7 ms·
This is, without exaggeration, probably the fiftieth blog post or long-form comment about how someone is using an LLM for "complex learning", and I'd just reall
by matherial 2mo ago
This is, without exaggeration, probably the fiftieth blog post or long-form comment about how someone is using an LLM for "complex learning", and I'd just really like to see at least one of these to be accompanied by a statement saying what are the kinds of problems the author can now confidently solve that they couldn't before.
In my experience, LLMs are really good for taking up your time and making you feel like you're learning, in the same way that many of the popular educational videos on YouTube are fun to watch and don't really teach you anything.
If you ask an LLM to give you a 500-word summary of quantum physics, it'll give you an oversimplification that probably leans on a hodgepodge of pop-sci metaphors. And if you start drilling down, you risk drilling down on these ELI5 metaphors, which can get you farther away from truth.
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago> don't really teach you anything Dunno, I've been learning a lot of Rust in the past few days. Just dove right into a project and asked AI to teach me stuff on a need to know basis. I'm actually getting used to Rust by now.
- noisy_boy 2mo agoSame. I setup a practice skill that has a curriculum/list of topics, teaching methodology, approach to drills, progress tracking and spaced repetition. Additionally I asked it to also give me problems relevant in my business domain so that I learn how to directly apply the knowledge in a realistic scenario. I am getting much more comfortable writing rust than I was barely two weeks ago. More than I was just reading tutorials.
- fluoridation 2mo agoA programming language is a skill with an accessible source of irrefutable feedback. If the program doesn't work, then you did something wrong. What happens if you try to learn something less concrete or less testable, like quantum mechanics, as the GP suggested?
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoI agree with you. I'm also using AI to help me learn electronics so I can finally make some real stuff I can hold in my hands. Lots of hard engineering involved so I'm a lot less confident in my ability to spot the AI's own mistakes. However, saying you can't learn "anything" is just too strong. I'm definitely managing to distill the AI's weights into my own brain.
- fluoridation 2mo agoIt's true in a very real sense, though. Without calibration, how can you tell whether you're learning something real or something fictitious? Imagine trying to learn a language from a single teacher, without ever talking to or corresponding with a native speaker. How could you tell whether you're actually learning the language, or the teacher's unique dialect? Yes, you indeed "learned" something, it's just something that might not bear much resemblance to the real thing.
- navigate8310 2mo agoThis made me realize all those benchmarks which unlike loosely acts as a person being awarded with a certificate after his doctorate is rather worthless, for you never know when it bullshit-ted.
- porridgeraisin 2mo agoYep. This is the key. You need some kind of knowledge of what the end result should look like to really learn something from LLMs. Otherwise it's a deep dark forest with no way out.
- 2muchcoffeeman 2mo agoAI is a super polarising topic. Even now there are people who are like “it’s all AI slop so it’s all useless” along with the “OMG AI!!! OMG we will have AGI soon!!!” people. The truth, as always, is in between. There’s loads of people using it for useful things, learning, automation and getting good results. But it’s also wrong enough that you need to deploy it carefully sometimes. Don’t worry about either group. Keep objective and use AI where it helps and do it yourself where you are better. That’s all.
- cowboylowrez 2mo agoyep, I think its even worth considering that some folks are internally conflicted, I am certainly an enthusiastic consumer of AI (or what I can mooch anyways) yet nothing prevents me from considering the downsides, with the usual bleeding heart guilt that comes with a perceived complicity in unfortunate happenings and I'd also probably be a nimby if I were the sort of titled landowner that anyone would listen to.
- xxs 2mo agoLearning programming languages is quite trivial. Many years ago I counted 16 that I had used professionally, now they are more. It takes way more time to master and be very comfortable with a language due to its ecosystem, though. Some languages are more likely to click with a person, yet underneath they are all the same (minus the functional languages that form their own group), e.g. some performance issues may require looking at the generate assembly code.
