TonyAlicea10

I hadn’t seen the other one! I grew up with this as well.

I like the camera grace window idea. I’ve been pondering how to handle the post-hit zoom in.

Good call on the wind text. I like the filter (?). I’ll look at your link.

Thanks for the feedback!

I don't think this is equivalent. The calculator won't occasionally hallucinate a wrong answer. LLMs are a far leakier abstraction which means skill atrophy impacts evaluation and verification ability.

> It would be inconvenient if maintainability still mattered because their products default to making it worse.

I think this is the most important line from this piece.

Incentives matter. The AI companies are incentivized to have us believe that LLMs are the new compiler. That’s ridiculous (a coding LLM is a very very leaky abstraction) but I hear coders, especially coders with poor fundamentals, say it all the time.

This entire AI period has been a study in marketing disguised as futurism.

I say this as one who uses and teaches AI. What fantastic, amazing, unreliable tools. Extraordinary in the right hands, but engines of cognitive and technical debt.

We’re going to disagree about the quality of LLM learning experiences.

As an educator I’ve used them a lot for myself and in teaching others. Good for one-off topics if you check facts and a lot of human educators have built good quality content that it rips off.

LLMs are rather terrible at an extended progressive curriculum.

That said, the core thesis was simple: it’s dangerous to teach children to trust LLMs.

Not what they are. That they’re right. Which they aren’t. A lot.

You said you largely agreed with that. So, what’s the approach within this service to mitigate that?

I appreciate you responding but you’re throwing a lot of “but X” when the question is “what about Y”.

> We actually work hard to make sure a child knows they aren't talking to something real - that they're talking to a computer program.

The problem is not talking to a computer program. Kids have been using computers in school long before LLMs.

The problem is teaching a child to trust what the non-deterministic system is guessing at them. That will carry forward in their life.

You’re teaching them that an LLM is right, not just what it is.

As an aside, I’m also not sure about the certainty of what “making sure” a 4-year old knows is real or not is.

> If your kid gets everything they need from their school, their home, their private tutor and so on, then great.

That’s a powerful emotional point made to shut down criticism. Except it has nothing to do with putting a kid in front of LLMs.

I expressly mentioned this in my comment. You could create a mountain of educational material, apps, and tools with LLM assistance and verify it. Same result.

You were skeptical that LLMs would hallucinate on topics for children and you said it was common sense.

But now you’re saying the common sense is that they will hallucinate.

I'm not sure how common sense says that LLMs will hallucinate less on topics for children. That's not how they work.

And no, LLMs are not perfect. They're non-deterministic.

And no, even if they were perfect my statement was that it is irresponsible to teach a child to trust an LLM. Even if it was perfect on these topics, as they move forward in education that trust would later fail them.

That is a problem both ideologically and pragmatically. You have to think long-term.

On a side note: ask an LLM to write a story at a 4-9 year old level. Work with it for awhile doing iterations and it will hallucinate a previous detail or change a character name as context rots. Lots of other examples of "basic" topics that still produce hallucinations.

> a hardcoded, "Let's get back on track" button would probably be needed

Very true! An adult might hit that button. 4-9 year olds I think are less likely to.

You’re applying human cognition expectations to an LLM. Just because the topic is simple to a human doesn’t mean it improves the likelihood the LLM will behave better. It’s all inference to the machine.

> Anyway no learning is needed for 4-9 year old education.

This is an extraordinarily naive statement. Learning how to teach well takes a lifelong commitment. A topic being basic for an adult does not mean it is easier to teach to a child. In many ways it makes it harder.

> That's just such a weird point to make.

No, it's not. The claim that "teacher's make mistakes too" suggests that AI is equivalent to a human teacher in value. I posit other ways in which a human teacher is potentially more valuable.

Also, teachers who love their students tend to want to educate them well.

> lol no. Have you ever tried correcting a teacher?

Do you mean as a student? If so, that's a different dynamic. Because teachers certainly have accountability processes in many institutions.

Reading books does not have the psychological effects of passing cognition to an LLM.

EDIT: A "luddite" is opposed to new technology. I'm a coder and technical educator. I teach people to use LLMs.

Responsible use of a new technology is not being a luddite. And there are equivalent concerns of the effects of social media on children as well.

> My point is that the hallucination rate of modern LLMs, while not zero, is so low that this is no longer an issue in practice.

That's just not true. Talk to an LLM about a subject you know deeply. They make up things all the time.

> 2024 called and wants its talking points back.

It's a classic example of the kinds of questions LLMs get wrong. There's plenty of others. Not sure your point here. We can easily find things a 4-9 year old will talk about that an LLM will get wrong, hallucinate, etc.

> a child tutored by a good quality state-of-the-art LLM with a good teaching-focused harness could have better learning outcomes than a child without it.

