3 ms·

While knowledge is always great, I would encourage people not to seek advice from successful people like this (survivorship bias). Moreover I am not sure it is

by koe123 1mo ago

While knowledge is always great, I would encourage people not to seek advice from successful people like this (survivorship bias). Moreover I am not sure it is even good advice? Would you advise a 17 y.o. to learn how transistors work or how to code (i.e. is LLM training the right level in the stack)? LLM training, a discipline where relevant work is already out of reach for 99.999% of budgets really as essential as this post implies?

embedding-shape 1mo ago
> I would encourage people not to seek advice from successful people like this (survivorship bias). Personally I don't see the problem, as long as you're aware there is survivorship bias involved here. What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? That seems worse :) Personally I do both, read about what worked for people, also read about what didn't work for people, then ignore both and do whatever the fuck I want.
- InsideOutSanta 1mo ago
  > seek advice from unsuccessful people Intuitively, I would guess that they have a better grasp of what made them fail than successful people have of what made them succeed.
  - embedding-shape 1mo ago
    Intuitively, that'd make sense if that unsuccessful person eventually found success, otherwise who knows if they actually picked up what made them unsuccessful in the first place?
    - InsideOutSanta 1mo ago
      I think it's reasonably common for people to understand what makes them unsuccessful but be unable or unwilling to resolve the problem. For me, I know that one major reason for putting an upper limit on my success is my inability to form effective professional relationships. I know I should go to events and talk to people and use these relationships to my advantage, but that's just not something I've ever been good at, and I find it so incredibly unpleasant that I also just don't want to do it.
      - sejje 1mo ago
        How do you know that's limiting your success? Do you think the most successful people got that way by attending events? I thought they were hacking in their garages, building great products.
        InsideOutSanta 1mo ago
        > How do you know that's limiting your success? I know there were opportunities I could have benefited from if I'd had better relationships with specific people. > Do you think the most successful people got that way by attending events? That's not what I said.
  - gf000 1mo ago
    Yep, many successful people greatly underappreciate the effect of simple dumb luck in their lives. And often they just make up complex reasoning chains, even wholly believing them, that more of it was in their control/talent, etc. Nonetheless, there are many successful people I would gladly listen to for advice, though they are often successful in a different meaning than what venture capitalists would use (e.g. parents with great kids, managing to keep a healthy work-life balance, happiness, and maybe even having time to spend on some cool hobby project -- you are heros!)
    - make_it_sure 1mo ago
      same do unsuccesful ones. They usually overappreciate luck of succesful people from what I see, as a way of coping, many say "that guy was just lucky, i was unlucky". If you dig deeper, that person wasn't just "unlucky", they lacked the persistence, work ethics and other qualities compared to other succesful ones. Of course, there are degrees and exceptions on every side, but the coping mechanism is very strong among people.
  - retsibsi 1mo ago
    I don't know; I think people in general are just not great at this. Successful people tend to underrate luck and overrate the brilliance of their own decisions, but the rest of us are prone to either reversing that and blaming everyone but ourselves, or being so determined to take accountability (or just depressed) that we become overly self-critical, or simply not understanding why things happened the way they did and reaching for any explanation that resolves the chaos into something narratively satisfying.
  - zombot 1mo ago
    Luck is a huge factor in success, so that logic leads nowhere. If one of the quacks selling how-to-succeed recipes had got it right, everyone would do it by now.
  - bigDinosaur 1mo ago
    If there's a single unifying fault to the unsuccessful people I know (for any definition of unsuccesful, including my own failures) is that they're precisely bad at working out why they failed - if they even think to ask the question. The successful people are generally much clearer that it was studying hard or networking or natural talent that contributed to their success. The latter group may have people who don't realise luck played a part, but they massively increased their chances of good luck by the aforementioned behaviours.
