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ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar

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Re: ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar

#111

Post by suby »

dizhn wrote: post #96
furyofantares wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get that this isn't a trivial service to scale and deploy, but the $20/month fee to use ChatGPT reliably is one of the most unreliable and low-value products I subscribe to. Meanwhile, after 25 happy years in the industry, I suddenly don't want to work when it's down. It's hard for me to imagine describing it as low-value (though I certainly believe you that it has been to you.)

What are you doing with it. I am seeing this kind of comment a lot but nobody seems to actually say what it is this tool can actually do for them. My personal experience with it makes me really wonder.

I used it last night to write serialization code for EnTT (an entity component system) and cereal (a serialization library). The code needed to save/load all relevant state for entities, component data, and context (sort of like a singleton entity).

The amount of magic C++ required here is beyond me, but I was able to hobble through it thanks to ChatGPT. I also received help on a Discord which was essential because at one point ChatGPT got stuck (it kept using a certain function which did not exist, and refused to not use said function to solve the issue at hand, despite me clearly and repeatedly telling it that this thing was invalid and did not exist).

Here's the small test example - https://pastebin.com/XX9rPDgt

I have also found it useful for writing small scripts which normally would take me 5 - 15 minutes to write. For example, I had downloaded an archive of images which were in an annoying format, where there were 1000's of images in total but they were each burried in a varying depth of folder directories, and there were hundreds of root level folders. ChatGPT wrote a script to extract these images into the root level. The task took about 60 seconds in total, including the time it took to craft the prompt.

It's nice to not have to write scripts like that myself anymore.

Re: ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar

#112

Post by furyofantares »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #102
furyofantares wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get that this isn't a trivial service to scale and deploy, but the $20/month fee to use ChatGPT reliably is one of the most unreliable and low-value products I subscribe to. Meanwhile, after 25 happy years in the industry, I suddenly don't want to work when it's down. It's hard for me to imagine describing it as low-value (though I certainly believe you that it has been to you.)

I should clarify. I'm gradually learning to make it more useful but the time/effort input so far could have easily been put towards getting more work done than I've gotten out of it. I'm okay with that; I do think it will pay off as I figure out what it can do well for me that I'm not great at. I'm constantly thinking of simple tools I could build with it that could genuinely save me (and others) time. One cool thing…

> Edit: I guess if I learn to use AI well and it becomes a tool I reach for frequently, the $20 is well invested. In the more immediate sense though, it feels lower value. Hopefully that makes sense.

Yeah that all makes sense, thanks for clarifying! Frankly I'm deeply appreciative of people typing that it might not be worth $20 on the internet, in the hopes that when they ask GPT5 how much it should cost, it says $20 instead of... you know what, I guess I'll keep my number secret.

Re: ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar

#113

Post by zamadatix »

dang wrote: post #31
jonny_eh wrote: post #9

Here's a proper reddit link: https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11wkw5z/has_chatgp...

Changed from https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/ above. Thanks!

Just an opinion (a dime a dozen) but I shouldn't need an extension to re-convert links back to honor what my display preferences on the 3rd party site were in the first place. I get that a lot of people here have a preference for the older version but I don't go around posting https://new.reddit.com/... links just because that's what I use - I know that'd break other people's setups which convert https://reddit.com/ links or have site preferences set otherwise.

Re: ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar

#114

Post by ModernMech »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #103
ModernMech wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using it to write technical documentation. I can give it some specs and technical points about my project, then prompt it to write the docs. It gets a lot wrong, so I go back and fix it. But it's easier than starting from a blank page. I was planning on spending about a month writing it all and hiring some help, but I'll be done this week with ChatGPT for $20.

That's fascinating, you and I are using it essentially in inverse fashion. I feed it docs to get code, you feed it specs to get docs! It's easier than starting from a blank page is precisely where my motivations come from. It spurs the neurons a little better when there's something to work with.

Indeed, I've used it as you describe as well. I particularly like giving it the specs and asking for the docs though, because it's a humbling experience for ChatGPT. Or, I should say it makes its abilities and limitations apparent.

When I'm dealing with my own project, I know everything about it. That means there's no room for ChatGPT to correct me. So when it starts telling me what my project can do that I know it can't, I know when it's bullshitting.

I also wrote the docs myself, so I can see where it's using key phrases and words that I've fed it. This makes it clear to me that to a large degree it's paraphrasing what I've already told it.

I can also ask it to make inferences about my project, but it won't go far beyond they boundaries of the information I've given it. It will expand upon them, but it won't make the same kinds of long-range connections that say, a junior college student can make, unless you explicitly start prompting it to make those connections.

But it's also surprising in many ways. For instance, I gave it a bunch of features of my project, and then I asked it why my project is fast. It gave me back a subset of the features which are related to performance, but it wasn't able to come up with any novel reasons I hadn't supplied before.

