271–280 of 652 posts
Really enjoying this. Thank you for the great work. I'm currently on Lesson 11 and noticed a couple typos (missing words). I haven't found anywhere on the site itself where I could send feedback to report such a thing (maybe I missed it). Hopefully you aren't offended if I post them here. I think the easiest way to point them out is to just have you search for the partial line of text while on Lesson 11 and you'll se…
Fantastic work. Quick suggestion: a link at the bottom of the page to the next and previous lesson would help with navigation a ton.
My design options are a bit limited so I went with a simple link to the next lesson.
I just wanted to thank you. I have only looked at the first two lessons so far, but this is an extraordinary piece of work, in its message’s clarity, accessibility and the quality of analysis. I will certainly be spreading it far and wide and it is making me rethink my own writing. Impressed with the Shorthand publishing system too. I hadn’t come across it previously
Your scroll-to-death user interface made me close the window before the end of the second page. Did you ask an LLM to recommend the most user-friendly UI to you?
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My impression is that companies in most of the fields do not like to be regulated or scrutinized, so nothing new there. While observing some people using LLMs, I realized that for a lot of people it really makes a huge difference in time saved. For me the difference is not significant, but I am generally solving complex problems, not writing nicely formatted reports where words and not numbers are relevant, so YMMV.
Is it good for one person (the writer) to save time, only for lots of other people (the readers) to have to do extra work to understand if the work is correct or hallucinated?
This holds true whether an LLM/AI is used or not — see substantial portions of Fox News editorial content as an example (often kernels of truth with wildly speculative or creatively interpretive baggage).
In your example, a responsible writer who uses AI will check all content produced in order to ensure that it meets their standards.
Will there be irresponsible writers? Sure. There already are. AI makes it easier for them to be irresponsible, but that doesn’t really change the equation from the reader’s perspective.
I use AI daily in my work. I describe it as “AI augmentation”, but sometimes the AI is doing a lot of the time-consuming stuff. The time saved on relatively routine scut work is insane, and the quality of the end product (AI with my inputs and edits) is really good and consistent.
> After talking to literally hundreds of educators, employers, researchers, and policymakers, we have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. Did you consider consulting with any college freshman or even college students? I know you're supposed to be guiding their education, but I think it's also good to check in and see wha…
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I know a lot of people who went through the "Oh, wow - wait a minute..." cycle. Including me. They're approximately useful in some contexts. But those contexts are limited. And if there are facts or code involved, both require manual confirmation. They're ideal for bullshit jobs - low-stakes corporate makework, such as mediocre ad copy and generic reports that no one is ever going to read.
> And if there are facts or code involved, both require manual confirmation. The hidden assumption here seems to be that the model needs to be perfect before it has utility.
Is there a way to download and read this as a document instead of web pages? They're hard to navigate.
We talked extensively with the 18-20 year olds who make up our target demographic and this "scrollytelling" style is their strong preference over the "wall of text" that I and most of my generation prefer.
What your comments make clear is that we need to develop a parallel version that is more less plain text for people who are using a range of devices, for people who have the same reading preferences that I do, etc.
Right now we're entirely self-funded and doing this on spare time but it's clear to me that an alternative version with a very clean CSS layout is the way to go, possibly with a pdf option as well.
I don't want to let versions proliferate too extensively, simply because this is very much a living document. Technologies are changing so fast in this area that many of the examples will seem dated in a year and — while we've tried to be forward-thinknig about this — some of principles may even need revision.