- IshKebab 1mo ago
  Seek advice from people who have had a normal level of success. Not a one-in-a-million level.
  - otherme123 1mo ago
    Veritasium has a good piece for this kind of bias: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I An advantage that is not "advisable", like being born in january, in a rich country, in an above average family, or just having luck, might have more influence on the outcome than any conscious action. It is almost sure that one-in-a-million level people only edge over the other 999,999 they competed with is just "have more luck".
    - IshKebab 1mo ago
      It's not the only edge. Wildly successful people are usually lucky and talented/hard working.
      - otherme123 1mo ago
        Nobody said otherwise, even the video linked talks about talent (which might be also seen as luck!) and hard working. Say you have 100 people, and you pre-select the 10 hardworkers, that "hardwork" between 98 and 100% capacity: even if luck only accounts for 5% of the success, it doubles the 2% you can still extract from hardwork. Of course, someone that only works at 30% capacity has to be immensenly lucky to overcome the 70% they have until the 100%. Of the 10 most talented and hardworking people above, I bet they have wildy different advise other than "do hardwork": use more LLM, use less LLM, keep away from computers, etc. And we are talking 1 in 100, not 1 in 1,000,000! It comes to mind someone like Kary Mullis. He was no dumb, but I wont put him either at the peak of talented or even hard working people in the field. Yet, he was "lucky" enough to invent the PCR, which earned him deservedly the Nobel Price. Now that he was made to believe that he is some kind of illuminated and well above the top human, he started giving (at the bare minimum wrong, probably even dangerous) "advise" left, right and center: take LSD, astrology works, extraterrestial glowing racoons exist, etc. Downtune the guy a notch or two, and you can find thousands of Kary Mullis around giving useless advise as they were messiahs.
- armcat 1mo ago
  It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, and then take advice from people that are amazing in that specific field. In mid 2000s in Australia all the "top people" were telling me not to get into a software engineering career because it was dead. It's certainly challenged right now, but it took off during those 15+ years.
  - embedding-shape 1mo ago
    > It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, Agreed, my previous stated "ignore both and do whatever the fuck I want" approach has worked out very well for me in life, people should probably focus on identifying better what their gut tells them, rather than what randoms on the internet thinks and writes.
  - kenjackson 1mo ago
    “It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, and then take advice from people that are amazing in that specific field.” What bucket should I put this advice in?
    - Archer6621 1mo ago
      Understandable irony. The way I see it, there are no buckets, only context surrounding the advice and your awareness thereof. If the context is unknown, best to take it with a big chunk of salt... Or spend time familiarizing yourself with the context if you think it's worth the time/effort; working on things that interest you is a nice way of doing that. But some advice is less specific than other advice though. Some things are always stupid, and some things are always smart, if you look at the context of our world and society. I find myself pursuing these "fundamental truths" with great interest lately, especially now that the world is changing so quickly.
  - bluecheese452 1mo ago
    A lot of the advice that is relevant for top performers in a field has no relevance to an average person interested in that field.
- ff10 1mo ago
  I would seek advice from people who have a theory of why or why not they were successful. A lot of those results were happening in very specific contexts and usually should not be regarded as a blueprint, but as inspiration to whatever I do.
- jasonkester 1mo ago
