Post

🐴 Alex Trost
@trost.codes

I have so much trouble going through courses that contain a lot of stuff I already know. I never know what parts are safe for me to skip. Reading through things I already understand provides zero dopamine and makes me check out. I wish I could filter for the unknown!

0 reposts9 likes

R. Alex Anderson
@ralexanderson.com

Oof. This kind of pattern matching is exactly the kind of thing LLMs are good at, I'm afraid. It would be trivial to create an app that indexes the text content of a course, pulls out a list of concepts, quizzes you on which concepts you already know, and then builds a course plan for you.

R. Alex Anderson
@ralexanderson.com

Meanwhile, that kind of pattern matching against the set of things you know is possible, but tedious without an LLM. Kind of exactly what you're already going through. Though the idea of a quiz to draw out what the student already knows and making a course plan based on that tickets my brain a bit

alan
@al9000.com

hmmm. that's a super interesting idea. I wonder if something like a TL;DR at the start of each section would be effective. Quick way to put eyes on something to see if you need to skip it. Would make a continuing narrative hard (e.g. a running code sample. The TL;DR might cover and fix that too?)

🐴 Alex Trost
@trost.codes

Yeah that's a good idea. I was also thinking like a quiz or something that let you "test out" of certain sections. I dunno, maybe I need to just suck it up and stick through all of it?

alan
@al9000.com

a brain-hack I've found for making it through stuff like that is to record it. like full on set up the mic and read the shit through (facecam optional, but screen recording probably). you don't have to do anything with the recording, but the process clicks my brain into a gear that lets me dial in