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Comment by ruszki | Hacker News Reader

Did you learn real things, or hallucinated info? How do you know which?

I normally ask for pointers to sources and documentation. ChatGPT does a decent job, Claude is much better in my experience.

Often when starting down a new path we don't know what questions we should be asking, so asking a search engine is near impossible and asking colleagues is frustrating for both parties. Once I've got a summarised overview it's much easier to find the right books to read and people to ask to fill in the gaps.

Does it matter if the hallucinations compile and do the job?

Yes, if there are unintended side effects. Doubly so if the documentation warned about these specific pitfalls.

If you think coding is slinging strings that make the compiler do what you want, I pity the fool that has to work alongside or after you on code projects.

You always check multiple sources like I’ve been doing with all my Google searches previously. Anecdotally, having checked my sources, it’s usually right the vast majority of the time.

I used it for learning biology, e.g. going down from human outer layer to lower layer (e.g. from organs to cells) to understand inner workings. It's possible to verify everything from everywhere in the Internet. The problem is finding an initial material that could present things in this specific or for you.

We used to call those textbooks.

Yeah, but ChatGPT is much more dynamic. I learn better when I follow my interests. E.g. I am shown this piece of info, questions pop up in my mind that I want answers to before I can move on and it can go into a rabbit hole.

That actually was a problem for me in school, that even for subjects that I was interested in, I had trouble going by the exact order, so I started thinking about something else with no answers.

It has made studying or learning about new things so much more fun.

It sounds like what you actually need is a wiki.

This argument is specious and boring: everything an LLM outputs is "hallucinated" - just like with us. I'm not about to throw you out or even think less of you for making this mistake, though; it's just a mistake.

they keep making the mistake, almost as if it's part of their training that they are regurgitating!

And humans are better?

QAnon folks, for example, are biological models that are trained on propaganda and misinformation.

Trauma victims are models trained on maladaptive environments that therapists take YEARS to fine-tune.

Physicians are models trained on a corpus of some of the best training sets we have available, and they still manage to hallucinate misdiagnoses at a staggering rate.

I don't know why everyone here seems to think human brains are some collection of Magical Jesus Boxes that don't REGULARLY and CATASTROPHICALLY hallucinate outputs.

We do. All the time. Give it a rest.

I hoped it was clear in the context of whom I was replying to, but it seems your LLM misunderstood my point. I was referring to humans.

Using the word hallucination is an "hallucination".

This brings up an amusing memory: My high school biology textbook still had the Haeckel's embryos images in it.

It also occurs to me that my grasp of history is definitely influenced by the age of empires games.

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