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- Hacker News
- > In plan mode (using CC, or OpenCode) I ask a model to build the foundational knowledge for X topic.
Makes sense.
> I ask it to review the accuracy of the knowledge base it built in the previous step.
Ooookay that sounds good.
> I proceed asking it to build a simulation of that topic in a low-poly, Rollercoaster Tycoon-like animation.
wat.
by muh_gradle - I’ve been using LLMs to create readable rewrites of RFCs and specs that interest me. It is not precise enough for implementation use, but it has increased my understanding of the underlying RFC.
Another useful approach has been asking Codex to implement complex things, like a Kademlia DHT or BitTorrent client in a literate style with the explicit purpose to increase understanding by reviewing the source code.
Examples: https://rickcarlino.com/notes/note-dump-and-ai-summaries/ind...
by rickcarlino - 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.by royal__
- 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 options like 90% of the time.
by f311a - I've had success using the socratic method. I give Claude some topic (say, how the intricacies of the bond market works, the content from which are screenshots of pages from a textbook), and then I go on a walk chatting with it in voice mode. Claude is the expert, I am the student. Claude asks me questions, leading me to an answer logically. I come back with questions, and we back and forth. LLMs arent like they were in '23-'25. I'm almost always skeptical its going to lie, and almost always wrong.
In particular:
- I limit it/encourage it to give me single sentence questions
- I sometimes will ask it to tell me a motivating, human-grounded story, when we're starting a new concept: claude responds "Maya is a bond portfolio manager, and her boss has asked her to quickly price in what happened if yields go down. She knows her bond's average duration, a measure in time, but she doesn't have a percentage, which is what her manager wants. How can she give him a percentage number with just a duration figure and the proposed new yield?"
- I'll often ask claude to let me work through it, to derive the thing myself, often resulting in a string of thoughts with "yes/no" trailers, to get the LLM to reply yes or no only, and avoid derailing my train of thought. If yes, my train of thought keeps going. If no, I've got something wrong.
- I'll sometimes stop and have it craft an artifact. I typically say "build me a Brilliant.org-style interactive demo of the topic", especially when we get into the realm of looking at the actual maths of a thing (for which prose and dialog is not optimal by itself AFAICT)
- I'll do this while I'm traveling, while I'm walking, while I'm doing chores.
It's so much fun.
by gnarlouse - > What you get is a beautiful animation that is 100% accurate and free of hallucinations.
I'm not sure I follow how this is actually guaranteed? The fact-checking process mentioned just seems to involve asking AI to review its own work.
by wxw - 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 you're learning, in the same way that many of the popular educational videos on YouTube are fun to watch and don't really teach you anything.
If you ask an LLM to give you a 500-word summary of quantum physics, it'll give you an oversimplification that probably leans on a hodgepodge of pop-sci metaphors. And if you start drilling down, you risk drilling down on these ELI5 metaphors, which can get you farther away from truth.
by matherial - 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 tried to use the LLM to fix this by having it generate a web page with diagrams and organized information flow. It's an improvement, but I still run into the issues I described in my first pint - LLM prose is annoyingly dense, and the useful information gets lost in a bunch of noise. You can direct it do something like "use plain English and avoid LLM prose - provide only as much information as necessary to demonstrate the point", but it is once again only a marginal improvement.
And then I begin to think to myself that I should just read a book on the topic written by a trusted source who put a lot of effort into teaching the topic properly and presenting the information in a thoughtful way. So, I am back to books and mostly try to use LLMs to clarify certain questions or ideas I have.
by 8bitsout