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How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

laurentiugabriel.github.io

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Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#371

Post by whazor »

matherial wrote: post #306

This is, without exaggeration, probably the fiftieth blog post or long-form comment about how someone is using an LLM for "complex learning", and I'd just really like to see at least one of these to be accompanied by a statement saying what are the kinds of problems the author can now confidently solve that they couldn't before. In my experience, LLMs are really good for taking up your time and making you feel like y…

My trick is to let agents make an University Course Curriculum based of books and papers. Then if I don't understand something, I ask AI to simplify the book/paper until I get it.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#372

Post by 9dev »

abustamam wrote: post #338
matherial wrote: post #306

This is, without exaggeration, probably the fiftieth blog post or long-form comment about how someone is using an LLM for "complex learning", and I'd just really like to see at least one of these to be accompanied by a statement saying what are the kinds of problems the author can now confidently solve that they couldn't before. In my experience, LLMs are really good for taking up your time and making you feel like y…

> many of the popular educational videos on YouTube are fun to watch and don't really teach you anything. As a tangent, I think the concept of pop science has wasted so much time of what could be considered brilliant minds. I can't believe how much YouTube people I consider really smart consume under the guise of "learning stuff." And the videos are always designed to be addicting and to entice you to watch other of…

I’m a bit too old for the YouTube generation (can’t stand the fast cuts and permanently agitated voices), but am absolutely guilty of reading a lot of pop-sci books. I feel like they do a better job at teaching stuff for the most part, but probably also make you fall into the trap of believing you actually learnt something…

On the other hand, I’m fine with not being an expert on topics outside of my domain, as long as I retain some basic knowledge and fun party facts. So there’s that.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#373

Post by 9dev »

jack_pp wrote: post #344
eterm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/issues/23049 So there's this 11 year old issue in a forgotten ffmpeg plugin and I fixed it with deepseek by putting it into a self-testing loop. Probably would have taken me a few weeks to even understand the initial code to begin with. I haven't…

So while I do agree that it is cool you were able to do this, I‘ll say:

Sending in the patches but refusing to take responsibility for them is a surefire way to contribute to maintainer burnout. Please don’t do this. Either commit to fixing something and driving the PR to merge, or abstain from it entirely.

The bottleneck isn’t the speed of coding, and what you’re doing here is actively worsening the situation.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#374

Post by TeMPOraL »

fluoridation wrote: post #333
fy20 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on what you want to learn and what your definition of "learnt" is. The other day I realised I had no idea how DNA and life works. I guess I studied it at high school (25 years ago), but maybe it didn't go into much detail or it just didn't click. So I asked ChatGPT to explain it to me, I came up with my own mental model from it's explanation, told it that, then it corrected me where I misunderstood…

>So I asked ChatGPT to explain it to me, I came up with my own mental model from it's explanation, told it that, then it corrected me where I misunderstood things. We went backwards and forwards for an hour, me asking questions, it correcting me, until I felt like I understood the whole picture. If you're only checking your understanding against the one source you used to obtain it, how can you tell whether your unde…

Self-consistency and consistency with your lived experience are good heuristics. Reality is self-consistent, so anything that doesn't add up indicated an error in the source or your understanding of it (or both).

EDIT:

I think it's a kind thing you need to tune yourself into. OTOH, I've observed many (most?) people seemingly being completely oblivious to self-consistency issues of their beliefs and mental models, or even texts they're reading or instructions they're following, and yet... somehow they're generally more successful at life because of it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#375

Post by qnleigh »

abustamam wrote: post #338
matherial wrote: post #306

This is, without exaggeration, probably the fiftieth blog post or long-form comment about how someone is using an LLM for "complex learning", and I'd just really like to see at least one of these to be accompanied by a statement saying what are the kinds of problems the author can now confidently solve that they couldn't before. In my experience, LLMs are really good for taking up your time and making you feel like y…

> many of the popular educational videos on YouTube are fun to watch and don't really teach you anything. As a tangent, I think the concept of pop science has wasted so much time of what could be considered brilliant minds. I can't believe how much YouTube people I consider really smart consume under the guise of "learning stuff." And the videos are always designed to be addicting and to entice you to watch other of…

Well everyone needs some downtime, and then I think it's important to acknowledge that there is a range of quality within the category of "educational entertainment." You can learn a lot of interesting things from 3BlueOneBrown and Veritasium, even though neither compares to working through a textbook.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#376

Post by northern-lights »

8bitsout wrote: post #48

I 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 had the same problem - Opus models past 4.7 tend to inflate output tokens for no good reasons, introduce innumerable jargons and is a pain to read. Then, I cam across this: https://github.com/ayghri/i-have-adhd/blob/main/skills/i-hav...

You can either install that skill or put the Rules section directly in your Global CLAUDE.md for Claude or Personalization setting for Codex and it should cut down the output verbosity by quite a fair bit.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#377

Post by fluoridation »

elAhmo wrote: post #364
fluoridation wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, yeah. That's what I said. Did you have a point or...?

For majority of people, especially children, book is an authoritative source. Virtually no one outside of research fields and very excited enthusiasts will check sources in depth to see whether what is shown in the book is true or not. So, I think the point OP is making is that most people don't really check sources while learning things 'the conventional way'.

We have to distinguish learning from, let's call it, recreational education. If you're learning a topic, you're not going to be using a single book. Not even schoolchildren do that. Regardless of whether you consider a book an authoritative source, if you read multiple books those books will have to agree with each other, and where they don't you'll experience some confusion until you can resolve the contradiction.

If you're only ingesting information from a single source, be that a book, a teacher, or an LLM, then you haven't really learned, because your knowledge base is unmoored. You can't learn history by studying Tolkien's mythos.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#378

Post by qnleigh »

gofreddygo wrote: post #148
copperx wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

I have to agree with this. Completely relying on LLM for all your learning needs is a disaster. But being absolutely against use of LLMs isn't doing you any favors. This is where you don't have a formula but rely on you judgement and evidence of your having learnt something. For example having an LLM summarize a dense topic and to find books so that you can filter faster and spend time reading those books works way b…

> Another one is having the LLM quiz you on your topics of interest

This is a great idea. I'm going to try it.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#379

Post by northern-lights »

Gander5739 wrote: post #102
enraged_camel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by this?

If the output can't be trusted, and you use another llm whose output can't be trusted to check the untrusted output of the first llm, then you're back where you started.

Unfortunately, I don;t think that can ever be fixed. For an LLM to know that it is not hallucinating about something, it must know that that statement(s) is/are true. Which it cannot infer due to Godel's Incompleteness theorems.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#380

Post by fluoridation »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #374
fluoridation wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So I asked ChatGPT to explain it to me, I came up with my own mental model from it's explanation, told it that, then it corrected me where I misunderstood things. We went backwards and forwards for an hour, me asking questions, it correcting me, until I felt like I understood the whole picture. If you're only checking your understanding against the one source you used to obtain it, how can you tell whether your unde…

Self-consistency and consistency with your lived experience are good heuristics. Reality is self-consistent, so anything that doesn't add up indicated an error in the source or your understanding of it (or both). EDIT: I think it's a kind thing you need to tune yourself into. OTOH, I've observed many (most?) people seemingly being completely oblivious to self-consistency issues of their beliefs and mental models, or…

How do you do that with topics not directly experimenceable, like quantum mechanics or, as in this case, silicon manufacture?
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