- ixsploit 2mo agoI like to use them to generate me tutorial series for technical topics I want to learn or improve. So I start a prompt like this: > I want you to create a tutorial series about X for me. The prime objective is that I improve in topic X so never provide a solution but guide and teach. (for programming never write code). First create a question catalog to assess my current level. Then I would ask it to structure the tutorial challenges in the following way: - Goal - Concept - Instructions I figured that if I don't need to read any additional material on the topic the LLM is giving me too much information and I need to change the prompt. Works for me and I used this too learn topics I feel now comfortable with, like nushell, opencyper, elisp, boot loaders etc. But maybe you don't consider this "complex"
- SwtCyber 2mo agoI think the key difference here is that you're using the LLM to create exercises, not to replace the learning material
- ignoramous 2mo agoCurious: Why not pick up a book or two on the topic, and use the LLM to help you through it [0]? To me, prompting the LLM without grounding it sounds like a sure shot way to end up learning "pop-sci", as GP puts it, instead of the actual science? If today's top LLMs are reliable enough (without grounding) to academically learn "complex topics" from, may be I need to adjust my priors. I must say, I do find myself chatting about other topics (without the need for grounding) that I'm trying to "absorb" (not really learn), like Behavioural Psychology & Philosophy. [0] Products like NotebookLM are built specifically for such usecases.
- SwtCyber 2mo agoThe test I'd like to see: take a problem set or task you couldn't solve beforehand, learn the topic this way, then try to solve it without the LLM in the loop
- brooke2k 2mo agoI would tend to agree in the case that someone is using LLMs as their primary source for learning. But I've found a lot of use in having a claude project containing the PDF of a textbook I'm working through so that I can ask it to clarify or help me through parts I find confusing. I would definitely say that's greatly accelerated my learning - or at least greatly accelerated the speed at which I integrate information from textbooks.
- fy20 2mo agoI think it depends on what you want to learn and what your definition of "learnt" is. The other day I realised I had no idea how DNA and life works. I guess I studied it at high school (25 years ago), but maybe it didn't go into much detail or it just didn't click. So I asked ChatGPT to explain it to me, I came up with my own mental model from it's explanation, told it that, then it corrected me where I misunderstood things. We went backwards and forwards for an hour, me asking questions, it correcting me, until I felt like I understood the whole picture. Am I going to become a biologist and study the origins of life from that? Definatley not! But if my kids need help on their biology homework, I now understand the basics of it.
- bilbo-b-baggins 2mo agoOr do you? Cause if you went back and forth with ChatGPT for an hour it definitely hallucinated and lied to you at some point. Maybe consider using something else like Brilliant.org if you want to learn a topic, yanno, so you don’t propagate whatever hallucination from ChatGPT to your kids.
- abustamam 2mo agoThese days online courses like Brilliant and such are likely largely LLM generated. Are they actually vetted by experts before publication? Who knows. My money is on no, or at least, not until someone complains. Its easy enough to prompt ChatGPT for primary sources when doing research to validate any claims its making.
- ImHereToVote 2mo agoYou should actually do this. Ask ChatGPT to check what it said against sources. It does correct itself. The corrections are usually not major. Just mental shortcuts.
- abustamam 2mo agoI personally do, but something tells me the commenter i was responding to wouldn't trust the llm correcting itself.
- robertwt7 2mo ago> many of the popular educational videos on YouTube are fun to watch and don't really teach you anything. I really enjoyed and learn a lot of things from Karpathy's and Andrew Ng's video. sure many don't really teach you anything, but I could say many others are useful too. Maybe it depends on the way we're prompting as well? it seems useful for some like Terence's message that was shared few weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345
- abustamam 2mo ago> many of the popular educational videos on YouTube are fun to watch and don't really teach you anything. As a tangent, I think the concept of pop science has wasted so much time of what could be considered brilliant minds. I can't believe how much YouTube people I consider really smart consume under the guise of "learning stuff." And the videos are always designed to be addicting and to entice you to watch other of their stuff, which makes sense, because theyre a business, not a school. I'm guilty of wasting time on YouTube as much as anyone else (I like watching stand-up routines and Red Bull extreme sports) but I am never under the guise that I'm doing anything productive with my time. Its okay to have fun learning, but I always felt that entertainment and education should be kept separate. You gotta learn something intentionally, not just get it served to you via algorithm. Note im talking about the educational "shorts" not the 60+ minute deep dives that are basically a college level lecture.