  > Personally I do both That’s what you get from listening to “successful people”. You get to learn about all the things they tried that failed, then the things that did work on that 24th try, which was successful. The “survivorship bias” people always seem to assume that the “survivor” lucked into his fortune on his first try ever, so he can’t have learned anything, so we don’t have to listen to him. But that’s seldom the case. I’ve written about this before: https://expatsoftware.com/Articles/survivorship-bias.html https://expatsoftware.com/Articles/survivorship-bias.html
  - make_it_sure 1mo ago
    very good read. I get into the same discussion sometimes with people. If you're successful you're automatically labelled as "lucky". There are successful people that failed many times before being successful. Somehow these days, previous failures and persistence seems to be ignored and they focus just on the luck you got on the 20th try.
- epolanski 1mo ago
  > seek advice from unsuccessful people? That seems worse :) Not sure why would you think so. Inverse reasoning is very powerful, and unsuccessful people can give you plenty of "don't do this mistake", which the survivors would not even think about.
  - embedding-shape 1mo ago
    > unsuccessful people can tell you teach you plenty of "don't do this mistake", But how can I know for sure that that particular mistake is actually why they were unsuccessful? Has exactly the same issue as listening only to successful people as they hardly know what actually made them successful most of the time, but they still compose large blog posts with their reasoning for why. Again, I still think my approach of reading both but then regardless go my own way is the preferable approach, at least for me, ymmv.
    - deleted 1mo ago
      [deleted]
- wiseowise 1mo ago
  Kids don’t even know what it is, even less actually feel what it is. At 17 you think that it won’t hit you, that you will be the one to survive until you don’t.
- djeastm 1mo ago
  >What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? Seek advice from the averagely successful people, since that is statistically what you're most likely to be.
- DonsDiscountGas 1mo ago
  > What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? Do both. Get advice from successful and unsuccessful people and take the diff
- well_ackshually 1mo ago
  The unsuccessful person is much more likely to be actually connected to the daily needs and struggles of a normal person. Paul Graham hasn't seen the inside of a grocery store in the past twenty years. I know who the 17 years old is closest to.
- q8zd3 1mo ago
  > What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? That seems worse :) Learning from their mistakes (where it did go wrong) can be as valuable as.
- vonneumannstan 1mo ago
  >Personally I don't see the problem, as long as you're aware there is survivorship bias involved here. Pretty tall ask, especially if this is targeted at 17 year olds...
- varjag 1mo ago
  The better alternative is to always ignore unsolicited advice.
- blitzar 1mo ago
  Just play the lottery once, pick the correct numbers and win $100mil. If you can't do that - not sure anyone can help you.
cultofmetatron 1mo ago
> Would you advise a 17 y.o. to learn how transistors work or how to code how many of us out here are doing work directly in what we got a degree in? I majored in economics and now I'm a CTO. I would absolutely advise a 17 yo to learn how to code, understand how transitors work and how to code an llm. even if he never works on llms, you basically end up with a kid with applied knowlege of statistics, math, physics hardware, logic and a whole lot of practice in critical thinking.
jbstack 1mo ago
> Moreover I am not sure it is even good advice? I think it is. He isn't saying to learn how to train a LLM so that you can go on to train LLMs. He's saying to learn it so that you gain a deep understanding of how LLMs work. Ordinary startups can still benefit from things like training or fine tuning highly specialised smaller models, knowing how to select and configure an appropriate model for the task at hand, knowing what software to use and why, understanding what's going on behind the scenes instead of treating everything like a black box, having a higher level of intuition about LLMs generally, etc. Most computer science courses do in fact teach things which are lower level than coding, such as how transistors work.
markb139 1mo ago
As a 17 y.o (way back in the last century) I didn’t need to be advised to learn about transistors. I just had a thirst for the knowledge. I would encourage everyone to learn something about transistors. They are one of mankind’s most useful discoveries.
- kingofalldevs 1mo ago
  Hey, I'm 19 CS undergrad but i don't really know what to do but I really wanna build something that can shape the world. Can you tell me more about why you would advice someone to learn about transistors? what are the possible career paths?
