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Study mode

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271–280 of 828 posts

Re: Study mode

#271

An acquaintance of mine has a start-up in this space and uses OpenAI to do essentially the same thing. This must look like, and may well be, the guillotine for him... It's my primary fear building anything on these models, they can just come eat your lunch once it looks yummy enough. Tread carefully

I used to work for copy.ai and this happened to them. Investors always asked if the founders were worried about OpenAI competing with their consumer product. Then ChatGPT released. Turns out that was a reasonable concern.

These days they’ve pivoted to a more enterprise product and are still chugging along.

Re: Study mode

#272

An acquaintance of mine has a start-up in this space and uses OpenAI to do essentially the same thing. This must look like, and may well be, the guillotine for him... It's my primary fear building anything on these models, they can just come eat your lunch once it looks yummy enough. Tread carefully

Ah, I don't know. Of course there is risk involved no matter what we do (see the IDE/Cursor space), but we need to be somewhat critical of the value we add. If you want to try and make a quick buck, fine, be quick and go for whatever. If you plan on building a long term business, don't do the most obvious, low effort low hanging fruit stuff.

yeah, if you want to stick around you need some kind of moat

Re: Study mode

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish each LLM provider would add "be short and not verbose" to their system prompts. I am a slow reader, it takes a toll on me to read through every non-important detail whenever I talk to an AI. The way they render everything so fast gives me an anxiety. Will also reduce the context rot a bit.

On ChatGPT at least, you can add "be brief" to the custom prompt in your settings. Probably others, too.

I guess what I actually meant to say was to make LLMs know when to talk more and when to be brief. When I ask it to write an essay, it should actually be an essay length essay.

Re: Study mode

#274
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not my experience that there are missing pieces as compared to anything else. Nobody can write an exhaustive tome and explore every feature, use, problem, and pitfall of Python, for example. Every text on the topic will omit something. It's hardly a criticism. I don't want exhaustive. The llm taught me what I asked it to teach me. That's what I hope it will do, not try to caution me about everything I could do w…

> It's not my experience that there are missing pieces as compared to anything else. How can you know this when you are learning something? It seems like a confirmation bias to even have this opinion?

That's easy. It's due to a psychological concept called: transfer of learning [0].

Perhaps the most famous example of this is Warren Buffet. For years Buffet missed out on returns from the tech industry [1] because he avoided investing in tech company stocks due to Berkshire's long standing philosophy to never invest in companies whose business model he doesn't understand.

His light bulb moment came when he used his understanding of a business he understood really well i.e. their furniture business [3] to value Apple as a consumer company rather than as a tech company leading to a $1bn position in Apple in 2016 [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_learning

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33612228

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/16/warren-bu...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/billionaire-investor-warren-...

Re: Study mode

#275
post #5

I would like to see randomized control group studies using study mode. Does it offer meaningful benefits to students over self directed study? Does it out perform students who are "learning how to learn"? What affect does allowing students to make mistakes have compared to being guided through what to review? I would hope Study Mode would produce flash card prompts and quantize information for usage in spaced repetit…

There's studies showing that LLM makes experienced devs slower in their work. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same for self study. However consider the extent to which LLMs make the learning process more enjoyable. More students will keep pushing because they have someone to ask. Also, having fun & being motivated is such a massive factor when it comes to learning. And, finally, keeping at it at 50% the speed f…

The study you're referencing doesn't make that conclusion.

It concludes theres a learning curve that generally takes about 50 hours of time to figure out. The data shows that the one engineer who had more than 50 hours of experience with Cursor actually worked faster.

This is largely my experience, now. I was much slower initially, but I've now figured out the correct way to prompt, guide, and fix the LLM to be effective. I produce way more code and am mentally less fatigued at the end of each day.

Re: Study mode

#276
post #251
post #26

I'll personally attest: LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new things post graduation. It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed. Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible, and the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and hope at some point, it'll make sense to you. Now, everyone ba…

I don’t know what subject you are learning but for circuit design I have failed to get any response out of LLMs that’s not straight from a well known text book chapter that I have already read

It definitely depends heavily on how well represented the subject is on the internet at large. Pretty much every question I've asked it about SystemVerilog it gets wrong, but it can be very helpful about quite complex things about random C questions, for example why I might get undefined symbol errors with `inline` functions in C but only in debug mode.

On the other hand it told me you can't execute programs when evaluating a Makefile and you trivially can. It's very hit and miss. When it misses it's rather frustrating. When it hits it can save you literally hours.

Re: Study mode

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all hours of the day This simply hasn't been my experience. Its too shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be useful. This happens quick for me. Also, god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly controversial subject and you want it to find reputable sources or particularly academic ones.

> and you want it to find reputable sources Ask it for sources. The two things where LLMs excel is by filling the sources on some claim you give it (lots will be made up, but there isn't anything better out there) and by giving you queries you can search for some description you give it.

It often invents sources. At least for me.

Re: Study mode

#278
post #26

I'll personally attest: LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new things post graduation. It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed. Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible, and the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and hope at some point, it'll make sense to you. Now, everyone ba…

> the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and hope at some point, it'll make sense to you. I find it odd that someone who has been to college would see this as a _bad_ way to learn something.

In college you can ask people who know the answer. It's not until PhD level that you have to struggle without readily available answers.

Re: Study mode

#279
post #26

I'll personally attest: LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new things post graduation. It used to be that if you got stuck on a concept, you're basically screwed. Unless it was common enough to show up in a well formed question on stack exchange, it was pretty much impossible, and the only thing you can really do is keep paving forward and hope at some point, it'll make sense to you. Now, everyone ba…

>Now, everyone basically has a personal TA, ready to go at all hours of the day. And that's a bad thing. Nothing can replace the work in learning, the moments where you don't understand it and have to think until it hurts and until you understand. Anything that bypasses this (including, for uni students, leaning too heavily on generous TAs) results in a kind of learning theatre, where the student thinks they've devel…

[dead]

Re: Study mode

#280

I'm really waiting for somebody to figure out the correct interface for all this. For example, study mode will present you with a wall of text containing information, examples, and questions. There's no great way to associate your answers with specific questions. The chat interface just isn't good for this sort of interaction. ChatGPT really needs to build its own canvas/artifact interface wherein questions/responses…

There are so many options that could be done, like: * for each statement, give you the option to rate how well you understood it. Offer clarification on things you didn't understand * present knowledge as a tree that you can expand to get deeper * show interactive graphs (very useful for mathy things when can you easily adjust some of the parameters) * add quizzes to check your understanding ... though I could well i…

> present knowledge as a tree that you can expand to get deeper

I'm very interested in this. I've considered building this, but if this already exists, someone let me know please!

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