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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#851

Post by EvgeniyZh »

lmm wrote: post #491
EvgeniyZh wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they would be stupid not to if their classmates are using it. Why would they be stupid? Were people before LLMs stupid for not asking smarter classmate/parent/paid contractor to solve the homework for them? Large part of education is learning about things that can be easily automated, because you can't learn hard things without learning easy things. Nothing conceptually changed in this regard, like Wolfram Alpha di…

> Were people before LLMs stupid for not asking smarter classmate/parent/paid contractor to solve the homework for them? In American universities where your GPA from your in-class assessments forms part of your final grade? Yes, absolutely. Where I came from you do your learning in class and your assessment in a small, short set of exams (and perhaps one graded essay) at the end of each year. That seems far more cond…

> In American universities where your GPA from your in-class assessments forms part of your final grade? Yes, absolutely.

Whether not doing everything to maximize your GPA is "stupid" (literally or figuratively) is a good question too.

But even if your assignments influence your GPA it's rarely the only thing that does, and not doing assignments will harm your ability to perform in midterm/exam/whatever.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#852

Post by handoflixue »

kevinventullo wrote: post #824
procaryote wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning to articulate your thoughts is pretty vital in learning to think though. An LLM could make something sound articulate even if your input is useless rambling containing the keywords you want to think about. Having someone validate a lack of thought as something useful doesn't seem good for you in the long term

Yeah, so the problem I’m solving is not that I don’t think enough about something, or even that I don’t think about it in the right way. “Murky” was maybe the wrong word. It’s more that I often find my audience does not have the longest attention span or forgiveness for sloppy writing; thus, the onus is on me to make my thoughts as easy to digest as possible.

As someone in a similar position, I have found I benefit from practicing - but also, LLMs are a really useful tool for that practice!

Learning how to condense what I say focuses me to think about what is and isn't important - and it also forces me to think in terms of "style" and "audience".

(My natural writing style is much more verbose - I want to address all sorts of branching objections and tangential concepts. I find parenthesis really useful, because I can dump a bunch of stuff there and it's a clear marker that you can safely skip it all)

LLMs are also useful, because I can ramble, work out my own summary, and then compare to the LLM. Or, when I was just starting out, ramble, get an LLM to summarize, and then try to work out my own summary that captures what it missed.

Aside from practice being inherently beneficial, I also find that being able to form my own summaries helps me catch when the LLM has misunderstood, hallucinated, or just subtly changed the emphasis - for instance, your original example was indeed much cleaner, but I wouldn't have felt like you were really truly a fellow rambler just from reading that.

Hopefully you don't mind a rambling post. If you want a TL;DR an LLM can probably do a decent job ;)

(ChatGPT Summary: Practicing summarization improves clarity, audience awareness, and writing focus—especially for naturally verbose thinkers. LLMs are helpful tools for this, both as a comparison point and a learning aid. Writing your own summaries sharpens understanding and helps catch LLM misinterpretations or emphasis shifts.)

(Yeah, that seems pretty accurate)

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#853

Post by aledalgrande »

mezyt wrote: post #544
aledalgrande wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this comparison a few times already, but IMHO it's totally wrong. A compiler translates _what you have already implemented_ into another computer runnable language. There is an actual grammar that defines the rules. It does not generate new business logic or assumptions. You have already done the work and taken all the decisions that needed critical thought, it's just being translated _instruction by instru…

Yeah ok. I was viewing AI as "a tool to help you code better", not as "you literally can't do anything without it generating everything for you". I could do some assembly if I really had to, but it would not be efficient at all. I wonder if there's actually "developers" who are only prompting an LLM and not understanding anything in the output ? Must be generating dumpster fires as you said.

Guess you haven't seen this https://www.reddit.com/r/csMajors/comments/1jg39g2/looks_lik...

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#854

Post by dogcomplex »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #817
dogcomplex wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you took a forklift to the gym, you'd come out of the experience not only very good at "lifting weights" , but having learned a whole lot more about the nature and physics of weightlifting from a very different angle. Sure, you should lift them yourself too. But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own tired brain was going to uncover. It's a very different but powerful educational exp…

> But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own tired brain was going to uncover. If you never learn to research, sure. Otherwise, you should be worried about accuracy, up to date information, opinionated takes, and outright lies/misinformation. The tool you use doesn't change these factors.

No but it increases the speed and ease at which you can check any of those - making a lot of those steps practical when they were a slog before. If people aren't double-checking LLM claims against sources then they were never on guard for those without an LLM either.

Besides, those are incredibly short-term concerns. Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#855

Post by [deleted] »

grey-area wrote: post #531
gsf_emergency wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think LLMs, if used correctly, can be useful for BOTH the credentialing and the human resource development (*cough*) Essentially, since they are a summary of "the" state of knowledge, the teacher should be able to ask them to put a number on how novel a piece of text is. Once LLMs are able to evaluate, independently, the soundness of an argument... (Hopefully, this will be achieved AFTER $5 H100s reach the average…

LLMs are sometimes wrong, and they don’t know they are wrong, nor do students. They are the wrong tool for pedagogy.

