the best help in the least amount of time. If you don't, you have to maximize the time you can put in instead, and both will be constrained by your intellectual capabilities.

One of the primary purposes of technology is to unbundle what consumers actually want from the craft that was previously necessary to deliver it, and in so doing allows us to do more, experience more, be more. That doesn't mean that there are no possible drawbacks, but let's not lose the forest for the trees.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323929

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