When I was 17, I wrote poetry and learned how to play guitar. I’m really happy that I did. That’s what I would do now, were I 17. I feel slightly bad for people who didn’t.
Sure, but isn't this a bit of a sneer? “I feel slightly bad for people who didn’t” has an air of superiority about it, and seems like a veiled swipe at those who lacked whatever qualities your 17-year-old self had. The guidelines have several different ways of asking us to avoid commenting like this.
As to the substance of your comment, there's nothing stopping a 17-year-old from writing poetry, learning guitar, and also learning about how LLMs work, if they're so inspired. Indeed I'm sure pg would encourage it, and that he did the equivalent of all those things himself when he was young. There's plenty of evidence of that in his essays: he wrote short stories, published a scandalous school newspaper, played soccer, and studied fine art and philosophy. See:
> there's nothing stopping a 17-year-old from writing poetry, learning guitar, and also learning about how LLMs work, if they're so inspired.
I assume the people at HN are intelligent enough to understand this without me having to explain the most obvious banalities to them. The point is why you would do anything at 17:
> if they're so inspired
You said it yourself. The Twitter post, to me, reads like career advice or something in that vein. One has plenty of time to run the wheel like a lab rat later, but at that very point in life you have possibility to find the thing that truly inspires you, that is its own motivation.
It’s not career advice, it’s life advice: don’t limit what you try and learn or accomplish to what your peers are doing or what your teachers tell you is sufficient. Follow your curiosity as far as it goes. Don’t stop just because it seems like it should be beyond the ability of “someone like you”. You might be more capable than you thought.
I was incredibly lucky to have had a father who worked that out for himself then impressed it on me. The people I feel sad for are those who don’t have people around to make them feel it’s ok to try things that seem impossibly advanced for your age or social status.
