Sometimes when working through difficult problems I will write pages of notes exploring a topic from a bunch of different angles until my brain is a bit exhausted.

I've found LLMs work reasonably well to just copy-paste that blob of thoughts into to have them summarize the key points back to me in a more coherent form.

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kaashif 4 days ago | parent [-]

I find value in going from the unstructured blob of notes into structured and coherent thoughts myself, rather than with an LLM.

If I understand something well, I can write something coherent easily.

What you describe feels to me along the lines of studying for an exam by photocopying a textbook over and over.

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kettlecorn 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I write notes that are very explorative and rambling on some topics. Like I have probably 100+ pages of notes on programming language design where I use my notes as more of a working memory than a cohesive document. In other cases I'll do competitive market analysis by looking at most products in a category and scrawling down first impressions, strengths, and weaknesses.

In some cases yes I'll synthesize that myself into something more coherent. In other cases an LLM can offer a summary of certain themes I'm coming back to, or offer a pseudo-outsider's take on what the core themes being explored are.

If something is important to me I'll spend the time to understand it well enough to frame my own coherent argument, but if I'm doing extremely explorative thinking I'm OK with having a rapid process with an LLM in the loop.

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ragequittah 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Usually studying a test book is reconceptualizing it in whatever way fits the way you learn. For some people that's notes, for some it's flash cards, for some it's reading the textbook twice and they just get it.

To imagine LLMs have no use case here seems dishonest. If I don't understand a particularly hard part of the subject matter and the textbook doesn't expand on it enough you can tell the LLM to break it down further with sources. I know this works because I've been doing it with Google (slowly, very slowly) for decades. Now it's just way more convenient to get to the ideas you want to learn about and expand them as far as you want to go.

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nunez 4 days ago | parent [-]

My issue with using LLMs for this use case is that they can be wrong, and when they are, I'm doing the research myself anyway.

	▲	ragequittah 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The times it's wrong has become vanishingly small. At least for the things I use it for (mostly technical). Chatgpt with extended thinking and feeding it the docs url or a pdf or 3 to start you'll very rarely get an error. Especially when compared to google / stack exchange.