I tend to ask the LLM for a single HTML page explanation, with a pedagogical approach. Something about dropping the word pedagogical leads to a more structured outcome, but I haven't quite figured it out why yet.
How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
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Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#92I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…
> LLM prose is annoyingly dense
It's just long. It just doesn't shut up. It's overly verbose. And you can't tell it to be concise or you degrade its quality.
If I ask what an integral is, the correct answer is that it is the continuos analog of a sum, generally used to calculate areas and volumes.
It should really be a single sentence, and then let me ask more about the terms I don't understand, and here's the beauty, in the previous one there can be only 5 terms I cannot know.
An LLM will vomit an entire page or more of explanation which isn't bad per se, but is an answer to something different: "give me a short introductory explanation to integrals". And that's not what I asked.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's much better to feed the book to the LLM and ask questions as you read along, instead of asking the LLM to basically write a custom book for you from scratch.
I came across the socratic method recently, and have used it to learn a couple of topics that I was having trouble getting to stick. There are some SKILL.md's available for it. It works for concepts as opposed to facts, and causes the model to guide you to answers through your own reasoning, which is both much more engaging than reading a wall of LLM text and helps the information stick.
Can you link the Skills.md?
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#94What’s everyone’s opinion on learning new tech things in this day and age? My opinion swings between positive and depressing vision of the future. I still learn new stuff, but I’m afraid it won’t have any value in a year or so. For example, I’m pretty good at optimizing low level stuff, but right now you can just ask LLMs to do so and they are pretty good at it. They will profile the code and suggest reasonable optio…
They're amazing at it, provided you keep asking the right questions. Trust me when I say that in the hands of someone who doesn't have your experience, the LLMs would not be getting the results you get. You might think what you're doing is trivial, it may be sessions that flow roughly, "Instrument this, okay this part is slow, profile this part, OK read the profile output and suggest a better approach". But your expe…
“asking the right questions” is built on years of experience doing the things now being offloaded to AI
“asking the right questions” is also a moving target with each model release
People simply underestimate the value of doing the work and think that the end result is all that matters
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#95I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…
Yeah, I am currently trying to work with Opus 5 to refresh myself on deep learning fundamentals, and... it's a mixed bag. I'm glad I already am familiar with the subject matter, as I can prompt for refinement and improvement. It is kinda following the Karpathy videos so far (a couple lessons in) but adding more math/derivations, which was what I asked for. It has trouble staying on topic, presenting information in a…
opus 5 doesn't follow instructions that great. probably needed that extra "creativity" to benchmax. if you are stuck on anthropic, try Opus 4.8 or Fable5 a try with the same prompts. very different results.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#96anyone using LLM to learn a new language? got any useful prompts for this?
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#97I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…
I have been using LLMs to help me turn my journals into interconnected notes and sometimes it is so confusing to read the notes that it doesn't resemble any human would write. Its like the models are getting stronger while also losing its touch to write human sounding sentences on complex topics.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#98I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…
Have you tried using the caveman skill ? :D Might be worth a try if you dont like long prose https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#99I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…
It annoys me that the default AI mode is so tedious and longwinded. I read a lot of nonfiction - the house style of AI is basically marketing copy.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#100> What you get is a beautiful animation that is 100% accurate and free of hallucinations. I'm not sure I follow how this is actually guaranteed? The fact-checking process mentioned just seems to involve asking AI to review its own work.
All these LLM-as-review hype pieces don’t acknowledge that it’s turtles all the way down
What do you mean by this?