There's a lot of work being done in 'could'. And it's entirely ignoring the dangers.

I'm not saying "no LLMs in education". I'm a technical educator and I give students LLM prompts and agent skills that I've built to help them learn.

This isn't that. We're talking about giving an LLM to a 4-9 year old and saying "this is your teacher".

> They're not going to struggle at all with things a 4-9 year old is learning.

Ask them how many r's are in strawberry.

> Also it's not like teachers never make confident mistakes.

That's an extraordinary false equivalency that is popular around here. Teachers don't make confident mistakes because the student asked the wrong way. Teachers can be held accountable. Teachers can learn. Teachers can love their students.

I think teaching a child to trust an LLM from a formative age is horrifically irresponsible.

If anything, an app should be made where a child learns to correct an LLM's mistakes and learn that it isn't trustworthy.

Actually, better, don't put an LLM in front of children. At all.

EDIT: If a use case is for children who can't afford good education, then use an LLM to make educational materials for children, review them, and make them available for free. After all, the contents are ripped off from human educators anyway.

Shared this with my co-workers and they all immediately found it incredibly addictive.

Be careful about applying all these complaints and suggestions. Most people here aren’t game designers.

What you have is quite successful (timer, losing, red countdown at 10 seconds, etc.). Unusually so. Too many changes could ruin it.

I suggest real testing with players of any tweaks, or having a completely separate mode where you test something more casual.

Otherwise touch nothing about the current game and give it time to gain popularity.

For me the timer makes the game. Most popular word games have no timer stress so it makes it unique, versus just "Boggle but one word at a time".

I would like the option to continue when you miss a word, but I also like the "miss a word and it's over" nature for the actual daily game.

You're not going to please everyone here. You might simply need to let the player pick a difficulty level, for example:

- Relaxed - No timer, keep going when you miss / Hurried - Timer, keep going when you miss / Rush - Timer, stops when you miss (default daily)

I think you really have something here! I love word games, and a new one that I would play daily doesn't come along often. Nice job!

Fair but not the human sociology I mean.

> most humans are stochastic parrots

There's a lot more happening behind the scenes when a human repeats phrases than what's happening in an LLM.

Sociological phenomenon. The desire to be liked, successful, or popular. The feeling that those phrases brings up.

LLMs are not experiencing any of that. As far as we know, neither is a parrot.

“The most surprising part? It all happened within weeks and lasted for months.”

That’s an AI tell. It may not be entirely LLM-generated, the various direct quotations help a lot, but there are touches that definitely feel like an LLM had a hand here.

Topic must be very interesting to have this much discussion on an obviously AI-written article. I couldn’t get past the first few sentences.

I stopped reading at "Here’s the observation that started everything:".

Source materials is great. Having the LLM write one part of a tutorial prevents you from asking it for a progressive curriculum which helps. If I give an LLM a sequence I want to learn, or an outline, it does much better.

Context and scope limitations are also helpful, as you mention. And yes, having experience in a domain makes learning with an LLM a dramatically different experience than from-scratch, since the LLM is nudged in different directions by our responses. When a novice uses an LLM to learn, the questions they ask the LLM can drive it in directions and hallucinations that would look obvious to an experienced person.

The worst failure mode is what I mentioned: the novice asking the wrong questions or driving the LLM in the wrong direction. Inference is strongly influenced by input tokens, and that's fairly unavoidable.

I don't mean to say your project doesn't have value though! I hope people use LLMs to help them learn (by directing them to good source materials from humans) rather than just asking it to do things for them and blindly trusting the results.

Yes, generally if you get a decent progression from an LLM, I find it's copying directly from a source, like a book or course. Giving it a progression helps a lot.

There is of course a degree of true usefulness to this. However I’ve been a technical educator for years and I’ve tried to do lots with LLMs.

Even now, LLMs are terrible educators. They do not make coherent progressive curriculums. They hallucinate details which the student will not have the knowledge to challenge.

If you use an LLM to make a tutorial you will get some benefit for sure, especially if you use it for Socratic sessions based on a corpus of data you provide (like a blog post or documentation).

Don’t expect it to teach you reliably though. It feels good to ask the LLM whatever you want, but if you’re learning a topic you don’t have the instinct to realize when it’s giving you a poorly chosen progression of information or teaching you something flat out untrue.

Yes I said “many” because if I didn’t qualify it someone would mention Rust.

Thanks! It's all stored locally on your device. No login, database, or trackers.

Many browser rendering engines are built in C++, so C++ is parsing the HTML. My general point is that many web/internet techs that web devs interact with have C++ one abstraction level below for actual implementation.

I always tell web developers I teach that the language of the internet isn’t JavaScript it’s C++.

Web devs are just users playing in a C++ dev’s program. ;)