Ask HN: How are you using AI to learn?

If you want to skip the clunky csv step, you can utilize https://github.com/jasperket/clanki and push directly from AI to Anki.

How do you verify that books and websites and videos are not giving you erroneous content?

You trust some and distrust others at face value based on prior experience and what you want to believe. Sometimes you check after the fact and sometimes you don’t.

It’s the same exact thing with LLMs.

I learned by building instead of studying. I'm a mechanical engineer working in finance, zero software background, and over the last couple of months I shipped a browser extension with an AI assistant writing the code while I made the product decisions.

The surprise was a) it has been much harder than I expected b) I ended up learning a lot. I thought it would may be pick up a bit of programming. But it was mostly everything around programming: how OAuth works, why my sign in kept expiring after an hour (a code deletion took out the token refresh route with it), how Stripe webhooks fail silently, why emails land in the Promotions tab, how Google decides what to crawl. Each broken thing forced me to understand a system I didn't know existed the week before. Learning to work with the AI model has also been a huge lesson on its own:)

I use it like a pokedex. Yesterday I was using it to know if I see swifts or swallows in the evening, and learned a bit more about them. For low-stakes questions that blogs cover well, it’s great. The stakes are low and it gives me a better starting point than shallow content.

It’s also good as a fuzzy dictionary/thesaurus/expression finder. It’s good for refining my writing skills.

I use it to learn German by writing the texts myself then comparing it with the AI’s version. It highlights subtle mistakes I make.

I really want an AI tutor (ai learning harness) that I can give it a topic, it can synthesize information from sources, gauge my level, create lessons that I can read, give me exercises, track repetition optimal timings and track my progress.

I've noticed that for me it's much faster to learn by doing exercises targeting the exact thing you need than just trying to apply that to a much bigger chunk of work directly, especially for someone that's a bit of a failing perfectionist.

I was just looking for that and I saw https://github.com/THU-MAIC/OpenMAIC. I haven't tried it as I'm trying a few small experiments to see if I can create a curriculum for a framework with no docs.

The first naive one failed for multiple reasons but mostly because many guardrails are needed and we need a proper process that tracks too many things.