704 karma · joined November 17, 2022
Example: https://imgur.com/a/Sh3DtmF
> Low-background steel, also known as pre-war steel and pre-atomic steel, is any steel produced prior to the detonation of the first nuclear bombs in the 1940s and 1950s.
Then there's also the issue that examples in documentation are often very contrived, and sometimes more confusing. So there's value in "work up this to do such and such an operation" sometimes. Then you can interrogate the functionality better.
I'm not sure if it's a facet of my ADHD, or mild dyslexia, but I find reading documentation very hard. It's actually a wonder I've managed to learn as much as I have, given how hard it is for me to parse large amounts of text on a screen.
Having the ability to interact with a conversational type documentation system, then bullshit check it against the docs after is a game changer for me.
A lot of the "LLMs are worthless" talk I see tends to follow this pattern:
1. Someone gets an idea, like feeding papers into an LLM, and asks it to do something beyond its scope and proper use-case.
2. The LLM, predictably, fails.
3. Users declare not that they misused the tool, but that the tool itself is fundamentally corrupted.
It in my mind is no different to the steam roller being invented, and people remaking how well it flattens asphalt. Then a vocal group trying to use this flattening device to iron clothing in bulk, and declaring steamrollers useless when it fails at this task.
Reddit absolutely had issues in the early days (ie: violentacrez), but the issue was mostly a dogmatic concept of free speech, rather than the moderation, and manipulation now. When your subreddit's user-base in in the hundreds, or thousands, rather than millions, it's much easier to pin down bots, and bad actors.
On the flip side, I've now found that getting AI to kick the tires on something I'm not super well versed in, helps me figure out how it works. But that's only because I understand how other things work.
If you're going to use AI in your learning, I think the best way you can do that is ask it to give you an example, or an incomplete implementation. Then you can learn in bits while still getting things done.
RE: Empathy. I've known a few people who's digital footprints look like this in real life. It's usually not empathy that's the issue (well, _primary_ issue). There's usually a cluster of things that have gone sideways that leads someone to becoming the sort of person who does this sort of thing.