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Study mode

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Re: Study mode

#491

Post by jimmaswell »

romaniitedomum wrote: post #412
jacobedawson wrote: post #379

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting…

> you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated

Regular research has the same problem finding bad forum posts and other bad sources by people who don't know what they're talking about, albeit usually to a far lesser degree depending on the subject.

Re: Study mode

#492

Post by sumeno »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #458
tekno45 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know? its literally non-deterministic.

Most (all?) AI models I work with are literally deterministic. If you give it the same exact input, you get the same exact output every single time. What most people call “non-deterministic” in AI is that one of those inputs is a _seed_ that is sourced from a PRNG because getting a different answer every time is considered a feature for most use cases. Edit: I’m trying to imagine how you could get a non-deterministic…

This is an incredibly pedantic argument. The common interfaces for LLMs set their temperature value to non-zero, so they are effectively non-deterministic.

Re: Study mode

#493

Post by benatkin »

jacobedawson wrote: post #379

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…

It's quite boring to listen to people praising AI (worshipping it, putting it on a pedastal, etc). Those who best understand the potential of it aren't doing that. Instead they're talking about various specific things that are good or bad, and they don't go out of the way to lick AI's boots, but when they're asked they acknowledge that they're fans of AI or bullish on it. You're probably misreading a lot of resistance & skepticism on HN.

Re: Study mode

#494

Post by kamranahmedse »

x187463 wrote: post #114

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…

We are trying to solve this at https://roadmap.sh/ai

It's still a work in progress but we are trying to make it better everyday

Re: Study mode

#495

Post by raincole »

jacobedawson wrote: post #379

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…

I'd share a little bit experience about learning from human teachers.

Here in my country, English is not you'll hear in everyday conversation. Native English speakers account to a tiny percentage of population. Our language doesn't resemble English at all. However, English is a required subject in our mandatory education system. I believe this situation is quite typical across many Asian countries.

As you might imagine, most English teachers in public schools are not native speakers. And they, just like other language learners, make mistakes that native speakers won't make without even realizing what's wrong. This creates a cycle enforcing non-standard English pragmatics in the classroom.

Teachers are not to blame. Becoming fluent and proficient enough in a second language to handle questions students spontaneously throw to you takes years, if not decades of immersion. It's an unrealistic expectation for an average public school teacher.

The result is rich parents either send their kids to private schools or have extra classes taught by native speakers after school. Poorer but smart kids realize the education system is broken and learn their second language from Youtube.

-

What's my point?

When it comes to math/science, in my experience, the current LLMs act similarly to the teachers in public school mentioned above. And they're worse in history/economics. If you're familiar with the subject already, it's easy to spot LLM's errors and gather the useful bits from their blather. But if you're just a student, it can easily become a case of blind-leading-the-blind.

It doesn't make LLMs completely useless in learning (just like I won't call public school teachers 'completely useless', that's rude!). But I believe in the current form they should only play a rather minor role in the student's learning journey.

Re: Study mode

#496

Post by paulryanrogers »

throwawaylaptop wrote: post #473
noosphr wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two days ago when my boomer mother in law tried to justify her anti-cancer diet that killed Steve Jobs. On the bright side my partner will be inheriting soon by the looks of it.

The anti cancer diet absolutely works if you want to reduce the odds of getting cancer. It probably even works to slow cancer compared to the average American diet. Will it stop and reverse a cancer? Probably not.

I thought it was high fiber diets that reduce risk of cancer (ever so slightly), because of reduced inflammation. Not fruity diets, which are high in carbohydrates.

Re: Study mode

#497

Post by AppleBananaPie »

throwawaylaptop wrote: post #473
noosphr wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two days ago when my boomer mother in law tried to justify her anti-cancer diet that killed Steve Jobs. On the bright side my partner will be inheriting soon by the looks of it.

The anti cancer diet absolutely works if you want to reduce the odds of getting cancer. It probably even works to slow cancer compared to the average American diet. Will it stop and reverse a cancer? Probably not.

How much does it 'reduce the odds'?

Re: Study mode

#498

Post by ploxiln »

czhu12 wrote: 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…

Maybe TAs are a good metaphor. Back in college, the classmates who went to TAs for help multiple times every week, really didn't get the material. I literally never went to a TA for help in my life, and learned the material much better by really figuring it out myself, "the hard way" (the only way?). These were math, EE, and CS courses.

Re: Study mode

#499

Post by andsoitis »

ramraj07 wrote: post #441
romaniitedomum wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience. But now, you're wondering if the answer the AI gave you is correct or something it hallucinated. Every time I find myself putting…

What exactly did 2025 AI hallucinate for you? The last time I've seen a hallucination from these things was a year ago. For questions that a kid or a student is going to answer im not sure any reasonable person should be worried about this.

For starters, lots of examples over the last few months where AIs make up stuff when it comes to coding.

A couple of non-programming examples: https://www.evidentlyai.com/blog/llm-hallucination-examples

Re: Study mode

#500

Post by dyauspitr »

jacobedawson wrote: post #379

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream. I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5…

HN’s fear is the same job security fear we’ve been seen since the beginning of all this. You’ll see this on programming subs on Reddit as well.
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