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Study mode

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Re: Study mode

#421

Post by tootyskooty »

danenania wrote: post #369
tootyskooty wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are both in-document quizzes and larger exams (at a course level). I've also been playing around with adapting content based on their results (e.g. proactively nudging complexity up/down) but haven't gotten it to a good place yet.

Nice, I've been playing with it a bit and it seems really well done and polished so far. I'm curious how long you spent building it? Only feedback I have so far is that it would be nice to control the playback speed of the 'read aloud' mode. I'd like it to be a little bit faster.

Glad you like it!!

I've been working on it on-and-off for about a year now. Roughly 2-3 months if I worked on it full-time I'm guessing.

re: playback speed -> noted, will add some controls tomorrow

Re: Study mode

#422

Post by cvoss »

romaniitedomum wrote: post #412
jacobedawson wrote: post #379

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting…

> But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct

> a healthy dose of scepticism is essential. Arguably, that applies to traditional learning methods too, but that's another story.

I don't think that is another story. This is the story of learning, no matter whether your teacher is a person or an AI.

My high school science teacher routinely mispoke inadvertently while lecturing. The students who were tracking could spot the issue and, usually, could correct for it. Sometimes asking a clarifying question was necessary. And we learned quickly that that should only be done if you absolutely could not guess the correction yourself, and you had to phrase the question in a very non-accusatory way, because she had a really defensive temper about being corrected that would rear its head in that situation.

And as a reader of math textbooks, both in college and afterward, I can tell you you should absolutely expect errors. The errata are typically published online later, as the reports come in from readers. And they're not just typos. Sometimes it can be as bad as missing terms in equations, missing premises in theorems, missing cases in proofs.

A student of an AI teacher should be as engaged in spotting errors as a student of a human teacher. Part of the learning process is reaching the point where you can and do find fault with the teacher. If you can't do that, your trust in the teacher may be unfounded, whether they are human or not.

Re: Study mode

#423

Post by throwaway290 »

czhu12 wrote: post #26

I'll personally attest: LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new things post graduation. It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed. Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible, and the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and hope at some point, it'll make sense to you. Now, everyone ba…

I really don't get it. Literally the only thing you need to do research is know what term to look up and you get at a bunch of info written by real humans

Re: Study mode

#424

Post by ants_everywhere »

jacobedawson wrote: post #379

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…

> I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism.

It happens with many technological advancements historically. And in this case there are people trying hard to manufacture outrage about LLMs.

Re: Study mode

#425

Post by nitwit005 »

BeetleB wrote: post #264
ainiriand wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've learnt Rust in 12 weeks with a study plan that ChatGPT designed for me, catering to my needs and encouraging me to take notes and write articles. This way of learning allowed me to publish https://rustaceo.es for Spanish speakers made from my own notes. I think the potential in this regard is limitless.

Now this is a ringing endorsement. Specific stuff you learned, and actual proof of the outcome. (Only thing missing is the model(s) you used).

I'd tend to assume the null hypothesis, that if they were capable of learning it, they'd have likely done fine without the AI writing some sort of lesson plan for them.

The psychic reader near me has been in business for a long time. People are very convinced they've helped them. Logically, it had to have been their own efforts though.

Re: Study mode

#426

Post by yieldcrv »

romaniitedomum wrote: post #412
jacobedawson wrote: post #379

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting…

If LLMs of today's quality were what was initially introduced, nobody would even know what your rebuttals are even about.

So "risk of hallucination" as a rebuttal to anybody admitting to relying on AI is just not insightful. like, yeah ok we all heard of that and aren't changing our habits at all. Most of our teachers and books said objectively incorrect things too, and we are all carrying factually questionable knowledge we are completely blind to. Which makes LLMs "good enough" at the same standard as anything else.

Don't let it cite case law? Most things don't need this stringent level of review

Re: Study mode

#427

Post by chpatrick »

phailhaus wrote: post #413
jacobedawson wrote: post #379

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…

HN is resistant because at the end of the day, these are LLMs. They cannot and do not think. They generate plausible responses. Try this in your favorite LLM: "Suppose you're on a game show trying to win a car. There are three doors, one with a car and two with goats. You pick a door. The host then gives you the option to switch doors. What is the best strategy in this situation?" The LLM will recognize this as SIMIL…

Humans who have heard of Monty Hall might also say you should always switch without noticing that the situation is different. That's not evidence that they can't think, just that they're fallible.

People on here always assert LLMs don't "really" think or don't "really" know without defining what all that even means, and to me it's getting pretty old. It feels like an escape hatch so we don't feel like our human special sauce is threatened, a bit like how people felt threatened by heliocentrism or evolution.

Re: Study mode

#429

Post by no_wizard »

gojomo wrote: post #310
no_wizard wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all hours of the day This simply hasn't been my experience. Its too shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be useful. This happens quick for me. Also, god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly controversial subject and you want it to find reputable sources or particularly academic ones.

Grandparent testimony of success, & parent testimony of frustration, are both just wispy random gossip when they don't specify which LLMs delivered the reported experiences. The quality varies wildly across models & versions. With humans, the statement "my tutor was great" and "my tutor was awful" reflect very little on "tutoring" in general, and are barely even responses to each other withou more specificity about t…

Latest OpenAI, Latest Gemini models, also tried with latest LLAMA but I didn’t expect much there.

I have no access to anthropic right now to compare that.

It’s an ongoing problem in my experience

Re: Study mode

#430

Post by throwaway290 »

nilamo wrote: post #160
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they can recommend several famous/well-known books They can recommend many unknown books as well, as language models are known to reference resources that do not exist.

And then when you don't find it, you move onto the next book. Problem solved!

Or you know what, just google books about some topic and get a list of... real books recommended by people with names and reputations? Its truly incredible!
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