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I'll personally attest: LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new things post graduation. It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're
by czhu12 1y ago
I'll personally attest: LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new things post graduation. It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed. Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible, and the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and hope at some point, it'll make sense to you.
Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all hours of the day.
I get the commentary that it makes learning too easy or shallow, but I doubt anyone would think that college students would learn better if we got rid of TA's.
- eternauta3k 1y agoYou can always ask in stack exchange, IRC or forums.
- wiseowise 1y agoClosed: duplicate Closed: RTFM, dumbass <No activity for 8 years, until some random person shows up and asks "Hey did you figure it out?">
- dizhn 1y ago"Nevermind I figured it out"
- FredPret 1y agoOr even worse, you ask an "xyz" question in the "xyz" StackExchange, then immediately get flagged as off-topic
- atoav 1y agoMy favourite moment was when I tried to figure a specific software issue out that had to do with obscure hardware and after hours I found one forum post detailing the solution with zero replies. And it turns out I wrote it myself, years prior and had forgotten about it.
- QuercusMax 1y agoI had a similar experience involving something dealing with RSA encryption on iOS.
- sejje 1y agoI googled a command line string to do XYZ thing once, and found my own blog post. I really do write that stuff for myself, turns out.
- Rooster61 1y agoOn IRC> Newb: I need help with <thing>. Does anyone have any experience with this? J. Random Hacker: Why are you doing it like that? Newb: I have <xyz> constraint in my case that necessitates this. J. Random Hacker: This is a stupid way to do it. I'm not going to help you.
- precompute 1y agoThis is the way to go.
- threetonesun 1y ago> the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and hope at some point, it'll make sense to you. I find it odd that someone who has been to college would see this as a _bad_ way to learn something.
- abeppu 1y agoIn college sometimes asking the right question in class or in a discussion section led by a graduate student or in a study group would help me understand something. Sometimes comments from a grader on a paper would point out something I had missed. While having the diligence to keep at it until you understand is valuable, the advantage of college over just a pile of textbooks is in part that there are other resources that can help you learn.
- czhu12 1y agoThe main difference in college was that there were office hours
- qualeed 1y ago"Keep paving forward" can sometimes be fruitful, and at other times be an absolutely massive waste of time. I'm not sold on LLMs being a replacement, but post-secondary was certainly enriched by having other people to ask questions to, people to bounce ideas off of, people that can say "that was done 15 years ago, check out X", etc. There were times where I thought I had a great idea, but it was based on an incorrect conclusion that I had come to. It was helpful for that to be pointed out to me. I could have spent many months "paving forward", to no benefit, but instead someone saved me from banging my head on a wall.
- BeetleB 1y agoImagine you're in college, have to learn calculus, and you can't afford a textbook (nor can find a free one), and the professor has a thick accent and makes many mistakes. Sure, you could pave forward, but realistically, you'll get much farther with either a good textbook or a good teacher, or both.
- IshKebab 1y agoIn college you can ask people who know the answer. It's not until PhD level that you have to struggle without readily available answers.
- adamsb6 1y agoWhen ChatGPT came out it was like I had the old Google back. Learning a new programming language used to be mediated with lots of useful trips to Google to understand how some particular bit worked, but Google stopped being useful for that years ago. Even if the content you're looking for exists, it's buried.
- GaggiX 1y agoAnd the old ChatGPT was nothing compared to what we have today, nowadays reasoning models will eat through math problems no problem when this was a major limitation in the past.
- jennyholzer 1y agoI don't buy it. Open AI doesn't come close to passing my credibility check. I don't believe their metrics.
- lmc 1y ago> I'll personally attest: LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new things post graduation. How do you know when it's bullshitting you though?
- mcmcmc 1y agoThat’s the neat part, you don’t!
- jahewson 1y agoSame way you know for humans?
- sejje 1y agoAll the same ways I know when Internet comments, outdated books, superstitions, and other humans are bullshitting me. Sometimes right away, something sounds wrong. Sometimes when I try to apply the knowledge and discover a problem. Sometimes never, I believe many incorrect things even today.
- nilamo 1y agoWhen you Google the new term it gives you and you get good results, you know it wasn't made up. Since when was it acceptable to only ever look at a single source?
