> What you get is a beautiful animation that is 100% accurate and free of hallucinations How does he know?
I thought of the "does he know" meme when I saw this.
How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
231–240 of 574 posts
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#232What’s everyone’s opinion on learning new tech things in this day and age? My opinion swings between positive and depressing vision of the future. I still learn new stuff, but I’m afraid it won’t have any value in a year or so. For example, I’m pretty good at optimizing low level stuff, but right now you can just ask LLMs to do so and they are pretty good at it. They will profile the code and suggest reasonable optio…
They're amazing at it, provided you keep asking the right questions. Trust me when I say that in the hands of someone who doesn't have your experience, the LLMs would not be getting the results you get. You might think what you're doing is trivial, it may be sessions that flow roughly, "Instrument this, okay this part is slow, profile this part, OK read the profile output and suggest a better approach". But your expe…
Except the steering itself is also disappearing, the same prompts from just 6 months ago now need much less steering, AIs are learning to even ask back in certain cases to persuade people with no experience towards the most likely correct choice
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#233> What you get is a beautiful animation that is 100% accurate and free of hallucinations How does he know?
Wrote about this awhile ago, and it hasn’t changed:
> Time and time again, when talking to people who rely on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other general AI tools, I hear them say, “AI is incredible. It handles nearly everything I throw at them.”
> “What does it fumble with?” I’ll ask.
> “Well, it still gets things wrong when it comes to my line of work.”
https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/04/08/on-ai-observational-comi...
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
LLM is still too verbose, a real person Socratic conversation can interact a couple sentences at a time, not spew 1-3 windowfuls of low density bullet points. I even wonder if this behavior is due to next-token prediction architectures, somehow.
I don't understand some previous complaints. It's dense and verbose seem at ends to me.
I know you probably don't consider it dense but wondering if someone can shed insight.
I find them like empty calories, like programming youtube tutorials. They maximize for feeling learnt instead of steady progress
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I really don't want to read anything generated by something like Opus 5 at this point. Personally, I find that its generated prose tends to have an undue weight to it, almost as if every topic I ask about somehow bears a heavy burden, or is otherwise load-bearing , to use its parlance. Quite puzzling, really.
Yes! I have a personal theory: LLMs are *fundamentally* handicapped at perceiving what's going on in the mind of the human (this can't be "innovated away") and that's at the root of what makes them suck at conversation. Next time you're chatting with someone, notice how much understanding is shared without anything being said. E.g. the other person might share something deeply disappointing, and they can tell without…
Even over phone calls you get a sense so unless it's in timing it isnt demeanor either
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#236> What you get is a beautiful animation that is 100% accurate and free of hallucinations How does he know?
Gell-Mann Amnesia. Recognises the failings in their own field of discourse, assumes all true about anything else, same source.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#237I 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…
I never used office hours as a student, which I later regretted because it made me work longer and harder to perhaps achieve somewhat better understanding in some classes, but also I dropped every proof-based math course I ever took. Overall I think my education would have been stronger by attending office hours. I view LLMs in education similarly to office hours. Some people abuse it to get homework answers without…
I completely agree. I have vibe coded what i would consider to be some pretty weird things in the name of learning facilitation.
Perhaps the best example has been a native macOS app that is a completely custom text editor with built-in debugger, lsp support, fuzzy finder, etc stuff you'd expect. Inside the same app is a library of books i can read within the app completely formatted and for every chapter/section of each book that is a quiz to take (LLM generated of course), a "recitation" tab where i am asked a question and say outloud my response to the AI to evaluate me on and then finally practice problems to do within the custom text editor (these are usually programming books). The reader also has ai re-write built in.
As neat as this is, and i worked through K&R like this, i have ultimately fallen back on "just read the damn book and go to the AI when you've got questions."
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#238> In plan mode (using CC, or OpenCode) I ask a model to build the foundational knowledge for X topic. Makes sense. > I ask it to review the accuracy of the knowledge base it built in the previous step. Ooookay that sounds good. > I proceed asking it to build a simulation of that topic in a low-poly, Rollercoaster Tycoon-like animation. wat.
It's such a surprising and delightful turn, I love it!
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI hater here. Too me this story is all to predictable. This is exactly how I thought using LLMs to learn would go. Or in simpler terms: well duh . I'm actually going to make a prediction here as well. I think you will soon realize that using LLMs to clarify certain questions or ideas you have will turn out to have frustrations as well. And that you will soon direct those questions to either peers you know in real li…
> I'm actually going to make a prediction here as well. I think you will soon realize that using LLMs to clarify certain questions or ideas you have will turn out to have frustrations as well. Much more likely that people will believe themselves to be an expert in a subject after having had a conversation with Claude about it.
Wild because people wouldn't do that with a friend. Something about an LLM giving people info has this insidious stoleb valor to the LLMs work. Like that wasn't your thought, you just google searched it.
Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics
#240I've had success using the socratic method. I give Claude some topic (say, how the intricacies of the bond market works, the content from which are screenshots of pages from a textbook), and then I go on a walk chatting with it in voice mode. Claude is the expert, I am the student. Claude asks me questions, leading me to an answer logically. I come back with questions, and we back and forth. LLMs arent like they were in '23-'25. I'm almost always skeptical its going to lie, and almost always wrong.
In particular:
- I limit it/encourage it to give me single sentence questions
- I sometimes will ask it to tell me a motivating, human-grounded story, when we're starting a new concept: claude responds "Maya is a bond portfolio manager, and her boss has asked her to quickly price in what happened if yields go down. She knows her bond's average duration, a measure in time, but she doesn't have a percentage, which is what her manager wants. How can she give him a percentage number with just a duration figure and the proposed new yield?"
- I'll often ask claude to let me work through it, to derive the thing myself, often resulting in a string of thoughts with "yes/no" trailers, to get the LLM to reply yes or no only, and avoid derailing my train of thought. If yes, my train of thought keeps going. If no, I've got something wrong.
- I'll sometimes stop and have it craft an artifact. I typically say "build me a Brilliant.org-style interactive demo of the topic", especially when we get into the realm of looking at the actual maths of a thing (for which prose and dialog is not optimal by itself AFAICT)
- I'll do this while I'm traveling, while I'm walking, while I'm doing chores.
It's so much fun.