• stolid_agnostic@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Wikipedia was useful for me as a grad student because I could look up a topic and there would be a whole lot of citations I could follow. I never used them as a source, but rather as a curated forum of information.

    • haruki@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Wikipedia is like our dear friend. It gives us general information, good advice, and direction in life, but never gets too deeply in it. The choice is ours to make.

      • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        You’d be impressed by how good I was at finding PDFs of original articles on random sites. Turns out that when you go to grad school in the third world and don’t have access to the journals in the same way as you are accustomed, you learn how to do it for yourself.

    • nednobbins@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I’ve been doing exactly the same thing with LLMs recently.

      "Tell me about "
      “What are the big problems their industry is trying to solve?”
      “Who are their biggest competitors?”
      “What’s the worst/best thing about them?”

      Questions like that often give me a great framework to look up specific questions, find relevant articles and get a handle on the sources that are likely to be useful.

        • nednobbins@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Very careful. I never use anything from them directly. I just use them to give me a starting point on what to look for.

          For example, if the AI tells me that some company is know for their low latency database, I’ll look around for primary sources on the latency of the database compared to other vendors. I’ll also look for evidence to the contrary.