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

GPT makes learning fun again

vipshek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 243 posts

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#181

Post by haswell »

papandada wrote: post #169
haswell wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And while it could be rightly said I've made things unnecessarily hard for myself approaching life like this, I feel it has been beneficial, and enriching, to force myself to really ask, what is this person saying here? I personally don’t believe there’s mutual exclusivity here. I spent the first half of my life just absorbing. I’ve spent the 2nd half of my life so far undoing the patterns of thought that can resul…

Well, here instead of asking you a clarifying question about your response, I might instead ask ChatGPT. Something would be lost, in my mind. Just musing out loud.

I think leaning on ChatGPT to understand others is as problematic as relying only on oneself to understand others, but now you’ve added a layer of your own interpretation depending on how you engage with ChatGPT.

Put another way, if you’re going to sources other than the individual speaking to clarify what they’re saying, the underlying issue is probably not ChatGPT or whatever the next tool is that comes around.

Another form of what you describe is leaning on one’s friends/acquaintances. Plenty of people do this, often with poor results. Reddit’s various relationship forums are a great example. I translate what I thought I heard and ask a 3rd party who wasn’t there what they hear. But by doing so, I remove even more context and make it even less likely to arrive at a useful answer.

I’m sure people will use LLMs for this, but the root issue is deeper, not caused by these tools.

I think that with time, we’ll get better at determining which types of conversations are worthwhile and which aren’t.

If I’m trying to understand a complex multi-faceted technical issue, it’s amazing to be able to drill deeper and deeper into the knowledge contained within the LLM.

If I’m trying to understand the internal states of other people, I have no reason to believe I’ll find good answers in a model that wasn’t trained on that person’s thoughts.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#182

Post by mrtranscendence »

notamy wrote: post #171
lcuff wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about what topics you have knowledge of where it's failed. Does it seem like there's a pattern to the failures? I've been using GPT for coding help, and it it is very helpful in ruby and bash, though it often delivers buggy software: Badly handled non-happy-path conditions, mostly, which when I tell it to handle the case, it may. It's a huge help for me finding gems and showing me standard ruby library sy…

> Does it seem like there's a pattern to the failures? Personally, trying to use it to write code (primarily Elixir backend and Rust systems/CLI), I tend to run into: - Hallucinating APIs that don't exist - Hallucinating entire libraries, despite being told repeatedly they don't exist - Saying it will make requested changes and not doing so - Not being anywhere close to idiomatic code - Not being able to explain code…

> Not being able to explain code it writes

I've actually found it (ChatGPT-4) reasonably good at explaining other people's code, for what it's worth. It does require providing some context for the code it's explaining. ("This function is part of library X that does Y, and it seems to be about Z. I can't figure out the purpose of the loop in the middle, though. Can you explain it?")

I'm with you on it writing code, though. It makes things up too frequently to be really useful.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#183

Post by mrtranscendence »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #151
devjab wrote: post #7

I'm in two minds about it. On one hand the internet (in general) has become so hard to find information on, and I agree with the author that GPT is a breath of fresh air. On the other hand I've seen GPT fail so miserably at topics that I'm knowledge about that I have a very hard time trusting anything it tells me. I'm not sure what the answer really is, but I'm not sure it's GPT. I wish we could go back to having sea…

[flagged]

> Every time someone claims ChatGPT doesn’t work they cannot give concrete examples. So I don’t believe you sorry.

Are you implying that ChatGPT always works, and that every time someone says it didn't work, they're lying? This feels like a joke to me. The other day it gave me the wrong code to compute indices for a Delta table, possibly because that capability didn't exist in the library it was using when the model was trained (though it shouldn't have made something up in that case). There, you have an example.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#184

Post by mrrobot900 »

im reading the wealth of nations right now, using gpt on the side to help clarify long passages and decode archaic terms. it's been tremendously helpful. some actual use cases:

- summarising entire chapters (summarise chapter 8 of book 1)

- asking to verify my own summaries (in summary, smith writes that ... am i correct?)

- explaining certain passages in ever more detail (explain ...; explain in simpler terms; im still confused, explain in more details;)

---

One very interesting case is when GPT produced an error, and I had it go through the error with me. In the end GPT managed to spot its own error and correct itself. Here's an excerpt, edited for brevity:

* gpt: [...] When the demand is too low, it encourages growth; when the demand is too high, it restrains growth. [...]

* me: "When the demand is too low, it encourages growth; when the demand is too high, it restrains growth." is this correct?

* g: Apologies for the confusion in my previous response. The correct statement should be:

When the demand for labor is too low (slow), it encourages higher wages and population growth; when the demand for labor is too high (fast), it restrains population growth by adjusting wages to find the equilibrium between demand and supply.

(GPT still giving the wrong answer.)

* m: i am still confused. can you explain in more detail

* g: [...] Smith argues that the demand for labor regulates population growth by influencing wages. If wages are too low, fewer children will be born, and the population growth will be slow. If wages are too high, more children will be born, and the population growth will be fast. [...]

(At this point GPT was able to give me the correct response.)

* m: so when the demand for labour is low, wages decrease and population growth slows down. when the demand is high, wages increase and population growth speeds up. correct?

* g: Yes, that's correct. [...]

(I pointed out that this was in contradiction with the earlier response.)

* m: did you not contradict yourself? "When the demand is too low, it encourages growth; when the demand is too high, it restrains growth."

