[hodder]

Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old. New sports, new businesses, new academic pursuits. Technology is a lever and AI is the biggest lever we've ever had. It enables laziness or incredible productivity. Choose your own path forward.

[zerobees]

I don't know this applies to you, but I've had several friends who convinced themselves they're exploring the frontiers of science, and it always turns out that their conversations spiraled into some sort of weird quantum-metaphysical gobbledygook.

LLMs are sycophants, and in long conversations, their sycophancy produces a positive feedback loop: the context window contains affirmations of incorrect interpretations / analogies, so the chatbot continues down that path because, well, that's the most likely completion of previous text. And before you know it, you're discovering the hidden fabric of the universe, which is always some Minkowski fractal spacetime tensor lattice manifold with subharmonic DNA nanotubes.

That is to say, unless you have a robust way to evaluate what you're learning, and to confirm that you're actually learning, I'd tread carefully.

[hodder]

You really just need to augment with tight prompting and know how to extract information and links to peer reviewed literature and well sourced information. Once again, technology here is a lever. Separating wheat from chaff has been key in academic and information pursuits forever and it is becoming ever more important.

[zerobees]

And you're gonna review that voluminous academic literature in a field you're not familiar with, right?...

That is my point: an LLM can be great if you know the field and can spot errors. Or, to a lesser extent, if you have some automatic feedback loop that the model can't easily game ("does this code pass unit tests?"). It's a lot less great if there's a risk that you won't detect the early drift.

[hodder]

Sifting through information to separate truth from fiction is a modern, experience-based skill that I’ve developed YES.

However, your perspective on how LLMs are used might be too narrow. While no one is suggesting using an AI to find a one-shot cure for Alzheimer's, LLMs are incredibly effective tools when paired with textbooks to master subjects like undergraduate physics.

[jplusequalt]

>LLMs are incredibly effective tools when paired with textbooks to master subjects like undergraduate physics

I agree that they can be helpful for explaining things if you're stuck. But since you used the example of physics, the majority of hard won physics knowledge comes from working lots of problems yourself.

Too many people are already used to LLMs circumventing the laborious aspects of things, so it takes a certain person to withhold from just having the LLM solve the problem for you when you're stuck.

Until we can figure out to teach people to fight against their instincts, then I don't think LLMs will lead to better long term outcomes.

[hodder]

On average yes this is almost certainly true. As I said above technology is a lever and most people are incredibly lazy. However if one has drive and determination they are also incredibly powerful tools

[meetingthrower]

100% you are so right. Don't rely on the LLM. It is a robot you give tools and context, and then you ask it to do something with that. It's amazing at that.

[jrflo]

If you’re cognizant of the sycophancy and not a total narcissist then it’s not too hard to figure out with a little experience when the models are just trying to hype you up

[lelanthran]

> Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old.

You aren't learning anything. Learning involves doing.

We've known this for ages: simply reading a maths book without drilling on the problems will not get a student to pass.

Best case scenario, you're reading stuff. For users of coding agents, they're not even doing that.

[Jtarii]

>You aren't learning anything. Learning involves doing.

You can have it write a program that generates drills for you.

I wanted to become better at reading sheet music so I generated a sheet music reading program. You can have it generate maths drills, then ask questions about it if you get stuck or whatever. If you genuinely want to get better at something then AI will help you learn it faster. Obviously its going to hamper more people's cognitive ability that it will enhance but that is a separate problem.

[lelanthran]

The people who say they are learning faster with it aren't mentioning drills, they're mentioning outcomes.

I actually did have an LLM ingest some material and generate drills. It worked well. It's rare that happens, though.

The difference between humans and other animals on the planet had always been the ability to reason. If we, as a species, lose that ability, we're looking at an extinction-level event.

[hodder]

Your initial response post was to me, and you absolutely injected the heavily biased assumption that I was doing no active learning.

[paytonjjones]

Learning by doing is often more effective because it naturally involves forced recall.

But it's not the only way to learn and not even the only way to do a lot of forced recall.

It's downright crazy to say you aren't learning anything by reading. You likely won't retain that high a % of the content without repeated drilling, but it's not like nonfiction exists for no reason!

[jplusequalt]

>It's downright crazy to say you aren't learning anything by reading. You likely won't retain that high a % of the content without repeated drilling, but it's not like nonfiction exists for no reason!

How much of a nonfiction book can you recall a few months after reading it? Probably very little.

However, I haven't taken a calculus class in nearly a decade and I still know how to solve derivatives and integrals.

Point being: there's levels to this, and reading is not nearly as effective as drilling exercises.

[oulu2006]

I'm learning by doing things.

