Preface
Lately I have been watching more and more people learn with AI, riding a wave of "AI in hand, world at my feet" confidence.
Doubt
When I was picking up some new Linux concepts I naturally wanted to try it too. But some commands did not work. So I searched online or asked an AI, and the answers sometimes had nothing to do with my actual situation, or worse, introduced new problems.
For a beginner like me, when an AI fires off a string of complex and potentially dangerous commands, there is no way to understand what is actually changing in the system. And if the question is even slightly niche, the model has no useful data to pull from and the fix never comes.
That makes you more afraid to ask, not less. But think about it: in every field, beginners ask "dumb questions." That is how it works. Everyone starts from not knowing.
The Internet today
Experience used to tell us the most reliable way to learn something is to find a person who has already done it and ask. But you quickly run into a problem:
Google can not find what you are looking for.
You search a question, open the first page, and it is wall-to-wall AI-generated listicles with titles like "10 Steps to Fix..." that say nothing useful after three paragraphs.
The next few pages are not much better. Either decade-old threads with outdated methods, or pages of unknown origin that look helpful but contain nothing of substance.
Finding genuinely valuable content is like panning for gold. Sometimes you strike something, but more often than not, it is all noise.
Honestly, the internet fifteen years ago was cleaner. There was less filler, and real information was easier to reach.
Not nostalgia
I was chatting with a friend about forums recently and they laughed at me: "Who still uses forums?"
Fair point. Many of the technical forums that once gathered countless skilled people sharing hard-won experience have either vanished or changed beyond recognition. Now there are ads everywhere, posts need approval, long-time users have left, and genuinely useful content is increasingly rare.
Learning is different for everyone. I cannot offer universal advice. But for most of us beginners, what we usually want is to solve one specific problem: why does this command error out? How do I change this config?
The old forums, rough as they were, had warmth, real interaction, and patience. In today's internet, spaces like that are hard to come by.
A dizzying age
Today's internet is over-abundant, the way bookstores are over-published. Presumably the number of truly useful books is finite, and the amount of valuable information online is probably just as limited.
What a dizzying age this is.