- holsta 1y ago> It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed. We were able to learn before LLMs. Libraries are not a new thing. FidoNet, USENET, IRC, forums, local study/user groups. You have access to all of Wikipedia. Offline, if you want.
- sejje 1y agoI learned how to code using the library in the 90s. I think it's accurate to say that if I had to do that again, I'm basically screwed. Asking the LLM is a vastly superior experience. I had to learn what my local library had, not what I wanted. And it was an incredible slog. IRC groups is another example--I've been there. One or two topics have great IRC channels. The rest have idle bots and hostile gatekeepers. The LLM makes a happy path to most topics, not just a couple.
- no_wizard 1y ago>Asking the LLM is a vastly superior experience. Not to be overly argumentative, but I disagree, if you're looking for a deep and ongoing process, LLMs fall down, because they can't remember anything and can't build upon itself in that way. You end up having to repeat alot of stuff. They also don't have good course correction (that is, if you're going down the wrong path, it doesn't alert you, as I've experienced) It also can give you really bad content depending on what you're trying to learn. I think for things that represent themselves as a form of highly structured data, like programming languages, there's good attunement there, but you start talking about trying to dig around about advanced finance, political topics, economics, or complex medical conditions the quality falls off fast, if its there at all
- dcbb65b2bcb6e6a 1y ago> LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new things post graduation. I haven't tested them on many things. But in the past 3 weeks I tried to vibe code a little bit VHDL. On the one hand it was a fun journey, I could experiment a lot and just iterated fast. But if I was someone who had no idea about hardware design, then this trash would've guided me the wrong way in numerous situations. I can't even count how many times it has built me latches instead of clocked registers (latches bad, if you don't know about it) and that's just one thing. Yes I know there ain't much out there (compared to python and javascript) about HDLs, even less regarding VHDL. But damn, no no no. Not for learning. never. If you know what you're doing and you have some fundamental knowledge about the topic, then it might help to get further, but not for the absolute essentials, that will backfire hard.
- avn2109 1y agoLLM's are useful because they can recommend several famous/well-known books (or even chapters of books) that are relevant to a particular topic. Then you can also use the LLM to illuminate the inevitable points of confusion and shortcomings in those books while you're reading and synthesizing them. Pre-LLM, even finding the ~5 textbooks with ~3 chapters each that decently covered the material I want was itself a nontrivial problem. Now that problem is greatly eased.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago> they can recommend several famous/well-known books They can recommend many unknown books as well, as language models are known to reference resources that do not exist.
- nilamo 1y agoAnd then when you don't find it, you move onto the next book. Problem solved!
- throwaway290 1y ago
- no_wizard 1y ago>Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all hours of the day This simply hasn't been my experience. Its too shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be useful. This happens quick for me. Also, god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly controversial subject and you want it to find reputable sources or particularly academic ones.
- kianN 1y agoI built a public tool a while back for some of my friends in grad school to support this sort of deep academic research use case. Sharing in case it is helpful: https://sturdystatistics.com/deepdive?search_type=external&q=https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6052486bc9144dc1730c12bf35323af3792a1fd0&engine=cn_all https://sturdystatistics.com/deepdive?search_type=external&q...
- ACCount36 1y agoIt is shallow. But as long as what you're asking it of is the kind of material covered in high school or college, it's fairly reliable. This generation of AI doesn't yet have the knowledge depth of a seasoned university professor. It's the kind of teacher that you should, eventually, surpass.
- scarmig 1y agoI've found it excels at some things: 1) The broad overview of a topic 2) When I have a vague idea, it helps me narrow down the correct terminology for it 3) Providing examples of a particular category ("are there any examples of where v1 in the visual cortex develops in a disordered way?") 4) "Tell me the canonical textbooks in field X" 5) Posing math exercises 6) Free form branching--while talking about one topic, I want to shift to another that is distinct but related. I agree they leave a lot to be desired when digging very deeply into a topic. And my biggest pet peeve is when they hallucinate fake references ("tell me papers that investigate this topic" will, for any sufficiently obscure topic, result in a bunch of very promising paper titles that are wholely invented).
- CJefferson 1y ago
- ainiriand 1y agoI've learnt Rust in 12 weeks with a study plan that ChatGPT designed for me, catering to my needs and encouraging me to take notes and write articles. This way of learning allowed me to publish https://rustaceo.es https://rustaceo.es for Spanish speakers made from my own notes. I think the potential in this regard is limitless.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoI learned Rust in a couple of weeks by reading the book.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoBut I agree though, I am getting insane value out of LLMs.
