alt Hacker News> AI is awesome as a consumer. You can just build whatever bespoke thing you want. It can walk you through a myriad of home improvement projects.
I hear AI is especially awesome in domains you personally don't understand.
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Yes, but unironically. It's a fantastic tool for learning. Better than Wikipedia or Google search.
I've used it as a fabulous tool to learn so many new things. From walking step by step me through rebuilding an electric motor, to reviewing and explaining my child's medical reports.
Yep! I’ve made so many custom apps for myself and family. I’ve made lots of purchases informed by AI that I would otherwise have been too overwhelmed to research. I’ve indexed all my bookshelves like a library just by taking a video and having AI build the entire analysis and label printing pipeline.
I do not understand small engines, but I would've thrown away a perfectly good honda 4 stroke this summer if I didn't have an LLM to help me with the diagnosis.
(And I only reached for the LLM after working through all the flowcharts and tables in the shop manual, reading relevant parts of two engine repair books, and watching a bunch of youtube videos.)
It's especially awesome in domains where:
1. you personally don't have the time to learn,
2. you can trivially evaluate the output ("does engine go brrrrrr or brr-splaugh-crunch"), and
3. there are no bad outcomes; or, there are bad outcomes (destroy engine, hurt myself) but you can augment with ground-truth ("do X as suggested by nlp machine but follow shop manual for doing X").
It was a 3B or 8B model too, so I probably burned more energy on unnecessary oil changes than on running the llm inference.
Say what you will about LLMs, and dear god can the claude-style harness outputs be annoying in the workplace. But they're great tools for accelerating the sorts of ultra-narrow-path learning curves that commonly pop up in tinkering/hacking/similar sorts of activities.
(Also, people without critical thinking skills believing everything they read pre-dates LLMs by thousands of years. This was a widely discussed problem with popular media consumption in the USA during the several years preceding the invention and popularization of LLMs (say 2015 to 2021). There's a different, more fundamental educational diagnosis for that problem, which LLMs may exacerbate, but which they did not cause and cannot cure.)