Now whenever I need to use a fancy new package that I never used of, I use LangChain to collect all documents from the package document site, load them into a vectorDB and start asking GPT questions. This method works in 80% of the time.
One pitfall is that with this method I only get what I want. I don't get a deep understanding of that package as it used to be if I carefully read over the documents. Still finding a balancing point in between.
GPT makes learning fun again
51–60 of 243 posts
Re: GPT makes learning fun again
#52You can downvote me but I think OP hasn't learned how to learn yet. If OP reads Wikipedia by understanding every sentence and clicking on every link, that's deliberately sabotaging his own learning. Attitudes like "I don't really feel like spelunking through a ton more articles" simply shows OP isn't interested in learning per se, just quick answers. OP learns in a way that's very child-like. When you are a five-year…
Just out of curiosity what would say is the optimal way to learn from an encyclopedia, research paper or Wikipedia?
Sticking to what you want to understand - for example, when reading a paper, you don't necessarily need to read the methodology, especially if it's out of your field. Read the abstract and the conclusion, identify any part of it that you are suprised by and would like further explanation, and go see that part of the paper.
A lot of the paper is talking to peer and people wanting to verify the validity of the paper - by it being peer reviewed, you can mostly assume that the paper is valid, and stick to what the paper is saying instead of it's methodology.
Re: GPT makes learning fun again
#53I noticed a while back that the internet has made me terribly prone to skimming. It got to a point where I could hardly stand to read anything longer than a short news article. To learn anything useful on the internet, you pretty much have to skim. So much of the internet is so loaded with filler and BS that it is hardly worth reading at all. With ChatGPT, it’s incredibly refreshing to be able to ask a question and g…
I have a standard copy n paste prompt that instructs it to keep answers concise and free of boilerplate.
Otherwise ChatGPT is prone to injecting lots of filler text as well.
Re: GPT makes learning fun again
#54ChatGPT can be a great supplement for independent research. But when the article mentions a “curious seventh-grader”, I think we should focus on getting them quality human instruction whenever possible instead of just pointing them to ChatGPT.
ChatGPT addresses a scalability problem: not everyone has access to a tutor or can just call up a teacher or mentor to learn and ask questions. But some in the tech industry claim that ChatGPT is as good as or even better than human instruction, which to me seems totally off base.
The biggest problem I see in using LLMs as a teacher-substitute is that LLMs answer the questions you ask, whereas a good teacher tells you what you need to hear. Maybe this is solvable with specialized model tuning, but we need to actually solve it before telling kids that the best way to learn is to talk to the computer.
Re: GPT makes learning fun again
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kindness and patience have always been in short supply on the public internet, but AI can simulate them in infinite amounts. That’s a positive thing about this generative AI revolution that I haven’t really thought about in those terms until now.
That is actually the killer feature of interactive AIs. People go on and on and on about "accuracy", completely ignoring that accuracy is irrelevant to 99.9% of things that humans do in their everyday lives. Simulating (positive) human interaction is far more impactful than getting facts correct.
What does it mean to have a positive interaction with someone who consistently tells you misinformation with a high degree of confidence?
Re: GPT makes learning fun again
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I'm not sure what the answer really is, but I'm not sure it's GPT." My suggestion is to stick with it and get a feel for what it's good at. I've found that after a few months of using ChatGPT every day I've developed a pretty solid intuition for which questions are likely to get good answers and which are likely to trigger hallucinations. It's difficult to describe what those intuitions are though! One rule of thumb…
> then ChatGPT is very likely to answer questions about it accurately. Uh, and sooo boringly, especially if there's even any tiny part of it that is developing or theoretical, and you want to learn about that part. I've used the phrase/request "more obscure (perspectives/explanations/etc)" with GPT so many times. (Try it, you might be surprised at alternative takes on things, takes which are not even necessarily cons…
Jonathan Blow is spending up to a decade on a new programming language to get away from c++.