- IshKebab 1y agoDoubtful. Unless you have very low standards of "learn".
- koakuma-chan 1y agoWhat are your standards of learn?
- IshKebab 1y agoI would say you have to be familiar with a large part of the standard library, de facto standard crates, and most language features, plus have the experience to write code and deal with compiler errors effectively. No way anyone is doing that in a couple of weeks by reading one book. At least for Rust. Maybe for something a lot simpler like Go it's plausible, but even then I doubt it. You're not going to know about any of the common gotchas for example.
- paxys 1y agoYeah regardless of time taken the study plan for Rust already exists (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/). You don't need ChatGPT to regurgitate it to you.
- JTbane 1y agoNah I'm calling BS, for me self-learning after college is either Just Do It(tm) trial-and-error, blogs, or hitting the nonfiction section of the library.
- crims0n 1y agoI agree... spent last weekend chatting with an LLM, filling in knowledge gaps I had on the electromagnetic spectrum. It does an amazing job educating you on known unknowns, but I think being able to know how to ask the right questions is key. I don't know how it would do with unknown unknowns, which is where I think books really shine and are still a preferable learning method.
- kelthuzad 1y agoI share your experience and view in that regard! There is so much criticism of LLMs and some of it is fair, like the problem of hallucinations, but that weakness can be reframed as a learning opportunity. It's like discussing a subject with a personal scientist who may at certain times test you, by making claims that may be simplistic or outright wrong, to keep the student skeptical and check if they are actually paying attention. This requires a student to be actually interested in what they are learning tho, for others, who blindly trust its output, it can have adverse effects like the illusion of having understood a concept while they might have even mislearned it.
- vrotaru 1y agoYou should always check. I've seen LLM's being wrong (and obstinate) on topics which are one step separated from common knowledge. I had to post the source code to win the dispute, so to speak.
- abenga 1y agoWhy would you try to convince an LLM of anything?
- vrotaru 1y agoWell, not exactly convince. I was curious what will happen. If you are curious it was a question about the behavior of Kafka producer interceptors when an exception is thrown. But I agree that it is hard to resist the temptation to treat LLM's as a pear.
- layer8 1y agoOften you want to proceed further based on a common understanding, so it’s an attempt to establish that common understanding.
- globular-toast 1y agoNow think of all the times you didn't already know enough to go and find the real answer. Ever read mainstream news reporting on something you actually know about? Notice how it's always wrong? I'm sure there's a name for this phenomenon. It sounds like exactly the same thing.
- tekno45 1y agohow are you checking its correctness if you're learning the topic?
- signatoremo 1y agoThe same way you check if you learn in any other ways? Cross referencing, asking online, trying it out, etc.
- tekno45 1y agoWe're giving this to children who inherently don't have those skills.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y agoThis is important, as benchmarks indicate we aren't at a level where a LLM can truly be relied upon to teach topics across the board. It is hard to verify information that you are unfamiliar with. It would be like learning from a message board. Can you really trust what is being said?
- Eisenstein 1y agoWhat is the solution? Toss out thousands of years of tested pedagogy which shows that most people learn by trying things, asking questions, and working through problems with assistance and instead tell everyone to read a textbook by themselves and learn through osmosis? So what if the LLM is wrong about something. Human teachers are wrong about things, you are wrong about things, I am wrong about things. We figure it out when it doesn't work the way we thought and adjust our thinking. We aren't learning how to operate experimental nuclear reactors here, where messing up results in half a country getting irradiated. We are learning things for fun, hobbies, and self-betterment.
