With all due respect you were reading, not learning. It's like when people watch educational YouTube videos as entertainment, it feels like they're learning but they aren't.

It's fine to use the LLMs in the same way that people watch science YouTube content, but maybe don't frame it like it's for learning. It can be great entertainment tho.

The YouTube analogy doesn't completely hold.

It's more like jumping on a Zoom screen sharing session with someone who knows what they're doing, asking for a tailored example and then bouncing as many questions as you like off them to help understand what they did.

There's an interesting relevant concept in pedagogy called the "Worked example effect", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worked-example_effect - it suggests that showing people "worked examples" can be more effective than making them solve the problem themselves.

So if I read a book about something, I'm not "learning it"?

Schools must be the biggest scam ever then :D

Disagree, it can be learning as long as you build out your mental model while reading. Having educational reading material for the exact thing you're working on is amazing at least for those with interest-driven brains.

Science YouTube is no comparison at all: while one can choose what to watcha, it's a limited menu that's produced for a mass audience.

I agree though that reading LLM-produced blog posts (which many of the recent top submissions here seem to be) is boring.