alt Hacker NewsIt has been generally agreed for years that different people learn best differently. I have found that I tend to learn very well reading books and taking notes (and, as applicable, doing projects) and not so great watching videos. I'd probably even prefer audio lectures rather than video content, if maximum learning was my goal.
I find LLM learning to be mixed. I can ask questions, seek clarification, and that helps me get to a specific answer quickly, or helps me to get past misconceptions quickly. But it seems to fall somewhere in between reading books and watching videos for me -- I still feel like I learn best through books, even if it takes longer. Specifically, it feels like actually being a little bit harder forces me to think deeper and/or retain more.
I do not wish for LLM learning to go away, but nor do I wish for it to replace books. I hope that many people continue to write in traditional formats.
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LLMs can be incredible at cutting through misconceptions. I remember learning to code 20 years ago, and getting stuck building a mental model of a Hash. I remember being able to recite the definition verbatim, but I just couldn't put it into use until it eventually clicked after what felt like an eternity.
I think about how an LLM could have dramatically shorted that, like it did recently to teach me Bayes' theorem.
It's interesting about text versus video -- I never ever look for video instruction for code, probably because I just came up on thick-ass books from the library and actual text on the computer in the 90's.
THAT SAID, a while back I stumbled across some Three.js video tutorials on YouTube by Wael Yasmina [0] that were so informative and crystal clear that it completely changed my opinion about learn-code-through-video. I guess it just depends on the subject matter and presentation. I'm way more open to it now, and find some odd videos on there that cover topics that never seem to come up in blog posts and searches. YMMV
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHIm_RXfYBM (example)