- qualeed 1y ago>we aren't at a level where a LLM can truly be relied upon to teach topics across the board. You can replace "LLM" here with "human" and it remains true. Anyone who has gone to post-secondary has had a teacher that relied on outdated information, or filled in gaps with their own theories, etc. Dealing with that is a large portion of what "learning" is. I'm not convinced about the efficacy of LLMs in teaching/studying. But it's foolish to think that humans don't suffer from the same reliability issue as LLMs, at least to a similar degree.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago> It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed No, not really. > Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible, and the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and hope at some point, it'll make sense to you. Your experience isn't universal. Some students learned how to do research in school.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y agoThey should have focused on social skills too I think
- HPsquared 1y agoLike a car can be "beyond economical repair", a problem can be not worth the time (and uncertainty) or fixing. Especially from subjective judgement with incomplete information etc
- fn-mote 1y agoI do a lot of research and independent learning. The way I translated “screwed” was “4-6 hours to unravel the issue”. And half the time the issue is just a misunderstanding. It’s exciting when I discover I can’t replicate something that is stated authoritatively… which turns out to be controversial. That’s rare, though. I bet ChatGPT knows it’s controversial, too, but that wouldn’t be as much fun.
- johnfn 1y ago"Screwed" = spending hours sifting through poorly-written, vaguely-related documents to find a needle in a haystack. Why would I want to continue doing that?
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago> "Screwed" = spending hours sifting through poorly-written, vaguely-related documents to find a needle in a haystack. From the parent comment: > it was pretty much impossible ... hope at some point, it'll make sense to you Not sure where you are getting the additional context for what they meant by "screwed", but I am not seeing it.
- mathattack 1y agoI've found LLMs to be great in summarizing non-controversial non-technical bodies of knowledge. For example - the facts in the long swings of regional histories. You have to ask for nuance and countervailing viewpoints, though you'll get them if they're in there.
- Barrin92 1y ago>Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible sorry but if you've gone to university, in particular at a time when internet access was already ubiquitous, surely you must have been capable to find an answer to a programming problem by consulting documentation, manual, or tutorials which exist on almost any topic. I'm not saying the chatbot interface is necessarily bad, it might be more engaging, but it literally does not present you with information you couldn't have found yourself. If someone has a computer science degree and tells me without stack exchange they can't find solutions to basic problems that is a red flag. That's like the article about the people posted here who couldn't program when their LLM credits ran out
- wiz21c 1y agoI use it to refresh some engineering maths I have forgotten (ODE, numerical schemas, solving linear equations, data sciences algorithms, etc) and the explanations are most of the time great and usually 2 or 3 prompts give me a good overview and explain the tricky details. I also use it to remember some python stuff. In rust, it is less good: makes mistakes. In those two domains, at that level, it's really good. It could help students I think.
- andix 1y agoAbsolutely. I used to have a lot of weird IPv6 issues in my home network I didn't understand. ChatGPT helped me to dump some traffic with tcpdump and explained what was happening on the network. In the process it helped me to learn many details about RA and NDP (Router Advertisments/Neighbor Discovery Protocol, which mostly replace DHCP and ARP from IPv4). It made me realize that my WiFi mesh routers do quite a lot of things to prevent broadcast loops on the network, and that all my weird issues could be attributed to one cheap mesh repeater. So I replaced it and now everything works like a charm. I had this setup for 5 years and was never able to figure out what was going on there, although I really tried.
- mvieira38 1y agoWould you say you were using the LLM as a tutor or as tech support, in that instance?
- andix 1y agoProbably both. I think ChatGPT wouldn't have found the issue by itself. But I noticed some specific things, asked for some tutoring and then it helped my to find the issues. It was a team effort, either of "us" alone wouldn't have finished the job. ChatGPT had some really wrong ideas in the process.
- PaulRobinson 1y agoAs somebody who has done both tech support, and lectured a couple of semesters at a business school on a technical topic... they're not that far removed from each other, it's just context and audience changes. The work is pretty similar. So why not have tech support that teaches you, or a tutor that helps with you with a specific example problem you're having? Providing you don't just rely on training data and can reduce hallucinations, this is the angle of attack that is likely the killer app some people are already seeing. Vibe coding is nonsense because it's not teaching you to maintain and extend that application when the LLM runs out of steam. Use it to help you fix your problem in a way that you understand and can learn from? Rocket fuel to my mind. We're maybe not far away...
- bossyTeacher 1y agoLLMs are to learning what self driving cars are to transportation. They take you to the destination most of the time. But the problem is that if you use them too much your brain (your legs) undergoes metaphorical atrophy and when you are faced in the position of having to do it on your own, you are worse than you would be had you spent the time using your brain (legs). Learning is great but learning to learn is the real skilset. You don't develop that if you are always getting spoonfed.
