People aren’t going to read books and stop to ask questions. That sounds like work and being curious and paying attention, and people don’t even read books when not doing any of those things.
People definitely aren’t going to start cracking open history books. I mean, ’cmon.
The ‘ask LLMs lots of questions while reading’ tactic is of course correct.
I was thinking along these lines about a year back, and I started working on an ePub PWA (web-based) reader with some bells and whistles. The relevant whistle here is that you can highlight a word, passage, whatever, and tap a button to make the LLM-du-jour guess your intent from context and go ahead and answer it. I find it generally knows what I want maybe 85-90% of the time. It seems like such a trivial feature, but once you get used to never having even wildly opaque references go over your head, it’s hard to go back.
It also makes it a lot less onerous to work your way through a book in a foreign language you’re learning. I know it’s usually not its wheelhouse, but Sonnet is inexplicably strong at translating passages from French and hitting the sweet spot of offering a relevant tip targeted to just the right skill level.
(It’s available here if that sounds appealing to anyone else. It looks like this. You gotta supply your own epub files, of course.)
I was thinking along these lines about a year back, and I started working on an ePub PWA (web-based) reader with some bells and whistles. The relevant whistle here is that you can highlight a word, passage, whatever, and tap a button to make the LLM-du-jour guess your intent from context and go ahead and answer it. I find it generally knows what I want maybe 85-90% of the time. It seems like such a trivial feature, but once you get used to never having even wildly opaque references go over your head, it’s hard to go back.
It also makes it a lot less onerous to work your way through a book in a foreign language you’re learning. I know it’s usually not its wheelhouse, but Sonnet is inexplicably strong at translating passages from French and hitting the sweet spot of offering a relevant tip targeted to just the right skill level.
(It’s available here if that sounds appealing to anyone else. It looks like this. You gotta supply your own epub files, of course.)