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How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

laurentiugabriel.github.io

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Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#102

Post by Gander5739 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #100
dozerly wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these LLM-as-review hype pieces don’t acknowledge that it’s turtles all the way down

What do you mean by this?

If the output can't be trusted, and you use another llm whose output can't be trusted to check the untrusted output of the first llm, then you're back where you started.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#103

Post by trueno »

copperx wrote: post #53
8bitsout wrote: post #48

I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…

It's much better to feed the book to the LLM and ask questions as you read along, instead of asking the LLM to basically write a custom book for you from scratch.

i threw the entire sanderson cosmere into a RAG graph sorta deal just to see how it would do if i questioned an mcp server for it about a universe i know decently well. it was actually astoundingly good. was able to find easter eggs acrossed different books and answer dumb questions like "why is kaladin emo"

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#104

Post by phatskat »

enraged_camel wrote: post #100
dozerly wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these LLM-as-review hype pieces don’t acknowledge that it’s turtles all the way down

What do you mean by this?

I read it as “if your LLM is being checked by another LLM, well then you need another LLM to check the checker. And can you really trust _that_ LLM? Probably should have an LLM to check the third one, and…”

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#105

Post by nullsanity »

8bitsout wrote: post #48

I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…

This is on top of the issue of LLMs being a moron. like, I'm sure dumb people can learn stuff from them, but I'm sticking to books written by people who know what they're talking ahout and not vibed slop.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#106

Post by oblio »

epolanski wrote: post #92
8bitsout wrote: post #48

I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…

> LLM prose is annoyingly dense It's just long. It just doesn't shut up. It's overly verbose. And you can't tell it to be concise or you degrade its quality. If I ask what an integral is, the correct answer is that it is the continuos analog of a sum, generally used to calculate areas and volumes. It should really be a single sentence, and then let me ask more about the terms I don't understand, and here's the beauty…

The new Google Translate. They've made it slightly better at translating paragraphs of text but in many cases it's lost the basic function for translation: dictionary.

Try it out, fairly sure that if you out in 100 random words for 30 of them it will just refuse to translate them (it will copy paste the original word into the target language) or it will do silly things like use the target 4th dictionary definition instead of the primary one).

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#108

Post by michaelmure »

I wish there was a LLM tool to explore a topic recursively, as a tree or a mindmap. You would start with some high level concept (say "cryptography") then dig further and further to more specific topics.

I think that would be a way more natural way to explore than being stuck on the classic linear output of a LLM.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#109

Post by dbrans »

praveer13 wrote: post #101

I’ve been doing something similar (browser only interactive courses served from GitHub pages) to teach me topics from beginner to advanced LLMs and systems intersection - https://kernelspace.naigap.com Distributed systems - https://byzantine.play.naigap.com

These are high quality at first glance. the visualizations and exercises are helpful.

What is your process for creating these resources?

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#110

Post by andy99 »

8bitsout wrote: post #48

I thought LLMs were a great tool for learning new topics - perhaps even complex ones. But overtime, I have had several frustrations with this. First, I get exhausted reading LLM prose. I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Second, as I dive deeper, I need a way to organize the information in a useful way as I begin to branch out in many different directions. I have tri…

The sycophancy is also a concern, it’s not really an impartial teacher, all its training is to suck up and maximize engagement rather than learning. The incentives are wrong.
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