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

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201–210 of 752 posts

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

#201
I use it for things that I cant find on the internet without lots of pain, and reading through garbage, such as:

- recipe ideas, like "what goes well with BBQ tofu in a Poke Bowl?"

- movie suggestions that i can fine tune, say what i already watched, etc

For code it mostly spits out buggy, subtly wrong code. Not useful for me. I mostly write low(er) level C++

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

#202

I've been working on my own personal-assistant for a couple of months, just connected it to telegram so I can reach it from anywhere. Can "talk" to my calendar, run commands on my home computer, etc. It also has its own memory, so doesn't need huge prompt windows (I'm running a couple of fine-tuned curie models btw). Now I've been giving it API access to a bunch of stuff to increase its capabilities.

What do you use for the memory ?

Can you explain a bit more ?

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

#203
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…

Thank you for your well written response. I found it informative as I'm also currently exploring ways to leverage ChatGPT in my daily workflow. I also found it interesting that your answer kind of mirrors the writing style of ChatGPT, especially at the end there.

I'm not saying you used it to write that response by the way, just that it may become more and more common for people to adopt this style the more ChatGPT's usage is widespread.

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

#204

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

This absolutely isn’t how humans learn. Humans learn by doing. Once you grasp the basics, you can read some documentation. Otherwise there’s not enough ground for the docs to make sense.

Once you’re comfortable with the basics by all means read the table of contents to know what you don’t know. I recommend this especially when dealing with databases, it’s amazing how many people never advance past the apprenticeship part of learning software engineering.

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

#205

I use it for things that I cant find on the internet without lots of pain, and reading through garbage, such as: - recipe ideas, like "what goes well with BBQ tofu in a Poke Bowl?" - movie suggestions that i can fine tune, say what i already watched, etc For code it mostly spits out buggy, subtly wrong code. Not useful for me. I mostly write low(er) level C++

I can’t say much about it’s ability to write lower level C, but I found that it’s pretty useful in explaining what low level code does, even if to me at a first glance it’s not obvious. It doesn’t only give you a line by line explanation but you can ask “what is this code supposed to do” and it will give you a pretty good guess.

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

#206

So much: - generate AWK to transform text - modify python script to make it multithreaded (when this worked first go I was very mindblown) - explain concepts that I half understand in clear language, eg explain sharpe ratio and show me the math - “what do people usually call” type questions. Like what are common job titles for people who do X and Y? - proof read my emails and make suggestions given a stated goal - se…

I'm curious what you mean by "reverse pitch understanding" in your second last point, could you elaborate?

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i think most people will just keep programming the way they do, and the AI hype will mostly die down. People have been saying that C++ is dead for decades, yet here I am writing code in it with a big community of others who do, too.

I think this is the problem. When people talking about c++ is “dead” ,at that time they meant 70% people using to perhaps 5% . Just like we says after industrialization,making clothes by hand is dead . It is irrelevant that there are still some people making clothes by hand . When AI the main way to code and remove 90% of coding jobs. It is also irrelevant to state that there are still 10% people still coding

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asked about an idiom I couldn't remember, by saying it in other words. You inspired me to try it for finding a book I can't quite remember the title of. Unfortunately no joy. Still, for the amusement of anyone who is interested, or anyone who might be able to help me with this book: --- Mindcrime: What was that horror novel from way back when, about the time traveling demon hound? ChatGPT: It's possible that you're t…

Have you tried asking a story-identification question on https://scifi.stackexchange.com/ ? I've seen quite a few questions on there get answered with even the most obscure books or movies, and your question should fit right in on that site.

I've posted to a couple of places, but I don't remember exactly where all now. I think there was one sub-reddit and maybe something on Twitter or Facebook. I don't think I've tried scifi.se. I guess that is worth a shot. Thanks for the suggestion!

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

#209
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m interested to hear more. Can you give an example or two.

My take: Messages like this... > Updated Gemfile.lock and added new dependencies (coderay, concurrent-… …ruby, crass, date, pry, method_source, public_suffix, puma, nio4r) and updated existing dependencies (rack-test, regexp_parser, xpath, nokogiri, racc, pg). Also added new files for a user authentication feature. Describe the "what" but not the "why". Even "user auth wip" would be helpful. It's like having autogene…

Spot on. The coffee already says what. If it doesn’t, probably could use a refactor.

Code doesn’t say why, who and especially why not. (It sometimes may say when, but the important when is always yesterday anyway.)

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

#210
I use Kagi as my search engine, however, Kagi has moved to a limited amount of searches for my price tier. So instead of searching "how do I do x in y?" I tend to ask ChatGPT instead. As SQL is my main language I tend to get really quick feedback if the code it supplied was valid or not.
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