For example: AI has helped me get into restoring retro tech, specifically resoldering leaky caps on retro Macintosh logic boards. Before AI, I didn't know how to use a multimeter (I knew theoretically how it worked), I didn't know how to use flux, solder wick, heat gun. I also didn't understand how bromine radicals yellowed plastic and how to reverse it by using blue light similar to what they use for indoor aquariums.

So AI unlocked doing for me.

[lelanthran]

You realise that every single one of those things had easily accessible videos to learn from, right?

You're happy using AI instead of other material because it will constantly tell you how brilliant you are, or how quick you're learning.

[oulu2006]

No, not everyone, there's no easily accessible video showing how to setup aquarium lights to slowly de-yellow ABS plastic -- at least I didn't find one; AI helped me find an obscure reference to it and I then read a few message boards where it was mentioned.

I also use AI to take in-progress pictures as I desolder to help me check for traces that need to be repaired or help identifying specific chips. I probably could try and find a video where the same chip is featured and someone explains it, and/or retrieve the schematic for the specific logic board, but that's very painful and does slow the process. Think of AI, in this specific case, as enabling skill development for me in a field I wouldn't have necessarily have gotten into, because of being short on time and AI helps me consolidate that information quickly.

[warkdarrior]

Should we also go to ancient scrolls for learning, because videos are too easy? The poster showed you how they learn with the help of AI. You can learn from videos, they learn from AI. What's the problem?

[hodder]

You are very closed minded. LLMs can absolutely give pragmatic and fast information in a useful (non-sycophantic form). You need to examine your extreme biases here.

Just because you can't use a tool doesn't mean the tool isnt useful.

Your bias on display here is frankly silly. Im not saying LLMs are ALWAYS the best way of learning something just like they aren't always the best at anything. They are a valuable tool though. Yes so is youtube and textbooks, and professsors, and peer review literature, and pen and paper, and block training etc.

[jjav]

> So AI unlocked doing for me.

I don't quite follow how AI unlocked any of that?

The best way to learn these things (well, second to a human coach who has the expertise and has time to guide you) is from youtube videos, not AI.

[oulu2006]

See my later post in this thread, I go into more detail about how I use AI in the restorative process.

In addition, I literally had AI build a complete list of parts to order from Amazon down to the caps for each system I wanted to rebuild -- it was close to 20 different items, I would have probably given up if I had to try and assemble this list from different YouTube videos.

[hodder]

When did I say I wasn't doing and just reading. That is your own heavy bias creeping in.

[risyachka]

This.

Without doing you may as well read some fiction. The result is mostly the same.

[hodder]

Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. Ive crafted LLMs to create drills and practice exams etc. Im not just reading about new sport activities, or videography/photography or linear algebra or physics. I'm putting it into action. As I said above, technology is a lever. Maybe you are just reading stuff and not drilling problems. That isnt me.

[Jensson]

Not sure how good LLM are at that given they are so biased towards the user being right. You would need an LLM trained to disagree with the user to properly grade your results of those drills.

[hodder]

Once more, you are making massively blanketed biased assumptions about me.

You seem to believe LLMs cannot even produce simple exams and rubrics is that right?

[Jensson]

At most you could do multiple choice questions, or questions with a single objective answer such as "what is the capital of France". But such tests aren't very helpful to learn new things.

Students cannot grade their own answers for more complex problems, they make mistakes but say they are correct since they don't understand the material, or they are correct but since it doesn't say the exact same thing as the example answer they say they are wrong and correct it even though it was already correct. And an LLM would be even worse than that at correcting tests.

This is not a bias against you, its just a general thing that applies to all students and people. Nobody is good at correcting their own work, even the most esteemed professor gets his work checked by other people. And an LLM is not another person here, they aren't good enough to check your work.

Note its much harder to accurately grade an answer than to answer a question.

[meetingthrower]

You are so incorrect here. If you feed it an evaluation rubric it will go after it! You really understimate the technology when in good and well intentioned hands. (Yes lazy people will use it to cheat and get to the answer faster. But it is like a grad student tutor who will do an evaluation in 30 seconds! Rapid iteration and laddering up...)

[hodder]

They absolutely are good at checking work. It really depends on the level and you are grossly underestimating their ability and over generalizing their limitations. To say an LLM can’t grade pretty much any undergraduate level or under subject well is to not understand how far they’ve come.

[cryo32]

You're not learning them. You're being told about them and given a hammer to leverage them with mediocre to low skill level.

Learning requires a huge time investment. Using an LLM doesn't shorten that.

[wvenable]

You've described school. You get told about things and given a hammer to leverage what you've been told.

An LLM absolutely shortens the research part of learning. If I had a human of who had a moderate level of skill who would endlessly answer all my questions, the result would be the same.

You might have a point when it comes to software development because the AI can tell you things but it also just do them for you, at which point, you've learned a lot less. But for non-software things I have to learn things so I can then go and do them.

