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ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

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Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#351

I had a detailed conversion with chatGPT about how to gracefully handle terminating conditions of a rust program. It summarized cogently to register at_exit()’s for each thread, panic handlers, and register signal handlers. It advised and explain in detail on my query about the thread handling for each of these variants, gave really helpful advice on collecting join handles in a closure on the main thread and waiting…

I really like ChatGPT & I similarly enjoy GitHub Copilot. The combination of these two technologies has eliminated a large chunk of the time I previously spent referencing documentation, repo issues, man pages, & stack overflow.

If you treat ChatGPT as the expert, you’re going to be disappointed. But when YOU are the expert & can verify what ChatGPT outputs, then it makes a fantastic automated reference.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#352

I had a detailed conversion with chatGPT about how to gracefully handle terminating conditions of a rust program. It summarized cogently to register at_exit()’s for each thread, panic handlers, and register signal handlers. It advised and explain in detail on my query about the thread handling for each of these variants, gave really helpful advice on collecting join handles in a closure on the main thread and waiting…

It goes both ways but people usually take one extreme.

You absolutely cannot deny the fact that chatGPT produces a lot of bullshit.

But at the same time you absolutely cannot deny the fact that it produces a lot of real answers to very complex questions.

Both the ability to make shit up and give real complex answers are amazing achievements.

I think a lot of people haven't picked up on the fact that in both cases chatGPT actually understands what you are telling it.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#353

I had a detailed conversion with chatGPT about how to gracefully handle terminating conditions of a rust program. It summarized cogently to register at_exit()’s for each thread, panic handlers, and register signal handlers. It advised and explain in detail on my query about the thread handling for each of these variants, gave really helpful advice on collecting join handles in a closure on the main thread and waiting…

I asked ChatGPT to create some 6502 assembly to multiply two numbers. It generated an iterative approach (add A to itself B times for A*B) but didn't include the actual addition. I told it that "hey, you forgot to do the addition in that code" and it promptly corrected itself. Personally, I don't consider that terrible given what I was asking it.

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Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#354
post #346

I had a detailed conversion with chatGPT about how to gracefully handle terminating conditions of a rust program. It summarized cogently to register at_exit()’s for each thread, panic handlers, and register signal handlers. It advised and explain in detail on my query about the thread handling for each of these variants, gave really helpful advice on collecting join handles in a closure on the main thread and waiting…

Last time I articulated your sentiment, the reply was something along the lines of "Well, if you actually needed to ask it about terminating conditions of rust programs, you are certainly the last person who should be judging the validity of its answer" LOL

Vital caveat. If you can access the correctness of the output, chatgpt can be extremely useful

If you cannot….well, that is where it shines at con artistry

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#355
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - from the examples I've seen, it appears that we're heading towards the Star Trek bridge computer. Even back in the days when TNG aired I don't think anyone really considered the computer "intelligent", just extremely capable and with a magical ability to fill in the blanks while also having a perfect memory for facts. Even without true intelligence (whatever that really is), there is no denying that having your…

I've posted this before, but using it as a coding partner reminds me of this scene ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaUuE582vq8 ) from TNG (Geordi solves a problem on the holodeck).

that is cool!

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#356
This article reminds me of some guy on Twitter who says nothing in AI space has changed since 2020.

Maybe so.

But you know what’s changed? Someone decided to get their a$$ out of the AI labs, write a really simple interface just to “get it up” and released it to the world.

That definitely will trump anything else.

Release early and release often.

The author is just jealous.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#357

I had a detailed conversion with chatGPT about how to gracefully handle terminating conditions of a rust program. It summarized cogently to register at_exit()’s for each thread, panic handlers, and register signal handlers. It advised and explain in detail on my query about the thread handling for each of these variants, gave really helpful advice on collecting join handles in a closure on the main thread and waiting…

I tried it this whole week. I was initially amazed and thinking "maybe it really will replace my job." Then I switched to "it's a useful helper" and "I can use it to study things". Maybe after the gained confidence, I gave it some more difficult tasks - write code that will give a user read-only permissions - it obviously failed to note that the public schema is special, so that the user could still DROP tables. Aske…

I find copilot better because I don't have to disrupt my flow to "ask" it anything. I start writing code, it suggests something, I hit tab if I like it, move on to the next line.

Also, it can read all of my other code (in the project?) so it seems more context aware.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#358

I had a detailed conversion with chatGPT about how to gracefully handle terminating conditions of a rust program. It summarized cogently to register at_exit()’s for each thread, panic handlers, and register signal handlers. It advised and explain in detail on my query about the thread handling for each of these variants, gave really helpful advice on collecting join handles in a closure on the main thread and waiting…

It goes both ways but people usually take one extreme. You absolutely cannot deny the fact that chatGPT produces a lot of bullshit. But at the same time you absolutely cannot deny the fact that it produces a lot of real answers to very complex questions. Both the ability to make shit up and give real complex answers are amazing achievements. I think a lot of people haven't picked up on the fact that in both cases cha…

> I think a lot of people haven't picked up on the fact that in both cases chatGPT actually understands what you are telling it.

This is something that I haven't seen mentioned yet.

The stunning aspect of ChatGPT is that it seems to understand* the nuances of what I'm asking. Yes, sometimes it spews bullshit, but the bullshit is still trying to address my questions, no matter how odd.

* I suspect that "understand" may not be the correct word here, depending on your definition. But at the very least, it can parse the nuances of my questions.

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually literally thinking about that as I worked on my solo project. This is like a coworker I can ask questions of and bounce ideas off of. It actually gives some insightful ideas. I was working on a file rotation scheme and it suggested naming the files uuid_ _ with the intent that resolution conflicts won’t need to be walked very often if ever optimizing the common case of file.0, file.1, etc. This isn’t l…

I mean usually the coworker wouldn’t be hallucinating at work

That depends, what’s the rate of hallucination compared to your coworker whose microdoses are a little too macro some days? :)

Re: ChatGPT: The Slickest Con Artist of All Time

#360
post #335
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand your point, and you are right. Had I been familiar with the image I was working with, and the version differences in configuration etc. It probably would have taken me the same amount of time. I look at this from a more zoomed out perspective, this is just the beginning. The point is its capable and will improve.

Will it improve though? I’m not a GPT hater or denier, but how do you even predict that it hasn’t already hit the wall? They can increase parameter count x100 again, but correctness is not some knob they can just dial up to 10. What if a learning dataset simply has not enough info for a correct answer to have a greater weight than all the “con” noise? What if an answer requires a sort of reasoning inaccessible to LLM…

Isn't that what the thumbs up/down are for? Some kind of annotating that can be used to improve future iterations of training ? They've got millions of people feeding potentially billions of queries, probably tons of feedback - would this not result in an improvement over time?
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