221–230 of 308 posts
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What does your workflow look like?
I use functions in openai and a template that forces the LLM to generate questions and answers from a text in a format that can be synced into the Anki app. Very straightforward workflow.
This stands to reason. If you need the answer to a question, and you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter approach than the former. You may be disciplined enough to do more research if the answer is directly presented to you, but most people will not do that, and most companies are not interested in that, they want quick 'efficient', 'compet…
Specifically, asking a question and getting an answer is not a general path to learning. Being asked a question and you answering it is. Somewhat, this is regardless of if you are correct or not.
I've been calling this out since OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT. The danger in ubiquitously available LLMs, which seemingly have an answer to any question, isn’t necessarily their existence. The real danger lies in their seductive nature - over how tempting it becomes to immediately reach for the nearest LLM to provide an answer rather than taking a few moments to quietly ponder the problem on your own. That act of…
I recognize this problem, but I find in my own uses of ChatGPT it actually allows me to overcome my laziness rather than making it worse. I'll have a problem that I want to work on but getting started is difficult. Asking ChatGPT is almost frictionless, the next thing I know I'm working on the project, 8 hours go by and I'm done. When I get stuck on some annoying library installation, ChatGPT solves if for me so I do…
This stands to reason. If you need the answer to a question, and you can either get it directly, or spend time researching the answer, you're going to learn much more with the latter approach than the former. You may be disciplined enough to do more research if the answer is directly presented to you, but most people will not do that, and most companies are not interested in that, they want quick 'efficient', 'compet…
I had thought I saw somewhere that learning is specifically better when you are wrong, if the feedback for that is rapid enough. That is, "guess and check" is the quickest path to learning. Specifically, asking a question and getting an answer is not a general path to learning. Being asked a question and you answering it is. Somewhat, this is regardless of if you are correct or not.
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> Do they know when the GenAI is bullshitting them? Anecdote from a friend who teaches CS: this year a large number of students started adding unnecessary `break` instructions to their C code, like so: while (condition) { do_stuff(); if (!condition) { break; } } They asked around and realized that the common thread was ChatGPT - everyone who asked how loops work got a variation of "use break() to exit the loop", so t…
If you take the generated code snippets and ask something like "There may or may not be something syntactically or stylistically wrong with the following code. Try to identify any errors or unusual structures that might come up in a technical code review.", then it usually finds any problems or at least, differences of opinion on what the best approach is. (This might work best if you have one LLM critique the code g…
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I think you're right at the edge of explaining why this "laziness" is a good thing. Everything that we have made is built on what we had before, and abstracts away what we had before. 99% of us don't remember how to make even the simplest Assembly program, and yet we unleash billions of instructions per second on the world. Even outside of math and computers, when was the last time you primed a well pump or filled an…
> when was the last time you primed a well pump or filled an oil lamp? All of these tasks have been abstracted away They have not been abstracted away, they have been made obsolete. Significant difference. The danger with LLMs is people will never learn tasks that are still needed.
I don't have to prime a well pump any more because my house and workplace are hooked into the municipal water system. I don't have to prime a pump because that task has gotten so abstract as to become turning a faucet handle. But engineers at the municipal water plant do have to know how to do this task.
Similarly, filling an oil lamp and lighting it is now abstracted for normal people as flipping a light switch (maybe changing a light bulb is a more appropriate comparison). But I actually have filled an oil lamp when I was a kid because we kept "decorative" hurricane lamps in my house that we used when the power went out. The exact task of filling an oil lamp is not common, but filling a generator with fuel is still needed to keep the lights on in an emergency, although it is usually handled by the maintenance staff of apartment buildings and large office buildings.
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I'm just old enough to remember pub trivia before it was possible to look things up with a phone. I firmly maintain that phones ruined pub trivia.
Depends on the pub. Where we play there is a gentlemen’s agreement that no one uses phones to help them answer questions
I have this business idea for a pub in a faraday cage that would make cheating impossible for pub trivia (added bonus: also removes any other reason for anyone to be on their phones!)
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I'm just old enough to remember pub trivia before it was possible to look things up with a phone. I firmly maintain that phones ruined pub trivia.
I agree but I think we shouldn’t limit this answer to pub trivia. What other aspect of human society and civil discourse did we lose because we never argue or discuss any more?
I've been calling this out since OpenAI first introduced ChatGPT. The danger in ubiquitously available LLMs, which seemingly have an answer to any question, isn’t necessarily their existence. The real danger lies in their seductive nature - over how tempting it becomes to immediately reach for the nearest LLM to provide an answer rather than taking a few moments to quietly ponder the problem on your own. That act of…
I think this is where my physical laziness benefits me. I’m often too lazy to spend the time to fully describe the problem to the LLMs and wrap it in a prompt that will produce something, in written text, so I think through it first. Usually I solve it myself or think of a better primary source.
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This is my take as well. There was a story a couple days ago about a neural network built on a single photonic chip. I fed the paper to ChatGPT and was able to use it to develop a much more meaningful and comprehensive understanding of what the chip actually delivered, how it operated, the fundamental operating principles of core components and how it could be integrated into a system. The fact that I now have a tire…
On the other hand you might be getting worse at reading those papers yourself. The more youngsters skip the hassle of banging their heads on some topic the less able they will be to learn at later age. There's more to learning than getting information, it's also about processing it (which we are offloading to LLMs). In fact I'd say that the whole point of going through school is to learn how to process and absorb inf…
>To realize a programmable coherent optical activation function, we developed a resonant electro-optical nonlinearity (Fig. 1(iii)). This device directs a fraction of the incident optical power ∣b∣2 into a photodiode by programming the phase shift θ in an MZI. The photodiode is electrically connected to a p–n-doped resonant microring modulator, and the resultant photocurrent (or photovoltage) detunes the resonance by either injecting (or deplet-ing) carriers from the waveguide.
It becomes very difficult to pick apart each thing, find a suitable explanation of what the thing (eg. MZI splitter, microring modulator, how a charge detunes the resonance of the modulator) is or how it contributes to the whole.
Picking these apart and recombining them with the help of something like ChatGPT has given me a very rapid drill-down capability into documents like this. Then re-reading it allows me to intake the information in the way its presented.
If this type of content was material to my day job it would be another matter, but this is just hobby interest. I'm just not going to invest hours trying to figure it out.