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1062 points mixto | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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rco8786 ◴[] No.42941843[source]
I have nothing but fond memories of reading Beej's guides.

It's also this sort of work that's becoming less necessary with AI, for better or worse. This appears to be a crazy good guide, but I bet asking e.g. Claude to teach you about git (specific concepts or generate the whole guide outline and go wide on it) would be at least as good.

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yoyohello13 ◴[] No.42941937[source]
Seems more efficient to have one reference book rather than generating entire new 20 chapter books for every person.

I also think if you are at the “don’t know what you don’t know” point of learning a topic it’s very hard to direct an AI to generate comprehensive learning material.

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rco8786 ◴[] No.42941989[source]
Definitely more efficient in terms of power consumed, not so in terms of human effort to build such guides across nearly every topic one could think of. But you're right, we shouldn't ignore the power consumption.

I have found that asking AI "You are an expert teacher in X. I'd like to learn about X, where should I start?" is actually wildly effective.

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yoyohello13 ◴[] No.42942485[source]
> not so in terms of human effort to build such guides across nearly every topic

How will LLMs be trained if no humans are making learning materials?

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1. rco8786 ◴[] No.42942794[source]
Whoever, or whatever, is creating the thing that needs reference materials would have to seed the initial set (just as they/it seeded the thing itself) and then go from there.

If you didn't, then you won't be included the training set (obviously) and the AI would not easily know about you. Sort of how if you start a really cool company but don't make a website Google doesn't know about you and can't return you in their search results. It's valuable for Google (AI) to know about you, so it's valuable to build the sites (docs) to get indexed (trained on).