- QuadmasterXLII 2mo agoI do appreciate the literal college lectures on there. Hard to get the algorithm to surface them but they’re golden for learning. Of course I would be unshocked if the authenticity signals I’m tracking (AB.203 Lecture 3 video title, general hubbub and shuffling of chairs at start of video, university affiliated channel) are all faked by grifters 6 months from now.
- miki123211 2mo agoI really like the term "edutainment" for this. It's the kind of high-brow entertainment that makes you feel like you learn something. For me, most "push" things are edutainment, whether that'd be Youtube videos or public-broadcaster television programs. Things you seek out yourself are not. In a similar vein, there's "newstertainment" (news that makes you feel like it's important to watch, but actually changes nothing tangible about your life).
- sciencejerk 2mo agoI can't watch Mark Rober's content because of this. He dilutes his remarkable engineering stunts into ADHD internet memes.
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- yuanBuilds 2mo agoIn reality, I would just ask LLM to give me a technical explanation of quantum physics, and ask any vocab and equation I do not understand in the response.
- PreciousH 2mo ago[dead]
- qnleigh 2mo ago100% agree. They are not good teachers. Nevertheless I've been using LLMs more and more to learn complex topics, but my learning is always anchored in something else: - Getting through textbooks and lecture notes. LLMs have gotten very good at answering basic questions on quite advanced material (e.g. representation theory and quantum field theory). By asking a very specific question or even giving the LLM a screenshot, I can get unstuck a lot faster. - Learning e.g. new python packages. Instead of hunting for examples on Stack Exchange, now I ask an LLM to write a minimal working example and then build off of that. By writing most of the remaining code myself and only using the LLM to answer questions, I've been able to learn new packages significantly faster. In both cases, the LLM isn't providing the curriculum or guiding what I learn. The textbooks, papers and coding tasks are. But now I can pick these things up much more efficiently.
- whazor 2mo agoMy trick is to let agents make an University Course Curriculum based of books and papers. Then if I don't understand something, I ask AI to simplify the book/paper until I get it.
- norome 2mo agoas ever the real problem is formulating questions, which requires clarity on the next discrete layer of missing comprehension, which requires self-reflection and genuine insight into your own mind.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> I'd just really like to see at least one of these to be accompanied by a statement saying what are the kinds of problems the author can now confidently solve that they couldn't before. I've spent a lot of time with LLMs for the last two years. Something I've tried, almost for decades, is to learn enough CUDA programming to be productive with it when needed. About 6 months ago, after again banging my head against it for weeks, something finally clicked and I feel like I've overcome the initial step of at least grokking the needed ideas so I know where to go next, and I can actually write + compile + use kernels made for my use cases. I won't claim to understand everything, but I couldn't do what I can today, before I learnt the things I now know. ~2 years ago, because of my very weak math foundation, I basically said "Well, CUDA looks really interesting and really fun, but it's too difficult, lets focus on other things", even after reading some starting resources and stuff. But, by asking countless of dumb questions to LLMs, forcing it to steer me in the right direction, when I'm otherwise just driving on the highway or what not, I finally feel like I have a grasp on something I earlier only dreamed about understanding, and I'm able to be productive with it now.
