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Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

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Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#281
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. It's also game changing for learning a new language (of any type, not just programming), any of the boring parts of software engineering like most programming tasks (it's like a personal intern -- sure you have to check their work and the quality is all over the place but still, dang I love it), and even a bit of therapy. At worst/minimum, It's the ultimate rubber duck. (To be clear, I'm exclusively using…

> and even a bit of therapy I’d be very careful with relying on gpt for anything health related; I’m not saying there can’t be benefits, just that the risks increase exponentially.

Risky vs what? Googling? Not doing anything? Waiting for a therapist? It’s extremely sensitive to human emotional dynamics. It is also extremely biased toward non violent communication, which is very hard for humans.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#282
Been pretty useful for discovery of SDK functionality in open-source libraries, that otherwise takes a bunch of time Googling the answer for. For example;

- Using golang, how do I write a custom marshaller for uber/zap

- Given a list of protogen.Files, how do I parse protobuf options and their values

Unfortunately the generated code is more often than not incorrect or uses non-existing API methods, but can give an idea of methods to use or where to look in the official api docs.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the kind of thing I hope LLM chatbots will be genuinely useful for. Though, how often do you find it completely hallucinating endpoints / parameters etc. ?

I use it for similar things as GP, and find its strengths to be similar too. ChatGPT hallucinates SVG path attributes. Ask it to make an svg of a unicorn - it will give you markup that looks okay, but if you look at the values of the paths, it's clearly gibberish. (SVG is a particularly interesting case because it's XML on the outside, but several attributes are highly structured, esp g.transform and path.d. Path.d i…

3.5 or 4?

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#285
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your well written response. I found it informative as I'm also currently exploring ways to leverage ChatGPT in my daily workflow. I also found it interesting that your answer kind of mirrors the writing style of ChatGPT, especially at the end there. I'm not saying you used it to write that response by the way, just that it may become more and more common for people to adopt this style the more ChatGPT's…

I suppose it was part of the "joke", but YOUR answer is the one written in ChatGPT style, not OP. I was thinking that maybe in the near future it will be "better" to write with a couple of mistakes here and there just to prove your humanity. Like the common "loose" instead of "lose" mistake, it will be like a stamp proving that you are a human writing.

I love this thought. Smart people will just instruct ChatGPT to make some mistakes here and there in their prompt. When I use ChatGPT I typically use a couple sentences describing how I want it to sound, which makes it less bland and probably harder to detect, but I don’t care about the latter part as much. Totally agree that the poster above seems Kaufmanesque.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#286
post #242

I might be in the minority here, but I'm not using any AI tools so far, probably to my detriment. I don't trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools until I can self-host them, and they can be entirely offline. There is some progress in this space, but they're not great yet, and I don't have the resources to run them. I'm hoping that the requirements will go down, or I might just host it on a cloud provider.…

I don't use them either. I've played around with ChatGPT and Copilot a little, and found that they often are subtly, but very confidently wrong in their output when asked to perform a programming task. Sure you could spend ages refining the prompt etc, but its going to be faster to just write the fucking code yourself in the first place most of the time. Then there's the privacy/security concerns...

I really doubt it would be faster to write code manually, even with the state of AI tools today. Even with very sophisticated keyboard macros and traditional autocompletion, someone using GPT would outperform anyone who doesn't. Think of the amount of boilerplate and tests you write, and tedious API documentation lookups you do daily; that all goes away with GPT. The amount of work to double check whether the generated code is valid, and fix it, is negligible compared to the alternative of writing it all manually.

Of course, I'm saying this without actually having used it for programming, so I might be way off base, but the feedback from coworkers who rely on even the now basic GitHub Copilot is that it greatly improves their productivity. I'm envious, of course, but I'm not willing to sacrifice my privacy for that.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#287
- weekly meal plan: I let chat gpt decide almost all my meals for a week given specific macro distribution parameters and I made a small script that takes the ingredient list and automatically orders them from the supermarket

- explore tech ideas: when I have an idea about how to improve a specific part of a system by using something I have little to no experience with I use chat gpt to explore topics, get to know which topics should I study to properly understand the solution and validate different alternatives

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#288
I just asked it to make an itinerary for a 45 minute long 6 year old boy's soccer practice. It was almost perfect. It needs to be tweaked (3 minutes for cool down?) but it did 95% of the heavy lifting.

I also asked it for vacation ideas with nice cabins and trailer hookups with outdoor activities for kids and nice cabins within 200 miles of where I live - it was almost perfect in its response.

I have trouble starting things from scratch, but once a framework exists I'm usually solid and can refine it to where I want it. For me, right now, I think that's where it shines: Giving me a solid starting place to work from. Beats the hell out of sifting through blog entries bloated with SEO filler.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#289
post #242

I might be in the minority here, but I'm not using any AI tools so far, probably to my detriment. I don't trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools until I can self-host them, and they can be entirely offline. There is some progress in this space, but they're not great yet, and I don't have the resources to run them. I'm hoping that the requirements will go down, or I might just host it on a cloud provider.…

> I don't trust it with my data, and won't rely on such tools until I can self-host them, and they can be entirely offline.

Interestingly, my point to The Verge was exactly that. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1633456289639542789

Me:

> So, imagine it. You'll have a ChatGPT on your laptop -- your very own, that you can use for whatever purposes you want. Personally, I'll be hooking it up to read my emails and let me know if anything comes in that I need to pay attention to, or hook it up to the phone so that it can schedule doctor's appointments for me, or deal with AT&T billing department, or a million other things. The tech exists right now, and I'd be shocked if no one turns it into a startup idea over the next few years. (There's already a service called GhostWrite, where you can let GPT write your emails on your behalf. So having one talk on the phone on your behalf isn't far behind.)

The article:

> Presser imagines future versions of LLaMA could be hosted on your computer and trained on your emails; able to answer questions about your work schedules, past ideas, to-do lists, and more. This is functionality that startups and tech companies are developing, but for many AI researchers, the idea of local control is far more attractive. (For typical users, tradeoffs in cost and privacy for ease of use will likely swing things the other way.)

Notice how they turned the point around from "you can host it yourself" to "but typical users probably won't want that," like this is some esoteric concern that only three people have.

So like, it's not just you. If you feel like you're "in the minority" just because you want to run these models yourself, know that even as an AI researcher I, too, feel like an outsider. We're in this together.

And I have no idea why things are like this. But I just wanted to at least reassure you that the frustrations exist at the researcher level too.

Re: Ask HN: How are you using GPT to be productive?

#290
post #123

Since I use ChatGPT regularly, I decided to create my own client. I prefer to avoid third-party services that require privilege escalation like Grammarly and Copilot. I have developed distinct profiles for different tasks, each with its own system prompt and input method. After getting the hang of it, I plan to tweak the parameters as well. Here are some of the profiles: Explainer: a default, general purpose Q&A. The…

"I prefer to avoid third-party services that require privilege escalation like Grammarly and Copilot"

How do they require privilege escalation?

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