But even for software development, I've learned a lot of esoteric crap to get interop working on projects that I will probably quickly forget just the same as when I had to spend hours skimming through stackoverflow.

[fzeroracer]

> An LLM absolutely shortens the research part of learning

No, it doesn't. Because in any scenario where you are using AI in a potentially appropriate manner, you are verifying every single source it spits out and cross referencing everything it says. If you do not do this you are failing the process entirely.

[wvenable]

If I ask my buddy for help, I don't cross reference everything he says either even though he could just as easily be wrong. A lot of what I'm talking about is every day stuff not nuclear physics.

LLMs are not even close to that unreliable.

[fzeroracer]

If I ask my buddy for help I'm not considering that part of research or learning I consider that leaning on their potential expertise. You're not learning shit on how to build a house just because you ask your friend to build one for you.

If we're talking about research as in actually attempting to learn and get to the heart of a matter then yes. You should be cross referencing everything.

[wvenable]

My point is if you ask your friend/LLM how to build a house and then build a house then you've learned how to build a house.

I've build a lot of "houses" recently that I wouldn't have attempted if I didn't have a friend/LLM to ask.

[ClarityJones]

Time helps to some degree, but I've worked with professionals who've earned a living for 30+ years, enjoy strong reputations among their peers, and who absolutely do not know what they're doing.

[ForHackernews]

Are you actually learning them or are you just letting the AI kinda do them for you? There was a time I knew how to take a path integral, but kinda-sorta knowing what something is and how to ask a calculator for it is different than knowing yourself.

[cortesoft]

I literally just started playing around with Lathe (https://github.com/devenjarvis/lathe) which was shared here on HN a few weeks back. There are some things I have been wanting to learn more about (some for work, some for personal desire), and I used it to generate a tutorial about some of the things.

I have been very pleased with the results so far. I was able to tune the tutorial to exactly what I want to learn, and it did a very good job (at least that i have seen so far). It has made learning fun, since I get to learn exactly what I want, and I can ask the AI questions and have it make changes to the tutorial in real time as i am working through it.

Now, will I keep using this at a rate to fully offset all of the thinking i have stopped doing since i started using AI? I am not sure, I guess time will tell.

[MiscCompFacts]

Yea, this is a serious problem but honestly it was present before LLMs. Actually knowing, deeply, how to do something was always very difficult and very time consuming. People would substitute it with “edutainment”: youtube videos, Ted Talks, blogs, etc. The thing is nobody was really learning deeply. We were training our brains for recognition, but mastery requires training for generation which was always the harder of the 2 cognitive processes.

[aix1]

"[Learning] new sports" strikes me as an especially odd one. I can see how an AI tool could help to learn the theory or perhaps come up with better training or match-day/racing strategies, but it won't short-cut the work of developing the necessary physical skills, will it?

[hodder]

See my response above on this.

[arbitrary_name]

I'm using it to learn coding.

i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before.

now i am learning basic scripting and data modeling etc.

it is phenomenal for learning languages.

i built a chicken coop and some furniture. the skills and confidence i gained are real. am i failing to learn certain skills in the process? of course. but I'm getting further then i would on my own, and that is truly meaningful.

you can keep dismissing it; but I'm genuinely using it to break down barriers, give me confidence, and highlight my ignorance in very productive ways.

i find it bizarre how unwilling some people are to recognize that.

[bluefirebrand]

> i could not get through the hurdles of installing an IDE and js/python modules before

You want us to believe you couldn't overcome the puddle-deep challenge of installing an IDE and using Pip or Node in the past, but now you're actually learning how to write functions?

Cool for you if true I guess but I'm pretty seriously skeptical

[ForHackernews]

I can sort of buy this, honestly. When was the last time you picked up a new language with unfamiliar tooling? Especially something older that won't hold your hand.

A lot of the most miserable parts of getting started coding have nothing to do with programming and everything to do with like, trying to apt-install the right compiler version or figure out which build headers you need or some other equally trivial bullshit that gets in the way of writing code.

[bluefirebrand]

> I can sort of buy this, honestly. When was the last time you picked up a new language with unfamiliar tooling?

I started learning Monogame with C# literally yesterday after being a chiefly JavaScript dev for over a decade. I'm having a lot of fun learning it from scratch with no AI

I'll concede that before yesterday it had been a while though

> Especially something older that won't hold your hand

Python and JavaScript are two of the most "will hold your hand" languages these days aren't they?

> A lot of the most miserable parts of getting started coding have nothing to do with programming and everything to do with like, trying to apt-install the right compiler version or figure out which build headers you need or some other equally trivial bullshit that gets in the way of writing code.

