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leptonsyesterday at 8:28 AM1 replyview on HN

>I used it to help me turn a cat exercise wheel (think huge hamster wheel) into a generator that produces enough power to charge a battery that powers an ESP32 powered "CYD" touchscreen LCD that also utilizes a hall effect sensor to monitor, log and display the RPMs and "speed" (given we know the wheel circumference) in real time as well as historically.

So what? That's honestly amateur hour. And the LLM derived all of it from things that have been done and posted about a thousand times before.

You could have achieved the same thing with a few google searches 15 years ago (obviously not with ESP32, but other microcontrollers).


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Implicatedyesterday at 7:52 PM

Right - it's not a big deal and it LITERALLY is amateur hour. But I did it. I wouldn't have done it prior, sure I could have done a bunch of google searches but the time investment it would have taken to sift through all that information and distill it into actionable chunks would have far exceeded the benefit of doing so, in this case.

The whole point is that it is amateur hour and it's wildly effective as a learning tool.

The fact it derived everything from things that have been done... yea, that's also the point? What point are you trying to make here? I'm well aware it's not a great tool if you're trying to use it to create novel things... but I'm not a nuclear physicist. I'm a builder, fixer, tinkerer who happens to make a living writing code. I use it to teach me how to do things, I use it to analyze problems and recommend approaches that I can then delve into myself.

I'm not asking it to fold proteins. (I guess that's been done quite a bit too, so would be amateur as well)

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