[deleted]

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#856

Post by satisfice »

arduanika wrote: post #755
satisfice wrote: post #97

I blogged about this just yesterday. The problem of disguised authorship ruins your reputation as a thinker, worker, and writer. https://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/487881

This is a good post. Off-topic, but on your parenthetical about SMS "wrong number" texts "(That scam doesn’t even make sense...)", part of why they do it is what's called "warming up" their sending number so that it's seen as legit by carriers and SMS filters. They're also seeing whether you're a real person who responds, in which case they can come back later with a more sophisticated scam (or re-sell you number, wh…

I agree it makes sense to the attacker to do it. I was just thinking that it shouldn't make sense to the person answering the text to think that it could be a wrong number.

Thanks for reading my post.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#857

Post by vishnugupta »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #778
vishnugupta wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was somewhat aware that in medieval period most started out as an apprentice in mid teens. Essentially work slaves in the house of a master. Then after a decade or so of toiling and gaining the skill they would go on to become individual business owners. But I wasn’t aware about the master peace. Thank you for sharing that!

Well you see the obvious difference. They actually trained people for the job. Even if it was under the guise of child labor. We simply stopped doing that. A decade of apprenticeship reduced down to 3 months of shadowing during summer.

By the time one is early/mid 20s they would be nearing master level in skill. Would have faced the real world for 7-8 years, know how the world works in terms of money, dealing with customers, and so on.

Compare that with today, by early 20s one is only getting out of college undergrad. About to start the real world job training.

So much of wasted time.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#858

Post by alex77456 »

sn9 wrote: post #221

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think; a language model produces the former, not the latter. It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in education and academia. They see work as the mere production of output, without ever thinking about how that…

There're several sides to this.

Different courses and universities vary in teaching quality greatly. Often the examination criteria is loosely correlated with knowledge or skill and students end up studying 'around' the examination process, rather than learning for the sake of it or for enjoyment.

Someone mentioned verbal exams - this is the way to do it, but I only had a pleasure to do very few in my years. Probably because it's seen as 'too time consuming' or 'time wasteful', so the shift is then to the student to waste their time instead.

And then you get the occasional course with a lecturer everyone just pays 100% attention to and engages with, where you almost don't need an exam in the first place.

'The problem of LLMs in academia' is a symptom. You get what you measure.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#859

Post by johnnyanmac »

dogcomplex wrote: post #854
johnnyanmac wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But using an AI teaches you a shit-ton more about any field than your own tired brain was going to uncover. If you never learn to research, sure. Otherwise, you should be worried about accuracy, up to date information, opinionated takes, and outright lies/misinformation. The tool you use doesn't change these factors.

No but it increases the speed and ease at which you can check any of those - making a lot of those steps practical when they were a slog before. If people aren't double-checking LLM claims against sources then they were never on guard for those without an LLM either. Besides, those are incredibly short-term concerns. Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately.

Does it? You google a query, get results, compare a few alternative results. You ask a prompt and what? Compare outputs to each other? Or just defer back to googling for alternative sources.

Firstly, these prompts tend to be shockingly close in behavior. Secondly, Google tends to rank reputable or self curated sites which have some accountability. It can be wrong but you know thr big news sites tend to at least defer to interviews to back up facts. Wikipedia has an overly strict process to prevent blatant, source less information.

There's room for error, but there's at least more accountability compared to what an LLM is going through.

> Recent models are a whole lot more trustworthy and can search for and cite sources accurately.

Lastly, prompts are still treated as black boxes, which is a whole other issue. For the above reasons I still would simply defer to human curated resources. That's what LLMs are doing anyway without transparency.

People want to give up transparency for speed? It seems completely counter to hacker culture.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#860

Post by johnnyanmac »

vishnugupta wrote: post #857
johnnyanmac wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you see the obvious difference. They actually trained people for the job. Even if it was under the guise of child labor. We simply stopped doing that. A decade of apprenticeship reduced down to 3 months of shadowing during summer.

By the time one is early/mid 20s they would be nearing master level in skill. Would have faced the real world for 7-8 years, know how the world works in terms of money, dealing with customers, and so on. Compare that with today, by early 20s one is only getting out of college undergrad. About to start the real world job training. So much of wasted time.

Yeah, they are different domains. I don't mind options for those who want to pursue an acedemic approach compared to a practical one. But for most fields we just don't have that choice anymore. Getting hand on experience? Gotta be recruited from acedemia first.

More reason to vye for labor protections. If they realize they can't just rotate out people every 6-20 months they may actually go back to fostering talent instead of treating acedemia like a cattle farm.

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