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

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521–530 of 752 posts

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

#521

Useful things: - As a thesaurus - What's the name of that "thing" that does "something" - kind of like fuzzy matching - A starting point for writing particular functions. For example, I wanted a certain string-manipulation function written in C, and it gave me a decent skeleton. However they're almost always very inefficient, so I have to optimize them. Things I've tried, that others seem to be blown away by, that I…

This is the kind of response that truly leaves me underwhelmed with Chat GPT. A thesaurus? A different kind of search engine? No thanks.

I think Chat GPT would be useful to raise an almost infinite number of accusations against your enemies on social media, muddying the water with a deluge of garbage and poisoning every conceivable well with unlimited zeal.

Are your societal purposes remotely at odds with my own? I'll unleash Chat GPT against you with an unrelenting barrage of accusations and insinuations.

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

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't make stuff up. There is no indication that will happen.

GPT-4 has a model capable of using around 50 pages of written text worth of tokens (32,000) not sure exactly how many lines of code that translates to but it’s a lot. GPT-3 can use 4k so that’s a huge increase, the next version could be even larger and there are other ML techniques that allow for massive context lengths. Copilot already does a good job of refactoring code and knows enough about your code base to use…

Is there a proof that context length increase will result in a better result? It’s a possIbility, but not certain.

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

#523
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.…

Me neither, but I think before long people like us are going to be left behind. We're like people who insist on continuing to ride horses in the age of the automobile.

That won't happen, you can't expect to be "left behind" by a tool that's this easy to use. The big downsides of using a LLM will show up long-term, people will be chained to them and won't be able to do simple, trivial things on their own.

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

#524
post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no idea if the alternative code you would have written would have been idiomatic or had some critical flaw. We have 50+ years of software engineering wisdom to deal with these issues. Testing, Fuzzing, version control, code reviews, the whole gauntlet.

I mean... I certainly know which languages I can write idiomatic code in and which I cannot. I can't know that my code will be free of critical flaws, but I do understand the common sources of flaws and techniques to avoid them, and I'm quite confident I can build small features like this that simply aren't vulnerable to SQL injection, on the first try and without requiring fuzzers or code review: https://infosec.exc…

You don’t have to accept the suggestions as-is. It’s just code, you can edit it as much as you like. Getting a good idiomatic starting point is a great boost.

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

#525
post #437
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the name of that "thing" that does "something" I could remember the name of one adult entertainment star. I thought this is where I can finally put this ChatGPT to use. It told me anything adult is off-limits. I’m glad that OpenAI can decide what’s good and bad for us.

It / OpenAi are not "deciding what is good and bad for us", it is deciding what services they want to provide or not provide. Your pontificating is doing more "deciding what is good and bad for us" (grousing about it's inability to identify the pornstar you're horny for today & dressing it up as some kind of moral high ground) than it is. There are plenty of open source LLM and "AI" models or research to build your o…

It seems like you think you have a moral high ground. Being horny for pornstar isn’t inherently bad.

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

#526

Useful things: - As a thesaurus - What's the name of that "thing" that does "something" - kind of like fuzzy matching - A starting point for writing particular functions. For example, I wanted a certain string-manipulation function written in C, and it gave me a decent skeleton. However they're almost always very inefficient, so I have to optimize them. Things I've tried, that others seem to be blown away by, that I…

This is the kind of response that truly leaves me underwhelmed with Chat GPT. A thesaurus? A different kind of search engine? No thanks. I think Chat GPT would be useful to raise an almost infinite number of accusations against your enemies on social media, muddying the water with a deluge of garbage and poisoning every conceivable well with unlimited zeal. Are your societal purposes remotely at odds with my own? I'l…

That sort of stuff only works until the other side hasn't wised up to your act. Judging by how popular LLMs are going to be, "trust" on the internet will be non-existent.

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

#527

I’m using it as a technical editor for a book I’m writing on bash for beginner programmers. Compiling this book from scratch is a one-man operation; I don’t have the budget or time to hire a technically-competent bash programmer who is also willing to act as a proofreader and editor. Instead, I plug in certain paragraphs and ask “Does the following paragraph about file descriptors / environment vs. shell variables /…

That sounds really cool. I'm always trying to get juniors more into the CLI. Link?

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

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of response that truly leaves me underwhelmed with Chat GPT. A thesaurus? A different kind of search engine? No thanks. I think Chat GPT would be useful to raise an almost infinite number of accusations against your enemies on social media, muddying the water with a deluge of garbage and poisoning every conceivable well with unlimited zeal. Are your societal purposes remotely at odds with my own? I'l…

That sort of stuff only works until the other side hasn't wised up to your act. Judging by how popular LLMs are going to be, "trust" on the internet will be non-existent.

And I can't wait. If ever there was a silver lining, I hope it will be this.

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

#529

I have a few conversations going. My most productive is a therapy session with ChatGPT as therapist. I told it my values, my short term goals, and some areas in my life where I'd like to have more focus and areas where I would like to spend less time. Some days we are retrospective and some days we are planning. My therapist gets me back on track, never judges, and has lots of motivational ideas for me. All aligned w…

Man please, go to a real therapist with experience.

Why? What are your arguments against AI in this scenario?

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

#530
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The top google search always comes with a lot of ads and other crap that you have to filter through. Also the response might not be exactly what your looking for (you might not have the same materials.) For instance you can ask chatgpt to create a practice plan that doesn’t require cones, or is focused on a certain set of skills, etc.

Just wait until sponsors start paying to have ChatGPT incept ideas into your mind. "Crucial next step is to buy some Rogaine", but significantly less obvious. Or other less obvious but highly impactful behavior modification like the algorithms used by TikTok/Instagram that push you in a certain direction or reinforce existing beliefs.

That's already a thing by virtue of how "harmful" data is filtered during the training / data gathering phase. You can't expect to just remove a certain "fact" and not have its immediate precursor not show up in answers. You need to eradicate the entire chain to a certain depth, and after that, because many ideas lead to one idea (and LLMs are devoid or creativity or originality), you only have a few "winners" at the top. The long tail is always cut, and so the entire model converges to a ~~ziggurat~~ few ideas, that might have been pushed hard pre-training phase.
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