- pyman 1y agoThis is one of the challenges I see with self-driving cars. Driving requires a high level of cognitive processing to handle changing conditions and potential hazards. So when you drive most of your brain is engaged. The impact self-driving cars are going to have on mental stimulation, situational awareness, and even long-term cognitive health could be bigger than we think, especially if people stop engaging in tasks that keep those parts of the brain active. That said, I love the idea of my car driving me around the city while I play video games. Regarding LLMs, they can also stimulate thinking if used right.
- globular-toast 1y agoIMO your problem is the same as many people these days: you don't own any books and refuse to get them.
- kridsdale1 1y agoI agree. I recently bought a broken Rolex and asked GPT for a list of tools I should get on Amazon to work on it. I tried using YouTube to find walk through guides for how to approach the repair as a complete n00b and only found videos for unrelated problems. But I described my issues and took photos to GPT O3-Pro and it was able to guide me and tell me what to watch out for. I completed the repair (very proud of myself) and even though it failed a day later (I guess I didn’t re-seat well enough) I still feel far more confident opening it and trying again than I did at the start. Cost of broken watch + $200 pro mode << Cost of working watch.
- KaiserPro 1y agowhat was broken on it?
- belter 1y agoDepending on context, I would advise you to be extremely careful. Modern LLMs are Gell‑Mann Amnesia to the square. Once you watched a LLM butcher a topic you know extremely well, it is spooky how much authority they still project on the next interaction.
- tonmoy 1y agoI don’t know what subject you are learning but for circuit design I have failed to get any response out of LLMs that’s not straight from a well known text book chapter that I have already read
- IshKebab 1y agoIt definitely depends heavily on how well represented the subject is on the internet at large. Pretty much every question I've asked it about SystemVerilog it gets wrong, but it can be very helpful about quite complex things about random C questions, for example why I might get undefined symbol errors with `inline` functions in C but only in debug mode. On the other hand it told me you can't execute programs when evaluating a Makefile and you trivially can. It's very hit and miss. When it misses it's rather frustrating. When it hits it can save you literally hours.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago> It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed. Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange, It’s called basic research skills - don’t they teach this anymore in high school, let alone college? How ever did we get by with nothing but an encyclopedia or a library catalog?
- axoltl 1y agoSomething is lost as well if you do 'research' by just asking an LLM. On the path to finding your answer in the encyclopedia or academic papers, etc. you discover so many things you weren't specifically looking for. Even if you don't fully absorb everything there's a good chance the memory will be triggered later when needed: "Didn't I read about this somewhere?".
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoLLMs hallucinate too much and too frequently for me to put any trust in their (in)ability to help with research.
- ewoodrich 1y agoYep, this is why I just don’t enjoy or get much value from exploring new topics with LLMs. Living in the Reddit factoid/listicle/TikTok explainer internet age my goal for years (going back well before ChatGPT hit the scene) has been to seek out high quality literature or academic papers for the subjects I’m interested in. I find it so much more intellectually stimulating then most of what I find online. Reading e.g. a 600 page book about some specific historical event gives me so much more perspective and exposure to different aspects I never would have thought to ask about on my own, or would have been elided when clipped into a few sentence summary. I have gotten some value out of asking for book recommendations from LLMs, mostly as a starting point I can use to prune a list of 10 books down into a 2 or 3 after doing some of my research on each suggestion. But talking to a chatbot to learn about a subject just doesn’t do anything for me for anything deeper than basic Q&A where I simply need a (hopefully) correct answer and nothing more.
- 1y ago
- GeoAtreides 1y agoI'll personally attest anecdotes mean little in sound arguments. When I got stuck on a concept, I wasn't screwed: I read more; books if necessary. StackExchange wasn't my only source. LLMs are not like TAs, personal or not, in the same way they're not humans. So it then follows we can actually contemplate not using LLMs in formal teaching environments.
- brulard 1y agoSometimes you don't have tens of hours to spend on a single problem you can not figure out.
- i_am_proteus 1y ago>Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all hours of the day. And that's a bad thing. Nothing can replace the work in learning, the moments where you don't understand it and have to think until it hurts and until you understand. Anything that bypasses this (including, for uni students, leaning too heavily on generous TAs) results in a kind of learning theatre, where the student thinks they've developed an understanding, but hasn't. Experienced learners already have the discipline to use LLMs without asking too much of them, the same way they learned not to look up the answer in the back of the textbook until arriving at their own solution.
