alt Hacker News> I do not think it is a proper thing to do for 17 y.o
If I'd get a buck every time someone said something like this to me when I was in the 13-18 range, I wouldn't have a ton of money, but it's so very annoying when people tell you this.
Regardless if they're "gifted" or not, regardless if you believe in myths like that or not, let children explore what they want to explore, even if you don't understand what it is or why they want to explore that, just let people explore, regardless of age.
It was such a terrible experience being a young kid growing up, with so many adults spending hours trying to convince me to stop sitting in front of the computer so much doing whatever; "why are you even trying to learn that stuff, you have to go to school to understand anything of this" and so much other similar trash.
Sorry, not your fault and I'm borderline trauma-dumping now, but really sad to see this sort of gatekeeping on HN of all places, age is irrelevant to learning ANYTHING, in my humble opinion at least.
Kids, find anything interesting? Jump into it, ignore what adults tell you, and do whatever you feel like, you'll find your place eventually.
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I just voiced my opinion. I just think buiding an LLM from the scratch for 17 y.o. is pointless exercise, advising a teenager to do so is borderline irresponsible, and frankly PG is simply virtue signalling here, as LLMs are still trendy, esp. in his circles.
There still will be varyy small number of outliers among youngsters who'd be able to extract tremensous value from such an excercise, but for most that'd be _IMO_ waste of of time, with illusion of understanding w/o actually having any.
Agree with this - started programming through learning scripting in ROBLOX when I was like 12 (this was back like 17 or 18 years ago) and it developed into a life-long passion for software engineering. I am thankful I had people around me (my parents), who were aware enough to realize I wasn't just playing video games and gave me the time I needed on the computer to learn and experiment with programming...
This also meant that by the time I was actually offered to take a programming class in school (junior year of HS), I had already been able to self-teach myself well beyond what that class was covering, thanks to just working on random projects that scratched an itch I had at the time, looking up anything I didn't know or understand, and internalizing those concepts over time.
In short though, I definitely agree, young kids and teens (and also, frankly, adults too!) should be encouraged to explore things that they have a passion for, without being told 'you need to go to school for this' or 'you cant understand this at your age'