- KeplerBoy 2mo agoTo be fair the entry barrier got a lot lower over the past ~5 years. Now you can write very good CUDA kernels with just a few lines of python DSL code. Zero cpp boilerplate and zero explicit compiler calls. Stuff like Triton, nvidia warp (the language), numba, cupy jax/pallas and so many others really paved the way. You can start out really high-level, run a profiler and then dive deep into the bottlenecks. TL,DR: Keep going, it's a great time to have fun with GPUs.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> To be fair the entry barrier got a lot lower over the past ~5 years. Now you can write very good CUDA kernels with just a few lines of python DSL code. Zero cpp boilerplate and zero explicit compiler calls. Well, yeah, but what I've being doing is learning proper CUDA, not "Python-compiled-to-CUDA" (otherwise it'd take like a just a week to understand enough :P ) and that's looking more or less the same today (although bunch of more complicated stuff piled on top of the fundamentals) as it used to, AFAIK. With that said, the environment is a lot simpler to setup today at least :)
- nathell 2mo agoI’ve found it helpful to ask LLMs specific questions about your knowledge gaps, or ask for concrete worked examples that illustrate the ideas you’re learning about. In [0], I ask: „When applying Hidden Markov Models to POS tagging in NLP, what do the latent states and observations usually represent?” I then follow up with some specific questions and requests for walkthrough. You can’t see it from this conversations, but I have Wikipedia and a bunch of other resources open in separate pages, cross-reading, and I follow up with a handwritten toy implementation of a Viterbi-based POS tagger once my mental model crystallizes. This is very different from a 500-word summary of quantum physics, and I still had to put in effort (this is unescapable!), but I found the experience rewarding. Also note that this is relearning of a topic that was part of my uni curriculum but long forgotten. In [1] and [2], I’m learning Spanish by reading García Lorca’s poems. Here again I’m going through the texts with a dictionary, and augmenting my learning with what a dictionary won’t tell me: given the usage of a word or phrase in this specific poem, is it something that could occur in everyday speech, or is it poetical? [0]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a743bc7-d0dc-83eb-acc9-8f2faaffc420 https://chatgpt.com/share/6a743bc7-d0dc-83eb-acc9-8f2faaffc4... [1]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a731be6-26bc-83eb-8d21-c965da5364b0 https://chatgpt.com/share/6a731be6-26bc-83eb-8d21-c965da5364... [2]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a731c01-5604-83eb-a5b8-cd1295d0efc5 https://chatgpt.com/share/6a731c01-5604-83eb-a5b8-cd1295d0ef...
- 0x696C6961 2mo agoI like to rephrase things in my own words when I read new concepts. The LLM can tell me if my version is totally off.
- manfromchina1 2mo agoI personally don't get this attitude. For one thing, nobody on earth can give you a 500-word summary of quantum physics in a way that lets you internalize even a tiny bit of it. That's not how you learn anything. Here's how I do it: I open Baby Rudin (3rd ed.), second chapter, and read the main text - absolute brutality. I unpack almost every sentence with Claude/GPT until I finally get what's going on. No ELI5 nonsense, just examples and counterexamples galore while absorbing the techniques and the way of thinking in analysis/topology. How do I know I've learned the material? By solving every single problem in that chapter. Here's the thing, though: the problems in Rudin can be brutal and decoupled from what's in the text, so if you can handle them, you've definitely mastered the material. No 500-word summary of analysis here.
- sublinear 2mo agoIs that meaningfully different from the study methods of the past? That doesn't require an LLM, and using one risks correctness in exchange for speed. You might not even get that speed if you're stuck in the weeds often enough. A decade ago, a google search for study guides written by another professor would have been slightly slower. A decade before that, you'd be even slower fumbling through several books. Every single word could at least be trusted. You don't get that from an LLM.
- winnit 2mo agoWhen studying a mathematics text, it is good practice to question what you are reading, trying to prove things to yourself etc., which IMO makes the problem of trusted sources much less than it is in things which you are not able to verify e.g. historical accounts.
- Jtarii 2mo agoIf you have an actual mathematics professor to ask questions to then sure do that, but most people don't have that luxury. Also the error rate of frontier LLMs on textbook highschool/college level mathematics is going to be extremely low. It is also significantly more engaging and fun.
- sumitkumar 2mo agoAgree. Just pay attention to the follow up questions a learner is asking to see the progress. If the follow up is just "continue", "go on", "next" or a non-sequitur then it is smell of a stall. If it is challenging or filling a gap in the answer then it is progress. So production from the learner is the only signal of worth here not the quality of LLM response, the time spent or the ability of the learner to reproduce the facts given by the LLM.