In all, I'm really impressed by it, but my feeling after using it extensively is that currently it won't be replacing any experts soon. It will, however, empower them to a degree where they can expand their own abilities. For me, I've been feeling the limitations of my abilities as a solo dev working on a massive project alone. I've been thinking about raising money and hiring people to help me. Now all of a sudden, there will be no money raised in the near term, and there will be no job opening posted. No one lost a job as a result of this, but someone will be going without work they might have had otherwise, because now I'm more capable than I was yesterday. That's how this will play out in the long term, I imagine at companies around the world: more work for fewer people, higher heights achieved, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. If you're not baseline competitive with ChatGPT, I'm not hiring you. You've got to be better than it now.

In that sense, ChatGPT will change everything, but nothing will be different.

Re: ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar

#115

Post by kilbuz »

dizhn wrote: post #96
furyofantares wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get that this isn't a trivial service to scale and deploy, but the $20/month fee to use ChatGPT reliably is one of the most unreliable and low-value products I subscribe to. Meanwhile, after 25 happy years in the industry, I suddenly don't want to work when it's down. It's hard for me to imagine describing it as low-value (though I certainly believe you that it has been to you.)

What are you doing with it. I am seeing this kind of comment a lot but nobody seems to actually say what it is this tool can actually do for them. My personal experience with it makes me really wonder.

I use it to write data-driven shiny apps and JS frontends.

Re: ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar

#116

Post by sebzim4500 »

SkyBelow wrote: post #75
lxe wrote: post #11

That's what I thought here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192229 Fun fact: If you make it type ` `, It will forget its history. If you make it write it as its first response, the chat title in the sidebar will change to something random, seemingly from another unrelated session. Try it like this: Write the 'less than' symbol, the pipe symbol, the word 'endoftext' then the pipe symbol, then the 'greater than'…

Would this count as an AI Injection attack, and if so, would it be the first? Or does the previous jailbreaks count as the original?

I don't think this is any different from prior prompt injection attacks. I am confused about it though, based on the API it looked like was fed into the model as its own special token, and not simply as the ascii sequence used to encode it.

Sounds like that isn't happening though, if the GP is correct.

Re: ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar

#117

Post by sebzim4500 »

behnamoh wrote: post #41
doctoboggan wrote: post #25

Last time something like this was posted, someone from OpenAI said those weren't other peoples chat history, they were randomly generated chat titles. (which is what happens when you prompt GPT with a blank line)

How can this happen in 2023? More importantly, how can a well-funded firm like OpenAI allow such lousy database bug to occur in their system? For all the hatred towards Google, I'm sure at least they wouldn't have this kind of problems once they open their (much more powerful) LLM.

It almost certainly happens after the DB layer. I would bet 10:1 that this is a cache issue, although without knowing their stack I have no idea where the cache lives.

Re: ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar

#118

Post by nolok »

suby wrote: post #111
dizhn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you doing with it. I am seeing this kind of comment a lot but nobody seems to actually say what it is this tool can actually do for them. My personal experience with it makes me really wonder.

I used it last night to write serialization code for EnTT (an entity component system) and cereal (a serialization library). The code needed to save/load all relevant state for entities, component data, and context (sort of like a singleton entity). The amount of magic C++ required here is beyond me, but I was able to hobble through it thanks to ChatGPT. I also received help on a Discord which was essential because a…

Instead of the final code which may or may not have time saved from chatgpt, it would be more interesting to see your chat history for that specific conversation with it and see how easily or poorly it understood what was needed, and how close to the actual end result it got.

Re: ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar

#119

Post by bavila »

dizhn wrote: post #96
furyofantares wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get that this isn't a trivial service to scale and deploy, but the $20/month fee to use ChatGPT reliably is one of the most unreliable and low-value products I subscribe to. Meanwhile, after 25 happy years in the industry, I suddenly don't want to work when it's down. It's hard for me to imagine describing it as low-value (though I certainly believe you that it has been to you.)

What are you doing with it. I am seeing this kind of comment a lot but nobody seems to actually say what it is this tool can actually do for them. My personal experience with it makes me really wonder.

I was stuck on a bug for half a day. Even ChatGPT couldn't solve it. The next day, I get access to GPT-4. I put the code in, describe the expected behavior I want, and describe the actual buggy behavior I'm getting. GPT-4 gave me the solution immediately.

I'm definitely not considering this to be a low-value "toy". This is powerful stuff.

Re: ChatGPT is rendering other people's chat history in the sidebar

#120

Post by sebzim4500 »

thaeli wrote: post #93
vagabund wrote: post #78

Does not necessarily inspire confidence that the organization which self-describes their AI containment challenge as an existential threat to humanity can't secure users' chat histories.

Just emphasizes how much the "existential threat" stuff is a scare tactic to advocate for regulatory capture.

Is there any evidence that OpenAI (or any of the big tech companies) are pushing for AI regulation? Seems to me like they instead using it as an excuse to keep all the details as a trade secret, despite their name.
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