For example, I just bought a 1990 Miata and I want to install a couple of rocker switches in the dash to individually control the pop-up headlights. I have enough circuits knowledge to safely change outlets and light switches, but I didn't know about relays. I asked ChatGPT how to add these switches and it immediately mentioned buying DPDT switches and tying in the OEM relay into a SPDT relay. It may have gotten the actual circuit diagram completely wrong, but now I know exactly what to read up on.
I'm trying to gauge whether LLMs are truly expanding our capabilities in a fundamental way or are really just another way to search for answers without going to google or a library.
Google search and Youtube search used to almost always get you what you were looking for. Now you have to fight with it to maybe get what you are looking for because of all the sponsored ads.
Search used to be a nearly solved problem.
I would say, for big decisions (financial, work projects, health, etc), you really need the sources and you need to double check things, but I would say that maybe 70% of my searches are closer to trivia than to life changing things, so LLMs are obviously very good for that. And frequently the stuff I search is trivially verifiable, so that's also good.
The bigger worry is that the general public doesn't have the mental immune system to actually know what to look for and especially to validate the LLM answers, so we're in for a world of hurt.
We will soon have some extremely brainwashed individuals.
Yes, because when I searched youtube for "miata wink mod" almost all of the results were for kits for microcontrollers which I wanted to avoid because I just want to control the motors with switches. Now I know to include "SPDT" in my search and I can find more targeted videos that add an override using switches.
The video you linked is relevant but doesn't really match what I want to do. The NA Miata has a motor for each pop-up headlight. There's a dedicated button that controls the headlights popping up and down but the light switch on the turn signal overrides this if the lights are on i.e. the relay is DPDT that's an OR of the 2 signals.
I want to add rocker switch for each light where the signal from the rocker switch overrides the behavior from the existing relay. If a given DPDT rocker switch is in neutral then the signal from the relay is used but if the rocker switch is engaged in either direction then the motor moves in that direction. ChatGPT did explain a lot about the default behavior and included a lot of the terminology that helped me confirm that. Of course, if I already knew about relays then I wouldn't have needed any of this, but I didn't.
Yes. With LLM it is easy to explore the domain from ground up, and it is interactive. You don't wait for some random guy in a video to come to a point, you are asking questions, consuming the information at your speed.
When I do this, I switch constantly between a search engine and LLM. I copy words of LLM into search box, and asking LLM questions about things I've found. It is the way to explore things. Search engines alone are not. Not anymore. At least you need to ask LLM for some starting points, because when you search google, you get results that are LLM slop. The same thing you can get from LLM, but not interactive, so it can go and go for multiple screens of a wall of a text, while delivering exactly zero useful information.
> I'm trying to gauge whether LLMs are truly expanding our capabilities in a fundamental way or are really just another way to search for answers without going to google or a library.
They just another way to search. And you should strike Google, it doesn't work anymore. 15 years ago google was good enough, but now it is useless.
I much prefer static web pages and text which is why I reach for the LLM hammer.
The way I see the two is as complements. A YouTube video with someone doing something is rich with information but it’s slow to process. A LLM prompt is fast but unreliable. Sometimes the information that in looking for is not in the Internet and I’m actually looking for a plausible hallucination so I can start from somewhere. Tradeoffs.
The chat is https://chatgpt.com/share/691266fa-c76c-8011-876c-027206abd2... if one is curious. I continued a bit to see what else it got right and wrong.
The thing is if you don't know the story or the books mentioned... it's perfectly plausible that what was written is correct. And while a good bit of it is... maybe; that it got material facts wrong makes it "if it's working from that, then nothing it produces is based on the correct information."
I've known that ChatGPT is full of crap (and experienced in other chats).
It can be a good tool to augment some capacities - but the exploration of ideas based on facts and reality are often (at best) flawed and if one is to try to build upon those flaws and add in one's own misconceptions, then its output is even more questionable.
They have value because they are very fast, concise, and right "often enough."
People used to make your criticism about Wikipedia (and occasionally still do).
All of the following are true:
1. They regularly make errors
2. They require more caution than most people have to use effectively.
3. They have tremendous value.
Wow, I have a couple Bill Bryson books on my reading list, can you share some examples of that?
"[...] I - someone who’s far from an expert at linguistics [...]"
The rather sniffy observation about Wikipedia falls very flat as the book was written 10 years before Wikipedia existed!
In fact Bryson wrote his book a good 20 years earlier than this critique so perhaps this huffy person has resources to draw upon that were not available in 1990.
Not that I really expect Bryson's stuff to dot every i and cross every t - he's a humourist.
Because you have access to various dictionaries and can easily verify it for yourself?
Assuming the quotes from the book are accurate, that's really poor.
I wonder if maybe Malcolm Gladwell would be a more apt comparison?
I can’t count how many times developers have tried to school me with their expert wisdom. It’s typically garbage, complete Dunning-Kruger. The causes are two-fold.
On one hand most of these people’s capabilities are an inch wide. Maybe they are really good about JSX, but you take that away and wisdom becomes empty hostility. I don’t want anything to do with JSX or React, so it that’s all you got you are probably just blowing smoke.
The other cause is no experience at all. For example somebody might think they are super knowledgeable on WebSockets because they used a package off NPM. They have no idea how it really works, can’t understand RFC6455 even with Cliff Notes, and can’t write original code.
If you want to be an expert at least start with your own implementation of the thing you want to be an expert about, but most of the people doing that work can’t program.
I can’t help but wonder if the DK coming out of LLMs is really any worse.
The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect