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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?

#171
I have been using it to reword messages that are displayed in an UI. I write out the information that the message needs to convey and ask it to generate a simple and concise piece of text that does the job.

A month or so ago, I tried asking it some really specific questions about the Linux kernel and it did not generate anything useful. I assume it must have gotten a lot better now with the larger model.

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

#172

I am using it to learn programming. I have no technical background but know enough about technology to be able to talk about the problems abstractly. Because my knowledge of the space is not via formal education and training, I have gaps in my knowledge and do not know deeper details about how ideas connect with each other on a deeper level. GPT allows me to ask questions and provide the right kind of "connecting" br…

My advice to learn programming is to avoid shortcuts and do the hard things like read the documentation

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

#173

For compliance, I have been using it to complete cheesy "security training" videos and quizzes that we are forced to watch in the organization for insurance purposes. The videos are so bad, the training is ineffective anyways. We used to load them all on mute at the same time every quarter, click through as fast as possible to get them out of sight, which is considered a metric for how valuable the videos are (how mu…

How does this work exactly? What is ChatGPT doing for you?

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

#175
post #137
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…

So on my coding problems I haven't had much luck. It doesn't seem to know Bazel, the Rust code I asked about was completely hallucinated, but it did solve a problem with Azure DevOps I had. I think if the training set did not contain enough of something it can't really think of a solution. What is really nice though it's as you say the refinement of questions. Sometimes it's hard to think of the right query, maybe yo…

This could mean the future goes one of the two ways. Engineers get lazy and converge on using only programming languages which AIs understand or have been trained on, or we forget about this waste of time and work on more important problems to solve in society other than the lack of an AI to be our crutch. Sadly, I think the former is more likely.

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

#176

Generally rewriting emails for clarity... but I found another neat use of GPT-4. For public APIs, I ask to make sure its aware of the api. Then I ask for endpoints. I find the endpoint I want. Then I ask it to code a request to the endpoint in language X (Ruby, Python, Elixir). It then gives me a starting point to jump off from. Thirty seconds of prompt writing saves me about 20 minutes of getting setup. Yes, I have…

You reminded me: I discovered that ChatGPT had invented an API for me. Has that happened to you yet? Since it went to the trouble of writing code for the API as well, I contacted the API developers to follow up about the topic. The code given was kind of a hand-wave anyway so I'd need to polish it up. The developers were surprised to hear they had an API. In truth, there was no such thing. I then found myself in one…

That's just asking for their API to be implemented by some bot. Not sure they really get to keep their job.

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

#177
post #137
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…

So on my coding problems I haven't had much luck. It doesn't seem to know Bazel, the Rust code I asked about was completely hallucinated, but it did solve a problem with Azure DevOps I had. I think if the training set did not contain enough of something it can't really think of a solution. What is really nice though it's as you say the refinement of questions. Sometimes it's hard to think of the right query, maybe yo…

Yeah, I gave it a simple task of encoding a secret message in a sentence by using the first letter of every word. Hello = "Hey everyone, lick less onions". I worked with the prompts for over an hour to try to get it to complete the task, and while I did have some success, it really struggled to reason about the task or provide a valid response. If it can't even reason about a child's game, I can imagine it struggles with a programming language it has barely seen. I don't think it's actually reasoning about things at all, just providing a statistically plausible response to prompts.

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

#179
post #150

I have been using GPT-4 to generate i18n files, and it is great. You can see this post to check GPT-4's translation capabilities: https://www.reddit.com/r/visualnovels/comments/11rty62/gpt4_... I can simply feed in an en.i18n.json file, and it will generate i18n.json files for as many languages as I want. I don't use a specific prompt, but I occasionally include general information about the software in it. Edit: I d…

And then you let a human check it I hope? It does very well for the top 1% of languages (in terms of text online), but quality quickly degrades where there is less training material. I asked a speaker of Northern Sámi, a language with not that big corpora available, to comment on GPT-4's translations into her language. She said "The translation is completely incomprehensible. Lots of non-existent and completely incom…

Yeah, it manages to produce intelligible output in Hungarian, but I've given the output to some native Hungarian speakers, and they're constantly telling me that it's making up words or using strange archaic words that they've barely ever heard used in regular speech.

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

#180
I use GPT4 to workshop different ML ideas. I ask it to combine different ideas from the literature, for example.

"How can I use denoising diffusion with this approach?" etc.

It's great to be in a critical mindset, because being creative and critical at the same time is much harder than being critical.

I use the socratic method and really dig in with it.

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