  - gensym 1mo ago
    Not the original commenter, but in my view as a crusty old software engineer, the reason to learn how transistors is because they're interesting and the key to how all computation is implemented. Once you learn how transistors work, you can learn how logic gates work. And then how CPUs and memory work. Bit by bit, computers stop being magic boxes and start being something built from technologies you understand. Now, for most software careers (including my own), that knowledge isn't directly practical. BUT, the most important things for a successful, fulfilling career are curiosity and a willingness to dive into subjects _without_ necessarily knowing how (or even if) that knowledge will yield practical applications. That drive is what's going to lead to insights and breakthroughs over your career that wouldn't happen if you just let abstractions be abstractions.
    - kingofalldevs 1mo ago
      Thank you
      - markb139 1mo ago
        Agree. Transistors really are worth learning about to any level - its certainly possible to get lost in the physics. I’d find some high level tutorials online that maybe use one of the free circuit simulator tools. falstad.com/circuit/ Nice animation on this site If you are really curious there are many simple circuits you can build. It’s quite a thrill to get an LED to blink with a self built circuit. I’m also a crusty old sw eng. I did spend sometime being a young electronics engineer. Good luck with the journey.
jhatemyjob 1mo ago
I just don't think he realizes how saturated it got over the years. Or maybe he knows at a conscious level, but not subconsciously. In 2000 (his era), it would have been really smart to study the source of Linux or Apache. Would have paid dividends over decades. Cuz that knowledge was so rare. The number of people hacking on LLMs now dwarfs the number of people hacking on web servers 30 years ago, by several orders of magnitude. And if you turn back the clock even more, I mean just even having access to a computer, let alone owning one, would have put you at a massive advantage. I don't know what to call it. The pioneers should be respected obviously, but at the same time you need to understand that for them, the game wasn't nearly as played out as it is now. I just don't think you can afford to be dicking around with LLMs like you could afford to dick around with random Linux distros 20 years ago. Too many people willing to do it for free these days. You don't wanna end up being the 2030 equivalent of a certain SNES emulator developer, or maintainer of a package manager for jailbroken iPhones, I mean the list goes on and on. Being a hacker doesn't automatically give you a path to being rich, or even making a decent living. It hasn't been that way for a while.
bodash 1mo ago
IMO these kind of advices never matters. Any individual still needs to make tens or hundreds of little decisions (every day) themselves, and that's what really makes all the difference.
qsera 1mo ago
>Would you advise a 17 y.o. to learn how transistors work.. Hell yeah. Transistors are pretty awesome.
larodi 1mo ago
Right - like advising people to learn nuclear power back in 1992. Perhaps a good idea, but super specific already. My gut is ML/AI is even more complex in 2026… I can’t even remember all the abbreviations and the new ones emerging. And every sub component, such as attention or embeddings, are actually a discipline of its own already.
willis936 1mo ago
I would encourage young people to be born rich. It's the best time in 100 years to be advantaged. Why waste your potential by having your labor stolen?
red_hare 1mo ago
As someone who teaches AI at a university, understanding the basics of how the LLM works is really invaluable to understanding where and how they'll be applied. You're right that it's probably a little too in the weeds, but it's also a nice clear and fun objective that teaches you the basics. Like building a TODO list in JavaScript to learn webdev or a Gameboy emulator in C++ to learn how a CPU works.
i5heu 1mo ago
It cannot be bad advice because learning something even slightly valuable is always good in a vacuum (as you mentioned) Since he has not given any reference point it is equally as good advice as „just learn everything slightly valuable“. So the real question is: „What should I not learn in favor of learning this.“ Or in other words: His comment is not usable because it can mean anything or nothing.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