Most everything has been covered in logical extensions of concepts started in the 80s-90s. Those products aren't good for our..
Ah there's no point commenting here anymore. HN is so blinkered in it's thinking.
The feeling of flying high on lofty concepts and pretending to get a bird's eye view of tech is no longer worth the squeeze. The thought patterns here are predictable like slashdot. I don't belong here. Bye.
Re: GPT makes learning fun again
#57Imagine being able to ask questions and get answers back based upon understanding, and not upon a curriculum or agenda. I have found this method to allow me to consume information much faster while skipping over the often tedious topics.
Do you think that "tediousness" is a good indicator of whether a topic is important?
Re: GPT makes learning fun again
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> then ChatGPT is very likely to answer questions about it accurately. Uh, and sooo boringly, especially if there's even any tiny part of it that is developing or theoretical, and you want to learn about that part. I've used the phrase/request "more obscure (perspectives/explanations/etc)" with GPT so many times. (Try it, you might be surprised at alternative takes on things, takes which are not even necessarily cons…
Jonathan Blow is spending up to a decade on a new programming language to get away from c++. Most everything has been covered in logical extensions of concepts started in the 80s-90s. Those products aren't good for our.. Ah there's no point commenting here anymore. HN is so blinkered in it's thinking. The feeling of flying high on lofty concepts and pretending to get a bird's eye view of tech is no longer worth the s…
Yep, if you don't care about the details or scope, everything is the same, all patterns repeat, all wheels are reinvented.
You've probably heard this before, but IMO you'll never find a happy place working from that perspective.
Re: GPT makes learning fun again
#59You can downvote me but I think OP hasn't learned how to learn yet. If OP reads Wikipedia by understanding every sentence and clicking on every link, that's deliberately sabotaging his own learning. Attitudes like "I don't really feel like spelunking through a ton more articles" simply shows OP isn't interested in learning per se, just quick answers. OP learns in a way that's very child-like. When you are a five-year…
The problem is Wikipedia. OP's approach is perfectly natural. Textbooks are designed for OP's approach because that's how people learn.
If I want to learn about topic C which requires knowledge of topics A and B, but C can also be generalized to concepts X and Y, it will be very hard to learn from Wikipedia.
If I don't know how to add numbers and look up "sum" on Wikipedia, in the second sentence I learn that summing is used for functions, vectors, matrices, and other things I don't know about. This is a cool feature and I love it for exploring but hate it for learning things that require a few layers of concepts to get.
Textbooks do the opposite and are awesome. An electronics textbook will take you step by step through all the concepts to get to LEDs, without "forward references" to the concepts you haven't learned yet.
The "problem" with textbooks is that it will take a while to get to the destination. LEDs might be in chapter 15 and you may not want to spend a few months going through chapters 1-14. You don't know what you will need to understand chapter 15.
But you can perhaps work backward - you are guaranteed that any unfamiliar concept introduced in chapter 15 will be covered in chapters 1-14, and that there is no rabbit hole.
ChatGPT or a personal tutor can shortcut this by giving you just the "narrow path" of knowledge to understand the concept that you want to learn.
Re: GPT makes learning fun again
#60It’s nice to be able to ask ChatGPT a half baked, poorly researched, poorly worded question with bad grammar yet get a totally good faith response back that’s a springboard for follow up questions. Whereas if you did the same thing on any stack exchange site you get downvotes and comments like “please read the guidelines and edit your question.”
Kindness and patience have always been in short supply on the public internet, but AI can simulate them in infinite amounts. That’s a positive thing about this generative AI revolution that I haven’t really thought about in those terms until now.
> Kindness and patience have always been in short supply
Agreed. Look at all the responses in this post attacking the author for how he learns, it's embarrassing to read. Now imagine that person is actually a teacher or TA, or worse a co-worker. I'd much rather deal with an imperfect ChatGPT session than that kind of flippancy.