- akst 2mo agoRE: On agents taking up your time One thing I've begun to notice is that LLMs list of a bunch of interesting stuff and raise all these thing you consider but often sometimes you just want a more focused response, so these scatter responses kind of lead you to being overwhelmed and losing focus on what you really wanted to do. At least I've started noticing this. Like I'd ask about some statical approach taken in a paper and suddenly i'm being bombard with all these potential pivots and things I really need to consider, I kind of just want to consider 1 thing at a time and come to things once I fixed the immediate issue. Sure I have no doubt these other pieces of information are useful but it's just not the most useful information I need right now. This is less of a problem with coding agents more so putting learning related questions to an LLM, like is the method covered in this paper, yes no? instead I get an exhaustive but overwhelming and indirect response that contains part of the answer. I just wanted to know if it was worth my time going through the paper but now I'm being bombarded told all this tangential information, which is unclear to me if I need to consider right at this moment, it's really distracting. Maybe this is something others adapted to but i've resorted speaking past it saying, "this is the question please stay on topic" or literally "one thing at a time please" and then it narrows in, but they really stretch your attention thin if you're not more aggressive with keeping them on topic. The smarter models are better, and if you use max compute it does a better job. I think they can definitely be helpful for learning, but you got play an active role, you can't just consume what it says like content.
- abrbhat 2mo agoLearning is not about what you put in, it is about what you can take out. It is also not zero-sum, but rather exists on a wide spectrum for any given knowledge domain. A good idea could be to prompt the LLMs to keep quizzing you on what you have read and test on both recall and understanding. Also learning is not just about truth, it is about curiosity as well. The pop-sci metaphors could actually good for satisfying the curiosity of let's say a 10-year old. What to learn and how to learn is ultimately at the judgement of the learner. The better the judgement, the more the learner can stay closer to the exact scientific details.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoThis is not a silver bullet that will make everyone a genius. Not even the best human tutor can do that. But it can be a massive clearer of certain roadblocks for people with no better human help available. Countless people have to resort to learning from teachers who themselves are confused and know the material only shallowly and give confused and wrong explanations that can be very hard to untie for the learner. For most undergrad level things, LLMs have a breadth and depth of knowledge and online search capability that it can make you unstuck on some misunderstanding quite effectively. You still have to work. It's not magic. But the goalpost cannot be to catapult the median person to become Einstein. It's a tool. Luckily I had my dad available who is a scientist, during my high school and he corrected several fundamental mis-explanations of my teacher that even to my mind logically simply didn't add up. I learned not to relay this back to the teacher of course and sometimes regurgitated the wrong answer in tests. Not everyone is so lucky. This has been my frustration quite often. Textbooks are sometimes wrong, both because the author really doesn't have good expertise on that slice of the topic or out of didactic simplification reasons. Having an LLM that can consult the real grownup literature and give the full story, not the birds-and-bees is quite useful.
- yoz-y 2mo agoI remember books using simplified models, but being flat out wrong?
- bonoboTP 2mo agoIt is sometimes typos, but even those can be confusing. But okay I'll admit books are usually on the end of simplification, at least for hard sciences. But sometimes they do handle the edges of the authors knowledge and sometimes misconceptions creep in. Famous ones include the reason for airplanes flying or similar "let's relate the hard science to practical reality" and making mistakes there where they think they can just improvise and wing it. Even evolution is sometimes explained very wrong. History and humanities is more murky. Of course "it's just simplified" is a defense that can be attempted to explain away all mistakes.
- coderatlarge 2mo agoprompt: if a family has four boys, would a bayesian conclude that their next child would most likely be a boy? fable taught me about the beta binomial and large observational studies that came down on both sides of the question about whether per family births are truly binomial. it also told me about countries like the uk and uae that are inching towards national genetic registries that might answer such questions definitively in time. as well as the efforts in Cyprus in this 80s to reduce beta thalassemia through voluntary testing of couples pre marriage.
