undefined

points

[-]

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.

by embedding-shape13 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

> I just voiced my opinion.

Same! I just happened to disagree with your opinion, and frankly, I'd say trying to gatekeep what people learn is closer to "borderline irresponsible" compared to asking people to build/learn/do X.

> youngsters who'd be able to extract tremensous value from such an excercise

But they're youngsters, who are about "extracting value"? Life is about fun, not extraction, not value, not avoiding waste of time but literally enjoy what you do, nothing is more important (IMO).

Then who knows, doing fun stuff sometimes lead to useful stuff, like in my life. But if you only think about "extracting most value for time spent" or similar "optimization strategies", then you'd never discover this part of life.

by BoredomIsFun13 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

> Life is about fun, not extraction, not value, not avoiding waste of time but literally enjoy what you do, nothing is more important (IMO).

This is, pardon, demagoguery. There is always "future fun" and "present fun" which a normal person would assign different nonzero weights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounted_utility). Besides, building a LLM _truly_ from the scratch, just using the famous 2017 paper and numpy manuals is not fun at all, esp. for a high schooler.

by embedding-shape13 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

> Besides, building a LLM _truly_ from the scratch, just using the famous 2017 paper and numpy manuals is not fun at all, esp. for a high schooler.

To you it isn't, is my entire point here. But why extrapolate what you think is fun, to others? Sure, I don't find that fun either (although useful), but who am I to say it isn't fun for others?

by BoredomIsFun12 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

We can continue this pointless conversation, in the tone "who you are to tell what is fun to others and whst is not". You'd be impervious to any argument stating that dealing with far beyound someone understanding and requiring countless hours of digging into difficult math is not fun even for those who thinks it should be fun, as they presumably, loves everything STEM.

by embedding-shape12 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

> We can continue this pointless conversation

Yeah, if you see it as pointless, then I prefer not to. Have a enjoyable day!

by VoidWhisperer14 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

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'