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GPT makes learning fun again

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Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#141

Post by chazeon »

seb1204 wrote: post #128
chazeon wrote: post #9

I really found asking GPT to put a math concept under a physics context very helpful for me. As a computational physics student, that is really how I understand math and the world. Only very few textbooks can help me with this. From [ Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words ][1], Steve once said in a interview in 1983: > The problem was, you can't ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look toward…

How do you know what ChatGPT tells you is correct?

Of course you will need to check real references, it’s like talking to people and people make mistakes too. GPT makes mistakes that in many time obvious to humans, like write equations wrong, write numbers wrong, and I only need to check other sources or use a calculator to check. But I only care about the intuitive/conceptual part anyway, which GPT does well.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#142

Post by ChatGTP »

rolisz wrote: post #105
ChatGTP wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that’s true, why bother actually knowing anything about the systems they run your software /s

I have a finite amount of time. I can choose to learn and know more about the software that I'm developing and make the software better, or I can spend some amount of time to learn the DevOps part, or some mix in between. In some cases, the ratio is 90:10 in favor of software development.

Is nginx hard to understand or something ?

in surprised how few services developers I’ve encountered who don’t know hot to configure a web sever or LB.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#143

Post by ChatGTP »

falcor84 wrote: post #136
ChatGTP wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that’s true, why bother actually knowing anything about the systems they run your software /s

Here's a thought experiment - seeing how software problems are often people problems, how knowledgeable should we expect a software engineer to be about biochemistry (the systems that "run" people)?

Nginx for a developer vs biochemistry though ? That’s a leap.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#144

Post by chazeon »

selimthegrim wrote: post #118
chazeon wrote: post #9

I really found asking GPT to put a math concept under a physics context very helpful for me. As a computational physics student, that is really how I understand math and the world. Only very few textbooks can help me with this. From [ Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words ][1], Steve once said in a interview in 1983: > The problem was, you can't ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look toward…

Which textbooks?

Here are some examples: e.g, Martingales for Physicists, Deep Learning and Physics

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#145

Post by nathan_compton »

LASR wrote: post #64
devjab wrote: post #7

I'm in two minds about it. On one hand the internet (in general) has become so hard to find information on, and I agree with the author that GPT is a breath of fresh air. On the other hand I've seen GPT fail so miserably at topics that I'm knowledge about that I have a very hard time trusting anything it tells me. I'm not sure what the answer really is, but I'm not sure it's GPT. I wish we could go back to having sea…

I want to use this comment to state one thing, not directly addressed to you. Stop using GPT as a database! GPT is far more useful a reasoning engine that can accumulate fuzzy data and then provide various views or transformation of that data. So asking GPT to parse a Wikipedia page and then asking it to teach you from it - this is a much more successful usage than what the author in the original article is doing. It…

I gave it a ten page document a few weeks ago and it could not answer questions coherently from it.

I find GPT4 useful, but I still feel its wishful thinking to call it a reasoning engine. It is, in the end, a giant model for predicting the next word in a corpus which you condition with inputs. I find it most useful to think of it as exactly that.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#146

Post by [deleted] »

tux3 wrote: post #21
kccqzy wrote: post #13

You can downvote me but I think OP hasn't learned how to learn yet. If OP reads Wikipedia by understanding every sentence and clicking on every link, that's deliberately sabotaging his own learning. Attitudes like "I don't really feel like spelunking through a ton more articles" simply shows OP isn't interested in learning per se, just quick answers. OP learns in a way that's very child-like. When you are a five-year…

I notice that this contains only criticism and comparison to children, without offering a better way to learn. If OP reads your comment, they will be no better at learning than they were before. In that way, it's a pretty unhelpful comment.

[deleted]

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#147

Post by [deleted] »

tux3 wrote: post #21
kccqzy wrote: post #13

You can downvote me but I think OP hasn't learned how to learn yet. If OP reads Wikipedia by understanding every sentence and clicking on every link, that's deliberately sabotaging his own learning. Attitudes like "I don't really feel like spelunking through a ton more articles" simply shows OP isn't interested in learning per se, just quick answers. OP learns in a way that's very child-like. When you are a five-year…

I notice that this contains only criticism and comparison to children, without offering a better way to learn. If OP reads your comment, they will be no better at learning than they were before. In that way, it's a pretty unhelpful comment.

[deleted]

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#148

Post by elif »

I was initially using gpt to learn for 5-8 hours every day..

But I was bitten by a series of completely made up facts, and my skepticism has forced me to research nearly every complex response since then to confirm.

This fatigue has really shut down my enthusiasm. Maybe I'll research a topic 3-4 hours a week now.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#149

Post by tarasglek »

Vanit wrote: post #135
tarasglek wrote: post #132

Things I learned using gpt in last 6 mo: * Various new english idioms. I read a lot, but still find new ones * More optimal translations between languages i'm ~native in. * ton of new JS, Python libs * Got deeper in SQL (recursive queries, etc) * Can use CSS way better than before * Mermaid I wrote https://chatcraft.org/ as a friendlier UI for learning programming related things.

FYI the autofocus on the API key field was a huge pain due to the Lastpass app (Android); it kept automatically opening the Lastpass app trying to fill it.

interesting. thank you for feedback. filed issue to look into it

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#150

Post by penjelly »

barrkel wrote: post #139
throwaway675309 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actually had great success with the automation of boiler plate DevOps nonsense using GPT-4, including: GitHub actions, Caddy scripts, Docker files, etc. Every second that I didn't have to: - go look up a similar problem on Google - open three or four stack overflow tabs - read through the stack overflow links - copy out the answer - change all the variables to match variable names that I want All of this represe…

I've found that LLMs give good results for really basic stuff, and are increasingly fantastical as you head towards the tail of the distribution. If you just need the beginner's gist or are completely unfamiliar with something, they're not bad. Getting specific answers to corner cases is often a waste of time.

luckily, large complex things are often made up of small simple things
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