- dalmo3 2mo agoThree magic words: "use Socratic method"
- xandrius 2mo agoHave you actually tried? I refreshed a ton of arguments which I had studied or briefly encountered before, so it's less likely to fool me than if I knew 0. And the fact that I can frame a question precisely and as deep as I like is truly unique and incredible. For some things you still need videos and practice but cmon, I don't get this generalised hate on LLMs, they are based on what us human wrote anyway.
- locknitpicker 2mo ago> In my experience, LLMs are really good for taking up your time and making you feel like you're learning, in the same way that many of the popular educational videos on YouTube are fun to watch and don't really teach you anything. You wrote a wall of text just to say you struggle with learning when using some media. That's fine, each one of us struggles with different things. However, I hardly think it's fair to extrapolate your personal struggles with learning styles to everyone in such a sweeping approach, or that this is relevant to the topic. If you want to go back to the basics, LLMs in the very least work as chatbots that you can use to follow the Socratic method to guide your way through your learning journey. If you still struggle with learning when asking questions and getting specific answers to them then it's safe to say LLMs are not a factor.
- TaupeRanger 2mo agoIt's like YouTube "Explainer" personalities, like Hank Green and Adam Neely. They do the kind of "learning theater" that makes you feel like you're learning something when you're actually just providing views and ad revenue. You'll come away from a video feeling like you gained knowledge, but: 1) there's a good chance it was subtly misleading (or just wrong) 2) you probably won't ever use the information in any meaningful way and will likely forget all relevant details in a few days 3) you almost certainly could have spent that time better actually doing or creating something - actually doing real learning and making real progress
- tcp_handshaker 2mo agoPlus they will take one hour to explain what could take 2 min, just to keep you on the platform....
- cube00 2mo agoThe algorithm wanted these "educational" videos to be 10 minutes at first and now it seems to want them to be 20 minutes. Once I saw that I realised just how padded the content really was and started looking elsewhere. Other good tells the content is low quality or a bad fit for video are excessive amounts of talking head (should have been a podcast) or stock video clips (it's video, show me something).
- ethbr1 2mo agoListening to YouTube on 2x makes it slightly bearable. But this was also the joke about TED Talks: everyone came away smugly confident they were part of an amazing tide of progress, ignoring any engineering or scaling challenges.
- steveklabnik 2mo agoTen minutes used to be the cutoff where you could provide an interstitial advertisement. This sort of turned into a sort of wive's tale, where people thought the algorithm would push such videos. It's not the case today. The reason that 20 minute videos are more popular these days is that more people are watching youtube on larger screens, like on their TV on the couch, and so more reliably watch longer videos than in the past.
- sathish316 2mo agoI’ve used the following teach skill by mattpocock to learn Java concurrency concepts in 20 bite-sized hands-on lessons starting from creating a new thread to building a Thread-safe Connection pool. I’m pretty sure I can adapt this to learn Concurrency in any language like Go or Rust. https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills/productivity/teach https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills/produc... The point is not that I’m learning Concurrency in a better way using LLMs, it’s that I can apply this style of learning using bite-sized, hands-on, visual explanations, quiz to any topic in the future. The lessons it generates are just code, and you can ask it to type check the examples, validate with recent libraries, use analogies to learn something better. Try it before thinking it’s just ELI5 or Summarization or assuming it’ll be hallucinating without verifying facts.
- tcp_handshaker 2mo agoTo learn from an LLM with all the hallucinations they have...it requires courage.
- onion2k 2mo agoIf you ask an LLM to give you a 500-word summary of quantum physics, it'll give you an oversimplification that probably leans on a hodgepodge of pop-sci metaphors. That's what you'd get if you asked a leading physicist too, so are you saying LLMs have achieved human-level intelligence?
- jupi2142 2mo agoI agree. If it's not followed by a test/exam, then it's entertainment, not learning.
