Live data from Hacker News

How I Use Claude

borretti.me

1–10 of 14 posts

Re: How I Use Claude

#2
> Claude is really good at helping here, mostly because thinking quickly saturates: when you’ve thought about a problem for five minutes, you’ve had all the thoughts you’re gonna have, and it’s time to talk to someone else.

It reminds me of:

"if you're thinking too much, write; if you're not thinking enough, read"

It's as if the act of writing engages yourself in a sort of conversation with the future reader.

Re: How I Use Claude

#4
> Ironically the one situation I’ve found where Claude noticeably hallucinates is when I ask questions about a large and novel text that’s entirely in context. Which is the opposite of what I would expect to see. …

Sigh.

Accurate responses in such situations would be useful for busy professionals in low-stakes scenarios.

But LLMs cannot replace the effect on the human mind that results from actually reading, understanding, and thinking about a text. There is no substitute: we must do our own thinking, because it is the work that matters — the journey, not the destination, yields the benefits.

Re: How I Use Claude

#5
> thinking quickly saturates: when you’ve thought about a problem for five minutes, you’ve had all the thoughts you’re gonna have, and it’s time to talk to someone else.

Perhaps consider you suffer from incredibly short attention span. Thinking for five minutes does not exhaust all the thoughts you are going to have on a topic, and if you spend five minutes considering the implications of such a though you quickly realise how absurd it is.

History is filled with stories of “shower thoughts” and bolts of inspiration which came from thinking on a topic long and hard and immersing yourself in it. If your idea were true, humanity would still believe the Earth is the center of the Universe and we wouldn’t have computers. Yours is precisely the type of mentality which leads to the proliferation of scams and conspiracy theories. It’s also a worrying trend with LLMs, that people are so willing to turn off their brains sooner and sooner.

Re: How I Use Claude

#6

> Ironically the one situation I’ve found where Claude noticeably hallucinates is when I ask questions about a large and novel text that’s entirely in context. Which is the opposite of what I would expect to see. … Sigh. Accurate responses in such situations would be useful for busy professionals in low-stakes scenarios. But LLMs cannot replace the effect on the human mind that results from actually reading, understa…

But you can argue with LLMs which will at least motivate me to understand the topic better and also learn new perspectives.

Re: How I Use Claude

#7

> Ironically the one situation I’ve found where Claude noticeably hallucinates is when I ask questions about a large and novel text that’s entirely in context. Which is the opposite of what I would expect to see. … Sigh. Accurate responses in such situations would be useful for busy professionals in low-stakes scenarios. But LLMs cannot replace the effect on the human mind that results from actually reading, understa…

But you can argue with LLMs which will at least motivate me to understand the topic better and also learn new perspectives.

You can also argue with humans, who can motivate you to understand topics better and learn new perspectives. That has been happening since the dawn of humanity.

Re: How I Use Claude

#8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can argue with LLMs which will at least motivate me to understand the topic better and also learn new perspectives.

You can also argue with humans, who can motivate you to understand topics better and learn new perspectives. That has been happening since the dawn of humanity.

Possibly, but it takes a while to find those humans with sufficient information (edited to add) and time, sometimes years.

Re: How I Use Claude

#9
post #3

Which one is superior for explaining topics and going through practice problems related to the SAT test: Claude 3.5 or ChatGPt 4o?

If you're studying for the SAT, just do timed practice tests until your score is where you want. This is probably more efficient than using a LLM, because it trains you in all ways (time management, etc) to perform well on the test. Either LLM chat service will be fine for explaining answers you don't understand.

Re: How I Use Claude

#10
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can argue with LLMs which will at least motivate me to understand the topic better and also learn new perspectives.

You can also argue with humans, who can motivate you to understand topics better and learn new perspectives. That has been happening since the dawn of humanity.

Yeah, but it's very hard to find someone on demand on that very specific topic that you are very interested in at that given moment. Back and forth takes forever, you have to keep checking your notifications, and some of them resort to personal attacks rather than focusing on the content.
Post reply on HN