by koe123 1mo ago

embedding-shape 1mo ago

> I would encourage people not to seek advice from successful people like this (survivorship bias). Personally I don't see the problem, as long as you're aware there is survivorship bias involved here. What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? That seems worse :) Personally I do both, read about what worked for people, also read about what didn't work for people, then ignore both and do whatever the fuck I want.

InsideOutSanta 1mo ago
> seek advice from unsuccessful people Intuitively, I would guess that they have a better grasp of what made them fail than successful people have of what made them succeed.
- embedding-shape 1mo ago
  Intuitively, that'd make sense if that unsuccessful person eventually found success, otherwise who knows if they actually picked up what made them unsuccessful in the first place?
  - InsideOutSanta 1mo ago
    I think it's reasonably common for people to understand what makes them unsuccessful but be unable or unwilling to resolve the problem. For me, I know that one major reason for putting an upper limit on my success is my inability to form effective professional relationships. I know I should go to events and talk to people and use these relationships to my advantage, but that's just not something I've ever been good at, and I find it so incredibly unpleasant that I also just don't want to do it.
    - sejje 1mo ago
      How do you know that's limiting your success? Do you think the most successful people got that way by attending events? I thought they were hacking in their garages, building great products.
      - InsideOutSanta 1mo ago
        > How do you know that's limiting your success? I know there were opportunities I could have benefited from if I'd had better relationships with specific people. > Do you think the most successful people got that way by attending events? That's not what I said.
- gf000 1mo ago
  Yep, many successful people greatly underappreciate the effect of simple dumb luck in their lives. And often they just make up complex reasoning chains, even wholly believing them, that more of it was in their control/talent, etc. Nonetheless, there are many successful people I would gladly listen to for advice, though they are often successful in a different meaning than what venture capitalists would use (e.g. parents with great kids, managing to keep a healthy work-life balance, happiness, and maybe even having time to spend on some cool hobby project -- you are heros!)
  - make_it_sure 1mo ago
    same do unsuccesful ones. They usually overappreciate luck of succesful people from what I see, as a way of coping, many say "that guy was just lucky, i was unlucky". If you dig deeper, that person wasn't just "unlucky", they lacked the persistence, work ethics and other qualities compared to other succesful ones. Of course, there are degrees and exceptions on every side, but the coping mechanism is very strong among people.
- retsibsi 1mo ago
  I don't know; I think people in general are just not great at this. Successful people tend to underrate luck and overrate the brilliance of their own decisions, but the rest of us are prone to either reversing that and blaming everyone but ourselves, or being so determined to take accountability (or just depressed) that we become overly self-critical, or simply not understanding why things happened the way they did and reaching for any explanation that resolves the chaos into something narratively satisfying.
- zombot 1mo ago
  Luck is a huge factor in success, so that logic leads nowhere. If one of the quacks selling how-to-succeed recipes had got it right, everyone would do it by now.
- bigDinosaur 1mo ago
  If there's a single unifying fault to the unsuccessful people I know (for any definition of unsuccesful, including my own failures) is that they're precisely bad at working out why they failed - if they even think to ask the question. The successful people are generally much clearer that it was studying hard or networking or natural talent that contributed to their success. The latter group may have people who don't realise luck played a part, but they massively increased their chances of good luck by the aforementioned behaviours.
IshKebab 1mo ago
Seek advice from people who have had a normal level of success. Not a one-in-a-million level.
- otherme123 1mo ago
  Veritasium has a good piece for this kind of bias: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I An advantage that is not "advisable", like being born in january, in a rich country, in an above average family, or just having luck, might have more influence on the outcome than any conscious action. It is almost sure that one-in-a-million level people only edge over the other 999,999 they competed with is just "have more luck".
  - IshKebab 1mo ago
    It's not the only edge. Wildly successful people are usually lucky and talented/hard working.
    - otherme123 1mo ago
      Nobody said otherwise, even the video linked talks about talent (which might be also seen as luck!) and hard working. Say you have 100 people, and you pre-select the 10 hardworkers, that "hardwork" between 98 and 100% capacity: even if luck only accounts for 5% of the success, it doubles the 2% you can still extract from hardwork. Of course, someone that only works at 30% capacity has to be immensenly lucky to overcome the 70% they have until the 100%. Of the 10 most talented and hardworking people above, I bet they have wildy different advise other than "do hardwork": use more LLM, use less LLM, keep away from computers, etc. And we are talking 1 in 100, not 1 in 1,000,000! It comes to mind someone like Kary Mullis. He was no dumb, but I wont put him either at the peak of talented or even hard working people in the field. Yet, he was "lucky" enough to invent the PCR, which earned him deservedly the Nobel Price. Now that he was made to believe that he is some kind of illuminated and well above the top human, he started giving (at the bare minimum wrong, probably even dangerous) "advise" left, right and center: take LSD, astrology works, extraterrestial glowing racoons exist, etc. Downtune the guy a notch or two, and you can find thousands of Kary Mullis around giving useless advise as they were messiahs.
