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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2025

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  • But the equivalent would be to take tutorials, examples and small open source projects and tinkering with them, rather than asking a machine to do it for you, no? I

    I’ve found that using LLMs to research/summarize eases the friction of entering a new hobby and having to learn the tools, techniques, vocabulary, etc. You can just use Google (As an aside, nobody worries about how dependent we are on search) but the answer may not be in a answered in a way that is understandable to you or that fits into the context that you’re working with.

    I’m going to RTFM eventually, but right now I need to figure out what the hell ‘Hello World’ means, who is World? Where do I type this text? What does compile mean?

    Of course, none of this changes anything about the fact that it requires actual mental effort and problem solving in order to learn. LLM agents provide a new tool for people to use to avoid making that effort which can injure their own education, I can agree there. However, if deployed intelligently, they’re a useful tool/tutor if you can’t afford a, fairly incompetent, human expert in every field to be on call 24/7.




  • Honestly, if someone is just looking to get started cheap and easy, buying a pi and installing pi hole is a great first project that has immediate positive returns. Adding more services can be easy (if you used containers) and expanding to add more services is cheap.

    Then, when you decide to spring for a server box, those Pis can still be useful as home automation devices. For example, they can control a decent amount of programmable LED strip lighting. Attached to a sensor shield, a solar panel and battery it can do atmospheric monitoring outside (while also controlling your driveway lighting) while being easy to integrate into HomeAssistant.

    If you need to retire it, you can throw some emulators on it (retropi), load it up with a few thousand ROMs and donate it to a place that buys kids toys for holidays/their birthday.