* g: Apologies for the confusion in my previous response. I misunderstood your question. Let me clarify:

When the demand for labor is too low, it restrains growth; when the demand is too high, it encourages growth.

So, when the demand for labor is low, wages decrease, and population growth slows down. Conversely, when the demand for labor is high, wages increase, and population growth speeds up. I hope this clears up any confusion.

(I then inserted the original erroneous response as a prompt, and gpt was able to "remember" that it generated the response earlier.)

* m: "When the demand is too low, it encourages growth; when the demand is too high, it restrains growth." what is wrong with this passage?

* g: I apologize for the confusion earlier. There is an error in the passage you provided. It should be:

This demand for labor operates like the demand for any other commodity, regulating the production and growth of the population. When the demand is too low, it restrains growth; when the demand is too high, it encourages growth. This dynamic determines the rate of population growth in different countries, such as rapid growth in North America, slow and gradual growth in Europe, and a stationary population in China.

---

i should mention that i am using the paid version (GPT-4). i tried the free model, but the quality was significantly worse. you can recorrect it multiple times consecutively and every time it would say that it was wrong the last time, and recorrect itself again and again.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#185

Post by gbjw »

dmd wrote: post #174
hammyhavoc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I couldn't even get it to figure out an NGINX config, despite feeding it the documentation and URL rewrites it would need, and the prior Apache .htaccess file. Spent days on it. Consulted with people who know more than me about prompt engineering. Nope. Reasoning is not its strong point, IMO. It's a next-word prediction model, why would it be? It's doing what an LLM does. Frequently, nonsensically.

> It's a next-word prediction model So are you. https://ceoln.wordpress.com/2023/03/31/its-just-predicting-t...

Maybe you are, but I'm not :).

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#186

Post by Workaccount2 »

chazeon wrote: post #141
seb1204 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know what ChatGPT tells you is correct?

Of course you will need to check real references, it’s like talking to people and people make mistakes too. GPT makes mistakes that in many time obvious to humans, like write equations wrong, write numbers wrong, and I only need to check other sources or use a calculator to check. But I only care about the intuitive/conceptual part anyway, which GPT does well.

It's funny, I tell people that chatgpt3.5 is like talking to someone you run into at an airport, chatgpt4 is like talking to someone you run into at a library.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#187

Post by grrdotcloud »

kerkeslager wrote: post #57
grrdotcloud wrote: post #4

Imagine 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?

No,I don't think so. There are times when you ask a question, and the person will condescend, in the positive sense, and speak at a level below you. I prefer to ask when I am teaching where I should start. I'll explain very quickly the basics, if they're familiar, I'll jump the next level. Until I reach the depth of their understanding, I will skip over foundational concepts.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#188

Post by hammyhavoc »

dmd wrote: post #174
hammyhavoc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I couldn't even get it to figure out an NGINX config, despite feeding it the documentation and URL rewrites it would need, and the prior Apache .htaccess file. Spent days on it. Consulted with people who know more than me about prompt engineering. Nope. Reasoning is not its strong point, IMO. It's a next-word prediction model, why would it be? It's doing what an LLM does. Frequently, nonsensically.

> It's a next-word prediction model So are you. https://ceoln.wordpress.com/2023/03/31/its-just-predicting-t...

And your qualifications and background are what? Why is this on a free WordPress instead of in a scientific paper if it's something to take seriously?

Counterpoint: https://the-decoder.com/why-large-ai-language-models-dont-le...

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#189

Post by dmd »

hammyhavoc wrote: post #188
dmd wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a next-word prediction model So are you. https://ceoln.wordpress.com/2023/03/31/its-just-predicting-t...

And your qualifications and background are what? Why is this on a free WordPress instead of in a scientific paper if it's something to take seriously? Counterpoint: https://the-decoder.com/why-large-ai-language-models-dont-le...

Do you think I wrote that? And what do qualifications have to do with anything?

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#190

Post by duckmysick »

input_sh wrote: post #109
rolisz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're not DevOps, why bother learning whatever framework is used today, but which will be replaced by something else next year? I just want to get my stuff deployed and that's it.

Saying that DevOps tooling changes every year is absolute nonsense. The tooling is fairly standardised nowadays (Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, Prometheus, CI/CD tool of your choice) and every part of it is over half a decade old. ChatGPT will only help you with the simplest of tasks, and even then you're gonna fail if you don't know to correct it. If you go beyond the most basic of the tasks you can learn h…

I'm not sure about standardized tooling.

Docker is being replaced with Podman. Supposedly a drop-in replacement, but the tools built for Docker don't play nicely. You have Ansible, but there's also Puppet, Salt, Chef. There's Terraform and also CDKTF (from the same company too), Pulumi, plus tools from each cloud provider. There's Prometheus and Nagios, Datadog, Sentry, New Relic.

The irony of CI/CD tool of your choice is not lost on me.

I'll give you Kubernetes itself as the system.

Yes, the concepts (containers, orchestration, reproducible deployment, infrastructure as code, unified monitoring, continuous integration) are well-established. How you get there? Not at all.

Yes, the OP was hyperbolic when claimed the tools change every year. But the landscape of devop tools is changing. There are dozens of dev tool companies funded in the 2023 winter batch of Y Combinator alone. Someone sees potential to disrupt the established tools. And it will be disrupted.

There was a world before Kubernetes and Terraform. It wasn't that long ago.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W23&tags=Develop...

Post reply on HN