- vonneumannstan 2mo agoIdk about other people but the way I usefully use llms to help with study is to treat them as a good tutor. If you are stuck on a problem or need an explanation of a concept it helps greatly. Much of the actual process of studying Math, Physics, CS, etc in University is sitting in a room working on problem sets and now you can do that with the equivalent of a highly competent Grad Student to bug with any issue you run in to. However yes trying to get an LLM to draft a 1000 ft view of an entire field and calling that learning is a poor use case.
- subhobroto 2mo ago> If you ask an LLM to give you a 500-word summary of quantum physics, it'll give you an oversimplification that probably leans on a hodgepodge of pop-sci metaphors What would a double PhD in quantum physics provide differently if you asked them for a 500-word summary of such a complex field? What would the human do very differently? I have an Associate Professor from CalTech who teaches quantum physics there and I will have them review your suggestions, so don't hesitate out of concern. > I'd just really like to see at least one of these to be accompanied by a statement saying what are the kinds of problems the author can now confidently solve that they couldn't before. I don't get why there's this overwhelming dislike for LLMs on HN. Everytime I make a comment on how insanely productive it has made me, I get downvoted to hell that leads me to be throttled by HN for hours at which point I can't engage in the discussion anymore. I say this in advance because if you post a comment and don't see a response from me until the next day, that's what's going on. So here's one of a dozen ways LLMs have helped me to learn, execute and deploy ideas rapidly. MiniPCs that used to cost no more than a burrito, Raspberry Pis, and useful hardware like that are extremely expensive right now: so I have to be creative in finding replacements. I have been able to use GPT5.5/GPT5.6 Sol/Gemini 3.5 Pro/Opus 4.8 to locate cheap ($5) routers and very cheap repeaters that can be reprogrammed to run Linux on them. This is an extremely intensive, laborious process that requires: 1. Flashing the device over Qualcomm EBL. 2. Validating that I didn't corrupt the 4GB eMMC, then partitioning it. 3. Doing multiple gated commands that verify step by step that the previous command worked correctly and had the desired effect. 4. If not, take remediation steps, failing which alert me so we can do a spike. 5. Remapping certain hardware and Flashing over a working Debian. 6. Install DropSSH + keys and validating that. 7. Installing the scripts, etc. Since these are not meant to be used this way, and I'm repurposing them, ordering these cheap Wi-Fi routers and flashing them is not a repeatable process. Each one is slightly different from each other. You really can't script it, not reasonably. OpenCode using the above models has cost me $5 worth of tokens so far to reflash 10 of these repeaters, at $5 each, into Microservers that do my bidding. They have 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of eMMC, can do USB OTG and being routers have WiFi and BT. A compatible hardware today would cost me ATLEAST $50+ each. Thanks to the LLMs for walking me through discovering this detail, holding my hands through the process and handing me over these working microservers. What else do you want to know?
- ma2kx 2mo agoI started learning Terraform. At the beginning i let the llm convert some of my homelab infrastructure into a tf project, because thats always the annoying part. Now I play arround with it and whenever I don't understand something or an error message appears, I ask the LLM politely e.g. why this error happened because I thought it should work this way and than it happily explains to me what wen't wrong and if my understanding was wrong or something else was the error cause. Essentially as I did learn before LLMs appeared but now I dont have to search for some stackoverflow threads, github issues etc. to find something vaguely similar to my problem and how I exactly implement this to my project.
- bryzaguy 2mo agoNot sure how relevant my example will be but I built a spaced repetition language learning LLM wrapper app to learn Japanese and it worked really well. I went to great lengths, however, to craft prompts which resulted in more predictable and useful results. ChatGPT on its own couldn’t do this.
- NuclearPM 2mo agoI have one. I can navigate the complex regulations regarding construction related permits much better than I could 6 months ago.
- foxyv 2mo agoI'm doing something like this for AES ciphers. I pretty much asked Cursor to write a step by step guide to the math behind everything with annotations. Then when I run into something I don't understand I can ask questions and have it elaborate. It's honestly kind of a fun way to learn about something.