How I use LLMs to learn complex topics

ventana

The title is not representing what the post is about. “Use LLM to learn complex topics” here actually means that the author asks an agent to describe the problem area, and then implement a simple web-based simulation game, and by playing that game, the author actually learns about the topic and its constraints. They use chip making as an example. That's actually a fun way to learn processes!

aswegs8

I mean, yeah, fun project. But that whole game could be like 15 mins of prompting.

IshKebab

> What you get is a beautiful animation that is 100% accurate and free of hallucinations. How do you know if you're learning this for the first time? Very risky to learn from LLMs. I've done it, but you have to keep your wits about you. Lots of "oh of course you're right - what I just told you was completely wrong".

rickcarlino

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... https://github.com/RickCarlino/tiny-bt

dcreater

YouTube has so many truly wonderful videos on chip production. I admire your approach but it seems like a lot of people are in this ai maxxing phase where they reach for ai for everything despite their being ready, high quality things already available for free

spacedcowboy

Another, possibly easier, way is to ask an LLM to give you a quiz on a topic, and then discuss your answers with it. Surprisingly effective.

user-

The little tool it outputted is nice, but click around the stages and the text is not high quality at all. The snippy titles, abbrievated explanations, I wish a few more iterations and thought was put into the actual main textual content. Especially for 'complex' stuff

dwa3592

i looked at the animations, they look cool, and i don't think i will enjoy learning things that way. as someone else said, there's a lot of content already produced on these topics. i also think the level at which these animations are playing, they are actually hiding the 'complexity' of these topics.

latent-l

Very cool, I like the visual learning nature of this and the auto play once starting. The game graphics are engaging which counts for a lot these days, I feel my attention span suffering after using agents for the past year. I've been working on a similar process of pushing to github pages, but focused more on having "practice sessions" with coding blocks to test content. Using webassembly and mock servers to mock backend endpoints Here's one I built to build a full stack llm chat system in the browser. https://model-systems-labs.github.io/latent/llm-systems/less...

ultra_nick

Oh, I do similar, but using single page websites. Last month, I read The Prince and had it make a text adventure campaign for me. For a lot of other topics, I often just ask it to create a simple python example that I can run.

fosterfriends

I love this idea!

brcmthrowaway

His other project, https://aivestor.tech/ , seems like a huge grift.

fosterfriends

Is there a way we could turn this into a reusable skill?

f311a

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.

royal__

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.

NBJack

My favorite way to learn infra topics at work right now is asking for a humorous analogy involving monkeys and bananas. I tend to remember the result, and it gives me reference points for new topics.

wxw

> 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.

ElijahLynn

This is a great share, gonna come back to it. Also worth mentioning that Matt Pocock has a /teach skill that creates interactive, learning sites for learning a new skill.

0wis

Really neat idea, I think it is one of the best ways to exploit the combined building and explaining capabilities of LLMs. I am currently building an app/game to explain friends and family concepts around wealth management and wealth building. Games are a great way to hide complexity while still including it in the « guide » you are making.

meerita

I use LLMs to learn deep technical concepts. I really like them because I can spend countless hours a day understanding things and building an investigation file with all my findings. I code examples and test the findings. It has helped me understand basically anything. I'm using LLMs right now to build a terminal browser, a GUI browser, and a PyTorch/LibTorch replacement. It's really fun to be able to learn and make progress this way. It's like reading multiple interactive books, where every concept can be explained again and again until I understand it.