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Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

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Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#111

Post by kensai »

teiferer wrote: post #61
kensai wrote: post #41

It definitely helps with expressing oneself in good "structured English" (or whatever natural language you speak). In my humble opinion, this is exactly the future of programming so it is worth it to invest some time and also learn how natural language processing if functioning.

Does it? I can blurb whatever grammatical, structural, spelling mess into the LLM input, it still gets what I mean. If I do that with a co-worker, they will be either offended or ask if I'm drunk or both. Just like omnipresent spell-check got people used to not caring about their correct spelling since a machine always fixes it up for them. It made spelling proficiency worse. We could see a similar trend in how peopl…

Your best friend or sibling or partner can possibly understand whatever you mumble without being offended, but it adds to ambiguity and errors or misunderstandings. That's why learning to write in bulletproof structured English decreases this danger. Thankfully, the same is desired for LLMs, even if they can catch most unimportant (spelling) errors.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#112

Post by Nevermark »

Klaster_1 wrote: post #18
snek_case wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the early 2000s Wikipedia used to fill that role. Now it's like you have an encyclopedia that you can talk to. What I'm slightly worried about is that eventually they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more, and it's not going to be good, because they have the ability to steer the conversation towards trying to get you to buy stuff.

One of the approaches to this that I haven't seen being talked about on HN at all is LLM as public infrastructure by the government. I think EU can pull this off. This also addresses overall alignment and compute-poverty issue. I wouldn't mind if my taxes paid for that instead of a ChatGPT subscription.

This is not a good idea at all.

Government should not be in a position to directly and pervasively shape people’s understanding of the world.

That would be the infinite regress opposite of a free (in a completely different sense) press.

A non-profit providing an open data and training regime for an open WikiBrain would be nice. With standard pricing for scaled up use.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#113

Post by isodev »

firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

> thinking improves thinking

Indeed, people trying to write prompts for the chatbots and continuously iterating on making their prompts clearer / more effective at conveying their needs is an exercise many haven't done since highschool. Who would've thought that working on your writing and reading proficiency may improve your thinking.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#114

Post by iamkonstantin »

isodev wrote: post #113
firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

> thinking improves thinking Indeed, people trying to write prompts for the chatbots and continuously iterating on making their prompts clearer / more effective at conveying their needs is an exercise many haven't done since highschool. Who would've thought that working on your writing and reading proficiency may improve your thinking.

I can imagine for some it's quite a challenge to deviate from short-form shitposting they normally do and formulate thoughts in complete sentences for the LLMs.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#115

Post by anotherevan »

firefoxd wrote: post #42

Not to dismiss other people's experience, but thinking improves thinking. People tend to forget that you can ask yourself questions and try to answer them. There is such thing as recursive thinking where you end up with a new thought you didn't have before you started. Don't dismiss this superpower you have in your own head.

It's also absolute awesome how every person's brain works the same way. It makes it some much more convenient that what works for one person works for every person.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#116

Post by croon »

vjk800 wrote: post #103
pmarreck wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more Not only can you run reasonably intelligent models on recent relatively powerful PC's "for free", but advances are undoubtedly coming that will increase the efficient use of memory and CPU in these things- this is all still early-days Also, some of those models are "uncensored"

Can you? I imagine e.g. Google is using material not available to the public to train their models (unsencored Google books, etc.). Also, the chat bots, like Gemini, are not just pure LLMs anymore, but they also utilize other tools as part of their computation. I've asked Gemini computationally heavy questions and it successfully invokes Python scripts to answer them. I imagine it can also use other tools than Python…

While they will always have premiere models that only run on data center hardware at first, the good news about the tooling is that tool calls are computationally very minimal and no problem to sandbox/run locally, at least in theory, we would still need to do the plumbing for it.

