bost-ty

Hi! Do you remember the name of that competition? Super interested in that.

I've seen your work at Hard Work Party before, by the way! Really cool stuff, glad to see you've also got the startup going as well.

In that way, the prompt is more interesting, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to go write a prompt because I dunno how to write what I wanna say, and then suddenly writing the prompt makes that shit clear to me.

Bingo. It can be a rubber duck that echoes your mistakes back. Unfortunately, as other commenters have pointed out, the prompt may not be as interesting/iterative as we might suppose: "Here's the assignment, what's the answer".

I hear you. But in this case, it seems like the author was mostly referencing academic uses of LLMs for either writing assignments or reviewing (academic) papers. Enterprise communications have their own carefully set requirements, but often they aren't meant to be instructive to the person writing them (assignments) or enhancing an existing corpus of knowledge (academic papers, optimistically).

I like the author's take: it isn't a value judgement on the individual using ChatGPT (or Gemini or whichever LLM you like this week), it's that the thought that went into making the prompt is, inevitably, more interesting/original/human than the output the LLM generates afterwards.

In my experiments with LLMs for writing code, I find that the code is objectively garbage if my prompt is garbage. If I don't know what I want, if I don't have any ideas, and I don't have a structure or plan, that's the sort of code I get out.

I'd love to hear any counterpoints from folks who have used LLMs lately to get academic or creative writing done, as I haven't tried using any models lately for anything beyond helping me punch through boilerplate/scaffolding on personal programming projects.

Thanks for the reply, and I know I'm replying ~a day late to your comment.

The near-term costs vs. the long-term payoffs of learning the math skills I was learning were pretty clear (immediate costs, opaque long-term benefits other than being better at math in a general sense). I didn't have anywhere to apply the math, so I decided to spend my time learning more from sources like "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", which is zero-cost to me.

I don't drink any $6 drinks of any sort; I also can't go back to change how much I did or didn't pay for a university education that did or didn't involve learning math for my major.

Other commenters I read who shared price concerns also didn't mention their latte habits or cost of their advanced degrees, so I didn't find this comment very helpful for making that comparison in my specific case.

I read this article because I wanted to learn more about their Math Academy experience, but I found the preamble and backstory a little long, which caused me to skim.

Re: Math Academy, I used the service for ~3 weeks last year from a post here on HN by the guy responsible for the AI/ML knowledge graph behind the platform (I believe his first name is Justin). I was "only" doing about 30-60 minutes a day (a little bit higher than their guidance, but low for someone not doing math otherwise IMO).

N.B. Due to substandard early instruction combined with being "gifted and talented", I was placed by the test into Math Foundations 1 (or 2?). For example, I still don't have an active/working mastery of the unit circle. So if you're a real whiz, YMMV.

I found Math Academy effective at showing me my weaknesses and sharpening those skills in the short term, but I probably didn't do it for long enough to benefit from the spaced repetition effects. I found the UI/UX better than Khan Academy (sans AI), and much less tedious (when I demonstrated understanding, the questions moved on or increased the complexity vs. doing the full problem set no matter what).

When I cancelled within the first month to receive my refund (see other commenters mentioning the high price), I was surprised to see my support email and refund request email both went to one of the founders (or owner?), Sandy Roberts, who was emailing me while also attending her daughter's college orientation (or helping her move, can't recall right now).

Cancelling was painless once I realized I was getting a response from someone at the platform --- so if you're interested in trying it, I can recommend giving it a shot. Maybe there's some sort of economy for them if more (adult) people sign up, because 50 USD still feels a bit steep.

Seconding another commenter: a very refreshing job page and company outlook. Thank you for posting here!