I agree but absolutely not for these two languages in particular

You can open the developer tools in any major browser and start typing in JavaScript right there if you want

Python you can install it and write it right in any editor

The upfront burden for both languages is absolutely trivial imo

[saulpw]

Python environment management is notoriously reticulate. I can totally imagine that they got stuck on some path bullshit so that the installed packages were on a different Python than the one they launched in the IDE. I've been using and configuring computers since they had DIP switches and if I were teaching someone to code manually I would absolutely let them use Claude to get their environment set up.

[ixsploit]

It's kinda easy to measure if you've learned something. You can test yourself if you can do what you've learned without AI.

[cpa]

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...

[MangoCoffee]

i'm using LLMs to do personal aspnet web project. i'm not skill in javascript. i let AI handle it and learn.

[orphea]

Sure. It doesn't mean that you're learning javascript though. This is where the OP, hodder, is wrong.

[wetwater]

I agree with the sentiment of the parent comment. But I also sometimes question what you have posed exactly. Am I really learning or getting the curiosity itch scratched. The line is very thin sometimes. But I think I am more in the camp of learning. I can ask so dumb question that I never had the courage to ask nor were they entertained where I was educated. It has been a boon to finally ask.

For example I am following Dirac's book "The Principles of quantum mechanics" to study QM. Pre-AI wouldn't have been able to do so, I am just that dumb. Even with AI its tough. but the thing is I can keep asking questions until I get that concept drilled in. Now I am doing it at a pace that's unfathomable to me.

But now that I am getting to grips with QM, I can get to things that I am really interested to learn like spin resonance and so on. This is something I am so grateful for.

Now it can be questioned that is it making me wise, intelligent or just "giving me answers" that I should strive to discover myself. I dont know the answer to that. But studying what I want, how I want and not getting judged is something i deeply enjoy. Srry the comment might have taken some tangents.

[skydhash]

> For example I am following Dirac's book "The Principles of quantum mechanics" to study QM. Pre-AI wouldn't have been able to do so, I am just that dumb

Why exactly wouldn’t you be able to learn pre-AI?

[elorant]

How exactly is AI helping you with sports? Have you become a better athlete? Have you learned more about the strategy of each sport from the perspective of a coach for example? Care to elaborate?

[hodder]

recently vibe-coded a personalized skateboarding block-training app. The platform maps curated YouTube tutorials to specific tricks I want to learn, logs my daily progress, and tracks failure rates alongside the specific reasons for missed attempts.It also functions as a structured video journal that integrates seamlessly into my coaching routine. For instance, during a session of 10 daily kickflip attempts, the app logs my success metrics and video capture so my coach can review my exact mechanics. Over time, this data-driven feedback loop visualizes my progression curve and systematically improves my landing consistency.

In another case I follow a bodybuilding cutting regimen and it helps me create and track recipes consistent with my diet plan and macro guidelines. It helps me also create tasty recipes that fit my criteria based on the ingredients I have on hand.

Those are just 2 examples.

I also recently built a backyard jib setup with a platform, ramp, PVC jib rail for snowboarding, and it helped me architect the design for it.

[larsfaye]

I actually agree with you; I definitely feel I'm able to use LLMs to learn and explore concepts, but I've always been a self-taught and highly motivated person in the first place. Everything technical that I know, I know because I put in the work to learn it on my own. That's why I wish these tools were being advertised as models that help you do BETTER work, not MORE work. They're using them as excuses to lay off swaths of workers, instead of allowing them to uplift people's skillsets. And, of course, it invited a whole mass of individuals who use them to artificially elevate their perceived skills.

[saadn92]

You think you're learning things at a pace you never imagined, but all you're really doing is learning superficially. You never really go deep into things, and it "seems" like you're learning faster, but how much can you actually recall of the things you learned? By the way, I'm saying all this because this has been my experience. I can prompt like no tomorrow asking questions, but I forget most of it because it's not deep learning. I'm not actually thinking myself, I'm allowing the AI to think for me.

[jplusequalt]

>Im learning new things at a pace I never imagined at 40 years old

Are you learning, or are you simply consuming?

I think we're missing long form studies that show if it's possible to learn deeply from compressed AI generated summaries of topics.

[digitallogic]

I have the same experience, but there's another dimension I want to throw out: breadth versus depth.

I've wildly increased my breadth of learning. If I'm ever curious about anything, even a passing thought, I can scratch that itch in a way I never could before.

But am I going deep? Acquiring new skills? Eh... I usually go far enough to unblock myself and/or settle a curiosity. I don't think that's good or bad, but it does present a certain set of tradeoffs that are different than going deep.

[Jensson]

Yeah, it is like going to a restaurant to taste a foreign meal rather than looking up how to cook that foreign meal yourself, cooking it and that way getting to experience it.

[GeoAtreides]

are you learning new things or are you just reading LLMs output? there might be some overlap, but those are very distinct activities

[fzeroracer]

Isn't this effectively the same argument an addict would put forward?