Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

laurentiugabriel.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 567 posts

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#461

Post by TaupeRanger »

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…

It's like YouTube "Explainer" personalities, like Hank Green and Adam Neely. They do the kind of "learning theater" that makes you feel like you're learning something when you're actually just providing views and ad revenue. You'll come away from a video feeling like you gained knowledge, but:

1) there's a good chance it was subtly misleading (or just wrong)

2) you probably won't ever use the information in any meaningful way and will likely forget all relevant details in a few days

3) you almost certainly could have spent that time better actually doing or creating something - actually doing real learning and making real progress

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#462

Post by sathish316 »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #33

This is a great share, gonna come back to it. Also worth mentioning that Matt Pocock has a /teach skill that creates interactive, learning sites for learning a new skill.

+1, you can customize it to learn any topic concisely, learn by doing, add challenges, add visual explanations

https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills/produc...

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#463

Post by mfalcon »

royal__ wrote: post #24

The biggest thing I've learned from doing stuff like this is that there are no shortcuts. At some point or another, to truly learn something deeply, you've got to dig in to the boring details and do things the hard way. LLMs can help with this...but I find it's usually tempting to try and just offload the boring stuff to them, which doesn't work.

The LLMs are a way to get quick feedback and getting it promotes quicker learning (if the feedback is good). Learning is difficult, sometimes I get blocked on something and before llms that could prevent me from learning some material, nowadays I have another tool to help me unblock and learn faster.

I think that could be called a shortcut, not in learning per se, but in the process of getting to learn.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#464

Post by gilleain »

input_sh wrote: post #460
gilleain wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is a great _reference_ but not necessarily the best way to learn about a topic. Of course, this depends on the topic, on who has been writing the page, etc A particularly bad example is higher maths - a wiki pages on a complex mathematics topic often reads like "A gruncheon is a worch in the brashation of plusters" and each of these words is a separate page or topic. Of course, you _can_ in theory 'just' cl…

If only Wikipedia contained like an easier-to-digest version of Wikipedia, using planer language: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA I just asked Opus to "explain DNA to me in simple language" and the two are not even in the same league in terms of quality.

Fair point - but I wonder how many people that have visited Wikipedia know about simple wiki. I was probably aware of it, but not enough to remember to suggest it as an alternative!

I mean - it is certainly better ... but it is still a lot of stuff. For example:

> Part of an organism's DNA is "non-coding DNA" sequences. They do not code for protein sequences. Some noncoding DNA is transcribed into non-coding RNA molecules, such as transfer RNA, ribosomal RNA, and regulatory RNAs.

Do you _need_ to know about tRNA, rRNA, and operons (?) to understand DNA? The thing about an encyclopedia/wiki entry is that it has to cover the whole topic. This is a strength for reference, as you can scan it and find the bit you need. For learning from scratch, I can see that a conversational approach (with a human or LLM) has advantages where the learner can direct the level of detail and path through the material.

Ultimately, both are worthwhile, but I can also see the strengths/weaknesses of both ways to learn.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#465

Post by sathish316 »

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…

I’ve used the following teach skill by mattpocock to learn Java concurrency concepts in 20 bite-sized hands-on lessons starting from creating a new thread to building a Thread-safe Connection pool. I’m pretty sure I can adapt this to learn Concurrency in any language like Go or Rust.

https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills/produc...

The point is not that I’m learning Concurrency in a better way using LLMs, it’s that I can apply this style of learning using bite-sized, hands-on, visual explanations, quiz to any topic in the future. The lessons it generates are just code, and you can ask it to type check the examples, validate with recent libraries, use analogies to learn something better.

Try it before thinking it’s just ELI5 or Summarization or assuming it’ll be hallucinating without verifying facts.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#466

Post by vilfred_sikker »

Really cool idea the sim game approach! I'm trying to find a good approach to learning in the age of agents, though more focused on the actual code I read and write in my day to day. I'm building tech-professor.com which is in beta, where my goal is to setup continuous learning for product teams and developers. It's a hard problem to solve, but I believe that llm-based learning will become better as models improve!

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#467

Post by engineer_22 »

turzmo wrote: post #459
manfromchina1 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't get this attitude. For one thing, nobody on earth can give you a 500-word summary of quantum physics in a way that lets you internalize even a tiny bit of it. That's not how you learn anything. Here's how I do it: I open Baby Rudin (3rd ed.), second chapter, and read the main text - absolute brutality. I unpack almost every sentence with Claude/GPT until I finally get what's going on. No ELI5 nonse…

Baby Rudin is a special textbook: it comes from a time when mathematics textbooks were not at all judged by their pedagogical value, but instead by their aesthetic appeal to mathematicians (a la Bourbaki). If you actually want to learn analysis, there are a nearly infinite number of friendlier resources (e.g., Understanding Analysis by Abbott). Learning to unpack difficult text on one’s own is a valuable skill. Resea…

Your argument sound remarkably familiar. Humor me:

"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.“

-Socrates, on writing. From Phaedrus

Secondary source: https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#468

Post by dns_snek »

endymion-light wrote: post #410
bilbo-b-baggins wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or do you? Cause if you went back and forth with ChatGPT for an hour it definitely hallucinated and lied to you at some point. Maybe consider using something else like Brilliant.org if you want to learn a topic, yanno, so you don’t propagate whatever hallucination from ChatGPT to your kids.

This would be a valid point maybe 3 years ago, but most chatbots will now query and verify direct sources, especially in research mode. This is very simple to validate and verify. You could argue it may find false primary sources. You can condemn models for a variety of other things, but acting as if this is still reality shows a lack of understanding as to modern model capabilities

Your comment is phrased as if it somehow refutes their point but it doesn't.

> Cause if you went back and forth with ChatGPT for an hour it definitely hallucinated and lied to you at some point.

If you're asserting that this is not the case today then that's going to be require pretty extraordinary evidence. "Chatbots use Google now" is not evidence that the information they provide is in fact correct.

They don't hallucinate all the time like they used to, no, but I'd be very surprised if the majority of these sorts of conversations were free of major factual errors.

I frequently notice degradation in the model model's ability to remain coherent when it searches for information online. For example I might ask Sonnet 5 "how do I build a shed" and during its search it presumably comes across an article which talks about building a shed out of paper mache, then the model responds with something like "I caution you against your plan to build a shed out of paper mache" -- Wait, what? Who said anything about building it out of paper mache?

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#469

Post by URMAJESTY68 »

> What you get is a beautiful animation that is 100% accurate and free of hallucinations

I can appreciate using all of the tools at your disposal to learn a new topic, and in no way want to discourage learning. I've used LLMs myself to question my own understandings and it can be helpful.

However, "... 100% accurate and free of hallucinations." isn't a statement someone who just learned the topic is capable of honestly stating.

Re: How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

#470

Post by vilfred_sikker »

f311a wrote: post #21

What’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…

I'm also trying out a lot of different approaches, and generally I like the sparring I can get from LLMs but with the acceptance that they make mistakes and some things still need some fact checking. But the models are improving fast, so I'm positive about this approach just becoming better going forward

I'm working on a side-project called tech-professor.com which is a platform for learning. The content is built directly from the source code in your pull request and repositories you follow. So you can quiz yourself and your team based on the code you ship. It's in beta and a lot of changes are still on the way, but if you want to check it out and give feedback, feel free to sign up for free.

Post reply on HN