So I agree that open source solutions will likely lag behind, but that's fine. Gemini 2.5 wasn't unusable when Gemini 3 didn't exist, etc.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#117

Post by fatherwavelet »

afro88 wrote: post #19
Klaster_1 wrote: post #2

This article matches my experience as well. Chatting with LLM has helped me to crystalize ideas I had before and explore relevant topics to widen the understanding. Previously, I wouldn't even know where to begin with when getting curious about something, but ChatGPT can tell you if your ideas have names, if they were explored previously, what primary sources there are. It's like a rabbit hole of exploring the world,…

I'm not great with math beyond high school level. But I am very interested in, among many things, analog synthesiser emulations. The "zero delay filter" was a big innovation in the mid 2000s that led to a big jump in emulation accuracy. I tried to understand how they work and hit a brick wall. Recently I had a chat with an LLM and it clicked. I understand how the approximation algorithm works that enables solving for…

audio DSP is a great example. Especially because the proof is in the output if you are then able to make a cool sounding analog filter emulation that you would not have otherwise.

I disagree on the students in educational institutions though. This is the biggest thing for the autodidact who doesn't have the privilege of the educational institution. I think of time, money and effort that would be needed to talk to a professor one on one about analog filter emulation. It is not happening for me.

There are also societal/social high pass filters to even get in the door for these educational institutions. I would just get filtered out anyway. It seems to me in time that entire concept will simply become null and void.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#118

Post by squidbeak »

Nevermark wrote: post #112
Klaster_1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the approaches to this that I haven't seen being talked about on HN at all is LLM as public infrastructure by the government. I think EU can pull this off. This also addresses overall alignment and compute-poverty issue. I wouldn't mind if my taxes paid for that instead of a ChatGPT subscription.

This is not a good idea at all. Government should not be in a position to directly and pervasively shape people’s understanding of the world. That would be the infinite regress opposite of a free (in a completely different sense) press. A non-profit providing an open data and training regime for an open WikiBrain would be nice. With standard pricing for scaled up use.

> Government should not be in a position to directly and pervasively shape people’s understanding of the world.

You disagree with national curricula, state broadcasters, publicly funded research and public information campaigns?

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#119

Post by jkhdigital »

attila-lendvai wrote: post #107
jkhdigital wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m required to teach DSA in Java, so I lay down a couple rules early in the course that prohibit 95% of the nonsense garbage that unconstrained OOP allows. Granted, neither of these rules is original or novel, but they are rarely acknowledged in educational settings: 1. All public methods must implement an interface, no exceptions. 2. The super implementation must be called if overriding a non-abstract method. The e…

but sometimes that is not worth it... IOW, it optimizes only to a couple of variables. it's important not to lose sight of the ultimate goal: to get the machine to do what we want with the least amount of total human attention throughout the entire lifetime of the software. it's a typical trap for good/idealist programmers to spend too much time on code that should already have been re-written, or not even written to…

I don’t completely disagree, just like 90%. Junior developers typically aren’t taught the design patterns in the first place so they dig deeper holes rather than immediately recognizing that they need to refactor, pull out an interface and decorate/delegate/etc.

I’m also going to point out that this is a data structures course that I’m teaching, so extensibility and composability are paramount concerns because the interfaces we implement are at the heart of almost everything else in an application.

Re: Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

#120

Post by jkhdigital »

normie3000 wrote: post #27
jkhdigital wrote: post #23

I started teaching undergraduate computer science courses a year ago, after ~20 years in various other careers. My campus has relatively low enrollment, but has seen a massive increase in CS majors recently (for reasons I won’t go into) so they are hiring a lot without much instructional support in place. I was basically given zero preparation other than a zip file with the current instructor’s tests and homeworks (w…

> I have strong opinions about good software design, some of them unconventional I'm jealous of your undergrads - can you share some of the unconventional opinions?

Another principle that builds on the other two, and is specifically applicable to Java:

- To the greatest extent possible, base interfaces should define a single abstract method which allows them to be functional and instantiated through lambdas for easy mocking.

- Terminal interfaces (which are intended to be implemented directly by a concrete class) should always provide an abstract decorator implementation that wraps the concrete class for (1) interface isolation that can’t be bypassed by runtime reflection, and (2) decoration as an automatic extension point.

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