armcat 1mo ago
It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, and then take advice from people that are amazing in that specific field. In mid 2000s in Australia all the "top people" were telling me not to get into a software engineering career because it was dead. It's certainly challenged right now, but it took off during those 15+ years.
- embedding-shape 1mo ago
  > It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, Agreed, my previous stated "ignore both and do whatever the fuck I want" approach has worked out very well for me in life, people should probably focus on identifying better what their gut tells them, rather than what randoms on the internet thinks and writes.
- kenjackson 1mo ago
  “It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, and then take advice from people that are amazing in that specific field.” What bucket should I put this advice in?
  - Archer6621 1mo ago
    Understandable irony. The way I see it, there are no buckets, only context surrounding the advice and your awareness thereof. If the context is unknown, best to take it with a big chunk of salt... Or spend time familiarizing yourself with the context if you think it's worth the time/effort; working on things that interest you is a nice way of doing that. But some advice is less specific than other advice though. Some things are always stupid, and some things are always smart, if you look at the context of our world and society. I find myself pursuing these "fundamental truths" with great interest lately, especially now that the world is changing so quickly.
- bluecheese452 1mo ago
  A lot of the advice that is relevant for top performers in a field has no relevance to an average person interested in that field.
ff10 1mo ago
I would seek advice from people who have a theory of why or why not they were successful. A lot of those results were happening in very specific contexts and usually should not be regarded as a blueprint, but as inspiration to whatever I do.
jasonkester 1mo ago
> Personally I do both That’s what you get from listening to “successful people”. You get to learn about all the things they tried that failed, then the things that did work on that 24th try, which was successful. The “survivorship bias” people always seem to assume that the “survivor” lucked into his fortune on his first try ever, so he can’t have learned anything, so we don’t have to listen to him. But that’s seldom the case. I’ve written about this before: https://expatsoftware.com/Articles/survivorship-bias.html https://expatsoftware.com/Articles/survivorship-bias.html
- make_it_sure 1mo ago
  very good read. I get into the same discussion sometimes with people. If you're successful you're automatically labelled as "lucky". There are successful people that failed many times before being successful. Somehow these days, previous failures and persistence seems to be ignored and they focus just on the luck you got on the 20th try.
epolanski 1mo ago
> seek advice from unsuccessful people? That seems worse :) Not sure why would you think so. Inverse reasoning is very powerful, and unsuccessful people can give you plenty of "don't do this mistake", which the survivors would not even think about.
- embedding-shape 1mo ago
  > unsuccessful people can tell you teach you plenty of "don't do this mistake", But how can I know for sure that that particular mistake is actually why they were unsuccessful? Has exactly the same issue as listening only to successful people as they hardly know what actually made them successful most of the time, but they still compose large blog posts with their reasoning for why. Again, I still think my approach of reading both but then regardless go my own way is the preferable approach, at least for me, ymmv.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
wiseowise 1mo ago
Kids don’t even know what it is, even less actually feel what it is. At 17 you think that it won’t hit you, that you will be the one to survive until you don’t.
djeastm 1mo ago
>What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? Seek advice from the averagely successful people, since that is statistically what you're most likely to be.
DonsDiscountGas 1mo ago
> What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? Do both. Get advice from successful and unsuccessful people and take the diff
well_ackshually 1mo ago
The unsuccessful person is much more likely to be actually connected to the daily needs and struggles of a normal person. Paul Graham hasn't seen the inside of a grocery store in the past twenty years. I know who the 17 years old is closest to.
q8zd3 1mo ago
> What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? That seems worse :) Learning from their mistakes (where it did go wrong) can be as valuable as.
vonneumannstan 1mo ago
>Personally I don't see the problem, as long as you're aware there is survivorship bias involved here. Pretty tall ask, especially if this is targeted at 17 year olds...
varjag 1mo ago
The better alternative is to always ignore unsolicited advice.
blitzar 1mo ago
Just play the lottery once, pick the correct numbers and win $100mil. If you can't do that - not sure anyone can help you.

