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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?

#531

Post by ineptech »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #498
ornornor wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be terrified to do this: - the insight into your mind that a private for profit company gets is immense and potentially very damaging when weaponized (either through a “whoops we got hacked” moment or intentionally for the next level of adtech) - chatgpt and other LLMs are known to hallucinate. What if it’s advice is wrong or makes you worse in the long term because it’s just regurgitating whatever at you?

I'm hugely curious why people are so worried that some AI has access to some thoughts of yours? Do you think you are somehow special? Just create a burner account and ask it what you want, everything it gets told, it's seen thousands of times over, does chatGPT or some data scientist somewhere really care that there is someone somewhere that is struggling with body issues, struggling in a relationship or struggling t…

> If i worked at openAI and had full access to everyones chats, I would get bored within five minutes and not even want to read anymore.

No one is going to actually read them, but try "ChatGPT-5, please compile a list of the ChatGPT-4 users most likely to [commit terrorism/subscribe to Hulu/etc]"

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

#532

Post by dmarchand90 »

dmarchand90 wrote: post #392
barbarr wrote: post #40

For coding, I've been using it like Stack Overflow. It really decreases my barrier to doing work because I can ask lazy follow-up questions. For example, I might start out by asking it a question about a problem with Pandas like "How do I select rows of a dataframe where a column of lists of strings contains a string?". After that, GPT realizes I'm talking about Pandas, and I'm allowed to ask lazy prompts like "how d…

I find it is like having a brilliant intern that is not super consistent in taking their antipsychotic medication

I asked gpt4 if it could guess what I was talking about: "It seems that you are referencing an AI language model like ChatGPT, which is developed by OpenAI. These AI models can provide useful information and perform tasks like an intern, but they might not always be consistent or accurate in their responses, similar to someone not taking their antipsychotic medication consistently. It's important to remember that AI models like ChatGPT are not perfect and can sometimes produce unintended or nonsensical outputs."

GPT3 had no clue

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

#533

Post by throwthrowuknow »

ornornor wrote: post #514
throwthrowuknow wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the ones already used by Google. Sarcasm aside, at least there’sa fighting chance chatgpt will remain a paid and ad free service. There’s likely to be a lot of competition soon

If it's done well, and I believe it can be given the impressively fluent conversations the current ChatGPT incarnation delivers, you wouldn't even notice that you're being manipulated or advertised at... Which makes it very insidious and dangerous IMHO.

What makes you think that isn’t the case now in other services you subscribe to?

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

#534

Post by precompute »

wussboy wrote: post #528
precompute wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it will be complemented by a ban on "non-official" computing devices and major push for thin clients. I'd rather the internet stay.

Thin clients can be justified as "zero waste" and "sustainable". It also restricts computing hardware, which makes the entire field look much more mysterious and high-tech. Plus, robot policing is the first commercial application of these things. That's a whole other can of worms that will make everyone regret machine learning.

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

#535

Post by hermannj314 »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #496
hermannj314 wrote: post #349

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…

Really? I've seen a few people say this, but every time I have tried it, it's been awful, everything it says is so generic and annoying, like it's from a buzzfeed self help article, I would love to use it to help me figure out what I need, what I Can do better, how I can grow etc, I feel kinda stuck in life and i'd love to have some method to figure out what i need to focus on and improve, so that is one of the thing…

I have had a lot of success just talking to it. Hypothetically I would say, "wow, too many words, you sound like a buzzfeed article. can you give specific advice about ____" and I am almost certain I would be happy with the reply.

I think the idea is addressed by others with regard to LLMs, it seems to be a better sidekick if you sorta already know the answer, but you want help clarifying the direction while removing the fatigue of getting there alone.

I agree though, despite this, it does go on rants. I just hit stop generating and modify the prompt.

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

#536

Post by nzealand »

ellisv wrote: post #518

GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a powerful language model that can generate human-like text, complete sentences, paragraphs or even longer text based on a given prompt or input. Here are some ways you can use GPT to be productive: Writing: Use GPT to help you write articles, reports, essays, or any other type of text. You can provide GPT with a topic, and it will generate a coherent piece of writing that…

Interesting. What prompt did you use to get GPT to write in third person like that?

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

#538

Post by imiric »

olalonde wrote: post #443
imiric wrote: 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.…

Genuine question: Is your concern primarily based on principles, or are you sincerely worried that OpenAI having access to your data could lead to practical, tangible negative consequences (beyond principles / psychological effects)?

I listed some of my concerns here[1]. It is mostly based on principles, but also on the fact that we don't know what these models will be used for in the future. We can trust OpenAI to do the right thing today, but even if they're not involved in the data broker market, your data is only a bug, breach or subpoena away from 3rd party hands.

Also, OpenAI is not the only company in this market anymore. Google, Facebook and Microsoft have competing products, and we know the privacy track record of these companies.

I have an extreme take on this, since for me this applies to all "free" proprietary services, which I avoid as much as possible. The difference with AI tools is that they ask for a much deeper insight into your mind, so the profile they build can be far more accurate. This is the same reason I've never used traditional voice assistant tools either. I don't find them more helpful than doing web searches or home automation tasks manually, and I can at least be somewhat in control of my privacy. I might be deluding myself and making my life more difficult for no reason, but I can at least not give them my data voluntarily. This is why I'll always prefer self-hosting open source tools, over using a proprietary service.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35304261

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

#539

Post by toomanyrichies »

phaedrix wrote: post #527
toomanyrichies wrote: post #520

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?

www.impostorsguides.com. Any feedback is appreciated.

Note that it is currently very much a work-in-progress, and you’ll have to wade through the unedited word salad of my stream-of-consciousness as I narrate the entire codebase of a certain Ruby version manager called RBENV. Which is why I currently have a “noindex nofollow” meta tag on it. But if that doesn’t dissuade you, help yourself!

Rest assured that my arrogant rants about the current state of technical documentation in our industry, as well as the frequent dead-ends in my thought process, will be edited out before I release the beta version.

I also plan on adding an entire section on using Github to learn about a repo’s history and the design decisions / trade-offs that were made. I’m basically writing this in the 1-2 spare hours per day that I have before work starts, so it’s slow going as you can probably imagine.

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

#540

Post by evilduck »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #267
imiric wrote: 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...

Copilot is a huge time and typing saver for manipulating data, richly autocompleting logging messages, mocking out objects and services in tests, etc.

If you're only expecting it to solve your hard problem completely and from scratch entirely from a prompt that's probably not going to succeed, but I can't see how you're possibly faster typing 80-90 extra characters of a log statement than a Copilot user who just presses tab to get the same thing. Those little things add up to significant time savings over a week. Same for mocking services in a test, or manipulating lists of data or any number of things it autocompletes where you'd previously need to author a short script to perform or learn advanced vim movements and recording macros to emulate.

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