alt Hacker NewsI came into the US tech industry in 2011 from a CS program (programming on my own longer), which was basically a pipeline into Java or web dev at that time (the classes on other things like OS, compilers, and FPGA were a thing, but seen by most as a hurdle not a promising or practical career pathways).
Most of the people I dealt with for the decade following that (i.e. pre-LLM) had little clue how any part of computers worked, and I don't intend that to be particularly pejorative, it's just that it's been somewhat easy to carve out a niche doing something to do with programming while having little understanding of the small or big picture.. all heuristics and applying working patterns.. for a few decades.
You can still understand whatever you want, today, with added tools. It's just a choice to turn your brain on or off. I think LLMs are perfectly fine as a learning tool to interrogate a subject, do comparatives, and then formalize your understanding by reading the sources. At a macro level brain rot is real, but it cuts across all generations and it started long before LLMs.
> At a macro level brain rot is real, but it cuts across all generations and it started long before LLMs.
The thing is, if there’s a way to do something easier people will generally just do that. All the nostalgia of the olden days has as a component that there were no alternatives as the example in the article highlights.
We can try to preserve the hard way to things that gets improved, but the hard way will only ever be niche if it doesn’t become extinct entirely. There is no going back.