- 38 1y ago[dead]
- MattSayar 1y agoIt's one more step on the path to A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Still a long way to go, but it's a burden off my shoulders to be able to ask stupid questions without judgment or assumptions.
- lottin 1y agoYes. Learning assistance is one of the few use cases of IA that I have had success with.
- andrepd 1y agoA "TA" which has only the knowledge which is "common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange"... And which just makes things up (with the same tone and confidence!) at random and unpredictable times. Yeah apart from that it's just like a knowledgeable TA.
- iLoveOncall 1y ago> It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed. Given that humanity has been able to go from living in caves to sending spaceships to the moon without LLMs, let me express some doubt about that. Even without going further, software engineering isn't new and people have been stuck on concepts and have managed to get unstuck without LLMs for decades. What you gain in instant knowledge with LLMs, you lose in learning how to get unstuck, how to persevere, how to innovate, etc.
- mym1990 1y ago"It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed." There seems to be a gap in problem solving abilities here...the process of breaking down concepts into easier to understand concepts and then recompiling has been around since forever...it is just easier to find those relationships now. To say it was impossible to learn concepts you are stuck on is a little alarming.
- cs_throwaway 1y agoI agree. We are talking about technical, mathy stuff, right? As long as you can tell that you don’t deeply understand something that you just read, they are incredible TAs. The trick is going to be to impart this metacognitive skill on the average student. I am hopeful we will figure it out in the top 50 universities.
- roughly 1y agoMy rule with LLMs has been "if a shitty* answer fast gets you somewhere, the LLMs are the right tool," and that's where I've seen them for learning, too. There are times when I'm reading a paper, and there's a concept mentioned that I don't know - I could either divert onto a full Google search to try to find a reasonable summary, or I can ask ChatGPT and get a quick answer. For load-bearing concepts or knowledge, yes, I need to put the time in to actually research and learn a concept accurately and fully, but for things tangential to my actual current interests or for things I'm just looking at for a hobby, a shitty answer fast is exactly what I want. I think this is the same thing with vibe coding, AI art, etc. - if you want something good, it's not the right tool for the job. If your alternative is "nothing," and "literally anything at all" will do, man, they're game changers. * Please don't overindex on "shitty" - "If you don't need something verifiably high-quality"
- ants_everywhere 1y agoI'm curious what you've used it to learn
- throwaway290 1y agoI really don't get it. Literally the only thing you need to do research is know what term to look up and you get at a bunch of info written by real humans
- yyyk 1y agoEverything you state was available in the net. Did the people grow more informed? So far practice suggests the opposite conclusion[0]. I hope for the best, but the state of the world so far doesn't justify it... [0] https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/ https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/
- archon810 1y agoI was recently researching and repairing an older machine with a 2020 Intel Gen 9 CPU and a certain socket motherboard, and AI made it so much easier and pleasant to find information and present answers about various generations and sockets and compatibility, I felt like I didn't deserve this kind of tool. LLMs are not great for some things, but amazing for others.
- ploxiln 1y agoMaybe TAs are a good metaphor. Back in college, the classmates who went to TAs for help multiple times every week, really didn't get the material. I literally never went to a TA for help in my life, and learned the material much better by really figuring it out myself, "the hard way" (the only way?). These were math, EE, and CS courses.
- voidhorse 1y agoI haven't used LLMs too much for study yet, so maybe they really are force multipliers, but I completely disagree with your assessment of self-directed learning pre-llm, the paving forward part isn't so dire. The internet, and esp. stack exchange is a horrible place to learn concepts. For basic operational stuff, sure that works, but one should mostly be picking up concepts form books and other long form content. When you get stuck it's time to do three things: Incorporate a new source that covers the same material in a different way, or at least from a different author. Sit down with the concept and write about it and actively try to reformulate it and everything you do/don't understand in your own words. Take a pause and come back later. Usually one of these three strategies does the trick, no llm required. Obviously these approaches require time that using an LLM wouldn't. I have a suspicion doing it this way will also make it stick in long term memory better, but that's just a hunch.
- bobsandbibs 1y agoI have been very skeptical of AI. But getting unstuck when studying. Its a huge help. This is the first I see the benifit with AI. I take a picture of a formula and ask chatgpt to explain the steps.