cultofmetatron 1mo ago

> Would you advise a 17 y.o. to learn how transistors work or how to code how many of us out here are doing work directly in what we got a degree in? I majored in economics and now I'm a CTO. I would absolutely advise a 17 yo to learn how to code, understand how transitors work and how to code an llm. even if he never works on llms, you basically end up with a kid with applied knowlege of statistics, math, physics hardware, logic and a whole lot of practice in critical thinking.

jbstack 1mo ago

> Moreover I am not sure it is even good advice? I think it is. He isn't saying to learn how to train a LLM so that you can go on to train LLMs. He's saying to learn it so that you gain a deep understanding of how LLMs work. Ordinary startups can still benefit from things like training or fine tuning highly specialised smaller models, knowing how to select and configure an appropriate model for the task at hand, knowing what software to use and why, understanding what's going on behind the scenes instead of treating everything like a black box, having a higher level of intuition about LLMs generally, etc. Most computer science courses do in fact teach things which are lower level than coding, such as how transistors work.

markb139 1mo ago

As a 17 y.o (way back in the last century) I didn’t need to be advised to learn about transistors. I just had a thirst for the knowledge. I would encourage everyone to learn something about transistors. They are one of mankind’s most useful discoveries.

kingofalldevs 1mo ago
Hey, I'm 19 CS undergrad but i don't really know what to do but I really wanna build something that can shape the world. Can you tell me more about why you would advice someone to learn about transistors? what are the possible career paths?
- gensym 1mo ago
  Not the original commenter, but in my view as a crusty old software engineer, the reason to learn how transistors is because they're interesting and the key to how all computation is implemented. Once you learn how transistors work, you can learn how logic gates work. And then how CPUs and memory work. Bit by bit, computers stop being magic boxes and start being something built from technologies you understand. Now, for most software careers (including my own), that knowledge isn't directly practical. BUT, the most important things for a successful, fulfilling career are curiosity and a willingness to dive into subjects _without_ necessarily knowing how (or even if) that knowledge will yield practical applications. That drive is what's going to lead to insights and breakthroughs over your career that wouldn't happen if you just let abstractions be abstractions.
  - kingofalldevs 1mo ago
    Thank you
    - markb139 1mo ago
      Agree. Transistors really are worth learning about to any level - its certainly possible to get lost in the physics. I’d find some high level tutorials online that maybe use one of the free circuit simulator tools. falstad.com/circuit/ Nice animation on this site If you are really curious there are many simple circuits you can build. It’s quite a thrill to get an LED to blink with a self built circuit. I’m also a crusty old sw eng. I did spend sometime being a young electronics engineer. Good luck with the journey.

jhatemyjob 1mo ago

I just don't think he realizes how saturated it got over the years. Or maybe he knows at a conscious level, but not subconsciously. In 2000 (his era), it would have been really smart to study the source of Linux or Apache. Would have paid dividends over decades. Cuz that knowledge was so rare. The number of people hacking on LLMs now dwarfs the number of people hacking on web servers 30 years ago, by several orders of magnitude. And if you turn back the clock even more, I mean just even having access to a computer, let alone owning one, would have put you at a massive advantage. I don't know what to call it. The pioneers should be respected obviously, but at the same time you need to understand that for them, the game wasn't nearly as played out as it is now. I just don't think you can afford to be dicking around with LLMs like you could afford to dick around with random Linux distros 20 years ago. Too many people willing to do it for free these days. You don't wanna end up being the 2030 equivalent of a certain SNES emulator developer, or maintainer of a package manager for jailbroken iPhones, I mean the list goes on and on. Being a hacker doesn't automatically give you a path to being rich, or even making a decent living. It hasn't been that way for a while.

bodash 1mo ago

IMO these kind of advices never matters. Any individual still needs to make tens or hundreds of little decisions (every day) themselves, and that's what really makes all the difference.

qsera 1mo ago

>Would you advise a 17 y.o. to learn how transistors work.. Hell yeah. Transistors are pretty awesome.

larodi 1mo ago

Right - like advising people to learn nuclear power back in 1992. Perhaps a good idea, but super specific already. My gut is ML/AI is even more complex in 2026… I can’t even remember all the abbreviations and the new ones emerging. And every sub component, such as attention or embeddings, are actually a discipline of its own already.

willis936 1mo ago

I would encourage young people to be born rich. It's the best time in 100 years to be advantaged. Why waste your potential by having your labor stolen?

red_hare 1mo ago

As someone who teaches AI at a university, understanding the basics of how the LLM works is really invaluable to understanding where and how they'll be applied. You're right that it's probably a little too in the weeds, but it's also a nice clear and fun objective that teaches you the basics. Like building a TODO list in JavaScript to learn webdev or a Gameboy emulator in C++ to learn how a CPU works.

i5heu 1mo ago

It cannot be bad advice because learning something even slightly valuable is always good in a vacuum (as you mentioned) Since he has not given any reference point it is equally as good advice as „just learn everything slightly valuable“. So the real question is: „What should I not learn in favor of learning this.“ Or in other words: His comment is not usable because it can mean anything or nothing.

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