Live data from Hacker News

Study mode

openai.com

561–570 of 828 posts

Re: Study mode

#561
post #119

As a lifelong learner, experientially it feels like a big chunk of time spent studying is actually just searching. AI seems like a good tool to search through a large body of study material and make that part more efficient. The other chunk of time, to me anyway, seems to be creating a mental model of the subject matter, and when you study something well you have a strong grasp on the forces influencing cause and eff…

Spaced repetition systems would be the perfect complement to your approach - they're specifically designed to help build that "offline" mental model by systematically moving knowledge from AI-assisted lookup to permanent memory.

Re: Study mode

#562

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 Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions.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…

Just have a second (cheap) model check if it can find any hallucinations. That should catch nearly all of them in my experience.

What is an efficient process for doing this? For each output from LLM1, you paste it into LLM2 and say "does this sound right?"?

If it's that simple, is there a third system that can coordinate these two (and let you choose which two/three/n you want to use?

Re: Study mode

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that I've got two people telling me here "ackshually" I guess it may not be hallucinations and just really terrible training data. Up next - ChatGPT does jumping off high buildings kill you? >>No jumping off high buildings is perfectly safe as long as you land skillfully.

Job's diet didn't kill him. Not getting his cancer treated was what killed him.

Yes, we also covered that jumping off buildings doesn't kill people. The landing does.

Re: Study mode

#564

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 Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions.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.

ChatGPT hallucinates things all the time. I will feed it info on something and have a conversation. At first it's mostly fine, but eventually it starts just making stuff up.

Re: Study mode

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is resistant because at the end of the day, these are LLMs. They cannot and do not think. They generate plausible responses. Try this in your favorite LLM: "Suppose you're on a game show trying to win a car. There are three doors, one with a car and two with goats. You pick a door. The host then gives you the option to switch doors. What is the best strategy in this situation?" The LLM will recognize this as SIMIL…

Humans who have heard of Monty Hall might also say you should always switch without noticing that the situation is different. That's not evidence that they can't think, just that they're fallible. People on here always assert LLMs don't "really" think or don't "really" know without defining what all that even means, and to me it's getting pretty old. It feels like an escape hatch so we don't feel like our human speci…

> Humans who have heard of Monty Hall might also say you should always switch without noticing that the situation is different. That's not evidence that they can't think, just that they're fallible.

At some point we start playing a semantics game over the meaning of "thinking", right? Because if a human makes this mistake because they jumped to an already-known answer without noticing a changed detail, it's because (in the usage of the person you're replying to), the human is pattern matching, instead of thinking. I don't think is surprising. In fact I think much of what passes for thinking in casual conversation is really just applying heuristics we've trained in our own brains to give us the correct answer without having to think rigorously. We remember mental shortcuts.

On the other hand, I don't think it's controversial that (some) people are capable of performing the rigorous analysis of the problem needed to give a correct answer in cases like this fake Monty Hall problem. And that's key... if you provide slightly more information and call out the changed nature of the problem to the LLM, it may give you the correct response, but it can't do the sort of reasoning that would reliably give you the correct answer the way a human can. I think that's why the GP doesn't want to call it "thinking" - they want to reserve that for a particular type of reflective process that can rigorously perform logical reasoning in a consistently valid way.

Re: Study mode

#566

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…

> An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment.

Not underrated at all. Lots of people were happy to abandon Stack Overflow for this exact reason.

> Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical

I'd be curious to know how much this significantly differs from just a custom academically minded GPT with an appropriately tuned system prompt.

https://chatgpt.com/gpts

Re: Study mode

#567

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…

From the good old days: https://152334h.github.io/blog/non-determinism-in-gpt-4/ (that's been a short two years).

Unless something has fundamentally changed since then (which I've not heard about) all sparse models are only deterministic at the batch level, rather than the sample level.

Re: Study mode

#568
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 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.

> god forbid you're researching a complex and possibly controversial subject and you want it to find reputable sources

If you're really researching something complex/controversial, there may not be any

Re: Study mode

#569
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned Rust in a couple of weeks by reading the book.

Yeah regardless of time taken the study plan for Rust already exists ( https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ ). You don't need ChatGPT to regurgitate it to you.

The key points that helped me, besides correlating sections to the corresponding chapters in the book, are the proposal of certain exercises every week to cover the topics we've seen and the encouragement to write small articles around the lessons. I've already completed the Rustlings independently before this but it left me kind of lopsided and wanted to make this knowledge as full as possible.

Re: Study mode

#570

I have a question: Why do we even bother to learn if AI is going to solve everything for us? If the promised and fabled AGI is about to approach, what is the incentive or learning to deal with these small problems? Could someone enlighten me? What is the value of knowledge work?

The world is a vastly easier place to live in when you're knowledgeable. Being knowledgeable opens doors that you didn't even know existed. If you're both using the same AGI tool, being knowledgeable allows you to solve problems within your domain better and faster than an amateur. You can describe your problems with more depth and take into considerations various pros and cons. You're also assuming that AGI will hel…

This is a really nice perspective!

> It could just as easily only help a select group of people and I'd argue that this is the most likely outcome

Currently it is only applicable to us who are programming!

Yeah, even if it gets away all the quirks, using it would still be better.

Post reply on HN