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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 8th, 2024

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  • First of all no, school fails miserably at actually teaching anyone to learn effectively, so that’s not why they do that. Second, they could just as effectively teach kids how to learn by teaching them things that are actually useful. I would’ve loved to have classes for note taking and studying, critical thinking, maintenance and repair… instead I’ve had to teach myself all of those things, meanwhile my school was too busy making me read about Victorian era dress styles to teach me any of that. Even math beyond algebra 1 is fairly niche and is probably better taught specifically to the people who need it. I’m in comp sci, I use that math all the time, but my friend getting his master’s in plant breeding probably doesn’t need to be intimately familiar with calculus.

    It feels better to tell ourselves that all of the years wasted by school are actually for something but the reality is that school just does kind of a bad job at equipping people with the skills they need, and it needs to be improved dramatically.













  • First of all, they are not FOSS. I know it seems tangential to the discussion, but it’s important because biases cannot be reliably detected without the starting data. You should also not trust humans to see bias because humans themselves are quite biased and will generally assume that the LLM is behaving correctly if it aligns with their biases, which can be shifted in various ways over time, too.

    Second, local LLMs don’t have the benefit of free software where we can modify them freely or make forks if there are problems. Sure, there’s fine tuning, but you don’t get full control that way, and you need access to your own tuning data set. We would really just have the option to switch products, which doesn’t put us much further ahead than using the closed off products available online.

    I’m all for adding them to the arsenal of tools, but they are deceptively difficult to use correctly, which makes it so hard for me to be excited about them. I hardly see anyone using these tools for the purposes they are actually good for, and the things they are good for are also deceptively limited.