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God I miss the days when websites like this had completely free educational materials. I miss Webmonkey from 25 years ago.
They just injected a much needed dose of industrial strength polymer into my personal backbone, and I thank them for it.
And another thing. I had to write some C++ material recently. Conversations with Claude went something like this:
“I’m a senior dev who hasn’t used C++ in 20 years. What’s new?”
[pages of output]
“Tell me more about the rule of zero”
[pages of output]
“[More questions]”
[pages of output]
“[More questions]”
[pages of output]
Then, once I understand it (and have written some sample code to mess with) I write a concise, direct, effective paragraph or two. You could read all AI output if you want. But I think I did it better.
You know when you finally see the answer, and you think, “Why didn’t anyone just say that in the first place?” When I write, I look for that thing to say. LLMs are pretty crap at it.
You can tell it to be concise or terse.
I don’t think that’s unique to LLMs though. Traditional learning material is very often like that too, and I actually find it worse because you can’t ask it questions.
I don’t disagree. There’s a lot of pretty poor material out there. 😅
Yeah I have to use it at work, so I use it to suggest improvements, explain why this or that wouldn’t work, or when I’m tired of googling an error message that leads me nowhere.
It’s hit or miss, sometimes it spares me hours of work, sometimes it just loops over dumb stuff.
It’s an okay tool, it’s interesting to know and understand, but I’m not too worried about it replacing me just yet.
This can easily be resolved with a more direct default prompt. But I actually prefer the verbosity of the standard system prompts. It allows for much better exploration and learning opportunities.
The problem is that the bot doesn’t know what people tend to be confused by, so I don’t think it’s a matter of the prompt. The verbosity itself isn’t even really the issue; the clarity is the issue.
I, too, use LLMs all the time to explore spaces. I just strive to help people explore particular spaces more efficiently than they can with LLMs.
Man, I feel for these guys. High-quality content is time consuming to research and produce, and website creation in particular has been low-hanging fruit for LLMs for a couple of years. It would infuriate me to know that I just came up with a cool trick or insightful workflow improvement that was immediately going to be sucked into a trillion-dollar plagiarism machine.
We all stand on the shoulder of giants. Sharing these tricks is how the world grows. But having someone else sell the fruits of your labor is particularly galling.
Amen to that. My goal has always been to produce the most optimal educational content. I don’t sell ads, track anyone, or charge for access. The only purpose is to write the best stuff. And currently it’s really easy to write better than an LLM. I don’t know what that looks like in 10 years, but the author’s right–pick up those shovels and produce quality human works.
And will LLMs vacuum it up immediately? Absolutely. Can’t stop it. I’ve put half a million words out there and they’ve eaten every one. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still best it, 'cause you definitely can.
