Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 94 posts

Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

#51

Post by embedding-shape »

nomel wrote: post #50

I think there's going to be the exact and precise range of people there has always been: some people are curious, and want/need to understand what they're doing, some people are not and just want to do. That want/need is a fundamental personality trait what makes an expert. LLM are a dream come true for these curious types. They'll only be accelerated by them. I don't think there's any real "loss" out there, just a b…

I guess I'm both people, depends on what it is and what other things I'm doing. Sometimes it's fun and interesting to delve deeply (oh no he didn't) into something for long periods of time, just for the sake of exploring and understanding. Sometimes I'm not curious about why something specifically doesn't work, I just need it to work so I'll hack around it any way possible so I can move on with what I really wanted to do.

I find that LLMs are useful for both cases in the end.

Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

#57

Post by FeteCommuniste »

nomel wrote: post #50

I think there's going to be the exact and precise range of people there has always been: some people are curious, and want/need to understand what they're doing, some people are not and just want to do. That want/need is a fundamental personality trait what makes an expert. LLM are a dream come true for these curious types. They'll only be accelerated by them. I don't think there's any real "loss" out there, just a b…

Some people will probably be curious regardless of their environment but I think there are others who could be swayed into developing curiosity (or not) by life experiences. And an ever-present "just gimme the answer now" button could be a powerful force pulling them toward the "incurious" side.

Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

#58

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

tmountain wrote: post #35
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #30

There is of course a degree of true usefulness to this. However I’ve been a technical educator for years and I’ve tried to do lots with LLMs. Even now, LLMs are terrible educators. They do not make coherent progressive curriculums. They hallucinate details which the student will not have the knowledge to challenge. If you use an LLM to make a tutorial you will get some benefit for sure, especially if you use it for S…

I have been working on a language learning app for myself, and I am using a textbook that I like as the basis for an Anki inspired “learning tree”. This is working pretty well because I can build progressions from the original table of contents.

Yes, generally if you get a decent progression from an LLM, I find it's copying directly from a source, like a book or course. Giving it a progression helps a lot.

Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

#59

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

devenjarvis wrote: post #32
TonyAlicea10 wrote: post #30

There is of course a degree of true usefulness to this. However I’ve been a technical educator for years and I’ve tried to do lots with LLMs. Even now, LLMs are terrible educators. They do not make coherent progressive curriculums. They hallucinate details which the student will not have the knowledge to challenge. If you use an LLM to make a tutorial you will get some benefit for sure, especially if you use it for S…

Really appreciate your perspective here! I do _not_ have a background in technical education, and am certain you've used and seen the failure modes of LLMs in this space far more than I have so far. A few thoughts based on my limited experience building and using lathe: - Part of the lathe skills are to first find source materials to base curriculum on. It's not foolproof by any means, nor is it a novel approach, but…

Source materials is great. Having the LLM write one part of a tutorial prevents you from asking it for a progressive curriculum which helps. If I give an LLM a sequence I want to learn, or an outline, it does much better.

Context and scope limitations are also helpful, as you mention. And yes, having experience in a domain makes learning with an LLM a dramatically different experience than from-scratch, since the LLM is nudged in different directions by our responses. When a novice uses an LLM to learn, the questions they ask the LLM can drive it in directions and hallucinations that would look obvious to an experienced person.

The worst failure mode is what I mentioned: the novice asking the wrong questions or driving the LLM in the wrong direction. Inference is strongly influenced by input tokens, and that's fairly unavoidable.

I don't mean to say your project doesn't have value though! I hope people use LLMs to help them learn (by directing them to good source materials from humans) rather than just asking it to do things for them and blindly trusting the results.

Re: Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it

#60

Post by altmanaltman »

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #22

A related idea is to have the LLM quiz you, Socratic-style about a topic of interest. It persists in asking questions at deeper levels until you arrive at the answer yourself. This forces you to think hard about a problem, and this effort helps with understanding, learning and retention. Of course I made a Socratic-quiz skill for this, to use with any coding agent or similar: https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-…

I think this might be useful if you are supplementing your learning from actual sources. Like you casually said you understood counter-intuitive things about diabetes/insulin, dopamin and motivation etc but these are very complex topics and require a lot of study to fully "understand". Its okay if you just see it as curiosity-driven learning but I dont see this as a way to learn anything that is actually important or serious.

Traditional method of looking up stuff, going through guided lessons etc are just more streamlined and faster than this method.

Post reply on HN