khuston

It’s the wrongness that bothers me. I wish Google would just link sources where it thinks the answer is, but don’t bother trying to answer directly if it’s wrong 10% of the time.

Good designs tend to have simple mental models. Some of these mental models are generic and apply across many projects. Or are even written into standards. I wouldn’t be too dogmatic about impossibility of understanding before building. Sometimes knowledge beats experience, and having an intuition for when can save a lot of time.

“Root cause analysis”, like “single point of failure”, is often misunderstood. A root cause analysis often finds multiple root causes. And a system can have multiple single points of failure.

I never used office hours as a student, which I later regretted because it made me work longer and harder to perhaps achieve somewhat better understanding in some classes, but also I dropped every proof-based math course I ever took. Overall I think my education would have been stronger by attending office hours.

I view LLMs in education similarly to office hours. Some people abuse it to get homework answers without grappling with the material, but the optimal amount is not zero.

LLM certainly not a replacement for a book, where you get someone’s extended personal approach to a topic, thoughtfully organized, reviewed and edited, often times actual courses taught based on it, with answers checked and errata available online.

I’m all for mass surveillance of roadways, but I want to see results. Every day I see and hear people breaking laws with their vehicles in ways that make life worse for others around them.

LLM-powered deep research tools are very useful at finding whether someone has already published on a research question. You could spend days performing keyword searches and traversing citation graphs but still miss relevant pockets of the literature. Semantic search is a genuine improvement here.

As to not trusting the generated text, you’re totally right. That’s why I use it as a search tool but mostly ignore the content of what the LLM has to say and go to the source.